Still I'd be on my feet.

Still I'd be on my feet.

I've been listening to Joni Mitchell's "Blue" this week, pretty much constantly while in the car. It replaced the new Sigur Ros after I had to finally return my spare copy to its rightful owner, and so now I only have one rightful copy of that, and am listening to it pretty much constantly in the house. But, Blue. Ah, Blue. Such a solid album. However, Today I started skipping the depressing songs, so it's a pretty fast listen. A really fast listen.

Blue is undeniably my Number 1 All Time Most Influential Album, ever, and I'm sure I've blogged about it ad nauseum. I was introduced to Joni by my high school friend Zwickler's dad one day when we were in his car the summer after graduation. Zwickler's dad said something like, "Oh, you'll love this. I can't believe you haven't heard of her, Julia." And I felt happy knowing that people cared enough about me to consider my musical tastes. And especially to consider that they were good tastes. Anyway, Zwickler's dad was right and I entered into a decade plus of adoring, worshiping that album.

Since that afternoon, I have also held track 9, "Case of You," as my favorite song ever. Number One All Time. This is occasionally replaced, depending on my mood, with Sufjan Stevens "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!" or Iron & Wine "Upwards Over The Mountain," or Sigur Ros "Glosoli," but I always, always come back to "Case of You." I hate having a favorite song, because I feel like professing favorites is just a way to be all: hi, I am really exceptional because I picked out something exceptional that someone else created. But I can't help it.

With all this High Fidelityesque chatter about my All Time Top lists, I'm going to have to describe the song autobiographically to you. I had a strange urge to tell you what the lyrics meant to me, but then I envisioned someone scrolling down the page(s) on their google search results for "Case of You lyrics meaning" and finding this post and invading my thoughts, my version of the song, and that made me feel dirty and stolen. So autobiographical it is. Although "Case of You" has been very timeless to me, making me feel sometimes like I'm not even myself, not the person sitting there listening to it, it still has always had a tremendous hold in my real life. Mostly, in one particular instance.

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, not too long after first discovering Blue, I fell in love with a boy who lived in Kentucky, and I put "Case of You" on one of the many mix tapes I calculatedly constructed for him. I painstakingly figured out how to play it on my beat up guitar so I could sing it to him over the phone. And when he came to visit me or I went to visit him, I'd play it for him in person. He was a much better guitarist than I, but he managed to humor my barely-mediocre arrangement. I mean, wouldn't you? The song is hauntingly beautiful and all tricksy up the neck of the guitar and various octaves and I think I might fall over if someone ever played it for me.

Once, at a restaurant in Cincinnati, I laughed out loud at him and he said, "you know, I've never seen you laugh before," and he sat back and soaked me in for a while but I think he must have realized right then that we couldn't really stay together, apart, if we weren't going to see each other laugh for months at a time, and I must have agreed with him. A couple of weeks later I went home and never saw him again.

Don't get me wrong, the song also went on every other mix tape or CD I made for every other boy I might have been remotely interested in, and maybe even that one I made for my friend Katie, but it was always in a sort of recreation of what that song meant for me in that single strange relationship. I wouldn't even say we shared any special connection to the song; it was just me and Case of You, all aimed at that guy.

But a not so very long time ago, thanks to the Internets, he randomly and unrelated-to-me recited a line of the song: "I'm frightened by the devil, and I'm drawn to those ones that ain't afraid," and I thought something like, "Oh god, I think my heart just skipped a beat hearing you say a line from that song," but said something a little more put-together, and he said something coolly like, "Oh yeah, didn't you introduce me to that album?" and I wondered what else I had clung to in that relationship and after that relationship that hadn't even phased him, that he'd forgotten.

In a way, it's as if that little interaction has freed the song from his hold, and now it's just mine again, a crazily poetic, glorious song with a distant suggestion of my old sad but pretty story in the background. I am as constant as a northern star.

Sorry my writing is such a disaster. I've been reading Sylvia Plath so I'm feeling all 1960s hurriedly tortured. Which is probably why I dug up the CD in the first place.

lyrics here.