#154) "If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot - In art class my junior year in high school, the teacher presented an interesting challenge: choose a song you like, and paint whatever comes to mind while listening to it.
It was a school assignment I could get on board with, and at 17, newly embedded in a pretty thick singer-songwriter phase, I had any number of quiet, contemplative, 'sitting cross-legged on the floor in the sunlight' ditties to choose from, but I didn't have to think about it for too long. If You Could Read My Mind sprang to mind almost immediately. We were allowed to bring a Walkman to school and listen while we painted, and so I brought my little cassette mix tape to school, sat down, turned it up (but not so loud anyone could tell what I was listening to...;-) and dove in.
With ol' Gordy ringing gently in my ear, I went heavy with the blues and purples and created a harbor scene in acrylic. It was a view from the top of a hill, a kind of little town in the distance thing going on - cloud-strewn sky drizzling into the horizon, boats on the water, gulls in flight, a boat house, a tavern with a light out front, an empty slip or two, and one hilariously disproportionate lighthouse exploding up out of the center. Seriously, from the painting's point of view, relative to the other components, that sucker would have been about 2000 feet tall, and 500 feet in diameter.
Oh well. I'm pretty sure the cloud-strewn sky looked good (even with the odd 15-pound seagull), and I'd give anything to have kept the painting.
I still love the song. If You Could Read My Mind is a fine break-up song - subtly venomous, befitting Gordon Lightfoot's organic approach to song writing. It seems sweet and melancholy....his voice gentle, indeed...but it's not. Without overstatement or rancor, it actually cuts a thin but deep trench lengthwise along the soul of a failed relationship, from which bitterness seeps slowly.
Maybe that's why I wish I'd kept the painting. It wasn't any good...no good at all. But I wonder what about this song inspired something so bucolic as a harbor scene. And further, why that still feels like the right interpretation...?
"I don't know where we went wrong, but the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back..."
#155) "Hurt" by Johnny Cash - Testament to greatness being possible at any age, Johnny Cash's version of the Nine Inch Nails song has become his swan song, and rightfully so. This is one cover version that almost completely reinvents the original, but in a good way, scrapping the marginalizing (and often over-the-top) angst with which Trent Reznor made his name, and turning it radio friendly, ready for prime time, as it were, but without relinquishing any of the emotion...making it more potent, if anything. What's more, it's accompanied by a moving video depicting the Man in Black in the last days of his life....
And most potent of all, seeming to know he's in the last days of his life.
"And you can have it all, my empire of dirt..."
