Day 16 – A song that has made me cry.

I don’t cry because of songs. I don’t cry during movies or television commercials. Those are not genuine emotions. Those are actors on the screen pretending to be something they’re not. Their entire job is pretending. Pretending doesn’t make me cry.

On the other hand, movies and music can elicit emotional response as long as the emotion is there to begin with. If I need to cry and I can’t, I watch Once Were Warriors. If I’m sad, my music has to be sad, too. Music and movies compliment my emotions, not cause them. I have cried along with songs, but I have never cried because of a song. I don’t even know what “a song that has made me cry” means.

That said, I do have a playlist called sad’n’slow, which I listen to when I’m sad. This is a selection from that playlist and a song I relate to quite a bit. “I could light but I just spark. I live on in the dark.”

This is by a little band out of Denton, TX called Slobberbone, now called The Drams, that I absolutely love. Nobody’s ever heard of them, except for me and Stephen King, and that’s a damn shame. They should be massive stars by now because their songwriting ability is amazing, but people suck. They’d rather listen to autotuned-beyond-recognition music like Ke$ha who doesn’t even write her own music and has a dollar sign in her name.

If you like singer/songwriter, alt-country/southern rock, go buy all their albums now. They only have a few “power ballad” type songs and this is one of them.

Once your eyes they shone like flashlights, fountains of clarity
And the most alkaline of batteries were you and me
Free of failure, flicker or fade
Depending where you’re from too much daylight can seem like an oddity
And devotion is a commodity, so with you it seems
It only comes in trade
But the first time the bill isn’t paid, it’s too late

So you just live in the dark
You could drive but you just park
You just talk when you could sing
And now it doesn’t mean a thing
You could bite, but you just bark
You could light but you just spark
You live on in the dark

Rolling papers, bottles and needles, and people we trusted
Our eyes just become too adjusted
We’d be busted if sightlessness were a crime
So now I guess I should be searching for matches but I don’t see what’s the use
Engines run ’till they’re out of juice
And I can’t even produce
Fuel enough to light your face
And that’s a light I will never replace in time

So I just live on in the dark
I could drive but I just park
I just talk when I could sing
And now it doesn’t mean a thing
I could bite, but I just bark
I could light but I just spark
I live on in the dark

It’s as if we’ve only ever come together just to test each other’s mettle
Or to justify subsistence or bolster our resistance to the idea that we should struggle
When we could just settle

So you just get numb to every itch
And there’s no feeling in your fingertips
And you cannot find the switch
And we’ve grown much too tired to grope
Yeah, we lost all our fire to cope a long time ago

So we just live on in the dark
We could drive but we just park
We just talk when we could sing
And now it doesn’t mean a thing
We could bite but we just bark
We could light but we just spark
We live on in the dark

I should have posted 16 Days instead, since this is Day 16. Opportunity missed. Oh well.