The Song Remains

Things come and go, people arrive and depart, sometimes staying for a few brief moments, sometimes for a lifetime.

One thing that always remains are the songs.

I'm sitting listening to August And Everything After by Counting Crows and I'm reminded once again just why this is one of my favourite records. Ever.

It fills my head with images, and memories, and desires. It gives me hope, it makes me despair, the music lifts my soul and the words break my heart because I understand them completely.

Since coming into my life thirteen years ago, Adam Duritz's lyrics have reached into my soul and ripped out my very being, holding it up in front of me, broken and bleeding for me to regard, to consider, to refelct on and ultimately to heal.

There's nothing so powerful as a song that is you, and so many of the Counting Crows songs seem to tell my story, even though I've never been to some of the places, or met some of the people, but still, they're me.

Duritz sings of love, of loss, of walking the fine tightrope that is sanity and of occasionally falling from it. He yearns for solitude and peace, and yet craves company and understanding. He sings pain, he sings joy, he sings from the heart and he sings me.

And I listen, and learn, and empathise, and remember and try to forget and re-live fragments of a life that isn't my own but could be.

If there is something beyond this life that we struggle through, then I have but one wish, that I can take the songs with me. For they are me, and I am them, and as long as I have them then I am never alone.


"We couldn't all be cowboys
So some of us are clowns
Some of us are dancers on the midway
We roam from town to town
I hope that everybody can find a little flame
Me, I say my prayers, then I just light myself on fire
And I walk out on the wire once again"

Counting Crows - Goodnight Elisabeth