I'll Wear Your Clothes When We're Both High

There is something frustrating about hearing a twenty year old song for the first time and knowing how much my twenty year old self would have loved it. Not only would I have felt it was appropriately named, I am fairly sure everyone who knew me would agree that if ever a song should be about a girl named Alison, this is what it should sound like.

Reading the lyrics, this is one of those muse who is so messed up that her craziness is enchanting to the comparatively stable singer songs. It's a shoegazer, dream pop version of Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses (about which I realize I have never actually written and now I probably never will). I am not sure if every man once secretly wished to be in the thrall of the sort of girl about whom these songs are sung, but most of the women I know did, once, secretly wish to have been such a girl. Maybe not so broken and crazy that we would be lost forever, but enough so that we would seem foreign and mysterious to our peers; given that that growing up in and of itself was an oftentimes damaging experience, we all wanted to believe our still open wounds were beautiful, mysterious, enchanting as opposed to just bloody and festering. To have someone write a song like this for us would give our pain meaning, right? 

Of course, the sad truth is that being that girl for someone wouldn't have made a difference because it would never have been the right person--we didn't care if just anyone found our messed up world thrilling. Because it was never the person we wanted to feel that way about us who did, those persons were off writing songs for other girls, girls who hadn't been damaged, at least, not by them. In fact, who is to say this song wasn't written about me (I mean, aside from the fact that I don't know these people)? It doesn't change the past, it doesn't change the pain.

But here is the cool thing, the silver lining on the dark cloud of painful experience: while we all not so secretly wished to be the muse, we also could have written this ourselves. Maybe that is the true lesson of growing up, realizing that you can write your own songs, that being the muse is all well and good, but it doesn't hold a candle to creating the work itself.

Hey hey, sha la la.