Safe in my own words, learning from my own words, cruel joke
Hello, I�m VeraLynn. Like all the other guest posters here, I struggled with and harumphed about the impossibility of picking just one song. Dom, this was a painful challenge, but it's made for wondrous reading. Like the rest of you fine folks here, music is everything to me, powerfully emotive ties to nearly every moment in my life and it feels almost like betrayal to declare any one song a favorite.
But there�s clearly one band that�s meant more to me than any other. And if you�re in the states, odds are you�ll have no idea who I�m talking about. They�re Marillion. And for the last 17 years or so, they�ve led me on a long, strange trip that�s had a pretty heavy influence on how my life�s turned out. And the start of it all can be summed in the way I feel whenever I hear the opening bars of Pseudo Silk Kimono. It�s not their best song or my favorite, but it was the beginning. It�s the opening song to an epic of an album and the opening of all these years�
It was high school, back when we were spending time driving around in my friends� beat-up cars, getting passionate about music, each other and the world. The music became our soundtrack: Queen, They Might Be Giants and these cassette tapes a girl had given my friend when he was a pizza driver. We kept flipping them over from side to side, listening to the albums in long, slow gulps. At first they were just background music until one day a keyboard riff struck me to the bone, a lyric stabbed at me and I realized I�d fallen in love with Marillion before I�d even noticed.
At the time, since they never made it in the U.S., it was difficult finding information about the band. We had no idea that around the time we discovered them, their lead singer left the band and they were heading in a new direction. But we fell for this lush, mid-80s meshing of prog/art/pop rock.
Over the years, I married that former pizza delivery guy and we saw our first Marillion concert. He discovered an email list to keep up with news of the band and told me stories over dinner about some of the folks on the list, who came to use the list more for social purposes than for information. Marillion fans were dubbed Freaks in honor of an old song of theirs, rather appropriate for the level of fanaticism they inspire.
More years passed. We divorced. He kept all the CDs, including the Marillion, and I began to build my own collection to replace my aging cassette dubs. I joined the Freaks list myself and found a warm community of people as passionate about music as I am. I began to meet Freaks in various cities when I traveled and welcomed them when they came to mine. I found several romances and several still-dear friends through the list.
We carried each other through all the ups and downs from falling in love (Beautiful) to losing loved ones (Estonia), all tied to what I referred to as �3,000 or so of my closest friends.�
I�ve seen the band fewer than 20 times, but in 3 different countries. And that�s hardly unusual for these guys. We threw pre-show parties for hundreds of Freaks. When my apartment burned down, friends sent me spare copies of their CDs and Marillion themselves sent me a package with several more. How many bands do you know that do that for their fans?
Anyway, back to the song. I�ve fallen in love to Marillion more than once, and they�ve been there for me when it�s fallen apart. That�s what the album, Misplaced Childhood, is all about: the time when you wrap yourself in denial about the end, the pining, the longing, the agitation and eventually to being ready to pull yourself back out of it in the end. It�s angsty and dated, but it�s salve to broken hearts (or formerly broken hearts) and well worth the indulgence of holing up in the dark with the album on repeat. And those opening bars of Pseudo Silk Kimono, misty, moody and evocative pull me right back to those first listens in the car, cruising suburban streets and back through all those moments that have framed so much of who I am and how I connect to music.
Posted by veralynn
2006-05-11
go back | random brainstorm | go forth
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