I'm going to regret posting this later

An Attempt to Tip the Scales
Bright Eyes

Did you expect it all to stop at the wave of your hand?
Like the sun's just gonna drop if it's night you demand.

Well, in the dark we're just air, so the house might dissolve.
But once we're gone, who's gonna care if we were ever here at all?

Well, summer's gonna come, it's gonna cloud our eyes again.
No need to focus when there's nothing that's worth seeing.

So we trade liquor for blood in an attempt to tip the scales.
I think you lost what you loved in that mess of details.
They seemed so important at the time
but now you can't even recall any of the names, faces, or lines.
It's more the feeling of it all.

Well, winter's gonna end, I'm gonna clean these veins again.
So close to dying that I finally can start living.

I listened to a lot of Bright Eyes my senior and junior year of high school. In college I more or less stopped because I got fed up with Connor Oberst's self-pity. Yesterday I found an old burned copy of Fevers and Mirrors in my bedroom cd caseand decided to give it a spin in the good ol' car stereo for old times sake. Expecting to be embarrassed that I had once listened to this album religiously, I played the first couple of tracks and to my surprise thoroughly enjoyed them.

I'm not sure whether to attribute this enjoyment to the simply explosion of pleasure that occurs when you re-encounter a old, loved object or person or to the intrinsic worth of the music itself. I'm leaning towards the former (Evidence: I recently listen to and enjoyed the early Offspring album, Smash). Oberst's music always gave me huge emotional highs in high school and much to my surprise it did once again today. I'm not sure why. It used to awaken my imagination and, almost magically, did so again today. In spite of his many flaws, Oberst can pen a decent song, whose primary strength are the communicate of an ineffable sense of, well, feeling. While that may seem stupid or trite, for INFPers like myself, its huge (Feeling is crack cocaine for an INFPer). Because O'berst songs avoid, for the most part, musical and lyrical predictability, they're good for multiple listens, faithfully giving heavy doses of emotional excess to hungry teenage souls.

The above song is from the second to last track on Fevers and Mirrors. I listened to it multiple times in the car today because I kept wanting to hear the lines "summer's gonna come..." and "winter's gonna end..." I want 'summer' to come cloud my eyes.

[if I were 18 again I could justify writing this post, being 23 makes this embarrassing)

If you decide to listen to this song, I would suggest not listening to the interview.