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Anybody Wanna Take Me Home
Ryan Adams
Rock n Roll
2003

I don't know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes I find that a line from a song will pop into my head at just the right moment.  Lately it's been: "Have you seen the moon tonight/Is it full?" from "Anybody Wanna Take Me Home".  I seem to have become hyper-aware of the moon.  It is ever-present; still hanging around in the morning when I'm on my way to work and back and beaming brightly in the darkening sky on my walk home at the end of the day.

I quite like Ryan Adams, but I find that sometimes he can be a little self-inflated and that he puts out too much material in a short span of time.  This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but he tends to be kind of inconsistent.  Anyway, this is a pretty good album and this song has been a favourite of mine for a long time. 

When I was in the mid- and post-McGill doldrums I latched on to this song's melancholy tone and its Smiths-like jangly guitars.  I loved, "So, I am in the twilight of my youth/Not that I'm going to remember" because that's exactly what it felt like.  Like being in my early twenties was supposed to be so wonderful and fun, but most of the time I just felt kind of lost or detached.  I would go out (these were my wilder days, after all), but I always felt kind of strange or out of place.  Like I both wanted and didn't want to be there.  Like I was both participant and observer.  It seemed like everyone else had an easier time being fully present in the moment, whereas I struggled: "The people dancing in the corner, they seem happy/But I am sad/I am still dancing in the coma of the drinks I just had." 

I am not the girl I was at 22 or 23.  I still love this song, but it doesn't make me feel the way I did then and I've got to say, I kind of like that fact.  It still does something to me though.  Parts of it make my stomach churn and something catch in my throat.  The build of, "I'll disappear/Just like magic" towards the wordless howling at the end of the song kind of makes me stop breathing.  But just for a second.