Albums for Living and Living for Albums #2- part 3

Thursday, 12-14-17

Alice Smith- For Lovers, Dreamers & Me (2006)

The Day: Busy, Spent more than 2 hours doing trash, and then yelled at someone for crushing the perfectly good, usable boxes I'd rescued from said trash, because of either their own spite or lazy-bumminess. Might get written up tomorrow for yelling. Also, after work, scored a $4 Star Wars ticket for tomorrow which more than offsets. I've been written up far more times than I've seen great Star Wars movies and this, I expect, to be a great one. A friend was stressed early and gallantly persevering. I told her about that line from The Best Exotic Miracle Hotel where Dev Patel's character says that 'Everything works out in the end. And if it's not working out then this is not yet the end.' She liked that. I like it too. It's good to keep it mind whether your day, your year, or your life gets a little rough.

8. Know That I...

Our protagonist, in this story that I'm either making up or keying into, is back in New York and wistful but optimistic. I feel like it's snowing that kind of softly falling, pretty snow that evokes the movies more than real life. Alice is either walking in it or watching it out a window. Perhaps both. She's window-side for the line about 'what's on the inside, keeps me from outside' but she goes out after and does that lovely, romantic, slowly spinning while singing the big chorus move because this is the kind of song that just begs for that. She knows that 'we will find love in the end' and I think that she's singing about her and the true love that she just knows that's out there for her but also for all of us. I think that she wants the 'we' to be everyone and the 'love' to be genuine and I think she's trying to talk herself into that and I love her for it. This is the most optimistic, if cautiously, that our heroine has sounded in several songs and it stirs the same feelings in the listener. I want to root for her all the more because I feel like she's rooting for me. Hang in there, Alice! This is not yet the end!

9. Secrets

This almost feels out of place, like we're going backwards at first blush. It feels like another breakup song. Now, it could be that she's still talking to Gary and re-litigating the issues of their history, but I tend towards the notion that this is another, more recent relationship. More time has passed and we're almost back to track 1, except now Alice has changed, she's been weathered and beaten by drama and heartache and she's less buoyant but also less naïve now. She's realistic and practical about these things. It still hurts but it could never hurt the way it did before. The lows aren't as low when the highs aren't as high and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. Alice on track 9 sounds like the type of woman who could give valuable advice to the woman on track 1, 3, 5... She's grown... and yet...

10. Love Endeavor

...She has absolutely not given up. Now we're really back to the beginning. This track flows beautifully into track 1 because it's about the promise of new love. It's about someone who despite everything they've been through, and knowing that nothing is guaranteed is still ready to dive headlong into a relationship. She's ready to risk it all over again because "Better to have loved...". This feels different from her relationship with Gary, which she entered into cautiously, and likely, different than the last one, which was short-term and dealt with in just one song. This feels like an all-consuming, crush... that could also lead to one. This feels like the relationship that begat Dream must have felt in the beginning. And maybe it is. The main lesson that I take from Lovers is that love is a cycle more than anything else. We fixate and celebrate the GREAT LOVES, the seemingly perfect, written-in-the-stars type of ideal loves but that's scarcely what love is or what love is for most of us, most of the time. If love had an even 50% success rate than most of us would have a couple of loves in our life. But it's not that and it never will be. Those loves exist and we'll be blessed if we ever find one but most of us won't, not exactly. And most of our relationships won't be that at all, most certainly. But just the possibility of that is enough to make it all worth the trying, and while we're endeavoring to try to find the ideal we might just grow and we might just truly feel and we might really find that all the messy failures are valuable in themselves. That's what I take from this. Every time I hear it. For the first time in a while or the 4th consecutive time in a day. Alice Smith has stated that she named the album after that line that Kermit in Rainbow connection because something in it (I suspect the singing fish) was reminiscent of the Muppets. I love the Muppets and I love this so I'd be down even if it made no sense at all, but it does.

Highly Recommended: For Lovers. For Dreamers. For Me.