BiblioAddict

On singing about home and what happens when you love it but leave it anyway:

This week’s Booking Through Thursday:

But, enough about books … Other things have words, too, right?  Like … songs!  If you’re anything like me, there are songs that you love because of their lyrics; writers you admire because their songs have depth, meaning, or just a sheer playfulness that has nothing to do with the tunes.

So, today’s question?

• What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love?
• Why?
• And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them?

You don’t have to restrict to modern songsters, either … anyone who wants to pick Gilbert & Sullivan, for example, is just fine with me.  Lerner & Loewe?  Steven Sondheim?  Barenaked Ladies?  Fountains of Wayne?  The Beatles?  Anyone at all …

On my way back from vacationing at home (St.Louis) for the holidays I had a four hour (!) layover in Chicago’s O’Hare airport.  It sounds awful, but really it was one of the best four hours I’ve had in a long time.  Four hours in an airport, was four hours of much-needed, uninterrupted reading time.  I passed the time with my feet propped on a table, my nose buried in State by State, and my ears plugged with Adele’s “Hometown Glory” playing on repeat for longer than it probably should have been.

Lyrically, it isn’t the best song I’ve heard, but it was perfect for where I was coming from and what I was reading (more on that later).  The lyrics:

I’ve been walking in the same way as I did
Missing out the cracks in the pavement
And tutting my heel and strutting my feet
Is there anything I can do for you dear? Is there anyone I can call?
No and thank you, please Madam. I ain’t lost, just wandering

Round my hometown
Memories are fresh
Round my hometown
Ooh the people I’ve met
Are the wonders of my world
Are the wonders of my world
Are the wonders of this world
Are the wonders of my world

I like it in the city when the air is so thick and opaque
I love to see everybody in short skirts, shorts and shades
I like it in the city when two worlds collide
You get the people and the government
Everybody taking different sides

Shows that we ain’t gonna stand shit
Shows that we are united
Shows that we ain’t gonna take it
Shows that we ain’t gonna stand shit
Shows that we are united

Round my hometown
Memories are fresh
Round my hometown
Ooh the people I’ve met

Are the wonders of my world (4x)

And here she is singing it live:

As I was listening to that, I was reading Andrea Lee’s essay on Pennsylvania in State by State.  It so eloquently touched on that bittersweet feeling of leaving home; that desire to see and experience more of the world and live a different life, yet the constant concern for what’s happening with family back home and the low-grade, nagging fear of not being there.

My middle brother is the one who stays.

Of the three kids in our family, my oldest brother, and I, the youngest, leap in opposite directions far from Philadelphia.  Our brother, the second son, is curiously content to live where he was born.  He travels around the world, visits me in Italy and his older brother in California, but is immune to the malady that gnaws his siblings: the idea that life could be better over there somewhere, out of sight.

…

All through the years he stays; he busts his ass staying.  He stays to help his flesh and blood through the mysteries of decrepitude, and final salutations.  And we, the self-styled adventurers, the voluntary exiles, are the ones who, with a pang, receive the 2 a.m. phone calls; jump trembling onto planes; walk timidly into the arrival zone where our brother is always there to pick us up.  With his face, so like ours, but transformed by a certain kind of look, a blend of privileged sadness, and knowledge we don’t possess.  Standing there waiting, of course, with his feet planted firmly on the ground.

And from Lee’s essay about what it feels like to leave home, I went to Jonathan Franzen’s essay on New York, which was very much about the reasons that we do (Franzen, by the way is from St. Louis):

You know, and the hazy blue-gray sky with big white clouds drifting over Central Park.  And the buildings of stone, and the doormen, and Fifth Avenue like a solid column of yellow cabs receding uptown into this bromine-brown pall of smog.  The vast urbanity of it all.  And to be there with Martha, my exciting New York cousin, and to spend an afternoon wandering the streets with her, and then have dinner like two adults, and then go to a free concert in the Park: the self I felt myself to be that day was a self I recognized only because I’d longed for it for so long.  I met, in myself, on my first day in New York City the person I wanted to become.

…

…the Midwest is like the dewy, romantic, hopeful eye of yin at the center of New York’s brutal, grasping yang.  A certain kind of Midwestern comes east to be completed.  Just as a certain kind of New York native goes to the Midwest to be renewed.

As a Midwesterner who stepped onto New York City ground for the first time last year and thought and felt, with all of my being, “This is home,” I know exactly where Franzen is coming from.

There is glory in where I’m from and glory in where I’m going.