remembering

I know it probably seems sometimes like my blog is little more than a Dwight Twilley fan site, but I just uncovered some footage I’d never seen before of the band (featuring Tom Petty on bass) pretending to play one of my favorite songs. …I think it’s Twilley’s innate grasp of the relationship between pop and heartbreak – the former tending to have the latter built into it – that explains why his music moves me on such a deep level. The theme of tonight’s song is memory. We spend so much of our lives reflecting on the life we’ve already lived. Or at least I do, especially of late as I try to make sense of a short but particularly intense and strange chapter in my life’s journey. When Twilley and Phil Seymour hit the song’s climactic high note, I remember you, it puts me in touch with the way loss can turn what were life’s tender moments into painful memories. The thing that made you so happy is gone, so remembering it leaves you with a chilly emptiness. You get over it eventually. Time heals and gives the clarity that comes with perspective. You come to understand that maybe you weren’t so happy after all. But tonight’s song is sung from the point of view of someone who’s not yet healed. The memories haunt him. If only he could step into a time machine and get a do-over. He’d do a few pivotal things differently, say things he didn’t say the first time around, and not say things he did say but shouldn’t have. But there’s no time machine, no do-over. There’s only memories, which with some distance lose their jagged edges. The events and the people you experienced them with fade away, much in the way the song fades, the main difference being that you can play the song over again. And you will…