Thankful for good music

I was driving in to work today, and I haven't tuned into a music station since last Friday on my way home from work. In the morning I usually listen to the local Boston News Station, WBZ 1030 AM to get headlines and traffic. I listen to the traffic reports so I can laugh, because my commute takes me through the back woods of towny New England rich towns, past golf courses, through woods... it is quite pastoral, and I enjoy listening to reports of traffic being backed up beyond the tolls on the Tobin Bridge.

In the afternoons I usually listen to Howie Carr on the way home unless he's being just too stupid for words. Mondays he has on one of the senior hot-shots from TV guide, Max Robins, so that's always fun to listen to.

So since Friday, there hasn't been music on in the car.

This morning I got in to drive and just didn't want to listen to the news anymore. They weren't going to tell me anything new. Right now we're playing the collective waiting game as a nation to see if our government is going to make a really big parking lot out of the middle east, or, they find some people alive in the rubble someplace. The latter isn't going to happen anytime soon.

So I put on the FM stations to listen to music. They must have heard the playlist I needed in my heart. I heard Bruce Cockburn, Counting Crows, BNL (oh you know it's my favorite!) and U2 singing "Beautiful Day."

I'm a pretty big U2 fan, as you've seen in past entries on my experience in the southwest, but I didn't think I'd ever want to hear this song again:

The heart is a bloom
Shoots up through the stony ground
There's no room No space to rent in this town
You're out of luck And the reason that you had to care
The traffic is stuck And you're not moving anywhere

You thought you'd found a friend
To take you out of this place
Someone you could lend a hand In return for grace

It's a beautiful day
Sky falls, you feel like
It's a beautiful day
Don't let it get away

...

You love this town Even if that doesn't ring true
You've been all over And it's been all over you
It's a beautiful day Don't let it get away
It's a beautiful day
Touch me Take me to that other place
Teach me I know I'm not a hopeless case

See the world in green and blue
See China right in front of you
See the canyons broken by cloud
See the tuna fleets clearing the sea out
See the Bedouin fires at night
See the oil fields at first light

And see the bird with a leaf in her mouth
After the flood all the colors came out

...

What you don't have you don't need it now
What you don't know you can feel it somehow
What you don't have you don't need it now
Don't need it now ...

I felt like screaming SCREAMING the end. What you don't have you don't need it now. Lifting my hands up. Offering the situation to the Lord. Asking him to take it. Giving him dominion over it all. And it is also kind of a prayer for the people who have lost so much over the past few days. Let it go. Let him or her go. Let the whole damn thing go.

So once I got into the office I realized just what I needed. I needed music. Not the crap played on the radio. Not the crap my officemates play at their desks. REAL music. Loud music. Music that kicks. Music with a pulse generated from hands against instruments instead of drum machines and remixed stolen bits of other people's talent.

I am listening to my MP3 collection right now and so much of what I love is forever changed just in the past 2 days. So many songs are different from here on in... this is my soundtrack for today.

• Jim Infantino singing to me "Somewhere over NYC"
• Indigo Girls doing Paul Simon's "America's Tune,"
• October Project's "Dark Times"
• Stevie Ray's version of "Little Wing"
• Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (listening to that right now. Now that's an edifying, soul lifting song. I'm laughing my ass off right now. The end of the song cracks me up, when Eric Idle is saying, "you come from nothing, you return to nothing. what do you lose? nothing! now give us a smile you buggah!)
• Fell on Black Days, Soundgarten
• No woman, no cry -- Bob Marley
• REM - End of the world as we know it
• Master of Puppets, Metallica
• Let the Day Begin, by the Call... that's a great anthem for us all to just get out there and sing at the top of our collective lungs.
• U2's 40 (I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry... he brought me up out of the pit, out of the mirey clay. i will sing, sing a new song...)
• The night they drove ole dixie down... by the band.

My playlist is about as all over the map as my emotions are right now. From Metallica to Bob Marley, I'm swinging between euphoria and absolute rage.

Seeing the presence of God in the hands of the workers, the volunteers; and the darkness and hatred toward the Islamic terrorists and how I just want us to wipe the region off the map. How can I balance these and come up with good, righteous anger?

more later. I need to get some work done.