Relative Something

This morning finds me enrapt with a song on an album from 1974. It’s been around since I was 15 and I have heard it probably thousands of times over the years, but I never closely listened to it. The song is “Fountain of Sorrow” from Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” album.

The song is 6 minutes and 42 seconds long which allows for a listener to easily get distracted from following each precious nuance of Jackson’s specific phrasing or the subtly of instrumental embellishments or background vocals. Those features are the underlying fabric of the more notable lyrics that interweave a mixture of simple and complex lyrics.

I visited the Wikipedia entry about the song and liked one reviewer’s description of it as “an intricate extended metaphor.” I also learned that the song is “generally assumed to have been inspired by” his relationship with Joni Mitchell. I didn’t even know they were a thing, but the word used was “brief.”

As often happens for me, I find myself dumbstruck by the invention of each brilliant aspect of a song that materializes from a person’s mind to become something significant and timeless.

The structure of a simple hit song that consists of a series of verses separated by a repeating chorus, sometimes augmented with a bridge interlude, seems so simplistic in comparison to successful songs that deviate from that basic structure.

In “Fountain of Sorrow,” I don’t know when I am hearing a verse, chorus or bridge. It just flows like a river.

Speaking of inventing a song, I saw that Joan Baez, who created her own epic relationship remembrance in “Diamonds and Rust,” recorded a cover of “Fountain of Sorrow” a year after it was released.

There are a lot of songwriters in the world. I am grateful for all of them. My appreciation goes to the next level when the creation of song recordings takes them to places of wonderment that didn’t previously exist. Each pause, every instrument, and every aspect of making a person’s idea into a musical “thing” that will last and last, that is the invention.

I don’t know why a single song will suddenly grab my attention after so much time but I thoroughly enjoy it when it happens.

It’s one of the few times I would ever welcome an “earworm” repetition of a favorite line or two.

Looking through some photographs, I found inside a drawer

I was taken by a photograph of you

There were one or two I know that you would have liked a little more

But they didn’t show your spirit quite as true…

written by: Jackson Browne album: Late for the Sky recorded: 1974

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