Songs I Dig: Runaway

There are some songs that just stick with me for whatever reason, that I become obsessed with them, and I listen to them over and over. One such example is TV on the Radio's Family Tree --I couldn't get enough of it for awhile--and I can still listen to Tunde Adebimpe's tale of a forbidden love any day of the week. I imagine ghosts connected to the tree keeping the lovers apart.

There are also songs that conjure up certain memories. Like smells, the memory songs can take me back to a particular place and/or time. There is that All Star song by Smash Mouth which makes me think of the summer of 1999, the one before I graduated from college. The last summer before I had to become an adult. It's a stupid song, but it reminds me of that time of fear and excitement and longing.

This is all a preamble to introduce what I intend (hope?) to be at least a semi-regular feature about songs such as those above. I don't have grand illusions that they will all be winners but I do promise to try and feature either a good song or a good story about a song.

So to start off this feature (called, for lack of a better name, Songs I Dig), I dig Runaway by The National. Off of their latest album High Violet (of which I highly recommend), I started listening to the album on my work commutes, and I got hooked on this song in late January/early February. I can't tell you exactly what the song is supposed to mean, though to me it sounds like love and loss. And maybe about the fight to keep the love and not giving up. Seriously, I'm not sure.



Of course, I think the beauty of music is that it doesn't always matter what a song means, or what the writer intended. Sometimes you can make it your own, and the deep, melancholic voice of singer Matt Beringer put sound to how I was feeling in early February. I was reeling from losing London and all that London was for me (friends, experiences, possibilities, making my own way) and feeling completely helpless about it. Lines like, "there's no saving anything," "I'll swallow the sun," and "We've got another thing coming undone," was the poetic version of how I felt. I might not have been running away, but I was going and I was blind-sided, and it felt like everything was closing in, or that I was '"being led to the flood," if you will. I was sad (still am), and I needed a quiet space to feel my loss, and this song provided it.

Yet, when I listen to Runaway now, I smile through my (sometimes figurative) tears. On my last day out in London, I took the bus across the Thames at Vauxhall. Outside my bus window, on a clear day, with Runaway playing in my ears, I had a beautiful view of Parliament, Big Ben, and the river. A most spectacular view, one that each of the countless times I witnessed reminded me of all that I loved of London. That it was my last meaningful look at London (for a little while at least) was a fitting end to three years well spent. And now, Runaway mostly makes me remember that view and my time in London. Which is why I dig it.


To download a live(ish) version of Runaway for free, go here.

TV on the Radio has a new album out in April. You can get a free download of Caffeinated Consciousness here.