July 9 - Wild Sage

An interesting, although perhaps inevitable - thing about this album full of songs about loneliness: they're all first person. John's songs tend to be first person anyway, especially the ones that are to a degree autobiographical, but it strikes me listening to this one that it would be even more difficult to write a second person song about loneliness. Because caring about someone enough to observe their loneliness usually means they aren't alone any more. Some manage it: Ben Folds' Fred Jones songs do a decent but maudlin job of capturing the solitary nature of caring and despairing when nobody else is around. But I think there's something about observation that would change songs like this. Make them fictional.

The particular loneliness in this song is more intentional than in several of the others in this album. This is someone who is, as the albus suggests, getting lonely. Travelling to that destination only called "away". The movements are vague in this song, the speed more important than the direction.

"Some days I think I'd feel better if I tried harder" is an incredible line, and one that I feel I've internalised a lot. The world is a hard place to fit into, and rejects people even as they reject it. There are some people it simply wasn't built for, and some of them wash up other places. Some of them never wash up at all.