Thoughts on a voice.

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Ride the Divide is a not too bad documentary about a pretty torturous bike ride. Amy Petty has 2 songs in the soundtrack, this missive is about “July.”

The song is about lovers leaving or apart. (yes, I've discovered linking) It has a wide dynamic range and slow beat, starting with just her voice in a quiet range, rolling up to full band and chorus, then returning to the intimate, then rolling back in. In the chorus, she's nailing notes in a powerful voice like Dame Adele or Flo have trained us to appreciate, though I think they really just released the natural love hidden for so long in all of us.

And it's that soaring voice that I want to write about, how the note and effects and context of this one little part convey an image of someone that never was. I hear this song and am filled with a wistfulness for a day in July some years ago when I met someone who I thought was this note. Of course that was artistic license, I know that I simply meant that some characteristic of this person reminded me of some of the soaring aspects of this note.

But, fascinatingly, it became apparent that I'd met that person at the end of the phase of her life being all I find soaringly possible in this note. Appearance only years after the end of the relationship, I enjoy my explanation while understanding its limits.

So this note sums all this up: becoming enthralled by the poetess who's period of creativity was ending as her station permitted a shift toward a self-focus, my loss of that and the reward for figuring it out, all of this rides along with Amy Petty singing this song.

It's not merely evoking emotions, it's recalling the evolution of them. Like recalling a recollection, and I'm a sucker for meta-.

Anyway, I shall off to exploit this mood for writing to work on a story about the events of July 20th, 1969. It may even appear here, redacted a bit to preserve sensibilities.