songs of surrender, a drive through the sticks

Savannah drove me to the Park & Ride today so that I could take the Logan Express to Boston for my flight home. It was close to three when we left, sun already low in the sky, coming in through the trees, casting a soft auburn glow, battling back the gray. Savannah gave me a tour of Florence Welsh’s new album — unmistakably her, but way more literal, more resentful, more mournful, more raw. I realized that when she’s angry, her sound is almost bellicose. We spent a lot of the ride listening, reading road signs, tracking headlights. I think there’s a sound so distinct of a woman’s grief that any woman acquainted with grief herself can pick it up immediately, no matter the genre. 

This one song came on, You Can Have It All. I thought about how I’ve seen this sentence make tons of appearances in the music in my life — all over worship songs, and then in secular love songs (Adele, lots of Adele). Always in songs of surrender, a type of song I find so fascinating. If to surrender is just to give up ownership and control, “you can have it all” is both loss and release. Much of the time I feel like these songs are about surrendering stuff we never had in the first place. Or about offering ourselves up completely.

I was thinking about this when And Love, the last song on the album, came on. I think it’s my favorite on the album, and this one is an even more direct meditation on surrender. If I could ask Florence Welsh anything, I’d ask her to describe how grief and surrender and love are knit together in her life. I’ve at least been thinking a lot about how they are in mine. 

[Verse 2]
And love was not what I thought it was
More like an animal crawling deep into a cave
Than a romance novel heroine being swept away
More like surrendering to something
And more like resting than running

And then I was at the bus station in Braintree, hugging Savannah goodbye in the little bus terminal, making plans to come up to Falmouth at the end of summer. 

One of the things I love about our friendship is the familiarity. This is a friendship that welcomes visits from afar to sit on the couch for a week and do very little, to tell each other what we’re getting each other for Christmas and end up getting each other the same thing, to FaceTime on the way to the grocery store. A casualness that is the product of diligently showing up for almost nine years.