I don’t understand what it is about staying up late at night that makes me melancholy, but sometime around 2:30 a.m. I’m just dying inside and suffering that sickness that can only be described as bittersweet. At dinner with a good friend on Friday night we talked about getting older… she said “I still feel 17 inside, how can I be almost 35?” And yes, my birthday is soon, and I’m musing over what it will feel like to be 45. I honestly do still feel 22 most days, it’s always odd when people call me m’am in the stores and I catch a glimpse of my graying hair in the mirror. This dissonance is especially resonant when it comes to music. You know what I mean! You hear a song that you heard when you were 22 and damnit, it’s difficult to make sense of the fact that you’ve been listening to The Saturday Boy for 23 years already now! (click on the image below to buy it) That just cannot be possible. No. I refuse to accept that I’ve held this song in my mind for more years than I was when it first hit me.

And no one does this to me like Billy Bragg. (no I’ll not argue that he’s the most brilliant of musicians, don’t fret) but his lyrics… comeon! If there is another soul out there in the world that is as melancholy as me, it must be Mr. Bragg. He’s taken us back in time with him, to his youth, to his life with his lyrics. I was 22 (or 21?) when I heard Brewing Up With Billy Bragg for the first time, on a crappy cassette player in the cramped quarters of a college dorm. My best friend of the time and I listened to it over and over again, we were enthralled. It was music for our folk, from our folk, and it hit us at the moment when the world lay before us with all it’s problems and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And we were learning about the killing fields and AIDS and the Sandinistas and the craziness of the Falklands and the closing of Head Start programs and de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, and all the things that our beloved President had been ignoring for years. But along with it, we learned about people who fought to bring these issues to light, to mobilize people and powers to change the order of things. And in our youth we idolized these struggles and these activists. And Billy Bragg was there, always there.

So now, I can’t possibly have been hearing this for 23 years can I? These horrors still exist, the world lay before me with all it’s problems and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. And I still idolize the those struggles against Apartheid, and against war, and the Sanctuary Movement and the struggle for union labor even in this post-union world. And Billy Bragg is still here.

But it’s the love songs that I turn to now. They speak to me differently than they did all those years ago. In that way I am 23 years older, (thankfully!). And now I feel that aching melancholy for highschool days that I never even had, and girlfriends’ brothers that I’ve never known, and rides home from somewhere with no one who tempted me to detour. Somehow his life’s story has melded into mine and been translated and reiterated into the fabric of my own history. Well, ok… maybe there was that one ride home that tempted me to detour! But such is the fate of growing up with a musician who writes such lyrics …. it’s inevitable