Lucas Recommends: “Spring” by Angel Olsen

Over the past year I’ve found myself getting more and more teary-eyed in simple, everyday moments. One of the particular situations for these moments is simply hearing a song lyric — or reading a line in a poem — that makes me think of my fiancée. When the first lyric of a song is “Don’t take it for granted / love when you have it,” I feel the challenge to take stock of how I’ve been as a partner: have I shown her enough gratitude? Have I shown her exactly how much I love her? Do I share these moments with her when they come up? Of course, in Olsen’s song, the speaker is singing of lost love, of a missed opportunity, so when Olsen sings, “I wish we were kissing,” prefaced by “I wish it were true love,” I hold in only one of those statements, because I already know it’s true love, and I always wish we were kissing.

I’ve thought a bit lately about how I connect with songs that have messages opposite — or merely different — of how I’m internalizing them, wondering if it’s a disservice to the song, the artist, the intended subject, etc. I imagine sharing the lyric “I wish we were kissing” and getting dunked on on Twitter, being told it’s not the point of the song. But the more I think about this song, specifically, the more I think of the final four lines: “So give me some heaven / just for a while / make me eternal / there in your smile.” With a song that still ends on a rumination of hope, of there being some chance at some level of relationship, even if only for a moment, using specific lyrics from it in a relationship that has worked out, that has been committed to, seems only fitting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSRsYI-bWkI(Song recommendation by Lucas Bailor)