Where am I from? Where do I belong?
I feel a certain rootlessness these days, and I think it stems from moving at a pivotal period in my life. When I moved back to Chicago, I lost my way back to familiarity, back to home. That first Winter I spent away from Texas was hard. My high school friends had come back home from college and I was stuck in a cramped apartment out in Lakeview, trying to reconnect with them via Facebook, dodging questions about when I’d visit.
I did end up visiting, and it was nice for a time, but there was a wall. I didn’t live there anymore and my friends had all stayed close, running around in packs in that old familiar way. I had known before I got off the plane that I had changed, but it wasn’t until I’d seen everyone that I actually felt it.
And I tried to be this magnificently transformed city boy, an artist, a sophisticated thinker. I wanted to show them all that I had broken the shell that constrained me, that I was fulfilling my high school ambitions.
But the truth was that the city had swallowed me whole. I needed a place to feel grounded, to feel safe, to recharge. A place that I could retreat to, where people that knew me before the change existed. I thought Texas might be that place. My old stomping grounds. A life before worry.
It wasn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because of the change? Because I’d grown apart from them? A constant reminder that, in a way, I had turned my back on the city I grew up in. Not that I’d ever been much of a fan of the town when I was living there. In fact, all I wanted to do was get out. Irony I guess. Maybe a little too Alanis for my liking.
That place I’m looking for, though, it exists. I’ve felt it. I feel it through song. Three tracks off of Dillard & Clark’s Through the Morning, Through the Night (the title track, “So Sad,” and “Polly”) take me there. The harmonies are what do it. And the choruses. I’m transported back to my bedroom on Travis Court, overlooking our pool at night, the reflections from the water bouncing off my ceiling. I’m driving down Peytonville Avenue with the top down, on my way home from school. I’m sitting outside the Starbuck’s in Town Square with a few friends just before closing. I’m at the AMC, seeing Anchorman with Sarah, holding hands for the first time, our palms sweaty, dare we disturb them.
Country ballads like these, they have hooks that actually get you. I could go on and on about how I don’t hear that anymore, but I’d be beating a dead horse.
I’ll spend my whole life trying to write a song as good as “Polly,” because I’ve been trying to find that place for so long, and that longing always creeps up on me over the holidays. Because I’m not there yet. I haven’t found it. Maybe I never will. But that’s what the music’s for, to help me forget and to help me remember.
“Through the Morning, Through the Night”
