Penrith to London
I've been listening to The Walkmen a lot in the last week, since introducing a friend to their music, and today's 3 hour train journey home felt like a perfect opportunity to disappear again into their very particular world — where it's always 5am, and your senses are filtered through the dawn's alcoholic fug, as you stagger on to someone's house after a raucous night of shouting and dancing, with ears ringing and your still excited mind unwilling to give in to your body's pleas for rest.
Then eventually back at the after party, whiskey clutched in hand, huddled in a corner with an old friend — someone who knows you better than you even know yourself — you have a passionate but slurred conversation about your lives lived and loves lost, the party doggedly carrying on all around you, lurching in and out of rhythm and your consciousness. That's what their songs mean to me, always world-weary but filled with a huge amount of love and generosity for the people who make us what we are, and the experiences we share with them.
I've always loved them, but the song embedded below, New Country, from their latest album You & Me feels particularly poignant to me at the moment, its initial message of optimistic exhilaration for the weightless possibilities of the new, cut through with both trepidation and a sadness for things past.
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