Comfort music

A couple months ago, Michelle Branch was playing at a city event near me. I got really excited, but when I told my friends, their reactions ranged from indifferent to condescending. I can't blame them. Michelle Branch writes her own songs (or at least did originally) and is, I think, an at least relatively talented musician, but she's definitely a producer of radio hits, pure pop and country. Wikipedia tells me that she opened for Hanson in 2000. In 2001, I had no regard for Hanson one way or the other, but I loved Michelle Branch.

"The Spirit Room" wasn't the first CD I ever received, but it was probably the first one that wasn't a "NOW" volume or a Spice Girls album (the Sailor Moon soundtrack is its own entity, not subject to normal rules of classification). "Everywhere" was certainly the first music video I ever saw all the way through. I listened to it with my friend Jenn. She and I tried to record a cover of "Everywhere" together, sitting on the floor of the back room of my house singing into a boom box's tape recorder. But playing it back, our voices sounded thin and desperate without instrumental backing, and we abandoned the project. Her favorite song was "Something to Sleep To," whereas I liked the two singles, "All You Wanted" and "Everywhere," with "Sweet Misery" coming in third even when I couldn't understand the lyrics.

My most vivid memory of "The Spirit Room" is listening to it on my best friend's Walkman on the way back from the fifth grade trip to historic Williamsburg. We were on a charter bus, and I leaned against the window. The rainbow specks on the grey seats, no seatbelts, the wide aisles, and the chatter of everyone else; and I sat alone and happy, listened to the whole thing through twice.

Years later, I bought and listened to her second album, "Hotel Paper." I liked the story in the liner notes that she had written some of the songs on hotel stationery while touring. And I loved certain songs, with "Tuesday Morning" and (again) the single "Are You Happy Now" being my favorite.

But it doesn't touch me as much as "The Spirit Room" does. When I hear the first chords of "All You Wanted," I am comforted, I am safe. It might not be "good" music, and her lyrics might be a little trite. But it's the music that first introduced me to music, that led to the passionate love I have for music today and indirectly to so much else, including my having any interest in Ben in the first place, and the creation of this blog. And it's the music that introduced me to songs about love, which is an important detail in its own right.

You're everywhere to me, and when I close my eyes it's you I see.

You're everything I know that makes me believe I'm not alone,

I'm not alone.

Love,

Sarah