Everyone's got their own road to hoe. Some are lucky to have the way be less arduous, but every last one of us has a certain-sized plow yoked up to our neck and it's a daily matter of mustering up the strength to move forward. It's an unsettling task to have to wake up to every morning, but there it is, behaving as sluggishly as we often feel, needing a summoning all of the inertia out there just to get going. Once a few steps have been taken, it feels a little easier. We learn to understand what it's going to take to move ourselves, but we tend to invite all sorts of folly and any number of intangible variances to walk with us on our ways, making everything significantly more challenging and punishing. These variances and follies are mostly in the forms of other people, whose baggage we can never view beforehand. We've got our own and we often keep it close, like a second skin. So does everyone else -- limiting their tells until the lines are tangled and the mess has sprung.
Many of the folks in the new songs by New York-based singer-songwriter Jesse Marchant seem to be dealing with the unfortunate revelations that come when someone -- down at the bottom of a hole -- is offered a rope, but it turns out that their true desire is to have the person who slid the rope come on down and be with them. Down there, is where there is a thought that happiness could be forged. Really, it's just a lure to get someone to fall victim to share the weight, to figure out what's gone wrong. Marchant writes with the conviction of a man in winter, who's seen the thaw, the growing season, the harvest and what all became of it. He's got that cool advantage of time and distance that brings about a chilly air. He sings:
"Down the street
At once where worlds collide
And light you alone
In an effort strained
I stopped to find the line
Best ends the poem
Where were you
When all of this was fucked
And on it's side?
Those words I underlined"
And later he offers, "You can't rely on me to straighten you away," giving us that one, line that suggests, "Not so fast. I've got my own sadness to contend with."