I Try To Reach You, When I’m In My Bed
I’m having one of those moments when a song has conjured up such a tangible part of my past that I can hear it around me, taste its air in my mouth and feel the way it pushes my heart against my chest. The song, delivered by my iPod’s random function, was “Mellow Doubt” by Teenage Fanclub, from their Grand Prix album, the moment where all of their influences and their loves and their talents came together to give us the great West Coast of Scotland Big Star album that we always knew they had in them all along.
Despite its pun-filled name (“Mellowed Out”, get it?), the song itself is this tender moment of melancholy, acoustic guitars and a thick accented sadness mumbling lyrics as heartfelt as they are artless (“I’m in trouble, and I know it/How I’m feeling, I can’t show it/But these feelings don’t go away” goes the chorus, setting the tone for the rest of the song). When I first heard it, it was (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?-era Britain, and the song probably got on the radio because it could’ve been a Noel Gallagher B-Side, but I remember it hitting a chord with the boy who felt too much that I was back then. I wasn’t convinced about the whistling break in the middle, nor singer Norman Blake’s beard, but I bought it nonetheless and played it over and over.
Years later, listening to it by accident feels odd; for all the nostalgia that hits me as soon as the strum and the voice comes inside me, I feel like I understand it more, what it’s about, even though that’s just me pushing all the experiences I’ve had since then onto the words. It feels like a song that I was too young for, or too innocent for, the first time, though, something I’ve grown into without meaning to (There are parts that seem so well-suited to my experiences that I wonder whether I’ve thought and done things specifically because of this song in some way, and I realize that and feel embarrassed, dumb and impressionable). For a second, I wish that I could go back and tell the me hearing it for the first time to make some different decisions and save himself some heartache along the way. But then, where would I have ended up?
