Recently I have been listening to Some Devil by Dave Matthews. There is a song on the album, which I like, but hadn’t taken the time to process the Lyrics. There was one line that reminded me of my wife and myself. She sometimes talks to me, and it could be minutes but eventually I’ll respond, and then she’ll have no idea what I’m talking about. Anyway that is irrelevant to the overall entry.

I’m going to start with the Lyrics to the song, which are mostly complete, there are two words near the end I have been unable to make out, and apparently no one else has either because they don’t show up on any of the lyrics sites out there.

“So Damn Lucky” (low quality mp3 to keep it small)

Everything’s different, my head in the clouds

I hit this corner with my foot on the gas
I started sliding, I lose it
Everything’s different just like that

Oh my God, wait and see, what will soon become of me?
Frozen heart
Screaming wheels
Does that screaming come from me?

So damn lucky, that you went on ahead
You said, you said, “I’ll see you later…”
I heard what you said a few minutes later, I’m sliding
Everything’s different, again

Oh my God, wait and see, what will soon become of me?
This frozen heart
Screaming wheels
Well does that screaming come from me?
I’m dizzy from all this spinning

Now I’m thinking that you did all you could
When you said “My love take it slowly…”
“Okay,” is what I said

Oh my God, wait and see, what will soon become of me?
Frozen heart
And screaming wheels
Does that screaming come from me?

Take me back, ’cause just before I was spinning
Take me back, to before I got dizzy
Take me back; amazing what a minute can do
Just like you
So, so, slide, up, around, around, around, around, up, around
Amazing what a minute can do, again
Around, around, around
Okay

Now on to the actual entry content …

What I think is cool is this song is written from the perspective of a guy who is in the midst of a car crash, and (I think) dies as a result.

It starts by saying “everything’s different, my head in the clouds,” and I take this to mean I’m dead. In the rest of the song the guy tells you what happened to him. (I know you’ve got the lyrics above but I’m going to narrate anyway.) He goes into a corner too fast and starts spinning and loses control of the car — frozen heart — screaming wheels — or is the screaming me? Then he says it was luck that his love went on ahead, as if to suggest he was glad she wouldn’t dir from his mistake too. Then he absolves her from guilt (although she won’t know it) because she warned him to be careful. He shrugged it off at the time, but while he was waiting to die, he knew there was nothing more she could have done. Then he wants to go back just before it happened, I assume to fix the mistake.

So while I was sitting at the Saturn dealership (for two and half hours waiting for them to change my oil and read the computer in my car) I was reading a book by a physicist Brian Greene — The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. He told of a game he played with his father in NYC growing up, which I thought was rather clever and intend on trying sometime. The game is to look at something (“a bus rushing by, a pigeon landing, a man dropping a coin”) and describe how it would look from an unusual perspective. An example from the book, “”I’m walking on a dark cylindrical surface surrounded by low, textured walls, and an unruly bunch of thick white tendrils is descending from the sky,” and figure out that it was the view of an ant walking on a hot dog that a street vendor was garnishing with sauerkraut.”

It occurred to me this is a gift good song writers have, and specifically Dave Matthews. He can take these obscure points of view, or events and write a story that is captivating and real, but one I would have never pondered on my own. It’s so simple and elegant, and it hits you like a brick wall.

The other thing I want to say is the music blends so well with this particular song; the guitar starts with a repeating hammer-on / pull-off pattern, which inspires a feeling of spinning.