: thinkin' about time :

... one of the great but bizarre things about the 21stC is portable music. I remember when Sony's WalkMan came out. My iPod is as basic as you can get, but I swap various handpicked playlists back and forth all the time while waiting for the the iPhone's price to come down ( who says Canadians need Rogers? I have an 18 year old with an eBay iPhone working just fine. Although, I think it holds a lot more songs than my $79 Shuffle ).

One of those playlists is Hootie & the Blowfish's 'Best of ... 1993-2003' ... I'm not going to pretend to be qualified to editorially comment on music like Bing can, Kingsley will, or Randy often does. I just enjoy it, and sometime it makes me think, differently. A good thing.

Cracked Rear View, which remarkably is the 12th best selling album in music business history, included hits Hold My Hand, Let Her Cry, Only Wanna Be With You, and Time. Drowning was a little too in-your-face I guess? But given Obama's week, maybe someone should dig it up again as it asks some great questions.

1993 and 1996 releases under Atlantic Records picked up Old Man & Me ( an old man's retrospective on a young man's involvement in a war ), Only Wanna Be With You ( settled out-of-court with Bob Dylan for unauthorized use of lyrics from Tangled Up in Blue ), and, of course, Time. 2000's Scattered, Smothered and Covered covered a diverse range of bands from 54-40 to Zeppelin, Bill Withers to Roy Orbison and R.E.M. Even though sued by him, H&TB contributed to a Bob Dylan tribute album with 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown' ... and countless songs found their way onto sitcom and movie soundtracks.

Time is one of those songs, like several of the above, that sound upbeat but have often profound, questioning lyrics. Kind of plaintive, semi-searching, sort of hopeful, almost. It is a great song to dig out when you are feeling a little lost, maybe confused about your life, or life in your world, whether locally or even cosmically. I keep a foot tall 50 year old hourglass on my shelves ... among my other knicknacks and mementos, just to remind me that time is a resource, an ally, an enemy sometimes. Here's someone with a few bones to pick with time, but that's OK. Get it out, I say. Maybe our songwriters and poets are psychologically far healthier than the majority of us?

Anyhow, this post came to me while on a nice long walk in the March sunshine this aft, so I thought I'd share it with you. I listened to 2006's Live in Charleston at www.hootie.com while typing this, and as it wraps up ( right about now ) 'The Killing Stone' is playing. Downright biblical. Say what you will, H&TB is just what the doctor ordered once in a while. Anyways, here's the lyrics to Time ... enjoy them.

dlc

***

TIME

Time, why you punish me?
Like a wave bashing into the shore
You wash away my dreams.

Time, why you walk away?
Like a friend with somewhere to go
You left me crying.

Can you teach me about tomorrow?
And all the pain and sorrow, running free?
'Cause tomorrow's just another day
And I don't believe in time.

Time, I don't understand
Children killing in the street
Dying for the color of red

Time, hey there red and blue
Wash 'em in the ocean, make them clean
Maybe their mothers won't cry tonight?

Can you teach me about tomorrow?
All the pain and sorrow, running free?
But tomorrow's just another day
And I don't believe in ...

Time is wasting
Time is walking
You ain't no friend of mine
I don't know where I'm goin'
I think I'm out of my mind
Thinking about time.

And if I die tomorrow, yeah
Just lay me down to sleep.

Time is wasting
Time is walking
You ain't no friend of mine
I don't know where I'm goin'
I think I'm out of my mind
Thinking about time.

Time, you left me standing there
Like a tree growing all alone
The wind just stripped me bare, stripped me bare

Time, the past has come and gone
The future's far away, but
Now only lasts for one second, one second

Can you teach me about tomorrow?
And all the pain and sorrow, running free?

'Cause tomorrow's just another day
And I don't believe in time ...

Time ... time ... time ...
You ain't no friend of mine
I don't know where I'm goin'
I think I'm out of my mind
Thinking about time.
Walking, wasting ... wasting time.

Time, why you punish me?