On May 15, 2007, Wilco released Sky Blue Sky, and it took some time to gestate in my heart and soul. Living alone in a snug house 12 miles out into Penobscot Bay, moored to an island, Jeff Tweedy had tossed me another lifeline. I had staked a claim a few years prior, and my earliest memories of first-time homeownership during the fall and early-winter of 2003 are interwoven with songs from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. In one memory, as "Reservations" fades into wan piano chords and broken strings, I can see Sou'easter sleet freezing on the storm door leading to the kitchen. On repeat in my head, "I'm not going outside."
By 2007, I thought I'd begun to find my sea legs. Thought. Rachel Lyman Field tries to evoke an island sense in her poem "If Once You Have Slept On An Island," but that's not quite it even though I had "wheeling gulls" in my head. I also had a Bose stereo and TV in the 21st century. The Islander market sold beer and sandwiches and bacon and eggs. On Saturday mornings, after a dump run, I could swing by the store and pick up supplies, chit chat and distract. Then came the long Saturday afternoons of walking someplace new, some narrow facet of Mullen's Head or Burnt Island, listening to the common eiders, buffleheads and scoters chatting. Some weekends, their murmur comprised all my conversation.
Looking back, I can see now how lonely I'd been. The gravitational yearnings, heavy for a woman I loved, pulled hard. She was far, far away from me. "Our distance has a way . . . " And as I tried to bury those feelings, they manifested in guttural fires that needed quenching. I drowned them in the moss and fog and ducks, boots scuffing the soil, constant motion. Once home, the sound of the 3:45 ferry trailing off through the Thorofare, I knew where I'd be for the next week. Right there, anchored to the home, trying to navigate a way forward without going anywhere.
So it was that Tweedy wormed his way into my soul. I'd seen Uncle Tupelo a few times, Wilco in 1995 after AM, banged my head in bars to the brash rock of his earliest work, but then we both matured, he more than I. In songs like "Radio Cure," Tweedy had proven to me that my earliest instincts were right. I'd put all my chips on him and dropped Jay Farrar after a 1996 Son Volt show at La Luna. Not for me. So here we were, me and Tweedy, alone together on an island, his hopes and fears mirroring my own.
Summers in those first years of homeownership were punctuated by glorious visits to see Nancy, someone the recalcitrant caretaker, Steff, called my "imaginary girlfriend." "Either she's on island or not," he'd say. Maybe he was jealous of the obvious riot in my soul bounding up the hill past the Post Office to my house. On one such return, my neighbor Jason handed me a burned copy of Sky Blue Sky. He raised his eyebrows and said, "Seriously, put it on." At first, I resented the MPBN In Tune by 10 Sara Willis "adult oriented rock" categorization, maybe a bit too polished. I wasn't ready to acknowledge that I'd turned 40.
By the time October fogs rolled in, and I knew I wouldn't be leaving the island any time soon to see her, the album unfolded. "Either Way," "Sky Blue Sky," "Patient With Me," and "What Light" tore me apart. ("Beneath the sweet calm face of the sea / Swift undertow.") The one song I almost couldn't make it through? "Hate it Here." It was an anthem to my solitude.
I try to stay busy
I do the dishes, I mow the lawn
I try to keep myself occupied
Even though I know you're not coming home
I try to keep the house nice and neat
I make my bed I change the sheets
I even learned how to use the washing machine
But keeping things clean doesn't change anything
What am I going to do when I run out of shirts to fold?
What am I going to do when I run out of lawn to mow?
What am I going to do if you never come home?
Tell me, what am I gonna do?
(©Wilco 2007)
Fast forward 15 years. I no longer live on my beloved island. I'm no longer alone. Traffic rushes past our house. I have urban tinnitus in Downeast Maine. Trucks and mufflers dragging, early morning clatter. I ask for silence, and I'm busier than I've ever been, all pursuits burying that hole within. And then, last week, we lost our beloved brother-in-law, Michael. We had seen Wilco the night prior at the United Palace Theater, a masterful show. We woke to the news of a hospitalization. Nancy hopped a train, and by 11a.m., he was gone.
Back home now, a week of work has passed, and I slip in the disc for Saturday morning breakfast. "Maybe the sun will shine today / The clouds will blow away / Maybe I won't feel so afraid." Tweedy acknowledging what I'd hidden from myself all along: afraid of being forever alone. Afraid of hanging up the phone. The silence. The stop of motion after hearing the duck chatter, the clatter of ferries and grocery lists, the grind of work, all emotion dismissed. Thinking of Betsy being alone, her beloved partner having gone home.
Now, the songs take on new depth. It's a masterful expression of fear and longing. The emotional cadence of a man, middle aged, unafraid to confront that emptiness within, the lonely trip again. I had sent the songs out to the universe on mixed CDs, and they came back to me in the form of Nancy and partnership. But we all must confront our own emptiness, each one alone. When "Hate it Here" came on, we wept. We wept for Betsy and her loss, our loss. We wept for the chasms we had crossed to be together, knowing how fragile it all is, how fleeting.
I've always admired artists who are brave because they confront these feelings head on: song after song after song. Samuel Beckett said it best in "The Unnamable": “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.” We will, and we'll carry with us this song.
