The Be Good Tanyas, “Blue Horse”

This was in the fall of 2001. I was a subscriber to the Erin McKeown fan newsletter, and I had read that she’d be opening for this band called The Be Good Tanyas for some shows she was doing in Canada. Since I liked Erin I thought I might like them too, so I looked for their CD in Borders and bought it one Friday night.

I was going through something emotional at the time and felt like I needed to get away. I woke up the next day at 5 AM Saturday morning and impulsively started driving up the coast along the Pacific Coast Highway, taking this CD along with me to listen to on the way. This was December 1, 2001. I though maybe I’d go to San Francisco where I’d never been up to at that time. . Well, ultimately I didn’t even make it as far as Monterey. I was tired after 5 hours of driving, and moreover I was confused and didn’t understand what I was doing. I got as far as Big Sur, this place on the central California coast where there are tall trees, windy roads, steep cliffs, small waterfalls, and fog. I just stopped alongside the road and listened, and I never wanted to leave. I felt like at that moment I belonged there, even if it was for just that moment. I often think of this imagery when I listen to The Be Good Tanyas, particularly when I hear the song “The Littlest Birds” with the lyrics, “You pass through places / And places pass through you / But you carry ‘em with you / On the souls of your travellin’ shoes”.

Several months later I was listened to this album while driving late at night on the freeway in LA somewhere with my thoughts wandering, and there was a moment where I was thinking that I finally understood entirely what was meant by the lyrics in the song “Only in the Past”, where they sing, “Run away to the seashore it doesn’t matter anymore / Doesn’t matter anymore / Words dry up and fly away with the passing of the days / Eventually you just let the stone fall ”. It’s about letting dreams and memories die and conceding defeat to the past. I was just thinking while listening to it that it’s too bad that nothing lasts. I can’t remember feeling so disconnected from life and from the world as I did around that time. All I could do was see the end of everything, and the end was never good. Happiness and sadness both seemed fake. If everything ended, it was hard to see the point of existence, and the only thing that seemed real was nothing… Hmmm… This song is supposed to be about moving on from a relationship and accepting that it’s time to move on, and it’s actually pleasant to listen to. Yet, for some reason it inspired me to think of all this other stuff that was swirling around in my mind at the time…

There are so many awesome tracks on this album that I find special meaning in, but if I have to choose a favorite one it’s Light Enough To Travel. It’s about not fitting in but not letting that get to you, or at least that’s what it’s about to me. Here are some of the lyrics:

Promise me we won’t go into the nightclub
I feel so fucked up when I’m in there
Can’t tell the bouncers from the customers
And I don’t know which ones I prefer

Promise me we won’t go into the nightclub
I really think that it’s obscene
What kind of people go to meet people
Someplace they can’t be heard or seen