Sometimes I get to write things for school, however brief, that I truly enjoy writing and thinking about. This is one of those times. When I first heard this song, I was very young. I remember hearing it on the radio many times when it was first released and still in heavy rotation. At the time it had this feeling of hope to me. I dont think I understood the lyrics as I should have. It sounded like what I imagined California felt like in winter. I had seen a lot of things about California on the television, but had no real understanding of what the place was like, that would come years later. Funnily enough, when I made it to California the song made me think of home. As I got older and more into the band I found out that the song was written during a time when the lyricist and singer Adam Duritz was visiting a hospital regularly because a friend was in a coma. It was both tribute and remorse. By high school I was attaching it to the relationships I had with different girls, and then to my relationship with one girl. I felt that the feeling of hope was still there to a degree, but it was a more specific hope. It became a symbol of hope in reconciliation. Then when it became clear that there would be no reconciliation, it became a yearly anthem for New Years Eve, with the line, Maybe this year will be better than the last, constantly my mantra. Then, as people do, I grew up. I stopped listening to it for a long time, and eventually the years started actually becoming better than the ones before them. Now when I listen to the song I dont think about the real meaning of the song, I dont think of the meaning that I attached to it either. Now when I hear it, I think about a time in my life that is long passed. I think about the people I knew back then. I think about driving my first car and listening to it while the leaves blew around my hometown in the fall. I become very nostalgic. And as meanings do, it changed. Now it represents my late teens and early twenties in sort of a bittersweet way. It helps me remember that I was just learning how to live this life, and that I should give my younger self a little slack when I think about him. A Long December has lost a lot of the artistic meaning that it held and now has a more personal meaning. Its an old friend, who changes but always sounds exactly the same. I will listen to this song and think of the way the air smelled in Albany, Georgia when I was just beginning to see the world as it is. I will listen to this song for the rest of my life and, mind full of happy regrets, smile a half-smile.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 04:56:02 +0000
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