my love, she speaks like silence

Songs can be regrettable things, even if you didn't write them.

I was out busking tonight (briefly, as drunken homeless types forced me to relocate a few times), and going through a few songs I hadn't played in a while. About ten seconds into "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" by Dylan (seriously one of the best love songs ever), it suddenly hit me that I'd associated this song with someone, and that for whatever reason, it was no longer appropriate to sing with that person in mind. The song totally lost its soul as I fell into this mental well, splashing around and trying to get a hold of why the song had ever meant so much. It seemed really hopeless, and I couldn't figure out why I was just going through the motions.

But songs are independent things, no matter how you attach yourself to them.

Dylan's song is all about "his love," and since I first heard it, I assumed he meant a girl. His "love." But all the wonderful qualities that he details about this woman throughout the song...it's too idyllic, too idealistic. No girl is like that. And it hit me. Maybe he just meant his capacity to love. His Love is "like some raven, at my window with a broken wing." Not some perfect girl. The whole song very well could be about him, and this cryptic, beautiful quality in himself that is perhaps so surprising to even him that he felt compelled to personify it in song as if his love was a lover.

Thinking all of these things in an instant, somewhere during the third verse, I felt the song take root again. I hadn't lost anything. I guess it's pretty impossible not to link songs to people, and that's not all bad. But it's a nice feeling to remember that they stand on their own, too.

Is this all really obvious? It might be, but I'd forgotten.

Many thanks to the gentleman who dropped a ten dollar bill in my case, as well as the couple who rode the train with me to 28th Street and stayed in the station for a few minutes to hear me play. It made my night.