inside out

I love music for many of the obvious reasons that almost everyone loves music. Chiefly, that it can manipulate our emotions. But for me, I think it’s even more concrete than that. Certain sounds, certain songs actually simulate exact feelings for me. Or specific people. I have said since the moment I first heard Grizzly’s Bear’s “Two Weeks”  that the song sounds like a how I want all of life to feel.

Some songs sound like how certain people make me feel. 

I like Katie Costello. I suppose she’s not a visionary or anything. She’s not reinventing the wheel. But I think (especially for being about 20 years old) she’s a good song writer with that soothing female-voiced indie pleasantness that I like to be surrounded by. Why? I suppose that’s what my life actually does sound like to me.

But this song, “Inside Out” is my favorite of hers. Largely because it sounds to me the way it feels hanging out with this one friend of mine. Familiar, like your own mind—"was that your thought or mine?"—but surprising to you, in a way you didn’t know you could be surprised. Blushing almost.  Lyrically, yes, but more than that. That lightly bouncing cello, intense but not,  a swell, a recede, a sort of mellow turmoil, that pushing up against the boundaries of your heart just a bit, a teeny bit of kazoo for fun. And what a lovely service, to know that when life makes it that you can’t always hang out with the people you want to, you can almost simulate the feeling. It’s not even that you like the song that much. It’s that you like the feeling.

I don’t like this live version as much as I like the studio version (kazoo missing) so I highly recommend just getting her album if you’re into it. 

photos from Katie Costello Music