CarrollBlog 8.5

The other day, at your show, you said something about how difficult it is to hold onto all the ways you used to feel when you were young. As we get older, the precision of our sadness, the dark fear and awe at the universe, the brightness, clarity, and ferocity of first love, they fade out of our lives, becoming something like a vague mist that floats beyond our grip, and we are powerless to stop the partial dissolution of ourselves into that mist, until one day, we find that we have lost track of who we were. It happens when we don't even realize it, and it is inevitable.

But when I hear your music, I am suddenly sixteen again, and that is a powerful thing you do — taking someone back in time so far, and so quickly. And I think that is what it means to be an artist — to try to hold onto that part of yourself that existed when you were sixteen — that crazy wild freedom of mind hoping to be saved so much that it save itself. And it means holding onto that part of yourself even when the rest of the world wants so badly for you to give it up, and even as it is disappearing.

And even if you can never go back yourself, maybe you can write a song that takes someone else back to how they were then. And I think that is alright, and in the end, maybe more important.

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from Amy Rebecca Klein's letter to Conor Oberst