So basically what happened was this. A songwriter got high and sat on the beach and wrote a song about the ocean, and the interconnectedness of everything. It’s five minutes long and there’s no chorus and none of it rhymes, and it slaps so hard I can’t even put it into words.
And it starts out talking about the biggest concepts possible - first God, then the ocean, the continents. Things that are so huge it’s hard to hold them in your head. And it moves - from the ocean to inlets, to estuaries, down through limestone into the aquifer - narrowing its focus more and more until these enormous concepts are distilled down into a single object - a glass of water for a child.
Then the second verse repeats the process on a more personal scale. Another idea that's almost overwhelming in its scope. “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman.” And again, the lyrics narrow it down to a single perfect detail. “My mother once told me she would have named me Laura.” Suddenly it’s not a nebulous concept - gender, in all its infinite complexity - it’s a real life. It’s not just a question of being a woman, but of being Laura. And you can hold Laura in your head. The song goes on, builds out that life - “one day I’d find an honest man to make my husband, we would have two children, build our home on the Gulf of Mexico” - but it almost doesn’t need to. It already said everything it needed to say in that one, perfect line.
And then five years later the songwriter comes out as trans, and that one perfect line takes on new layers of meaning. Suddenly you know that the person singing "If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman; my mother once told me she would have named me Laura," is a woman named Laura Jane Grace. You know that, but she - the version of her recording New Wave in 2007, trapped in soundwaves like a bug caught in amber - doesn't. And that secret, that you know and she doesn't, is another thing so big you almost can't hold it in your head.
so anyway yeah what I’m getting at is I really like the song I think it’s pretty neat 👍
