The sheets and the pillowcases were stripped from the bed earlier in the day. They were thrown into the washing machine. They finished that round of intensive cleaning and were limply, soggily thumped into the dryer for the last jog of the process, to regain their stiffness, to earn a flowery or citrus-smelling aftershave. They've never felt like people before - ever in their inanimate lives - but they feel like new people, after all of this. They've got a new lease on life, as they're pulled out in a steamy and relaxing clump, ready for another few weeks of lying prone of a bed and letting people sleep on them, screw on them and whatever else is bound to happen on them. Tooth Ache, the musical project of Burlington, Vermont's Alexandra Hall, makes you long for one of those freshly made beds, one that you can't wait to crack open and slip your legs and body into - so you don't wait. You nap. Even with the windows glowing with the sunlight on the other side of them, you let your urges take over and you retire for a mid-afternoon breather, for a re-grouping. It's music that comes from a shaken place, but it only soothes you back down, to a place where you've felt you need to be to remain sane.
Hall sings on "Wild Horses":
you were uneasy
with the way the prairies leaned into the evenings.
and I had to rock you all night
and tell you everything would be alright.
when we saw the wild horses
you were inconsolable.
oh what unholiness, to rush toward your impermanence.
oh what bliss, to run like this.
you were uneasy
with the way the prairies leaned into the evenings.
and I had to rock you all night
and tell you everything would be alright
while my heart raced wildly
toward nothing.
The idea of prairies leaning into the evenings makes you think of a perfect melting of time into place. It embraces a wildness of time without a harness and of land squirming like a wind-blown sidewalk beneath us. It could be guiding us to that aforementioned bed or it could be moving us alongside the pack of horses that we hear approaching in the distance.