November 05, 2003 - 3:28 AM

Sarah McLachlan Gives Me the Gitchy Feeling

I got this strange feeling Monday night as I was at Tony's place, upgrading my Macintosh Software to OS 10.2.6. We were watching the movie Beautiful Girls while eating pizza, and I was idly surfing the net. I decided to check out Sarah McLachlan's website to see if they'd redone it, what with the impending release of her new album. As I clicked through it, reading the news items, admiring the photos, checking the discography, visiting the fan weblinks, I slowly was swallowed up by an urgent yet pleasurable anticipation. I haven't felt this in a long time...it's an electric excitement that tugs me forward eagerly to a future event, yet it is also suffused with the anxiety and apprehension that something will go awry, preventing the future event from ocurring. Presentiment looms, unsettling my insides; at the same time, there is comfort and calm from the knowledge that that which I'm looking forward to is so close. My head and heart will be all aflutter with the intangible thought of what might be, then the concrete reality will ground me, but it's not too long before I'm giddy again. The dull agony combined with the phlegmatic hope is like...it's like...heh, this cold snap of authentic autumnal weather we're experiencing is crystalizing it in my head...it's like being alone in the early evening, when the sun's gone to bed too early, the heating hasn't quite kicked in, your feet are cold, the traffic outside your window is the only sound you can hear, and you just want a hug, but there's no one around to hug you. It's the unrequited want, combined with the hope and memory of what a warm hug is, which, painfully, makes the want so much more desperate.

Gah, it's so tough to describe. But, yeah, for a little while, I had that feeling again. Now, I know that I haven't felt this way about an album in a while. In fact, I no longer anticipate an album's release date, hoping that I can be the first person to buy it; instead, I just add albums to a wishlist so that, later on down the line when I'm feeling splurgey, I can throw it in with 7 to 10 other CDs on a shopping spree. But I used to. I remember going into the Newbury Comics store in Amherst on Tuesdays, the smell of wood, Doc Martens, and new cds simmering, the bright yellow, red, magenta and chartreuse "New Release" and "Sale" stickers popping out at me. There was an ache, a yearning as I tiled through the racks; the warmth of innocent and pure desire that pulsed down my arms, wrapped around my back and across my chest, slid through my fingers when they crinkled across THE shrink-wrapped CD. I distinctly remember feeling this when Eleanor McEvoy's 2nd album came out, when Ani DiFranco's Dilate came out, and when Dar Williams End of the Summer and Sarah's Surfacing came out on the same day in 1997. The last vivid memory of this feeling that I have is the final time I saw Sarah on a solo tour, in Towson, MD in '98.

So, the reality hit me as the webpages unspooled: Sarah McLachlan's new album is coming out TOMORROW (yesterday, now). I'd been excited about it's release ever since I saw it listed in Entertainment Weekly's Spring/Summer/Fall music release schedule earlier this year. But it didn't sink in until Monday. It lasted through her performance on Letterman that night. It's still been coming and going. I figure it'll abate for a while once I pick up the CD, but it will surge again when tourdates are made official. Such a wonder, to be consumed by these overwhelming emotions that I thought I'd outgrown.

Now Listening To : Heather Nova-Oyster
Random Thought : Why is "revolve"'s noun form "revolution" and not "revolvation"? Where does "revolt" fit into this insanity

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