August, Track 3: Goodnight L.A.

The full explanation of what’s going on with this is available here, but the short version is that over this month we’re doing a little essay-ish series connected to eleven songs I associate with August. They’re organized like an album, in the order listed below. Some of the writings will be more focused on the songs than others, and this is all vague enough in general that we don’t know exactly how it’s going to go. We’re finding out. Today, we’re onto Track 3.

Side A

1. “August and Everything After” – Counting Crows
2. “Untitled (Love Song)” – Counting Crows
3. “Goodnight L.A.” – Counting Crows
4. “Wildest Dreams” – Taylor Swift
5. “Coming Home” – Diddy – Dirty Money, Skylar Grey

Side B

6. “Rockin’ the Suburbs” – Ben Folds
7. “Meet Virginia” – Train
8. “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” – Paul Simon
9. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
10. “Satellite Call” – Sara Bareilles
11. “L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N.” – Noah and the Whale

If you use Apple Music, a good friend and reader has put together a playlist of Tracks 2 through 11 here.

***

There’s an inherent disorientation to watching the sun rise at the end of the night. At the beginning of morning, should you be awake that early, the sunrise matches our diurnal instincts, opening the world to, quite literally, the light of day. But at the end of night, the sunrise is out of place, and so, nature would imply, are we.

Having never worked nights in a formal sense, instances in which I’ve been awake straight through from dusk to dawn stand out in memory, as do a few secondhand occasions. My brother moved from Chicago to Boston in his mid-20’s for work, and before he left, he embarked upon a bender which often included end-of-night trips to breakfast. Once—I’m forgetting some details, I’m sure—the evening was capped with some twilit rearranging of a friend’s patio furniture from said friend’s balcony to more modernistic positions on the sidewalk below. My end-of-night sunrises are more mundane, but they too stand out: In San Francisco for a weekend one summer, retiring late enough meant that morning was by then well underway on the East Coast, briefly inserting echoes of transatlanticism into my long-distance relationship. Loyal to an end-of-night walk and prayer my freshman year of college, I was serenaded by the songbirds in the bushes behind the Basilica late on a warm April night, a sound that pushed my eyes upward, to where the sky, to my surprise, had grown lighter. My first night alone at my parents’ new house in Crystal Lake, shortly after high school graduation, I got spooked by creaks and a poorly timed TV show and decided to watch sunrise out by the water.

I understand that there are nocturnal people among us, by preference or demand, for whom nighttime sunrise does not bring alongside it these marks of instability. I am not among them.

Goodnight L.A., from Counting Crows’s 2002 Hard Candy (a good record to think to), is, in one sense, about an end-of-night sunrise—about a literal sunrise:

I said, “Goodnight, L.A,”
‘cause I’m awake in my room.
I’ve been up for thirty-eight hours,
and it don’t look like sleep’s coming soon.

…

But I don’t mind the dark
discovering the day,
‘cause the night is a
beautiful bright blue and grey.

But it’s about this sort of sunrise in the other way, too. It’s about a place of placelessness. It’s about being broken: insomnia is its entrance, a shortfall of human connection is its chorus, its second verse shares the hopelessness of in one conception romance and in another friendship and in yet another the entirety of life taken as a whole. It’s about being broken to the point that there is no slot in which to fit.

August, a transitory month for so many, draws out this placelessness. Perhaps the most mindful, the most intentional, and in a separate category the least impassioned among us can close summer calmly and on time, going to bed (as the metaphor would have it) at a reasonable hour. But for most of us, the sun is rising, and in particular summers—those prior to a change of schools, those prior to a change of jobs, those amidst college as friends leave one by one and soon you’ll leave too—we see the sun rising, and we find ourselves alone to watch it.

There’s a thing about sunrises, and that’s that they’re beautiful. Taking every bit of context out of the equation, a sunrise is a beautiful thing. Gray or many-colored, warm or cold, dazzling or simple, I do not know of a sunrise that does not, purely in a visual sense, open the day or close the night with beauty. And that beauty provides a place. A place amidst the placelessness, whether revelous or stressed or perhaps having spent the night battling demons, having spent 38 hours battling demons and knowing that 38 number is going to grow. At its best in these settings, the sunrise is a comfort. At its minimum, as the good bard sings, we “don’t mind.” Sometimes in August, perhaps looking out a coffee shop window at the end of the workweek before heading home to the family for a Friday night…the “don’t mind” is all we need.

***

We’ve been on Counting Crows all week, now, for more than a quarter of this little August project, and as you may have gathered or I may have explicitly stated, Adam Duritz is my favorite poet, with all due apologies to the great New Englanders, as well as to the St. Louisan with whom I share a birthday. And so, if I may indulge, I’d like to highlight the poetry of these verses, some of Duritz’s best self-contained work (while acknowledging that to be honest, I don’t love this song’s chorus all that much).

I said, “Goodnight, L.A,”
‘cause I’m awake in my room.
I’ve been up for thirty-eight hours,
and it don’t look like sleep’s coming soon.

‘Cause I could break like a bird.
Or I could swallow the sea.
It feels like the daylight is coming,
and no one is watching but me.

But I don’t mind the dark
discovering the day,
‘cause the night is a
beautiful bright blue and grey.

First off, I love the wonder at the end of this verse, the idea of dark “discovering” day, and the intertwinement of night and day described so simply as “bright blue and grey.” But I also, again, am struck by how in high school I liked to pluck a line out of context, and how, “It feels like the daylight is coming, and no one is watching but me,” can be taken so hopefully when taken on its own, despite its forlorn surroundings here.

And the second:

And it’s a dangerous time
for a heart on a wire.
Shuttled from station to station,
noisily not knowing why.

So I put my head on the ground,
and the sky is a wheel,
spinning these days into things that I’ve lost,
but you can keep all the years.

But I don’t mind the days
gone rolling away,
because all this sunlight
feels warm on my face today.

It takes some time, for me at least, to process the image of a heart bouncing from station to station, but my best interpretation is probably that love, in this case, is a wild goose chase (the honkiness of that phrase makes me wish there was a gooseless phrase describing that phenomenon).

My favorite part from this verse, though,—well, there are two—but my first favorite is that image of the sky as a wheel, and we’ll get to the second. The wheel-sky as an active entity, too, actively spinning these days into things like it’s some cosmic sewing machine, transforming Earth’s rotations into things that Duritz here has lost…it’s just really deft poetry.

But the last part, and the part I’ll leave you with, is again the comfort. The call to the present. The feeling of the sun, warm upon one’s face—in this case, as August turns by.