Songs from 2018, Part 1: Epiphany

I love songs the way I love books. Stories, themes and symbolism can all be as powerfully communicated through 3 minutes of music as they can in a full-length novel. Lyrics do the telling, which is why the words are just as important to me as the sound of a song. While re-listening to some of my favorites from this year, I tried encapsulating what each one was about in a single word, and found that 3 ideas kept appearing. The first: epiphany. 

Epiphany is a sudden widening of your world. "Ghost of a King" by The Gray Havens widens into a new world altogether. It's a meeting that whirls into a supernatural journey and ends in a healing shock of water. The man in the song knows he's broken, but learns that the broken part of him belongs to the supernatural world he never knew existed. He discovers in immediate succession the impossible hopelessness of his state...

          you are a lonely soul 
          with a heart of stone that rakes against your thirsty bones

...and the impossible hope of newness.

          Where no chariot can take you,
          where the river meets the sand,
          there is water there that can quench your thirsty bones
          and make you well.

I recognize all the moments I've felt most alive in Beta Radio's "All at Once I Saw It All." It begins with homesickness for the unknown - a grasping at infinity. You reach and reach until the moment you glance back at time-bound reality. Then in the light of forever, life strikes you in an epiphany. 

          How rare and beautiful
          that we were ever even born.

It's as if the whole of life can briefly be seen "to scale," but of course that also includes a fearful awareness of its end. 

          The ghost parade a shroud,
          my body rearranged.

And you're left reaching for eternity only fiercer than before. 

I think Taylor Leonhardt expresses the bewilderment and joy of epiphany in her song "Everything" (and "Surprising Me" from the same album). I love the discovery of something so significant that it touches every part of living. You get to run from one thing to the next, watching it change in front of you, soaking in the novelty of re-orientation. 

          You flipped the whole thing around

          dropped the sky to the ground

          you are here with us now.

The end of this song brings me to the second overarching idea in my favorite songs this year: surety. To be continued in Part 2...