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Very rarely do I concur with people. Getting me to co-sign a statement of opinion is like putting the proverbial camel through the eye of a needle, if the camel is pregnant with sextuplets and the needle is squinting.

It’s not because I’m terribly single-minded, arbitrarily contrary, or even particularly committed to my own obsessions and beliefs. More than anything else, I find it difficult agreeing to something that fell out of someone else’s head, beyond the basic truths that exist in a perpetual state of self-evidential validation.

Even then, it took Mrs. Robinson the better part of October 1986 to convince me that two plus two did in fact equal four.

I suppose on a fundamental level, my basic internal suspicions supplant all other external information, at least initially. You know the saying, ‘Fool me once, shame on you.’

Being the source for the shame of others makes me feel guilty and confused, and as such, I never trust anyone enough to cause them to dig that hole in the back of their beliefs.

Unless of course anyone happens to be someone that sings a song, full of words that make me reconsider everything I ever knew about everyone I wanted to meet.

More than my parents, more than my girlfriends, more than who I hope has been God muttering to me under his breath every fifth Saturday morning, I believe the words sung by singers. That is to say, if they sing something that makes sense to me.

I’m just far more willing to give a song a chance at being true than a promise from the tall woman with the thin hands and conscience.

There’s something about the context of music that makes it so much more immediately believable than other options. I don’t know if it has something to do with the movement of strings being a loose metaphor for lines of communication being used in the most abstractly concrete way possible, but, it works for me.

I have taken literally hundreds of words that strangers have looped around their necks until they couldn’t breathe anymore under the weight of their ideas and used them as crutches for my own life.

They have failed, they have bent, they have caught fire, but more often than not, the lyrics of a great record have said what I could or would not force to fall from my mouth with the help of her pliers and my guilt.

A perfectly clear and tangible example of the words in a song making more sense to me than anything anyone I know has ever told me are from Oasis’ so-good-it’s-so-terrible-it’s-genius-all-over-again hit, Wonderwall.

The ugly, elegant Gallagher ends each verse with one of the most pitifully lovely sentences ever committed to acetate, that when coupled with the song’s melody will not only break her useless heart, but hopefully make the shards sharp and functional all over again.

“I don’t believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now.”

We’ve all wanted to tell her that at some point, and after the boys from Manchester did it, if you believe them, if you believe it, then you already have too.

Very rarely do I concur with people, but I’ll believe a song to the moon and back, if it goes from A minor to F and while keening about her bottom lip and a glass of milk.

Hooboy, will I believe.[[In-content Ad]]

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