I wrote last December about the pleasure of returning to novels you have previously read. What fascinates me about this experience is how the same novel can seem so different upon your return. The novel has not changed but you have; in encountering it again you bring something different to it and get something different out of it. The same is true it occurred to me this evening of music. For example I have come back to this Gaslight Anthem song periodically in the nine years since it was released:
It has carried intense, sometimes overpowering meaning for me, reflecting how my engagement with the music was tied up in processing events in my own life. But this meaning has been completely different at three different points in my life, in ways I was suddenly struck are actually mutually exclusive. I can cash this out at the level of lyrics. But this is secondary to the immediacy of the conflicting reactions. The song quite literally means different things to me, mutually exclusive things, at different points and articulating this involve putting words to something which is prelinguistic.
Mark Carrigan 