Crawford 1

Megan Crawford

Emily Litle

ENG12100L

13 November 2020

Journal #7

I find myself drawn to the genre of singer-songwriters. Overlapping gentle acoustics

wash over my mind, as I respond and “skate away” to Joni Mitchell, wake up to Bright Eyes, as I

am carried into reality through the lyricism of modern artists such as mxmtoon. As though it

were a gravitational force, I am brought back to the sweet sounds of soft and slow music.

Sometimes warm, calm, cheerful, but always with lyrics that take me to a specific feeling.

I live in feelings. I am drawn in waves to moments where I feel too much, thrown back to

where I feel nothing at all. Music allows this flow to even out. It allows me to summon myself to

places in which I can feel what I need to feel in that moment. Singer-songwriters tend to have

that painful storytelling that defies physics and weaves gold into tears. They take the words to

their emotions and make an extremely personal feeling relatable. There is always a song that I

can find to describe a specific feeling. Much like linguistics when studying foreign language,

there are certain phrases in different languages that express feelings that we don’t have words

for. Certain songs have sounds and lyrics that can describe these feelings.

In Mitski’s “A Burning Hill”, she describes something that is so familiar, so

heartbreaking, and sometimes exactly what I need to feel.

“I'm tired of wanting more

I think I'm finally worn

For you have a way of promising things

 Crawford 2

And I've been a forest fire

I am a forest fire

And I am the fire and I am the forest

And I am a witness watching it

I stand in a valley watching it

And you are not there at all.”

- Mitski, A Burning Hill