Miles of Light Explode

"Golden" revisits my mind often, lyrically as well as melodically.

Watching a stretch of road/ Miles of light explode/ Drifting off a thing I'd never done before

It is gorgeous, the way the main riff climbs the fretboard, and returns again to ascend after each chorus. For a song with such urgency -- the rhythm of brush sticks is ceaseless -- this is a song that somehow manages to drift along insistently, like the way the wind lifts a leaf -- and the pedal steel is perfect.

I heard this song for the first time in Taos, New Mexico, where I was living for the summer with a guy named Chris from South Carolina. We were working for the Forest Service on a backcountry trails crew in the Santa Fe National Forest. Chris and I hadn't met before, but we got along very well. He had a great beard. Musically, Chris bestowed on me lots of Woody Guthrie, never enough Vic Chesnutt, a smattering of Bonnie "Prince" Billy, a modicum of Modest Mouse, and my first introduction to My Morning Jacket.

Favorite lyrics...

People always told me that bars were dark and lonely/ And talk is often cheating filled with air


Be right here forever, go through this thing together/ And on heaven's golden shores, we'll lay our heads


How many times I have prayed this last idea, thinking of people I know who have already left this earth, or who are still alive, but lost to circumstance, belonging now to the past, and here I am wondering where the present went? "Golden" is a beautiful song for ruminating, or for just drifting along.

My Morning Jacket "Golden"