You Look Like Rain — Morphine
#365Songs: March 23rd
Two things come to mind every time it rains: a Raymond Carver poem, and a Morphine song. Let’s start with the former.
Rain
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
I love the nostalgic essence of a guilt-free sprawl on a rainy day. Where I grew up in the Midwest, and then later lived for years in Chicago, almost every day was gloomy. As a result, I took the rain for granted. A burden, an annoyance, yet another washed out day. But now, as I’ve gotten older and live in a place where it seldom rains, I understand the true beauty of canceling everything, of drinking too much coffee, taking a long bath, shutting out the world. Reading. As with most things in my life, a dense layer of melancholy hovers above me at all times, and while that may sound unappealing to most, for me it’s just the heartbeat that reminds me I’m still here, feeling and learning and searching for meaning through nature, through art, through the foggy glass that separates me from the outside world.
And the second thing that comes to mind is Morphine’s perfect song. Though I distance myself from this truth, I am in fact a ’90s kid. And Morphine is a band that makes me rethink what was otherwise a monstrously mediocre era in music history. Now before you all freak out, there was a LOT of great music during the decade, but you had to dig, you had to have the right friends, you had to grow up in the right place in the right way to discover the great artists, and I very much did not grow up in that place. My love for ’90s music is retrospective, the bands I’ve come to love are the ones I discovered after the decade ended. Though I knew Morphine a bit in the mid-to-late ’90s, I didn’t come to truly appreciate them until much, much later.
Fellow 365 Songs writer, PreacherBoy, told me the other day that Morphine’s Mark Sandman died on stage in Italy. He said, “To me, Sandman was like Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise come to life … literally just the coolest human alive.” What a great way to describe someone; what a great way to be described.
That coolness is everywhere in the Morphine catalog, but particularly within “You Look Like Rain.” It feels like a rainy day, inside and out. If a cozy living room on a rainy day could be a venue, this is the band that I’d want playing on that small stage, this is the song I’d want to hear as the encore.
Your mind and your experience call to me
You have lived and your intelligence is sexy
I want to know what you got to say
I want to know what you got to say
I want to know what you got to say
I can tell you taste like the sky
’Cause you look like rain
There’s a laziness to the song, a fucking coolness that makes you want to pour a drink too early in the morning, makes you miss the burn of a late night cigarette. There’s a blurriness, the way the outside world looks through a foggy window, conjures a desire for it to never stop raining. This song comes to mind every time it rains, and I’ll just start singing it on repeat, “you look like rain, you look like rain, you look like rain.”
Like most songs I love, it contains a gloomy melancholy, a yearning, the lightest shade of darkness fueling complex emotions. You Look Like Rain is a bluesy, jazzy, downtempo Waits-ian masterpiece, it’s atmosphere a balance of the enticing with the haunted.
You think like a whip on a horse’s back
Stretched out to the limit you make it crack
Send that horse ‘round and ‘round the track
I want to know what you got to say
I want to know what you got to say
I want to know what you got to say
I can tell you taste like the sky
’Cause you look like rain
Morphine is a band deserving of more than one small post about one small song, but I only get one song from this one band and this is it. A perfect companion to Raymond Carver’s broken world on a gloomy day, and I’d want it no other way.
