In the opening pages of Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow is a notice reading:

Persons attempting to find a “text” in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a “subtext” will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct or otherwise “understand” it will be exiled to a desert island in the company of only other explainers.

Yes.
Sir.
Got it.

By no means do I intend to dismantle Trent Reznor’s psyche or read some kind of tacky, machine-molded, pastel and porcelain symbology into George Michael.  I sincerely respect and understand Berry’s warning about our (read: my) propensity to kill something beautiful by cutting it in pieces “figuring it out.”  However, I also heed the wise words of Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, who, in “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies” writes:

Analysis is an act of love. Reading slowly, carefully, looking for pattern considering word choice, the logic of line breaks, figures of speech, pondering the fitness of images– these require a quality of attention that is comparable to the kind of attending a lover pays to the beloved.

It is in this spirit that, tomorrow, I will begin to take a loving look at the songs I’ve chosen for Through Songs I Was First Undone. To write, lovingly, about what is knowable regarding each song and the ways each has ‘undone’ me.  In certain cases, I’ll also be sharing about studio process and some intentional decisions made while recording in order to draw something out of these very alive and still speaking works.

I’ll begin with Georgia Lee.