Some Sunday afternoons are somber. The coming evening elicits a hyperventilation, a tightening in the chest, an urge to escape and bolt down the nearest hole you can find in the hope that at the end of that tunnel, there may be an entire world where nobody knows anything about you and you can throw your phone and your keys into a bowl of glowing sulfuric acid. You can move to Algeria, change your name, work as a mechanic, and wait till this same miasma descends upon you again.
Tricky - Evolution Revolution Love - 2001
But in other times, the nature of the afternoon is to be the glittering soulful jewel divinely pressed into the day. As the sun perforates your skin, filling it up with light, you feel transparent, just passing through, the throbbing of your veins just an incidental rhythm of the universe. Already you can feel it being written into your permanent memory, a stop point you'll want to point back at and say - yes, right then, I was happy.
Pavement - Cut Your Hair - 1994
For Sunday evenings when you can't feel anything but the passage of time, there's this song. The great sad song, a creation that puts you in touch with half a world of people. People everywhere, staring out of the windows of apartments, looking at ceiling fans, looking silently at eachother, closing their eyes.
REM - Perfect Circle - 2001
The power of the song is in the backing vocal croon, a sound like the wind through trees in cold forests. When I close my eyes I see the women of a Norse village waving off longships floating out onto the dark blue velvet of the cold seas. They don't know if anyone will ever return, and their men are beyond the reach of the voice now, almost beyond sight.
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