Michael Chapman - "You Say"

My record player broke a few weeks ago. It just stopped turning on. I never liked it much anyway, so it was awesome when I went onto Craigslist and found a beautifully kept German-made Dual 1246 for sale locally. I met the guy in a Turkey Hill parking lot the next day, during which he gave me a thorough walk-thru of the mechanics of the LP player. I took it home, plugged it in, and rediscovered my love for vinyl. 

I stopped buying records a year or two ago when it was looking very likely that Jess & I were going to be packing up, downsizing, and moving into a small place somewhere with mountains. When we realized we won't be having kids, we felt a strong urge to get rid of all the things that rooted us to a home, a place that wouldn't be filled with the sounds we had imagined. We were ready to go somewhere new we could fill with new sounds, dreams, ideas.

Anyway, this year brought us both new jobs, which has put off the moving for at least another couple of years, and here I am with a sweet old record player that sounds awesome, free space on my record shelf, and space to fill with new sounds. I went crate digging for the first time in a long while yesterday after work and found some sweet records. The best find for me was in the last bin I looked through. It's a record by Michael Chapman called Michael Chapman Lived Here. It's a collection of songs  from 1969, 1970, and 1971. I discovered Chapman through Steve Gunn's "Ancient Jules" video  and his brilliant cover of Dylan's "Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat" on Mojo's Blonde on Blonde Revisited record (really worth picking up...). He's not very well known nor given a lot of notoriety, yet he's one of those musicians that a lot of other musicians know about, respect, and dig into. 

I played through this record three times. When Jess got home from teaching girls how to code, I made her listen to one particular song - "You Say". Every once in awhile a song just sticks. It speaks to you from the past, in the present, about the future. Or it just has a great hook that tags you somewhere nothing else has before. As I listen to this song over and over again, I can't help but feel like it should be played as the credits roll at the end of an amazing film. It's a song that I'll be putting on every mix c.d. I make for the next few years. It's a song that I'll always come back to throughout my life and it'll sound slightly different each time I hear it. Another line will stick out, phrasing will take on new images. It's up there with certain Jack Gilbert poems, Dylan's Time Out of Mind, Han Shan's Cold Mountain Poems, Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Steinbeck's East of Eden, and a few other pieces of art that thread their way throughout cups of coffee, hikes up ravines, and early morning drives to work.

Dig it.  

"You Say" Michael Chapman

And so I'm saying goodbye
Although God knows I don't want to
And so I'm saying goodbye
I just don't know when it will be that I see you

Oh it might be when the spring time does come
Then we can walk on the seashore.
And it might be when the winds they blow cold,
And I can lay in your warmth once more.

And it might be when the rain starts to fall,
We'll ride on trains through the mountains.
And it might be when there is no rain at all,
And we can lay all the day in the sunshine.

You say you know where I'll be bound all alone,
You say you know why I'm leaving
You say that nothing ever touches me at all,
And I don't know what it is to be broken.

And so I'm saying goodbye
Although God knows I don't want to
And so I'm saying goodbye
I just don't know when it will be that I see you