I am just back from watching a goddess in action. Or a Rachael Yamagata concert, for the less acquainted.
I particularly liked her little rambles. They were deep, dark and so eloquently echoed the common thread of heartache that binds her fans. I remember the one she did leading up to this song, You Won’t Let Me. She described the song to be about the moment in our lives ”…when you feel your love is enough to save someone.” Oh boy she’s good. That hit deep.
I also like her quirky (and probably unnervingly spot-on) assumptions about her fans. She did ask us if we had managed to survive Valentine’s and there was slight nervous laughter, drowned out by damnit-how-did-she-know chuckles. She also mentioned love triangles, which is a topic that I can never be any less familiar with if I tried.
I bought tickets to her concert on a whim last month, not knowing what to expect. I knew I would come out of the concert hall having my long buried feelings stirred, but I never expected to make peace with the tumultuous emotions I like to torture myself with, think of certain people and be surprisingly and completely okay with the fact that they are no longer in my life, nor renew my faith and hope in love. You know how they say the best songs are the ones that make you feel what you need to feel? It is not just a trite, preachy sentence made up by a lonelygalz90 somewhere on a xanga blog in cyberspace. It’s the honest-to-goodness truth.
For the record, I have never felt so much magic, baited breaths and broken hearts in one room before. It didn’t matter that some of the audience looked like they were barely over 16, while others were probably hitting 46. Once she started singing, I could feel the entire hall opening up, breathing, feeling together. And if there were any way to measure the extent that music saves the soul, I am certain you’d find a few hearts that got their pieces stitched back together in the one and a half hours of pure goodness.
