Astronautalis

I didn't know I was an Astronautalis fanboy until yesterday.

I was on my fourth listen of Cut The Body Loose. I had just gotten home from work and was quickly folding some laundry before my wife and kids picked me up to head out to dinner. 

I had just started the song "Forest Fire" over for the third time in a row because I kept thinking I was missing something. Something in the song was fucking with me. Something familiar, but indescribable, like when you put yourself in the shoes of the girl in the book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. You're lost, but something is pulling at your zipper, leading you out of the woods. 

Something. 

Then, while folding a baby blue bath towel it hit me.

"A forest fire has a smell to it,
a certain sweetness that misleads us to believe that everything's well again.
Summer's sweltering. 
The kind of heat you feel inside your feet, radiating upward from the earth within."

And then I choked on my own spit as tears welled up in my fucking eyes.

Who the fuck writes like that?

"I ain't no christian, that was mama's thing.
I don't know how to pray,
and if I did I'm not too sure he's listening.
To me it's whispering.
I don't know,
Maybe there is some fucking magic in giving language to hidden things."

FUUUUUUUCK.

At this point I'm holding the towel against my chest and I'm staring at the bluetooth speaker across the room and I have absolutely no thoughts inside of my head. I have lost the ability to fold a rectangle in three equal halves. I'm fucking speechless. 

Do you know how long it's been since lyrics have slapped the text out of my mouth?

Do you know how long I've been waiting for a lyric to come along that I'd consider tattooing across my fucking forehead?

And then the song progresses and Astronautalis says, and calmly repeats, "Why are we so afraid?", and then a beat that could coddle me into forever on my deathbed finally drops.

And I don't have an answer.

I just know in that moment, as I stand in complete awe of this dude's words, the feeling like I'm part of something for just having listened to something so confusingly and emotionally jarring is all I can really pinpoint. I'm crying for reasons beyond me, yet I'm comforted because I recognized that there was something flickering from beneath the water. At the bottom of the river sparkled something shiny, asking to just be found.

I'd rather not write out every thought the album has encouraged me to think so far, just two days after it was released, but I encourage you to purchase this album. I implore you to spend the six to ten bucks it costs to listen to some of the deepest thoughts ever captured on record whenever the fuck you need them. 

I'm an Astronautalis fanboy and I didn't know it until I forgot what it was like to be anything but.