Carrier Wave

I recommend everyone go out and buy Patty Griffin's "Flaming Red" (and, while you're at it, the live album, "A Kiss in Time"). Flaming Red is a wonderful synthesis of her delicate, driving, incising voice and her deliberate, lapidary verse. For me, her melodies are so strangely familiar that each song is like flexing a muscle I didn't know I had. I was particularly struck by "Carry Me," which takes you out of body to electromagnetic pulse and back. It seems to really capture a certain delicious anxiety of the body going fully wireless, humans evaporating and lifting from the earth in all of our alchemical quicksilvery love-flight. Whatever else have people sung about? The song reminds me of the lingo of amateur radio. Communication by the broken wave of morse code is called "CW," shorthand for "carrier wave." My grandfather is a radio nut, building them from the ground up. The desire to transfigure the voice and broadcast it into the ethers runs in the family. But who doesn't like flight? It's ever so fly. "Language is a virus from outer space," said Burroughs. If so, the aliens have already landed... and perhaps they are preparing for take-off again.

Maybe they come by land
Maybe they come by sea
Maybe they've already come
Maybe they come by me
Slipping into the twilight
I ride the broken wave tonight
An old song on the radio
You knew a long time ago
An old song on the radio
Going out over the ocean

Carry, carry...

Maybe it's World War I
Maybe its World War III
Maybe it's Vietnam
Maybe we're on TV
Falling into the tall grass
Melting into the tall glass
Spilling out over the lip and
Into the ocean
Into the ocean

Carry, carry, carry me
Over the ocean, over the ocean, over the ocean, over the ocean
Over the sea

Maybe I've come so far
Maybe I'm on my knees
Maybe I'm dead or alive
Maybe I'm none of these
Just an old song on the radio
Someone put on a long time ago
Going out over the ocean
Over and over the ocean
Over and over the ocean
Over and over the ocean