2. (Talk To Me Of) Mendocino

Kate & Anna McGarrigle (Warner Bros., 1975);
composed by Kate McGarrigle

Closing the first side of this great, simultaneously gemütlich and itchily disturbing debut album is the usually droll Kate’s solemn elegy to a personal geography that seems so random – New York State? Indiana? – that one has to assume it’s all really about the kind of observer she was becoming in each place, at each time, and in each verse as you hear it. A likely counterpart to its strangely prim opening “farewell to the state of old New York” is “Saratoga Summer Song,” only recorded as a demo around the same time. In that song, Kate describes a group of other “nice young adults” communing near Saratoga one summer in the early ‘70s - getting high, skinny dipping, never sleeping alone, who “weren't too smart and we had a bust,” but so what – “[W]e who are free / Swing like the rope from that tree.” “Saratoga” is a great one, but “Mendocino” was always the keeper, not just because it’s a gorgeous hymnlike non-hymn, but because it’s just as specific as “Saratoga” except instead of “dope and lust,” there is only the sunrise over the redwoods. “I'll rise with it till I rise no more.” Could you say as much?

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).