I'm what you might consider a "nervous flyer." Before takeoff, I can always be found sitting anxiously in my assigned seat, doped up on the tiny calming pills of Ativan my doctor so unwillingly hands over to me.
With palms sweating profusely, I study my fellow flyers as they flick through the provided in-flight reading material. Do they have the same pre-flight visions that fill my head: the doomed plane helplessly jets downwards while engines scream as panicked and frantic passengers think of loved ones and wonder whatever can be done? All as a single bright and jagged mountaintop, replete with never melting snow, looms up as we grow ever nearer until...well, you know where this is going. As I sit there, angst ridden, I hope that if I picture it clearly enough, and if I can concentrate hard enough, perhaps it will guarantee us all a safe flight; a sort of anti-curse, if you will.
I am so relieved, and oddly delighted, to know I am not the only darkly superstitious one out there: "And to save all our lives, you've got to envision / the fiery crash, it's just a formality / or must I explain, just a nod to mortality," sings Andrew Bird in "Fiery Crash," the first track on Armchair Apocrypha, released this spring.
But even more than hooking me with his aviophobia, he suckered me with his catchy melody. It's the kind that, for days on end, sits so deeply hooked in my head that it makes me softly curse and wish I were clever enough to have written something so achingly irresistible. "Fiery Crash" is a delicious little dazzler that builds itself slowly with sweeping strings, understated keyboard and lush vocal arrangements. The candid and melancholy lyrics seemed written just for me.
Andrew Bird, I'll fly with you anytime.
Andrew Bird plays Richard's on Richards in Vancouver on Saturday, Sept. 1. Wheee!
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