we were just pretending

30 Days of Song

Day 28 - A song that makes you feel guilty

Cathedrals - Jump, Little Children live at the Music Farm (via adrockc2)

It was back during my junior year of college when I was studying abroad in London. I was traveling around a lot, seeing new places, something I’d always wanted to do, but at the same time I also felt oddly useless. I couldn’t get a job because my student visa didn’t allow it, and I always felt a jab of lameitude whenever I did super-touristy things in new cities… like going to cathedrals. Everywhere. 

I’m what you would call a militantly unreligious individual, but I ironically get a huge kick out of big, gaudy cathedrals. In every city or town I visited, I’d end up at the top of some spire, surrounded by gorgeous frescoes of Jesus and all his little assholes, looking out over the ancient rooftops of some city or other.

I loved it, but this sense of not being of use to anything, of traveling without really growing, festered within me. I got this song in my head standing in a million naves, gazing up at a million Tintorettos. It was the nagging voice in my head, saying: “Girl, you need to figure your shit out.”

In the shadows of tall buildings
Of fallen angels on the ceilings
Oily feathers in bronze and concrete
Faded colors, pieces left incomplete
The line moves slowly past the electric fence
Across the borders between continents

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is.