8. June 2019 By Walter Price 0

Taste of every breath, SINGLE: LYDIA LOVELESS – “Mile High” (‘Boy Crazy and Single(s)’)

Lydia Loveless – ‘Boy Crazy and Single(s)’ is available @ Apple Music.

At an imagined crossroads where Rhett Miller, Lucy Dacus, and Ray Wylie Hubbard merge, I like to picture multifaceted singer-songwriter, Lydia Loveless peering down the paths taking real-life inspiration from her losses, triumphs, and circumstances in between. At times, this constant observer taking passing soundbites and constructing hard to forget songs. Now and again, stories that aren’t necessarily easy to translate.

And for one song in particular, hard to translate is what has been entertaining my mind for the better part of a year now. “Mile High”, which is on Loveless’s 2017 collection ‘Boy Crazy and Single(s)’ (Bloodshot Records), is as dramatic as it is perplexing, for me anyway.

I’m certain that there are hostilities at hand, but what or who are they for? I’m also confident that the words and verses are exactly were the storyteller wanted them. It’s just, for this listener, agonizing trying to pinpoint the cause of the antipathy. And perhaps, as I was recently reminded, that is the brilliant and befuddling addiction, the mystique of this song’.

And unless you’re trying to fulfill some sort of pop formula when writing a song, it doesn’t much matter how the audience interprets your words. Once your verses are released into the wild, it becomes a part of other’s memories. Soundtracking whatever predicaments…

Check out the live version of “Mile High” from the WMNF series below. And let the lyrics find a personal definition. Oh, and perhaps you shouldn’t call Loveless (or yourself) an “outlaw artist‘. Agreed.

“and I don’t wanna die I wanna just see the look on your face
when I jump I wanna hear all the sounds you’d make
oh can I have one taste of every breath that you take…”