04 baby can i hold you

It’s an old song track from Boyzone, a name many haven’t heard in this time of Linkin Park and Jal and the like. Boyzone was a boy band that sang pop love songs in the 1990’s. They disintegrated later on, and only Ronan Keating alone of that band sings today. I am not their brand ambassador, so don’t take me for that. I just like their songs.

I have a few of their songs in my computer, and I was listening to one of them right now, named Baby can I hold You.

They say music is the language of the soul. At first I took it for one of those meaningless things full of nice words that people say when they are moved. Well, now I know it’s not that. It has meaning, a logical, comprehensible meaning. Maybe I can explain it with the help of this song.

The guitar at the beginning of the song is soft, rhythmic and mellow, the sort that makes you feel happy and sad at the same time. The sort that reminds you of that little hidden stream in the mountain forests that you never before saw in life except once or twice with the inner eye. Then comes the voice, and the music takes on a more rhythmic tone, and believe me, it remains no longer a song for me. It becomes a sort of inner eye itself, a journey to my own internal universe and its seldom-visited little worlds, a pacifying medicine that I must have, a song I cannot stop. It tells me of things long forgotten, things that maybe I never saw or felt before, and yet there is an eerie feeling that this is a recollection from the past, fragments of some distant life I must have led somewhere. There are hazy, dream-like visions of a sepia landscape, a sepia road that winds down to a port, where there is a small ship or boat moored, its sails dim and sad in the dying sun’s rays. The images come as if they have been extracted from the distant and forgotten realm of some past time, with the scent of old memories in them. And yet, I can strongly say that I have never been in places like that.

The song reminds me of the time when my sister was given her own room, and she was so happy about it that she blared Boyzone songs in her room in happiness. It was an evening, as far as I remember. It has been a long time since this happened, and I won’t bet it really was evening, because all memories after a time melt and recreate themselves into sweeter images, and for me the evening is the best part of the day. So it might easily be the case that my subconscious mind decided to tune the image and bathe it in a softer glow of evening. Anyway, that is my first memory of Boyzone, and I faintly remember either feeling or telling my sister that the songs were good.

The cassette was hers. I played it a lot too, in the coming days. It was named Boyzone… by request, and it is till date the best collection of songs I have ever heard.

Anyways, as I was saying, I was listening to one of their songs, and well, it worked its magic once again. I was transported at once to a world that never was, a great field touching the unblocked horizon on all sides, and a single line of spaced-out haystacks running across that field, with the sun shining softly on them, making them glow golden-orange. Against one of the stacks stood a girl I love, a girl I have loved since always and will love forever, and she is none of the girls I have met in my waking life. She is just my mental portrayal of love, and she lives nowhere but my mind. The sun falls on her smiling face and a huge welling feeling urges inside me. All of life’s problems, little disappointments and anxieties are put to sleep for a few precious moments as I take in her beautiful face and the dying sunlight bathing it, and breathe easy after a long time.

Have you ever heard a song, or read some lines from a book, or smelt a smell or heard a name that arises in you some strong emotion for some reason, and you get a feeling that this specific element is associated with something bigger that has happened in life? As you search your memory, out pours from mind the song you heard on a cassette borrowed from a friend you liked a lot, the book you had to do a research on and got C- grade in it, the smell of perfume that a girl you once loved used to wear, a name that meant a lot to you in a time left behind years ago. This song creates images in my mind in much the same way. The wooden harbour, the girl in the golden field, all seem to have drifted to me from some long-forgotten phase of my life, maybe not this one, maybe some other life I had led somewhere, some other love I had experienced, all now reduced to fragments of mental images that shimmer in mind like a dream.

Sorry

Is all that you can’t say

Years go by and still

Words don’t come easily

Like sorry

Forgive me

Is all that you can’t say

Years go by and still

Words don’t come easily

Like forgive me

But you can say baby

Baby can I hold you tonight

Baby if I told you the right words

Ooh, in the right time

You’ll be mine…

1Life.