Words I Might Have Ate

My mental stability reaches it's bitter end
And all my senses are coming unglued
Is there any cure for this disease someone called love
Not as long as there are girls like you

Everything she does questions my mental health
It makes me lose control
I just can't trust myself

Green Day got it so right, all that time ago in 1992! Songs about real life! Songs that still touch me now, still mean everything to me now, almost 10 years after they hit me for the first time!

Where is the 2009 equivalent of Green Day? What are these bands doing, poncing around in their tight jeans and pointy shoes, singing about the environment and Africa and questioning democracy? Who is getting teenagers through the toughest part of life? I do hope that they are still listening to Kerplunk, playing along on their second hand guitars and forming bands and caring way too much about appearing to not care.

Although I'm still as much 'into' music as the next person, I haven't been hit by a band or even a song in a long time, maybe years. Music has seemed to stop understanding me. It used to be my life, my best friend and my way of determining who I wanted to be my friends. It all seems so 'middle class' now, trying to keep up with the Jones', or, in the music world's case, Radiohead.

Blah, Radiohead. Who wants to 'support' a band that is smug enough to allow the listener to choose the price of their album?

I won't be heading back to my punk days just yet, no fears. I need a little more than 'three chords and the truth' to keep my senses satified (must be getting old). But there is something warming and sweetly melancholy about this CD, revisiting my 14-year old self with baggy jeans and too much jewellry, and the way I delighted in visiting Rocola (independant record store in Pontefract, long past its demise) and coming home with a whole afternoon's worth of listening and re-listening, reading the booklet from front to back, writing the especially good lyrics in my notebook. And then weeks and weeks of guitarring, learning each song by heart. And years of being lonely with it, laughing with it, frustrating with it.


Nope, don't make 'em like they used to.