Field of Flowers

O YOU whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you;
As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I will tell you something I have not been telling anybody: I am writing a book. When I was 27 years old, I was floating some paper boats down a canal with a group of Chinese college students and we were writing our hopes and dreams on the boats and sending them off, wishing them well. I wrote "to publish a book before I am 30." It seems like maybe it's going to happen.

The scary thing, though, is that this book is almost -- not exactly, but almost -- a memoir, a book about my own experience, and so I am faced with a task that is actually not really easy at all: to come up with a narrative shape for pretty much my entire life and who I am.

I kind of have no idea how I am going to do this, because all I can remember about my life are little random things that seem to have no bearing on anything. One thing I remember is that The Fatherless and the Widow, by Sixpence None the Richer, was the first CD I ever bought. I had just read about Sixpence in a magazine called Breakaway, which is (or was, actually -- I think it's been a casualty of the recession) published by Focus on the Family and which probably bills itself as a magazine for "teen guys." I find it pretty amusing that this magazine -- which regularly ran articles on stuff like mountain biking, rock climbing, what to do about "zits," dating, etc. -- ran an article about a band with a girl singer who sang songs about feeling lonely and sad and spinning around in fields of flowers.

But I'm really glad they did, because I was at a phase in my life where I was looking for something in the way of guidance re what was cool and what was worth my time and what was, in a sense, "OK" music for me to listen to as a Christian teenager. I'm not sure what it was about Sixpence that made me want to buy their record -- I guess it was because they were called "alternative" music and I was 13 years old and thought maybe I was "alternative."

I am glad that I bought the CD and I am glad that "Field of Flowers" is the first Sixpence song I heard. There are things about it I didn't understand at the time -- like how influenced by the Smiths and the Cure it was, or what Slocum meant when he wrote about Whitman's "subtle electric fire" -- but I did understand the most important thing, which was this is a song about love, by somebody who knows about love. Really, it's a remarkably mature love song for such a young band, mature and knowing in its simplicity: let me know what makes you happy and I'll do it over and over and over again. Something must have stirred in my brain, an alert to the potentially erotic sentiment.

Do I have to keep using that word, erotic, to describe what Sixpence has done? If I do, it is only because so very few Christian bands have ever even dared approach the sensual, and Sixpence does so even here, on the very first song on their very first album. Nearly everything worth loving about Sixpence, the bright melodies and poetic lyrics and Leigh's paperthin voice and Matt's nimble solos and the clear, focused tightness of the pop form, is present on "Field of Flowers," with one notable exception being the song's lack of spiritual angst. That will come later, and plenty of it. So for now, let's just spin around.

Also: I could write what I've written about nearly every other song and say that "Field of Flowers" has a truly excellent guitar solo, but I'll just assume that's a given.