"Coffee" by Copeland, Sunday, March 7, 2021

It was a rainy summer break during Freshman year of college. I was still driving my '91 Toyota Corolla, and that was the summer that I binged the first three Copeland albums. It started with 2003's Beneath Medicine Tree, the indie/rock concept album about love and loss. About a month later I bought, 2005's In Motion, which was a little more musically diverse. The next year's Eat, Sleep, Repeat, was closer to musical theater than rock. Each Copeland album had its own unique mood. Today's song, "Coffee," comes from BMT, which is the most immature of the Copeland albums. Lyricist and singer Aaron Marsh was fine-tuning his craft at writing sappy love songs, and this album's lyrics tended to be a little too over the top. The song "Coffee" appears as track 9, with a story as cliche as they get--two small town kids falling in love while talking all night at the diner. The brief brush drum solo toward the end sounds just like coffee shop music. 

THERE'S A LOVE THAT TRANSCENDS ALL THAT WE'VE KNOWN OF OURSELVES. I've been drinking coffee since before I can remember. My parents tell me that I used to steal my dad's coffee as soon as I could crawl. I must have burnt myself many times. When I was seven or eight my grandma gave me coffee. She told me not to tell my mom because my mom didn't want me drinking it. Growing up as a Seventh-day Adventist, it was a demonized beverage. But when I was in 10th grade, my family all started drinking it, and we haven't stopped. I've gone through periods that I tried to reduce my consumption, but it was a fruitless endeavor. When I first came to Korea, I wasn't able to find any good coffee except for sugary instant coffee that came in a stick. I drank a lot of it, and my face got rather wide in the pictures. Fortunately I found better solutions, and now the highlight of the work day is when my coworker and I make French pressed coffee at work. 

THERE'S PLENTY OF TIME LEFT TONIGHT. It seems that most weekdays I can drink as much coffee as I want and sleep well. However, there's something about Sundays that an afternoon coffee will keep me up until 2 am. I hate Sunday nights. With the anxieties of the work-week looming, it's a race to prepare everything--the laundry, the meals, the cleaning. We get to the afternoon lag and the decision: to drink coffee and sleep horribly or to suffer through the Sunday race to Monday. Sorry, Aaron, it's probably too late for coffee. Sunday isn't a great night. Let's postpone until at least Thursday. Who needs sleep on Thursday night? The second week of the semester starts tomorrow. Time for the grind to begin. Fortunately the daily grind includes Columbian and Brazilian beans. 

https://genius.com/Copeland-coffee-lyrics