“Good Morning Fire Eater” by Copeland, Monday, January 9, 2023 (updated repost)

 

It's difficult to pick a single track from You Are My Sunshine to represent a specific feeling. Although Copeland released the record in the fall of 2008, my first year off at college, it was really the dead of winter of 2009 that has burned this record into my memory. The winter of 2009 was particularly cold, even for East Tennessee. There were lots of gray days which had nothing particularly special but Easy Mac and fresh laundry. Saturday nights or Sundays some friends would drive into Chattanooga for dinner and then we’d just go back to the dorm to do our homework. Rather mundane stuff. This album was a soundtrack to those gray days. Songs like "Should You Return" was a song of hope that spring would finally come. "The Grey Man" was a song about wallowing in the uncertainty of things ever looking up. "Chin Up" was a melancholic song about the futility of trying too hard--though the song never actually makes you want to give up. 

I'M AFRAID YOU STOPPED TO LICK YOUR WOUNDS. Then the flu struck in the middle of sixteen credit hours. A high fever. I couldn't get out of bed for a couple of days. A couple of missed classes and a bunch of homework to catch up on, a nagging cough that lasted for at least a month. Songs like "The Day I Lost My Voice" and some other songs from the second half of the album really resonate with that time. And yet, I don't hold any grudges to this album. I can still listen to it and fondly think of the time that I could be sick in bed, comforted by Aaron Marsh's voice and the collaboration with Aaron Sprinkle.

THE KINDEST LOVE IS STILL BLEEDING FROM THE LAST SHOT. So, today's song is "Good Morning Fire Eater." Rather than the You Are My Sunshine version, I chose the remake from last year’s Revolving Doors, a ten-track reimagined Copeland album complete with orchestration. The original version was illustrated through the music video: a mundane day in the office transformed into a pseudo-medieval battle. The Revolving Doors version starts out akin to the original version, relying on programming but slowly adds orchestration. Today’s song celebrates the slow feeling of simple days. For me today, it’s my last day of a trip to Jeju and the weather is moody. It’s a great day to sit inside a cafe, and “Good Morning Fire Eater” could be the soundtrack. Tomorrow it’s back to work, back to writing for me. 

You Are My Sunshine version:

Revolving Doors version: