Song of the Week: "Wait So Long" by Trampled by Turtles

Perhaps because I am a white man, and a tad geeky, I really enjoy hoedowns. Actually, I hate hoedowns, and square dancing and all the horrible slowed down, pop music that passes for country music these days. But I love the idea of a hoedown: getting in an abandoned barn with a few friends, a fiddle, a banjo, a guitar and anything else you think may be neat and going to town. Frenetic, a little bit bluegrass and a whole lot of fiddle and banjo, I present the only song to be played at my perfect hoedown: “Wait So Long” from Trampled by Turtles.

At first listen, this is floor stomping music at its simplest, its purest and its best. Get excited, bounce around, run through some walls, get in a few fights but make sure your foot is crashing down on the hardwood on the downbeat. The second time around, you really listen. You try to follow along with the intermittent banjo solos, the fiddle solos and the pounding bass but you fear you may succumb to either an irreversible state of euphoria or an uncontrollable seizure. The song is so alluring, but its frantic pace is so entirely dangerous to those who listen to a song with their entire body.

It is an electric shock of a tune. My feet bounce with the bass; my head bobs to the banjo; my torso flows with the lyrics; my fingers tap along to the fiddle; and you cannot stop them. You have no control. Though the chorus announces that you are waiting, the song really forces you to go.

You listen again and again and again, each time feeling the need to run about a thousand miles. But, on one pass through, you detect something: a slight twinge of sadness in the lyrics hiding beneath the joy-inducing sounds of the song.

It hit me during my third or fourth listen. I was pounding along to the fiddle when I heard “I am just a raindrop in a river, just a little itty-bitty grain of sand.” The dancing stops and I understand how joy can come from pain, how the root of beauty is hideousness, how happiness can only come from confronting, understanding and reconciling with unhappiness.

God, what a song.