"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
Last week's song was a big famous one I admitted I didn't really connect with until I was a father. This week I have a big famous song that I latched onto early, maybe for contrast.
I won't say that Solsbury Hill is inherently a teenager's song - it's bigger and more encompassing than that. But I bet I was only one of a legion of teens across several generations to take it to heart.
This is a song about transformation, about a transcendent experience - or about using such an experience as a metaphor for the changes you make in your life anyway. In real life, it was Gabriel's "why I left Genesis" song, but it doesn't actually explain that, or anything.
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom boom boom
It's a song of vibes, but songs are all about vibes - you feel a song more than you logically explicate it, always.
So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
'Til I thought of what I'd say
Which connection I should cut
That vagueness, that mysticism - it means Solsbury Hill can mean whatever a listener needs it to mean, can be about whatever that listener is going through in their life as much as it was about Gabriel's life.
And it's yet another example of the song with a distinctive sound, a great riff, that starts quiet and gets louder and bigger as it goes along - I won't say that always works, but it works consistently when done well, and this is one of the best examples of doing it well.
"Grab your things, I've come to take you home"
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