Librarian

My October 2012 Song of the Month

Melissa Dow’s great image for “Librarian” by My Morning Jacket

The month that ends in hauntings deserves a haunting song: Librarian by My Morning Jacket. I discovered this group, which hails from Louisville, Kentucky, thanks to NPR’s All Songs Considered, when their Circuital album ranked #19 on listeners’ favorite albums of 2011. I enjoyed that album enough to buy their earlier album Evil Urges, and Librarian has become my favorite track from that effort. Lead singer Jim James hits just the right tone in this somber tune, and I like the above image of it created by Melissa Dow.

This is a story song where the lyrics are the key. I can thoroughly relate, having spent plenty of time haunting the huge Bizzell Memorial Library at the University of Oklahoma back in my college days. My own version of this song would take place after a years-long romance crumbled, with me hoping and wondering about the possibilities if I could screw up the courage to flirt with an attractive fellow patron, held back by the “mirror’s evil way.” I also like the reference to Rainy Days and Mondays and poor Karen Carpenter, who died in the grip of anorexia nervosa. Such a beautiful voice, silenced by the mirror’s evil way.

The mirror has never been my friend, and these days is especially unkind as the rest of me ages into sync with my prematurely bald head. But thankfully I know from experience that being with someone who is truly beautiful on the inside is the “simplest of pleasures, the world at its best.”

Librarian
by My Morning Jacket

Walk across the courtyard towards the library
I can hear the insects buzz and the leaves ‘neath my feet

Ramble up the stairwell into the hall of books
Since we got the interweb these hardly get used

Duck into the men’s room combing through my hair
When God gave us mirrors He had no idea

Looking for a lesson in the periodicals
There I spy you listening to the AM radio

Karen of the Carpenters, singing in the rain
Another lovely victim of the mirror’s evil way

It’s not like you’re not trying with a pencil in your hair
To defy the beauty the good Lord put in there

Simple little bookworm buried underneath
is the sexiest librarian

Take off those glasses and let down your hair for me

So I watch you through the bookcase imagining a scene
You and I at dinner, spending time, then to sleep

And what then would I say to you lying there in bed?
These words with a kiss I would plant in your head:

“What is it inside our heads that makes us do the opposite
Makes us do the opposite of what’s right for us?
‘Cause everything’d be great and everything’d be good
If everybody gave like everybody could.”

Sweetest little bookworm hidden underneath
is the sexiest librarian

Take off those glasses and let down your hair for me

Take off those glasses and let down your hair for me

Simple little beauty, heaven in your breath
Simplest of pleasures, the world at its best.