Mineral (or how this is not the last post about this band)

She stepped outside into the morning air
To watch the cars go by and let the sun dry her hair

It’s cold outside. Winter has returned after misleading us into believing it had just been here for a short stint. Apparently it just took a little detour round the corner, like a hurricane, keeping all quiet in the midst of it before letting all hell loose again. I am living in the middle of the biggest city in Germany and one would guess that snow is not a common good given all the global warming etc. Ha, how foolish a mistake to believe.

I will always associate the kind of music Mineral play with life in the USA. Somewhere in the Mid-West, where you can’t get from one place to another without using a car. Some place with lonely wooden barns painted in red, a windmill attached, fields of grain along straight lanes of black tarmac. Cliché basically. But this is what I feel, when listening to those sounds. You can feel the summer dirt crawling up your nose, the dry earth under your palms when you sit on the brown, dried-out grass, staring at the blue sky and the few white clouds above. This music exemplifies the „other“ America. The one us Europeans hardly think of, when referring to the USA.

And she folded up her fears like paper airplanes
And lost them in the trees

A small town doesn’t leave you with a lot of options. Especially when you are a young adult or when you find yourself in the middle of growing up. You might think you’re a lot more mature than you actually are – what do your parents know ey? I guess one of the biggest mistakes parents can make is thinking that a small town will keep your kids off drugs, off all the alluring possibilities and dangers etc. Small towns do fuck all to prevent that. The urge to escape the small enclaves of suburban or countryside living are a lot bigger. So what is the easiest solution to do that? Right, bloody drugs.
I’m drifting away here, but the point I’m trying to make here is, that when you are young, you don’t see the obvious benefits of the cosy warmth only suburbia offers. The days (and nights) I spent outside with my friends, along the river, in the woods, getting drunk, smoking, laughing have left a deep mark in my memories. Sometimes you might forget them, they seem so distant that they are greyed out dots. But all of a sudden I stumble over a video of a band like Penfold and while watching the video feelings and images, the smell of the air, the blanket, that we used to sit on, all creep up along the lines of my odd brain.

What I always longed for (and still do) is that sense of people being together in one place, at the same time, not saying a word, maybe not even knowing each other, but when you look into each others faces, you know you’re exactly where you belong. Live music can fill the void that I am missing so often. And watching the Penfold video, I feel like I know those guys – I feel the lyrics, but I also sense that mutual understanding, the sense of being where they belong.