Convalescence

I'll just sort of...
put this...

Therapy
(lyrics by Matthew Thiessen)

I never thought I'd be
Driving through the country just to drive
With only music and the clothes that I woke up in
I never thought I'd need
All this time alone it goes to show
I had so much, yet I had need for nothing but you
But you

This is just therapy
Let's call it what it is
With a death grip on this life always transitioning
This is just therapy
'Cause you won't take my calls
And that makes God the only one who's left here listening
To me

I'm letting it all sink in
It's good to feel the sting now and again
Hope is one less woeful thing there is to fight through
Getting it I'll begin
Fresh paper and a nice expensive pen
The past cannot subtract a thing from what I might do for you
Unless that's what I let it do

This is just therapy
Let's call it what it is (not what we were)
With a death grip on this life always transitioning
This is just therapy
'Cause you won't take my calls
And that makes God the only one who's left here listening...

Loneliness and solitude are two things not to get confused
because I spend my solitude with You.
I gather all the questions of the things I just can't get straight
And I answer them the way I guess You do.

'Cause this is my therapy
'Cause You're the only one
Who's listening to me

This is my therapy
Let's call it what it is
Not what we were
With a death grip on
This life that's in transition
This is my therapy
'Cause you won't hear me out
And that makes God the only one who's left here listening

This is my therapy
Let's call it what it is (not what we were)
With a death grip on this life always transitioning
This is my therapy
'Cause you won't take my calls
And that makes God the only one who's left here listening
To me


----


If I said that "Part of It" had Thiessen opening up about his feelings, then that goes at least as much as "Therapy."  This song is the most open yet about his emotional state (he needs "therapy") and his walk with the Lord.  Probably my favorite line in this song is the one about loneliness and solitude.


I will be quick to point out the return of the travel motif.  Driving "just to drive," as it were.  I also want to preliminarily mention the irony of the final line in the chorus, "That makes God the only one who's left here listening to me."  Considering he's singing this song to an audience of thousands.  This line, if anything, strengthens my argument that this album is a prayer, albeit one that Thiessen shares with his listeners through an album published by the band he fronts.  And in my mind that makes this album a testimony.  Better, a testimony that avoids heavy-handedness and drips with honesty.


The first verse reveals to us that, at least in the semantic space of this song, Thiessen never expected to be spending his time driving for the sake of it, or to be isolating himself.  It seems to me that the further we get in the album, up to a point, the closer Thiessen's voice (poetically speaking) gets to the event that sparked the work.  My other comment about this verse is the wordplay of ambiguous meaning for the pronoun "you."  He could have needed nothing but her, or he could need nothing but Him, and probably he's referring to both.


The chorus is certainly an interesting beast.  Like most good choruses I encounter, it doesn't stay rigid throughout the song.  For example, the behavior Thiessen refers to in the first verse shifts from "just" therapy to "my" therapy.  He owns it as time moves forward, and he admits he really needs it.  This highlights the reason he's "call[ing] it what it is," because he doesn't necessarily want to need help.  Like he said at the start, he'd rather just "forget and not slow down."  The word "therapy" also implies he feels like it's helping.


There's an echo that happens in the chorus. "Not what we were."  The first instance is another singer entirely, a quiet parenthetical aside (which I have presented as such in the lyrics).  But in a slower version of the chorus, Thiessen himself sings the words.  After that, it's an echo again, but louder, and more sure of itself.  The statement itself is of interest, as it refers to "calling it what it is," the titular therapy of the song.  But in typical Thiessen wordplay fashion, the meaning of calling it what it is doesn't stay exactly the same between lines.  "What we were" was a relationship aimed at marriage—a parallel strongly invoked in the Christian concepts of the Bride and the Bridegroom.  But Thiessen is clearly saying this isn't the way he's communing with his Father in this context.  It's in the context of the Great Physician.


Yet another portion of the chorus is ripe for discussion.  I think Thiessen hits the nail on the head by saying that life is "always transitioning," and I think he's right to take a death grip.  Don't mistake this for meaning Thiessen is holding on too tightly—remember forgetting and not slowing down—but rather that the death grip is just to stay alive in a world that's always changing around you.  I've had a few conversations in the last couple days about how life is always a transition from one state to another.  Right now I'm in a pretty weird place and trying to figure out how to transition to the next state—and out of the house.  If you let go in a time like this, you can lose yourself.  My grip slips sometimes, and I lose a few days or a week to the sort of apathy that reflects idiomatic sofa vegetables.  


There's not too much to say about how Thiessen's female "you" won't take his calls.  It's part of a semantic piece of the puzzle, and obviously part of why he's driving just to drive, with music and God to keep him company.  It comes to the heart of his difficulty:  she has parted from him.


The bridge, which I've already referred to, details more specifically the sort of emotional work Thiessen is doing.  Out on the road alone, he wrestles with his questions and presents them all to God, playing the sort of guesswork game that comes with the faith.  Again, it's really honest.  Thiessen's walk with God isn't a series of questions and answers, or of deals made and bargains kept.  God in "Therapy" is almost the Great Psychiatrist, listening to His son talk about his experiences, and guiding him rather than giving direct instruction.


I've said that Thiessen "seems to think the therapy is working."  I put that in quotes because by that I mean the narrative voice of Thiessen telling us this emotional story thinks, during "Therapy," that it's working.  And he seems to continue to think so, because the next song on the album is called "Over It."  Tomorrow we'll talk about how that title might be a little deceiving, and how the narrator-Thiessen may be deceiving himself at this point in the album.


As a final note, I'd like to point out that even now the music is bright and moves forward at a brisk pace, and so does the inflection in Thiessen's voice.  Yes, he's hurting, but he's still not slowing down.  I point this out because we'll see whether he sticks to this or not as we move into the last half of the album, as indeed we are doing.  "Therapy" and "Over It" form the track-number center of the album, sandwiched between "Part of It" (and "Outro") and "Sahara" on the other side.  There's a radical shift in tone coming up.

Listen to "Therapy."  In fact, I'd suggest you listen to everything up to Therapy around now, if not the whole album.  I don't really want to encourage maintaining suspense moving forward, because the album is really much better as a whole, but if you've never heard the whole thing and you want to hold out, I guess you can do that.

This was one of those days where stuff happened and visitors appeared, thus the later posting than most of these recent blogs have been.  I'll make no apologies.  Another reason for the delay was a need to chew on this song a bit.  I always feel the need to chew on it, maybe more than any of the other songs on the album.

Get some good sleep, peeps.  Ciao.