MUSIC has an amazing ability to conjur memories, moods and feelings from times past, often at the first few bars, or howls of a chorus.
Bittersweet Symphony conjures for me a week of escape to the Tasmanian Highlands from my newspaper job, in late ‘98 after a particularly brutal election campaign. Outside cell phone range, and tourist season, I lived out of the back of my truck, cooking over an open fire, unshaven, unwashed and unheard from. The fishing was phenomenal, the browns would come into the flooded shallow margins to feed at dawn, tails waving gold in the morning light. One glorious cloudy day they stayed all day, better yet I had i all to myself, hidden away at the end of a long wet goat track of a road.
The song follows me to water. I’ll find myself in special moments and special places, humming it to myself, mostly when I’m sightfishing it seems, and when I find myself truly alone on the water. I recall an evening on McCoys Spring Creek outside Dillon Mt, another on the North Branch of the Au Sable in Michigan and more recently on Norfork on Monday, when seemingly everyone went home.
Hope you enjoy it too
