I don’t want to debate the pros and cons of the Red House Painters, or the absurdity of attempting AC/DC and Modest Mouse covers, or anything dealing with Mark Kozelek at all. This entry is about one song.

I’ve listened to Sun Kil Moon’s “Carry Me Ohio” on and off for the past few years, but always in bursts. It’s my favorite off their Ghosts of the Great Highway, and I love it not (only) because of some sad-sap, broken hearts club reason, but because it was popular. Or at least relatively popular. Enough to have someone out in middle-of-nowhere Midwest, USA write online that, in his neck of the woods, the radio airwaves were saturated with it.

How often is a song you love popular amongst the right crowd? I know that sounds pretentious—“There is no right crowd”—but it doesn’t take much to realize the gal with the Miles Davis T-shirt at the Fall Out Boy concert is a smidge out of place. While I’ve known people who love musicians for their idiosyncrasies and bands for their unity, I’ve never known a community that loves a song on its own, at least not in my lifetime. There exist no future expectations. A person can invest in it without any vulnerability; s/he doesn’t have to worry how the next album will sound, or if the death metal guitarist will cut his hand on the knives attached to the ceiling fan while doing Windmills in a small room. There’s no “What if the singer goes solo?” looming in the air. No, this group’s commonality is their complete disinterest in anything but that six-and-a-half-minutes.

It’s a curious thing, loving a song for being there at the right time. It cuts me to the core to think that maybe, just maybe, there were a few others out there in love with this song for the same reasons I was.

“Carry Me Ohio” has reminded me of one thing since I first heard it—driving at night (everyone gets one). Well, driving somewhere and then parking, but still driving. I sat thinking of teenage boys with their “pink carnations and a pick-up truck” driving around Nebraska (which I realize is quite a ways from Ohio), parking in cornfields, listening to this song and smiling at a clear night sky. And though I sat alone, they were the ones keeping me company at a time and place I needed it most. It was comforting thinking a group of people were smiling right back at me across the thousands of lonely miles that separated us, paved or otherwise.

As far as I’m concerned, this song was meant for that moment, that time and place, with the moon hanging above the palm trees like a Christmas ornament. I wanted to drive into the night and have that feeling of companionship unlike any other. Nearly two years later I feel the same way.

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