Haunted

If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know that your humble author is a big fan of music.  Most of the time I have music playing, and especially when I'm working.  It seems to help me keep my energy up, and sometimes feels like it aids my creativity and perspective as well.

Unfortunately, there are some down sides to this constant soundtrack playing, especially when an emotionally charged song comes up and I don't take the time to skip past it.  That was especially the case when Poe's "Haunted" came up on the old iPhone yesterday.

Poe wrote the concept album of the same name due to interactions she had as an adult to finding a number of audio tapes that her now deceased father had left behind.  It is a dark and emotional body of work that deals with an adult still trying to process the loss of a parent.  From that emotional perspective, her album has been compared to Pink Floyd's The Wall.

Over the years, when things ever got too stressful for me, I'd call my dad.  He always seemed to know what to say when I needed a kick in the tail, or an encouraging word to let me know that I didn't suck, or offer a new perspective when I was too emotionally charged to see what was truly happening, or just say something funny to make me laugh and get me pulled out of my funk.  
Then I lost him.

Time and again, starting with his illness and later with his death, I'd long to be able to pick up the phone and just talk.  Because I knew at the end of the conversation, regardless of how it'd go, I'd feel better.  Unfortunately, those days ended.

Thus, Poe's Haunted has always been an important song to me.  

Here it is:



The part that always gets me is at the 2:40 mark:

I'll always want you 
I'll always need you
I'll always love you
AND I WILL ALWAYS MISS YOU

I pretty much never make it thorough that stretch without crying.  It just makes tangible for me how damn much I miss my dad.  And it seems now, with life so crazy, that I miss him even more than ever.

Hence, when it came on yesterday, I made a mistake by letting it play.  Luckily I caught myself, as by the 2:00 mark I know what was happening and went and shut my office door.

And then I went back to my desk, sat down, listened, and cried.

And I missed my dad.