Here's the inevitable thing about life; nothing stays the same. No matter how much it feels like things are immutable, everything changes while our minds blend the differences like an old zoetrope turning still images into an animated wonder. Much like how our bodies regenerate our cells so we are literally not the same people we were ten years ago, music is not static either. The ways we interact with it shift, the electrical pathways in our minds carve new branches, and old friends become acquaintances we nod and wave to as we forget where we ever met them.
I've been thinking a lot about relationships over the course of the last year, because many of the threads that connect me to the world have felt as if they had frayed to the breaking point. People who I thought were dear have been receding from my life, and I have proven to myself it makes no difference whether I try to hold on or not. If people can fade so easily and so quickly, the same holds true for music. It isn't always enough to have an old record sitting on the shelf, there needs to be a reason that pulls us back together time and again, much as having a photograph hanging on the wall is not the same as maintaining the connection with that person.
Ten years ago, despite being cynical by nature, I was more optimistic than I am now. "Lemon Parade" was still inspiring me to explore my own depths for the sake of art, and I still had the energy to love Tonic enough to believe a new chapter was still on the horizon. Now, after another decade in which we only have one new song to show for our patience, belief is a hard thing to come by. Perhaps I am too much an empiricist, or perhaps it's existentialism manifesting, but when the only experiences left are memories, the future is nothing but an illusion.
When I listen to "Lemon Parade", I remember every second of those first twenty years; the obsession that wore thin the magnetic strip of the cassette tape, the reflexive strumming that taught me the basics of guitar before I had one, the voice that rang in my head as if it was my own. I remember all the times I put the record on when I needed something to make me feel like 'me' again, when I needed music to fill the role of the 'trusted friend who tells me lies', to borrow a phrase from a different band.
With ten years dust collected atop the old memories, seeing the past in vivid color isn't quite possible anymore. I know plenty of people who use the term 'friend' far too liberally, applying it to anyone they have ever had a passing conversation with. To me friendship is a two-sided connection, one that needs attention so as not to corrode and eventually snap. It's an irony that I was once lectured by someone for saying something that was taken as a slight on our friendship, despite the fact that person has not had any conversation with me that was not in service or about themselves in years. I've been trying to convince myself those sorts of people are not friends, and the same applies to bands and music.
This isn't to blame Tonic for not making a new album in more than fifteen years, but merely to say that figments of the past aren't able to grow with us in the same manner as someone who is still here in the daily fight. Tonic has not given me any new context to think about their music and their evolution, stuck in the amber of my memories. I spend too much time there as it is.
Since the last time I wrote about "Lemon Parade", and the ways the re-imagined acoustic version gave me a new perspective on something I loved so dearly, much has changed. Maybe I haven't changed, but I no longer call Tonic my favorite band, I no longer have "Lemon Parade" listed as my favorite album, and I've given up on writing/playing the music it inspired me to create. It isn't painful to listen to the album, but it does serve as a reminder of dreams I used to have but no longer do. That's another topic I've written far too much about. I was young and stupid, so my interpretation when I first heard "If You Could Only See" was mistaken. It's funny when I think back to that, because to this day my errant take on that song is more relevant to my life than the song itself. Perhaps I wasn't quite as stupid as I thought.
The point of all of this is to be a reminder that being dead-set in your thinking is not noble. Changing your mind is not just healthy, it's vital when the world around us is constantly changing. If new experiences and new evidence don't make you reconsider things from time to time, you no longer have opinions and feelings, you have reflexes that are as worthy of praise as being tapped on the knee by a rubber mallet. Love is not a reflex, it's a choice we make on a daily basis, and there's nothing wrong with realizing one day that we are making that choice out of habit.
Ten more years down the road, I still love Tonic and I still love "Lemon Parade", but it's the kind of love that is wrapped up in the nostalgia for memories we don't want to see fade away. "Lemon Parade" is the old friend you see at a reunion and reminisce about some stories with. It is no longer an album I make memories with, it's an album I use to recall memories when I need to remember what having a bit of hope felt like.
That is to say, in another five or ten years, I may not even remember the anniversary of such an important part of my life, because there really isn't anything left to say.
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