Songs That Touch My Soul

We all have them, songs that seem to touch a secret place in your soul – sometimes secret even from you. They can grow and occasionally fester like an open wound, or they can fill you up, inspire you, and occasionally even heal you. Sometimes they don't even reflect your musical tastes. They can be shameful secrets that you keep from family and friends. You feel like a drug addict craving your next fix. At times like those you thank the powers that be for MP3 players - the syringe of those suffering with this affliction.

This is the seventh installment of songs that touch my soul. And as always this edition is full of passion, desire, and lust. This is a form of therapy, this sharing of my neuroses, my secret inner lunacy, the big ball of crazy that is me. Welcome to my musical schizophrenia.

“Magic” – Colbie Caillat

With the recent changes in my personal life, romance has been on my mind again. I can’t help but think that this time, I want it all. Fuck settling for someone who is “close enough”, frankly I don’t need someone in my life just to fill space. This time I want it all, I want the fantasy. “Magic” is about the fantasy, that perfect chemistry in love. Caillat's lyrics evoke the images and feelings of cold fire moving over bare skin with the lightest touch from a lover and the joy of seeing the face you adore, above you with love in their eyes. It’s an intoxicating image sung in a beautifully sweet, romantic, almost girlish way but with a sensual, lustful feel to it and decidedly big-girl lyrics like: “You've got magic inside your finger tips/ Its leaking out all over my skin/ Everytime that I get close to you/ Your making me weak with the way you/ Look through those eyes”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Colbie Caillat knows what it means to be a woman in love.

“All Kinds” – Dan Wilson

And of course I want a man who can’t resist me. Who adores me, thinks that no woman anywhere was ever or has ever been as perfect and amazing as I am right now. Okay, who doesn’t want that? I think Dan Wilson sums it up beautifully when he sings to some very lucky girl: “You've got the kind of beautiful/ Makes the boys want to give up running all around/ You know the kind of magic spell/ Makes the wild, wild horses lay down on the ground”. “All Kinds” is the first track from his latest solo effort Free Life (one of my best albums of 2007) and like the rest of this poignant alt-folk-rock album it has the same mixture of acoustic and electronic instruments; feeling still, bare, evanescent but with a nearly orchestral quality to it. Dan Wilson seems to understand what many men do not, when you love us we don’t want there to have ever been anyone nearly as life altering as we are. And when we leave you, we simply want you to pine for us for the rest of your lives. Is that really too much to ask?

Article Author: A.L. Harper

I'm a writer and music journalist originally from Salt Lake City, but now living in Scotland. I was a Punk/Goth in the '80s and these artistic influences have stayed with me; although a love of Chopin, chamber music, and Spanish guitar would seem to belie this. …

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