UMPQUA RUSHING
The Past is Not Done With Us
Source credit: https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2016/06/01/479498392/song-premiere-blind-pilot-umpqua-rushing
Blind Pilot singer-songwriter Israel Nebeker writes about "Umpqua Rushing" and And Then Like Lions via email:
The past isn't finished with us yet. Love can be like that, too. I think of this album as a conversation about different kinds of loss and the courage we find when we face loss honestly, cracked open and unsure of what we will become, which is the only real way to face it. In this song, I write about the Umpqua Forest in Oregon and the lost coast of Northern California. It amazes me how places reveal themselves as significant to us by the stories we live in them. They echo memories back to us when we visit or when we listen from afar. I like that, and it reminds me how the past isn't finished with us.
Every time I hear this song, I am so moved I could throw up. It’s this one line that gets me every time: “Your blackened branches drifting through my water…”
Sex and love are so cerebral for me - and then so not. I hear this concept - blackened branches drifting through my water, and my mind gets it on such a deep level that it enters my bloodstream and becomes part of my body. I could probably read this lyric and feel a certain type of way. But this is a song, which is a poem exploded. And the way it’s sung, the honest longing in the voice and the melody of the line, just filet me open. It begins as a thought and becomes a racing of my heart, a punch to the gut, a physical knowing, an opening, a feeling that makes me want to lay naked on a lakeside boulder in the sun accepting whatever’s to come: life, death, sex. At this point, anyone who could think of that line (and relate to it) becomes the sexiest human alive. I don’t need to know what they look like. I’ve seen their insides on the outside and I’m here for it.