First Bird
Here’s to 2025
Decades ago in some introduction to psychology class the instructor said offhandedly that every time you have a song stuck in your head, it’s related to an unconscious emotional need. Must have been a Freudian thing—no random accidents in consciousness—and she was probably wrong, but hey, I believed her anyway.
On the last day of my 2024, which you are reading about on the first day of 2025, the song I couldn’t stop hearing in my mind was “First Bird” by Bill Callahan. It must be an important tune for him, since he opened both his 2022 album Reality and his 2024 live album Resuscitate! with it, and also he put a painting of a bird, which we can assume is the First Bird, on the cover of the former.
It’s one of Callahan’s great tunes, regardless, and I think it played in my head so many times on December 31st for obvious reasons: Coming out of dreams, coming back to dreams—the past, where the stories have been told and the endings are known, is receding, while the uncertain present is here and it’s now and yet often it doesn’t quite seem real. The cycle of beginnings and endings; how, when life feels good, like it does for me today, we can find peace inside this rhythm.
Happy New Year and thanks for reading.
A great track to start a new year with. This was an important song (and version) for me last year. It ended up on my end-of-year playlist and also featured in two posts I wrote: one on dreams (https://songstudies.substack.com/i/146426257/and-were-coming-out-of-dreams) and one that was a review of Resuscitate and of threads in Callahan's songwriting career: https://songstudies.substack.com/p/a-few-well-placed-words-listening. Happy dreaming and listening for the new year.