Another Day to Face Up, Another Day to Wake Up

With less than 90 days sober I did what I had always done in the midst of a rite of passage--I assembled a song list and burned a CD. In a typically earnest and naive act of early recovery, I wanted the music to chart the entire course of my release from alcoholism.

Yes, self-mythologizing is definitely one of my character defects.

But aside from the obvious grasping for premature maturity, the CD was also my implicit declaration of faith that there was a better way of life for me. And also of the hope that music might continue to be as crucial in my sober life as it had been in my drinking one. I knew that alcohol and I had traveled as far as we could go together, but I was terrified that leaving drinking meant departing from my life's soundtrack. Up to that point music+drinking=the little I knew of transcendence. Would my sober life sound soulless, like Michael Bolton doing Vegas?

Hoping the songs could solo without the alcoholic accompaniment, this is what I came up with:

"The Slow Descent in Alcoholism"--The New Pornographers

"I Got Drunk"--Uncle Tupelo

"Moonshiner"--Uncle Tupelo

"Bottom of the Glass"--Whiskeytown

"Hurt"--Johnny Cash

"Save it For a Rainy Day"-- The Jayhawks

"Juanita"--Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow

"Leaving New York"--REM

"Deeper Well"--Emmylou Harris

"Feed Kill Chain"--Jay Farrar

"Choices"--George Jones

"Life is Beautiful"--Ryan Adams and the Cardinals

"The Big House"--Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell

"Be Not So Fearful"--Jeff Tweedy

"Every Grain of Sand"--Bob Dylan

"Long Way to the Light"--The Waterboys

"Please Tell My Brother"--Golden Smog

I called the collection "Another Day to Face Up, Another Day to Wake Up" a line from one of the songs it contained. In the posts to come, I'll explore how these songs and many others have helped me to live sober. I'm grateful for my sober life, grateful that I don't do things as asinine/ambitious anymore as trying to capture all the work of a day at a time lifetime in just 80 mins of music.

But I'm also blessed that these songs could, in fact, sing for themselves. What a relief to know that beauty and wisdom and awareness of suffering and forgiveness and joy and God, all that these songs mean to me, are more real than alcohol's power and much more a part of my life now then they were before 9.19.05.

Happy listening, happy living.