Ambulance Blues - Neil Young
From a favorite album, a favorite track. A haunting sense in a song.
I guess I’ll call it sickness gone
it’s hard to say the meaning of this song.
an ambulance can only go so fast,
it’s easy to get buried in the past
when you try to make a good thing last.Neil Young, Ambulance Blues, On the Beach
There’s something so soothing to me in those words. The song has been explained in terms of its seemingly very precise meaning by those who understood references like “Up in TO” for Toronto, with Young’s history in mind or “I never met a man who could tell so many lies” as being about Nixon.
But what makes musical lyrics magical to me is how they transcend, so effortlessly, their embedded contextual meanings, and perfectly and artfully represent my own, very different, very personal context.
So, when I say, I don’t know what it means, as I’m doing now, I do so knowing full well what I’m told it meant to Young, but I’m really more interested in what it means to me.
One thing is clear in how something plays to my meaning — tension — like the dynamic between the beginning and ending of a single sentence “it’s easy to get buried in the past / when you try to make a good thing last” is magestically strung out by Young with a new tonality on the second half of it, the full measure of a poetic new line that imagines it is all there is being said.
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