Sorry about all the lyric entries. I don’t feel obliged to do the haredawg shtick here, so they weren’t gratuitous. I’ve had entire discographies stuck in my head for the past few weeks. It’s a divorce thing. I haven’t even seen sunny in a year, I haven’t lived with her for more than a few weeks in the last three years, so that sentimental stuff, the stuff that makes the hardest of us go all Polly Anna has been crystallizing into rock candy and I’m the stick it’s wrapped around.
I have a thousand bad sunny stories. She did have a singular gift. Ok, now that I’ve used the word gift I’m going to take it back. It’s an easy word to recognize. Nobody who sings like that is gifted, well, yes, but the gift is a piece of sand, it takes a lot of work and time to make a pearl out of it. She really could sing like nobody else, I mean nobody. It’s easier to make comparisons to Janis Joplin or Billie Holiday, except for neither of those two tried doing one another. Sunny could out Janis Janis and Out Billie Billie. This is not hyperbole. I loved her and now I don’t. She killed my dog and other lesser crimes against me. I don’t hate her. She’s just become sand where there was a pearl. I don’t hate sand.
It’s hard to listen to certain songs without hearing Sunny do them. When we came out to her mom that we had gotten married (it was the first time, I think, that I met her, certainly the first time I met husband number five) we were at this resort on the Washington coast and the man and wife folk/silly act on the stage got the word we were newlyweds and made us come up on the stage. Me and my new father=in-law du jour went first and neither of us can sing. Sunny was next with just the female of the duo. The female suggested me and bobby McGee. When Sunny refused the microphone the female thought it was out of shyness. No. Sunny goes into a twitchy kind of trance/stomp sort of like Joe Cocker. Her voice is trained, but when she lets it out of the cage she will blow speakers. The room was a mere 3000 square feet. Nobody applauded except for our table. They were awestruck in the presence of greatness. Our table knew what was coming.
The plethora of other things Sunny thinks she excels at are nowhere near as refined as she thinks they are. If she had ambition you’d all know who she is. Again, not hyperbole, not the opinion of a doting husband. She has a set of chops, or maybe had, it’s been a long time, that can find the soul of a song, any song, and belt it out or whisper it so that even a deaf man in the cheap seats can feel it. If she cut another album and it went multi-national, I would buy it (ok, so I’d pirate it, still, I would have it) but I wouldn’t tell people “That’s my ex-wife” I wouldn’t try getting a back stage pass. She killed my dog. She is a grain of sand in my heart. But she sure can sing.
I think the first entry that is public on my Open Diary is a poem about her singing. She posted it on Facebook last year, citing the source with some sort of intro like “I can’t believe someone loved my silly ass like that”. She has never been able to distinguish reality from rock candy. It’s a coping mechanism, an extreme one, but it has been necessary for her. I just mean it’s not personal, it’s not about me, it’s about her. She needs everything to be rock candy; otherwise her life would be pretty damn horrifying. I was not a great husband, but if it were a competition, she’d win the shitty spouse medal hands down. But damn she sure can sing.
Shit, let me find the fucking poem and cut and paste it here.
She got a voice like a freight train
Running cars from Detroit
Through a cornfield
With the moon telling secrets
To the tenderloin dusk
And my Lover
She got a voice like the down bound elevator
On the sears tower, bring it down low a hundred floors
In nothing flat
To the backbeat of the Chicago streets
And the lunchtime whistle of the stockyard
And my lover
She got a voice like the cane pickers hand
Brown sweet and warm hard
Working through the straw boss sun
You work your whole life
For rum on someone else’s table
And my lover
She got the voice of the heron
Hidden in the reeds
She got the voice of the falcon
Swooping to the river
She got the voice of the crane
Calling for her tribe
And my lover
She got the sweet hot coffee voice
She got that mountain shine whiskey voice
She got the cask-aged cedar smoked
Don’t let it out of the cage
Kinda voice
And when she talk to me
It make my skin all hot
And when she sing to me
It make my cock get hard
And when she love me with that voice
They ain’t no other place for me
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