The Innocence Mission: “Bright As Yellow”

Songs like a warm towel around the head and neck. Songs like a sleeping bird tucked against your nape. Songs like cicada drone melting sideways into the haze lifted from boiling grass. Songs like a mountain of cushions a gun is fired into. Songs like benevolent lights pendulous in the dark across an opaque water. Songs like familiar leather. Songs like scent memory spinning you around saying ah! The Innocence Mission are all devout Christians and have since parted ways with and never replaced their drummer because they’re the sort of band which doesn’t require one. What sort of band doesn’t require a drummer you ask, well how about one whose hit single was about rejecting beauty and sheepishness in favor of a natural inner warmth, in favor of kindness, and even so it still made it to the Party of Five series soundtrack. A band who worried last year that their album of hymnals wouldn’t go over well with the “non-devout” members of their fanbase they weren’t even sure still existed except I do. A singer with a voice like the discovery of singing. I needed this song at fourteen precisely as much as I needed this blog at 27 precisely as much as I needed something undefinable at 28 and so I found this CD and I found this blog’s password and here they are and here I am and here you are and here we all are bright as yellow. Warm as yellow.