There are songs that are connected, forever, with particular moments and particular emotions; “Seeds,” from Camille’s most recent album (as I write this), is one of these for me. It helps, I guess, that I listened to this song on repeat at the particular time I recall with such clarity whenever I hear this — but there was something about the lines (and the delivery thereof) “How can you serve them?/How can you spoil them?/How can you trade them? How can you grow?” that made me feel as if I couldn’t breathe and needed to cry at the time.
I remember wandering the streets, walking back to where I was staying at the time, feeling at once disconnected from everything I thought about myself and what I wanted out of life — really intense, emotional existential crisis stuff that I’d been ignoring for years — and the sun was setting and I was just listening to this again and again and again. It had come on randomly, and I’d be lying if I said that I’d paid too much attention to the song or even the album it had come from before that. But at that point, it felt as if she was singing directly to me with a code I couldn’t break but could tell was important.
The strength of the memory to me is surprising, synaesthetic. I can remember my legs aching, the hunger in my belly at the time; I can feel the feeling I had at the time as I struggled with the everything in my head and what it might mean for me in the long run. All of that plays in me again when I hear this song, each time, with the verse feeling as if the tension is growing, just constantly ratcheting up until the glorious release of that chorus, the way her voice breaks free of everything being restrictive in what came before. Each and every time I hear this song, there’s such a beautiful, freeing sense of escape to be found in it. In multiple ways.