Daily Jam - Romneydale

In some form or another, I’ve been living in my head for as long as I can remember. Sure, I join the real world from time to time, meet people, make friends, get married, have kids, and occasionally experience the kind of existential dread that only living in a crumbling society or dying world can evoke, but eventually I return to the daydreams. I’m always back in the fog. It’s like staring at a blank canvas, contemplating the paint, the strokes and layers forming in the ether before creating an image, or looking at a page or screen, the letters and words gradually assembling into meaning. But it’s also not so romantic, the pretentions of an artist rather than the cold reality, a simple mode of escapism.

It’s just so much easier to pretend than to be.

In some other alternate reality, maybe I’m a successful writer, or a musician, or a filmmaker, cartoonist, psychiatrist, marine biologist, politician, ninja, astronaut. Or maybe I’m not. Probably I’m not. Probably I’m just floating along imagining I’m all of those things like I do here.

Though I hope I’m the ninja.

Anyway, daydreaming and pretending and living in your own head works best with a soundtrack, something to make it all the more cinematic, all the more false. And nothing works for floating around all day for me quite like the funereal folksong of “Romneydale,” a bit of crusty, lo-fi Americana from the 2011 album The Outside Room by Natalie Mering’s project Weyes Blood…or sometimes Weyes Bluhd…or sometimes Weyes Blood and The Dark Juices. But mainly just Weyes Blood.

“Romneydale” is a surreal and heady piece of psychedelic folk, six minutes of aimless wandering in a trancelike state. There’s something almost ominous about the song, the gentle guitar strumming and bits of chime and ambience carrying an old world weight beneath them while Mering’s ghostly, haunting, and cooing vocals float in the air like unsettled dust, disturbed by the shuffling of solemn shoes, a dirge for a lost middle America. But there’s also this kind of melancholy and soothing call to come back home, back to the warmth of your blankets, back into the arms of a loved memory. And maybe stay there for a while.

Back to my head with me.