Sera Cahoone - I've Missed You All These Years
Bee Delores pans for gold -- and finds lots of it -- in Sera Cahoone's resliient collection of songs eight years in the making: I've Missed You All These Years.
Sera Cahoone's I've Missed You All These Years shimmers like newly discovered gold in a creek bed out west. She collects 11 songs, or gold nuggets, and stuffs them in her pockets. Over eight years, she toiled in the songwriting soil, tirelessly planting seeds and harvesting crops, and emerged with a brilliantly hopeful record about truth, recovery, and the understanding that her life's journey doesn't have to be dark. And that's not to say the record isn't without more sobering ruminations on matters of grief, pain, and climbing out of the pitch-black depths.
"Not How I Hoped" plucks the heartstrings and rejuvenates the teardructs, lubricating the emotions until the dam breaks and floods the senses. "All of my friends, the circles I’m in all have changed," she sets sail on the rising tide waters. "But I’m doing fine, the world just ain’t the same." Whether it's fractured familial relationships, shredded friendships, or romantic ties, life is full of severed endings that flail in the brutal, bitter wind. There's no stopping the end.
The clouds briskly part like Moses and the Red Sea in the following track: the galloping "Horse Runnin'." "I grew up right here, and I’ve been around / Never thought I’d see a girl like you in this town," Cahoone offers. Her chirpiness flutters throughout the record, and she demonstrates great determination to never allow even life's most tragic, devastating moments to derail her will to really live. That energy continues through songs such as "Tangled Nights," a saloon spinner with one helluva groove, and the prairie-dog opener "High and Low," its breeziness cascading across a wide-open space. "Let’s lay on down and leave it all behind," she sings, molding both sadness and freedom into one clay figurine.
I've Missed You All These Years isn't about discarding the misery we sometimes feel in life. It's learning how to soak those moments into our skin, our lives, further giving us resilience and strength to weather the next storm. It's acceptance and learning that a few scuffed knees, bruised elbows, and even a broken heart can be cleansing. It teaches us about what really matters in life and the endurance it takes to finish the race. "Got too high down by the riverbed, you had to talk me down," sings Cahoone with a heavy head and heavy heart in "No One Like You," a foggy meditation about a love that can never be extinguished. "And I know I'm nearing your heart / There's no one like you at all."
They say life isn't about the destination but the journey. And along the journey, there will be terribly bleak times that will make you lose hope in humanity and in yourself. But traversing terrible conditions is part of the package, of being human, of living. In the end, the darkness won't matter. We'll hold the goodness to our chests and escape into the light.
