“I’ll be your statesman, your guru, your mobile home.”

As I mentioned last week, I have synesthesia; sound has inherent color to me, and abstract ideas inherent shapes. I’ve always been this way, and I only recently learned that it’s uncommon. Most people I know, when asked specific things (most often about how they visualize time), seem to reveal a touch of synesthetic thinking, so I think it’s more of a spectrum or style of thought than a distinct thing.

Kristeen Young’s voice is always quite complicated in its shading, and most of the tones are cool. The whole of Enemy is blue and purple. X is ice-blue. The track “Devil Girl” is a rich violet; “This Is the Dawn Of My D-Day” (2008), is pink, red and gold, and has a metallic gleam.

I’m writing about it today for no good reason, except that I love it; she doesn’t write a lot of straightforward love songs, and this one’s soaring giggle is pretty unique. It also has a really good central metaphor. Young has occasionally covered Hazel O’Connor, and I wonder if this song, in addition to love-as-allied-invasion, doesn’t reference O’Connor’s “D Days (Decadent Days);” no relation in tone or subject matter, but the association gives it a sense of outlawry.

The lyric is both strange and strict. It enforces internal rhymes across both verses, periodically dips up into a trilling “like…doo, doo, doo” which euphemizes nothing, and the imagery -mostly of a car/lover, the sequel to the television/lover of “My TV”- seems almost horrific until it snaps together.