If you’re the type of person who likes to read a book, and then go back and read it again, now knowing everything you didn’t know when you started it the first time, I think you’ll appreciate why this song made the cut to represent chapter 1.
Listening to “Riverwide” after completing the chapter, you should come away with a vague, indistinct sense of who Autumn is – knowing someone’s deepest fear (in the refrain) is quite revealing. Listen to this song again, after you finish “The Strangest of Places,” and you’ll no doubt find that, like the second time through on a good book, the lyrics reveal more than they did the first time.
I first ran across this song shortly after Sheryl Crow’s “The Globe Sessions” album came out, having been lured in to check it out by “My Favorite Mistake.” At the time, that song spoke to me because I was in a relationship that I knew was unhealthy, and definitely had no chance of being anything serious, yet I was reluctant to let it go, because it was something different from loneliness. Although “My Favorite Mistake” was the song that motivated me to buy the album, “Riverwide,” “It Don’t Hurt,” and “The Difficult Kind” quickly snagged the top spots in my list of album favorites. The former two spoke to that unhealthy relationship and its aftermath, the latter turned out to be oddly prophetic (but that’s a story for another time, in chapters yet to be written).
For chapter 1’s song, I wanted to summarize where Autumn was in her life, her state of mind, and to do so in a way that would foreshadow the journey of self-discovery she was about to begin. That was a pretty tall order, and I didn’t know how close I’d come to checking all of those boxes, but I was determined to try.
I don’t recall how I ultimately settled on “Riverwide,” but I do know that this is the only song that has ever been assigned to chapter 1. All others had a few swap outs here and there, as I ran across other songs in my shuffle that I thought might fit better, but not this one. Chapter 1 has always been “Riverwide,” and when I decided on the final chapter’s song, “The Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron – also a one-and-done decision – I was elated to notice the continuity in the river theme that flows between them (which I picked up on after putting a playlist with all the songs on it together, and listening to it on repeat).
If you started reading this post expecting a metaphorical break down on this song’s significance that makes it the perfect choice for chapter 1, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not going to happen.
Could I do it? Absolutely.
Will I? Hell, no.
Everyone has a story, and everyone has their own unique perceptive filters. What I hear when I listen to the lyrics from “Riverwide” may be way different from what you hear; we all ascribe our own meaning to literary creations. If you listen to this song after reading chapter 1 and attach whatever meaning you take away from the lyrics to Autumn, then you’ve started to make her your own. In that moment, she’s more you than me. As an author, that’s my ultimate goal. If there is any piece of Autumn in who you are, then I want you to make that connection.
If I tell you what that song means to me, you’re not going to see yourself in Autumn, you’re going to see me, so I’m not going to do that. I may point out some fun bits, as I did in the last post I published here, but the interpretations and associations to the story will be your own, as I hope these characters will also be, in some way.
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