This story originally aired on November 16, 2019.
The sheer physicality of aging and dying are things we try not to think about, so it’s especially striking when these subjects turn up in unexpected places — say, your indie rock playlist.
Carrie Goodwin plays bass for the Seattle-based band Great Grandpa, and she also happens to be a nursing student. In her song “Rosalie,” Goodwin introduces us to someone losing her grip on life — and maybe gets us a little closer to wrapping our brains around our common fate.
She caught up with Sound Effect contributor Allie Ferguson to dissect the song, and talk about the intersection of nursing and art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBydI5yySro
(The lyrics of Great Grandpa’s “Rosalie”)
The path in her brain gets rewarded again
Where it hardens and strengthens in a looping?refrain
And?masked spectres of?the past reveal themselves against her?will
To slide in this moment, alive again pro tem
There’s an endless expanding drawn in the eyes
A soul decomposing, a body alive
Rosalie lives, lives on her own
Scared like a german shepherd, in the back of the yard
Wait til morning, cares coming by
Changing her clothes, listening to
Odd things, throw the cereal on the ceiling
Stretched screams, shallow skin, swollen feet
Rosalie lives, lives with her own
Home like a TV sitcom, and her kids in the car
Wait til nighttime, see her again, hollow and thin
Wading through
Odd things, throw the cereal on the ceiling
Stretched screams, swollen speech, void of meaning
Sad scenes can be beared, can be handled
No thing keeps me up, keeps us screaming
It’s the hardest part, the hardest part
Just a relentless regress
