“And all this means nothing to the sun…”

I once asked Matt Talbott, “What is ‘Green to Me’ about?” In retrospect it was a bold question because, did I really want to know? In my asking I had empowered him to do something no one else could do: morph this thing that I cherished into something other than what my heart and mind had made it. As the man who penned the words he was the rightful owner of the meanings behind the abstractions, and his answer would be absolute. What if he gave me something completely contrary to my own images? I’d be bound by his notions forever and my own would fade. Thankfully, he did no such thing. In response to my question he said, “I was reading a lot of quantum physics at the time,” and then he paused for few moments and stared outward into space before saying, “It’s not about anything, really”. And my own realities remained blissfully intact.

Before all of this there was a Wyoming summer, sun-bleached and expansive, where nearly every day transitioned from wide open skies to billowing gray-black clouds each afternoon. As the sun would continue its descent behind the sage-encrusted hills that we called mountains, it would invariably break through in beams to highlight slow-falling rain. Later we would savor the smell of wet earth and sagebrush as it poured in through the open windows of our vehicle, trekking on dirt roads toward an empty space in which to huddle around a fire beneath the dome of stars. It was in this context that HUM’s music became a major part of the soundtrack to my life. In my mind this was the perfect backdrop for the guitars that seemed to expand infinitely outward, the drums that thundered ever downward, and the forlorn fragility of Talbott’s voice uttering his beautiful tangle of words. Twinkling melodies from the furthest reaches intertwined themselves into layer upon layer of tone painstakingly crafted to embody volume and depth, carried aloft by a rhythm section cut from stone. These were not songs, these were landscapes swathed in hazy earth-tones and bathed in shifting weather patterns. Just like my desert. And where the two realms overlapped there were Matt's narratives painting anguish, yearning, and love onto my life; the object of his affection, an unnamed girl that I replaced with my own, oscillated between distance and nearness. Every aspect of this music seemed to come from the outermost fringes of the mind while simultaneously invading the innermost chambers of the heart. In these inner spaces you’re free to build towering constructs of meaning out of someone else’s art and tether them to your own experiences. Whether you allow these constructs of memory and emotion to be toppled is your own choice, but sometimes it’s the generosity of the original author that leaves them intact.