Jackson Square

Jackson Square by Mason Jennings

I'm shocked this is my first Mason song… anyway, Mason's a pretty good storyteller. And this is one of his better stories: meets a girl, falls in love, she goes nuts, kills herself, and he misses her to the point where he almost kills himself - and all this happens around Jackson Square. There are a few Jackson Squares, one in San Fran and another in New Orleans... but after a little googling it seems like Mason is referring to the one in New Orleans. But that doesn't matter, I sort of picture Jackson Square as something more Paris-like in its look and feel than anything else. Or maybe something like one of those small squares off of DuPont in DC. This makes sense since I listened to this song like 100 times in the summer of 2006 often times while walking around Northwest DC. A good song and I love the opening line "Dust cloud coming off an old dirt road/that leads up here to this little graveyard". Though for the past week or so, I've been fixated on the line "Life is something you can't control/when you try to hold on to it/it makes you let go". My knee jerk reaction is that I agree with these words, but upon more reflection, I sort of disagree with it. I agree, we can't control life. But does it make us let go? I would think - if anything - we hold onto moments of our lives, even after these moments have long passed. Time goes on, but life stalls. We are all guilty of this, of becoming stuck in a moment or a feeling... some people move on from these moments better than others. I can name a few friends who are stuck on the girl who dumped them four years ago or the guy whose glory days were in high school, and he's still living that dream at 26. Life doesn't make us let go, maybe we should let go, but life does not make us do so. But I will give Mason this, "Anyone who says that life is clear/has never seen a mirror/or been to Jackson Square"

*This just came to me, but this song could be about Katrina...

Listen:

If you want to see 12 seconds of a live preformance of this song...