Hi, friends. It’s beet quiet here for a while. I had a case of the depression and I think I’m finally back to the point where I can turn my brain on for something like this and not have to fight off a swarm of intrusive thoughts and negative self thought. But it’s Friday, which means it’s Injection Day, and I’m listening to Rush’s masterpiece album Moving Pictures on vinyl.

Music has been my poetry since I was a tween. Song lyrics are easy to get stuck in my head, so they’d live there and I’d turn them over trying to figure out what they mean. This has historically put a barrier between me and having a deep appreciation for the entirety of the Moving Pictures album, because as much as Red Barchetta rocks, the lyrics are “Neil Peart’s weird libertarian thing.” Listening to power metal helped me move past that and just rock out.

Power metal, generally speaking, isn’t that deep, so its lyrics tend to be fairly surface level and don’t have much nuance living in them. Which isn’t to say they don’t have substance, just less meat for my brain to pick of their proverbial bones as, say, Dream Theater’s earlier work before they started sounding like a Dream Theater cover band and wrote songs about the AIDS crisis (Learning to Live), the death of a parent (Another Day), or a tongue-in-cheek parody of power metal that everyone took seriously enough they followed it up with an entire concept album (Metropolis–Part I: ‘The Miracle and the Sleeper’).

A lot of power metal is a parody of power metal, I think specifically Rhapsody of Fire and Manowar as the overwhelming majority of it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. In any case, the lyrics feel like they’re much lower stakes to me. To the point that my “injection day anthem” is Venom of Venus by Powerwolf, a song about being so unbelievably into a woman that you lose touch with reality that declares “we want venom of Venus in veins” in the chorus so I’ve simply plundered it for my own agenda.

Practicing doing that with Power Metal has allowed me to sink entirely into Moving Pictures to the point it’s my favorite Rush album (Limelight is my favorite Rush song, for the record). Unfortunately, it still hasn’t gotten me past The Trees, which makes Hemispheres unlistenable for me on vinyl as that song is a barrier between me and La Villa Strangiato and I haven’t been able to listen to Gloryhammer since those gross text messages leaked and they fired Thomas Winkler.