Spring can really hang you up the most ~ Sinlung Tops

Although I should have stayed home and worked more yesterday (my publisher may be disappointed I didn't), I was compelled to go into the city alone just to see the cherry blossoms in the park. Sakura is truly a reflection that spring has arrived in Japan and I wanted to experience it and see the joy too in other people's faces. It was beautiful. Then, by chance, one of my favorite jazz ballads of all time began to play on my iPod (I'd forgotten that it was in the mix). The song is called "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." It's a classic from 1955 and a jazz standard today. Spring is symbolic of rebirth and hope and new beginnings and myriad other positive things. But spring can also be a time of bitter-sweet pain and stinging ambivalence as one forges ahead, leaving behind memories of a lost love (or a love that could have been), or a lost job or a friend or a place, or even of a dream, and so on. I first heard this haunting ballad when I was 16, thanks to my music teacher Kathleen King, one of the few teachers who made a difference in my life. Some people may think that a 15-16 year-old kid can not understand the lyrics to a song like this, or appreciate the slightly painful beauty of the notes, but they surely can, if they are exposed.
Here is the version I listed to yesterday as I stopped to view the cherry blossoms near the castle. It's by the legendary Mark Murphy, whom I met in person when I was 17 at one of his gigs in the US:

Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most by Mark Murphy
Download now or listen on posterous

04 Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most.mp3 (5382 KB)

(I took the photo for this slide above yesterday in the park in Osaka. The background out of focus is the water of the moat that surrounds the castle. Click for a larger size.)
Hang you up the most
Apparently the phrase "...really hang you up" was inspired by imagining how a hip jazz musician might express the old T.S. Eliot line "April is the cruelest month...." Jazz has a way of expressing things a little more subtly. In the subtly there is great beauty and more room for interpretation. Checkout the lyrics to the song here. One of my favorite parts is this:
Morning's kiss wakes trees and flowers,
And to them I'd like to drink a toast.
But I walk in the park
Just to kill the lonely hours.
Spring can really hang you up the most. After a while we can get the meaning of the ballad:
Love seems sure around the new year.
Now it's April. Love is just a ghost.
Spring arrived on time,
Only what became of you, dear?
Spring can really hang you up the most. "Love" could mean "Love affair," but I think Love in this case could also be a metaphor for all sorts of things such as hope or a plan or a goal, etc. In any case, as the song goes on, it is clear that the fantastic beauty of spring is no cure. Clinging to the past or to "what might have been."
To me the greatest line comes right at the end: But when you keep praying
For snow to hide the clover,
Spring can really hang you up the most. This is open to interpretation and it surely does concern the pain of a broken heart and not being ready for "Spring" and all that it implies, but to me it also speaks to the pain we cause ourselves by looking back -- or clinging to the past -- and wishing that things were different than they are. When we look back with regret and pray that the present was different and more like the past, well, this is the kind of thing we all do but it does indeed hang us up the most. Please give yourself a view minutes to watch this version below of Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most by the greatest singer of all time: Ms. Ella Fitzgerald. This is a 1974 live recording in Holland. What Ella does with this song is absolutely stunning; there's no one like her today. Embedded media -- click here to see it.