Transit
Daytrotter Session - Nov 23, 2011
- Welcome to Daytrotter
- Long Lost Friends
- Listen & Forgive
The hardest part about falling in love is when it’s an actual fall. When the trip and the plunge is endless and painful, you think back in retrospect that it might not have been worth putting all of your chips in the middle of the table. You think that you maybe should have kept a few chips for later, just in case this leap of faith was a slaughter as so many leaps of faith are. Faith has no basis, after all. It’s always been abject and that makes it liable to be insensitive and erratic. It will fail you more times than not and you should be ready for it to cause a ringing headache and jar a few teeth loose. Transit and especially its lead singer, Joe Boynton, must have had their lot of falls. They must have taken all kinds of leaps, with varying degrees of success. The jumps that have yielded the most promising inspiration have been the ones that have ended in thuds and the seeing of the ugliest of stars. Boynton comes across as a hard-luck lover, one who is good and kind and sweet-hearted, but not taken seriously by those he has feelings for. He’s left out in the cold often, wondering and wondering what in the hell went wrong this time, how in the hell this could have happened to him again once more. There’s both pain and consideration in his voice, on the Boston, Massachusetts group’s latest album, “Listen & Forgive.” There’s pain in thinking about the results and there’s consideration in that the odds are always stacked and sometimes – most times – the time is just not right. Who hasn’t felt the brunt of that many a time? There sure is pain and yet there’s still hope that it can all be reversed. There are loves that drag and loves that happen in the spur of the moment. We can’t understand them for the life of us and it’s then that they become consuming and Boynton sounds as if he’d rather not think about too much else than about the turnarounds, the miraculous redemption of love persevering. Transit makes their sadness into ballads that you can pump a soft and earnest fist to. You’ll want to do this mostly where you have some privacy for these are the small personal pleas for feelings to change. It’s not the fun stuff that gets talked about at parties, around the keg, but during those heart-to-hearts with dear friends, in bedrooms and dens. Boynton sings, “And in my dreams/You run back to me/Isn’t it amazing in this world that anyone can love anyone at all?” on “Long Lost Friends,” and like many of his lyrics, we realize what he’d like to have happen, but we sense that he’s going to have to keep waiting.