I checked in on the Taking Over My Mind by Mark Griffin, as the kettle heated itself up to the boil timer, that irritating hiss of impatience, and by the time the first chorus came up my head it was gone. That is the impression this song makes. It does not enter with a trumpet; it seeps into the room like the golden light through a half-open gate of a barn, and before you know it, you feel that the air is less hostile. as though the world gave a lean towards you.
Mark has a voice... a whole landscape in it. That Australian cliché of dust and red soil and long roads and urban nights when you can smell rain without ever seeing it fall. It is shabby, but like an old flannel, it is warm, dependable, unbelievably comfortable. And he weaves it in a song that is as cool and as a breeze that blows across the paddocks and pulls the hair off your forehead. The plucked guitar is as bright as the sun shining on a creek bed, and the repetition has that sluggish, good-natured motion, which gets into your blood without leave. It is folk, it is country, it is that it is front-porch half-smiling that one offers when one is really happy to see you.
It is the manner in which he speaks about falling in love that really intrigues me. There is nothing dramatic, no bang. It is as though something is about to creep on him when he was busy performing some routine chore, such as hanging the laundry, and then he is smiling without even knowing he is smiling. And you feel it too. It has a silent, undesirable, warmth in the middle of it. You can just feel the ghost of John Prine sitting on a milk box in the corner and nodding in time to this low approving smile because the storytelling of Griffin possesses that narcissist magic too the simple words that find their place in the right spot right over your heart.
I played the song all afternoon, and each time it comes on it seems to me like an old friend is prowling back in the room, and sags into the chair opposite you with a laugh that blows the dust off your spirits. Taking Over My Mind is not attempting to make that great statement. It’s merely prodding you and telling you that the world still has little, bright, candid things in it provided you allow them inside. And tomorrow? I will turn the kettle on again, press play because it is a habit, and leave the tea to get cold without even thinking about it. Some songs are worth that.
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