Lisa Mednick - Wrecker

I wish that I had something long and elaborate to say about this song, but I don't. I've heard it once (and immediately bought the cd, which these reviews are indicating happens far more often than it does).

Lisa Mednick comes from Austin, Texas, the live music capital of the country. Do you really need to know anything else? Well, okay, you probably do. I can't really pinpoint what it is about this song, except that it has this haunting, almost Celtic overlay. Wrecker is less a song than it is a keening, even though we'll all read into it different versions of loss. Because of this, Mednick becomes mythical; she's Medea, or the bean sidhe.

Ultimately, Wrecked talks about being, well, a wrecker. The choice of words is phenomenal; she speaks not of the end of love as a cessation, but as a banishment. Moreover, it's never really even about the end of love, but about how she'd said all along that it would never work because neither person is really built for the relationship. The song starts with a line strong enough to strike hard in direct contrast to Joni Mitchell's Case of You (which was likewise quoting Shakespeare's Julius Caesar): "I'm not the faithful star to lead you through the night."

There seems to be an almost nautical theme in the music that I've chosen lately; it all flows in a way almost oceanic, and this song is perhaps the hallmark of that trend. Wrecker is the ocean's destructive qualities, which we can see in other songs, like Dar Williams' The Ocean.