music
Spring Time Mix Tape
I'm going to fuck the rules and botch this meme: List seven songs you are into right now.
You wanna know why?
- Wolf
- Parade's
- New
- Album,
- At
- Mount
- Zoomer
While I was stealing it off the interwebs last night and listening to it on different ones, I was offering up my apologies to the music deities, promising that, right after I move, right after I buy my new record player, the first LP I buy will be this one, and the second one I will buy will be their first album.
When you've loved an album as much as I loved Apologies for the Queen Mary, you kind of worry that the next album won't live up. Second albums often don't. But on Myspace, when the first new song started up, my palms got all sweaty and I felt kind of nauseous, the kind of nauseous that only extreme pleasure and its crazy flood of hormones can make you feel.
But oh, they're trying to kill me. I'm hoping this is wrong wrong wrong, or at the very least, incomplete, but ack! Every tour listing, it goes a little something like this:
M: So guess where they're playing on August 3rd?
J: Umm, Ottawa?
M: No. Montreal. Guess where they're playing August 9th?
J: Ummm, Ottawa?
M: No. Toronto. Guess what they're doing in between the 3rd and the 9th?
J: Playing Ot-
M: FUCK ALL.
That's right. They've got 6 days between gigs in cities just to the left and right of us, and no show in Ottawa.* I mean, I realize that My Fake Ex-Boyfriend Spencer Krug must have been devastated when he got that memo from my secretary, but really, that was years ago. I really figured he would have been over it by now.
God, even fake dating a keyboard player gets me nothing but heartache.
*You're probably thinking, Butch, honey, do you not love them enough to travel for them? Why yes, you do! And I will say: August 3rd is five days after I move into my new house and I am old and I will be sore and tired and I will end up not enjoying the show. Why not August 9th? Well. I've got even better things to do.
Verklempt
Let's blame it on February. Every one I know has winter ants in their pants. We're sleepy. We bake muffins* like fiends. We fling our socks in a rage from our 4 am hot feet. We are sick of snow, tired of shoulders tight from hunching against the wind. We hate our skin and winter insulation. We have cabin fever and we are sorry for our sorry selves.
It's been a weird few days for me.
See, the fact of a pretty clean breakup coupled with a couple months of some some hard-on misery did not, as it turns out, do me too much harm. In fact, just lately, I have been experiencing an odd feeling. Took me a while to place it, but then today, trudging up bank street to yoga, the freezing rain already soaked through my puffy, my back sore from shovelling, I felt it again, this time, this time with a word on its surface: contentment. It's lasted since then.
A corner behind me. I'm not saying I'm better or that I'm not still sad. But I am deeply contented with my life as it is and as it will unfold, however that looks. It's actually even a little exciting to think about who I might get to know, who I might next kiss, where I can take my life. And that's alright.
Here's where it gets weirder: you mix one part grand irritation with two parts sighing contentment with one other part re-emerging father issues and what you get is someone who can barely restrain her sobs at the Nina Nastasia show last night and definitely can't control the tears.
Some people cry during movies, I cry during songs.
Jennifer and I were both just exhausted, mid-winter not-enough-booze late-show tired. I was loving NN's show, but with the tired and the worry over poor Freya (who I'd forgotten to feed before leaving the house, fuck. me.), I knew I didn't have a whole show in me. Six or so songs in, I figured she wasn't going to play the one song I was kind of desperate to hear before I got my guilty and did I mention tired ass on a bus home. I leaned over to J. and said, "One more song?" She nodded.
And then the opening chords of "In The Evening". I leaned over again, grabbed J's arm tight, just above the elbow.
"This is the song I wanted to hear. I am going to cry now."
Truth is, I'd already been crying. Two songs earlier, the lines
I always dreamt of the day I would bury you/ I never thought on the day I'd stop hating you. // On an altar, you look smaller
made my eyes ache and blink, blink and ache.
So when my favourite of her lines came up - the words I moved into this house alone/ My jacket like an awning/ Oh, and it was hailing melancholy soaring over the optimistic driving chords and beat - my breath hitched up and I pulled my shoulder blades in like tight armour to keep from curling up on the floor and sobbing. In relief, possibly, though I'm not sure.
Aie, snow, rain, cold, dark. A visceral sense of well-being. Breakups, my lost father.** February.
*I'm going to lose big useability marks on this, because that link does not take you to a post that talks about muffins. But Andrea likes muffins, and may write about them again sometime soon. In fact she might, like Jennifer, have a muffin-hole.
**Right, in the euphemistic sense. It's not like he took the wrong turn at Albuquerque or I put him on a shelf and promptly forgot that fact when I shut the cupboard door. I still even have his address and phone number. Though I haven't talked to him since Christmas, so it is possible he's moved.
Meme-head
I did this meme a while ago, stolen from Jennifer's blog. It amused me. I hope it amuses you also.
Instructions: put your digital music device/program on its shuffle setting and then use the songs to answer these questions. No cheating.*
How does the world see you?
She Talks to Rainbows - The Ramones
Will I have a happy life?
Punk Rock Love - The Sweethearts
What do my friends really think of me?
Perfect Disguise - Sleater Kinney
Do people secretly lust after me?
Summer Skin - Death Cab for Cutie
How can I make myself happy?
3-minute Rule - Beastie Boys
What should I do with my life?
The Tallest Man, The Broadest Shoulders - Sufjan Stevens
Will I ever have children?
EMI - The Sex Pistols
What is some good advice for me?
In the Ghetto - Candi Staton
How will I be remembered?
I Gotta Move - The Kinks
What is my signature dancing song?
Chapel Hill - Sonic Youth
What do I think my current theme song is?
Everything's Just Wonderful - Lily Allen
What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
No Pun Intended - The Hives
What song will play at my funeral?
Blue School - The Blue Scholars
What type of men/women do you like?
Rise Up With Fists - Jenny Lewis
What is my day going to be like?
Fight For Your Right - Beastie Boys
*Umm, of course I cheated. But only a little. Beethoven? I don't remember putting Beethoven on my computer. I like his stuff and all, but some Beethoven movement I've never heard before is categorically unfunny in this meme. So I cheated, but I cheated for you.
I'll Believe in Anything
Nearly two years ago now, I rediscovered music. When things started getting bad - and I don’t mean just Not Working, but capital-B-A-D BAD – with my ex, I bought Plans by Death Cab for Cutie.
I’d stand in the middle of our living room and look up at the ceiling and listen to “Marching Bands of Manhattan” over and over again.
Sorrow drips into your heart through a pin hole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound
But while you debate half-empty or half-full
It slowly rises, your love is gonna drown
And I’d shake.
It’s not like I’d forgotten about music or anything. Quite the opposite. I’d been going to shows pretty consistently, and been living with musicians for nearly 3 years. Although I was surrounded by music, and happily so, it was a very passive engagement. Other people picked the songs, other people wrote the songs, other people practiced them. I might help out with lyrics or structure here and there, but mostly I just either paid attention or didn’t. I was not engaged.
But DCFC pulled me in again. I was ripe for engagement. I was feeling confused and sad and torn about what should we do and how can the yelling stop and what do I want here and now and what do I want in the future and I think maybe it is. Not. Drip. This. Drip. Life. Drip. Drip.
And I’d sing.
Last summer, I dove back into music wholeheartedly. I went to see shows by people I didn’t know. I bought CDs by bands I’d barely heard of. I faithfully listened to John in the Morning on kexp.org to find out about what was going on. I read music blogs obsessively. I discovered Wolf Parade.
Apologies for the Queen Mary is an excellent album, start to finish. There are great lyrics on it and crashing drums and wicked weird harmonies and I am a big fan of vintage organs. I became addicted, listening to it compulsively, kind of sick of it, but needing to hear it one more time. Just once more.
But far and away my favourite song was “I’ll Believe in Anything.” It first found its way into me when Wolf Parade played at Barrymore’s. That was a fucking great show. I kinda knew the album, and enjoyed the show altogether. Then that song came on and I shut my eyes and turned my face up to the lights and felt the vibrations coming up through my feet and entering my nervous system, zinging the song all around my body.
It became my anthem. I have probably listened to it a couple hundred times. There have been days where I just put it on repeat and hit play.
When I listened to it, when I remembered listening to it, when I sang it in the shower or under my breath it made me believe I could take the fire out from the wire and take away your shaky knees and made me feel like I was very brave for walking around with both legs and that I could find you to fight the scary day with me. That we might pull the tricks from our sleeves to find we’ll believe in anything, both together. That I would hold your face in my hands and tell you to look through me to a place far away from here, a safe place, with olive trees, where nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn either way. And it made me believe that someone might give me their blood and their bones and their voice and their ghost. Their eyes, to see sunshine, in the place far away from here.
And so I shut my eyes, and look to the light. And I sing. And I shake.
Coming Up: The Solid Senders
Eric, who I've mentioned here a few times, is playing a show this weekend. I've never seen The Solid Senders live, but I have heard them on Myspace and seen them on YouTube and read about them in the news.
That's just like real, right?
