5/4/12

"Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back"
~Dog Days Are Over
Florence + the Machine, Lungs

4/30/12

And the best April I've ever had ends with a new TGA single. It's a get-up-and-go song, but ever bittersweet. Guitar solo rules. Brian Fallon sounds amazing. Feels like "Drive" a little bit. This is one of my most anticipated albums of the year, and if "45" is any hint, it's going to be the perfect summer record, and it's going to drive stakes through my heart in all the right places.

I'm in Austin, Texas today. It's wonderful here, in a tattooed calves and tan pavement way. The air is hot and heavy and full, the people on the streets are a varied bunch who look like lots of fun.

 Today feels like a day I've earned. Tomorrow, I get to learn. Next week, I get to try. Here's to the future.


"There you go. Turn the key and engine over. 
 Let her go. Let somebody else lay at her feet."
~45
The Gaslight Anthem, Handwritten

4/28/12

"You want a love story? I’ll tell you a love story.

So I’m a senior in college, I’m a music history minor, and there’s this dreamy composition major who happens to live right next door to me. He sits near me in one of my classes, behind me, so I know he’s there and can feel him breathing, boring holes into the back of my head with his honey-hazel eyes, and all I want to do is turn around and run my fingers through those golden curls.

He’s beautiful, soft-spoken and more than slightly mysterious, as well as an incredible concert pianist. The kind that bobs and weaves, playing with head and shoulders as well as nimble fingers.

So, this semester, we’re in a Wagner class together, going through the operas two weeks at a time, reading a 600 page biography as flagrant and sentimental as you’d expect from an opera lover. Wagner is tragic, dramatic, wretched, vulnerable and visceral. In life, and in work. The music is violent and beautiful and profound, utterly profound. It is a soundtrack for the fated.

Well, I’m a senior in college, and my relationship’s gone sour, so one day I decide to start talking a bit. His name is Sam, and when he smiles at me I feel dumb. We exchange pleasantries, while leaving class or passing each other on the sidewalk. One day, he comes up to the porch when I’m sitting there smoking a cigarette. We begin chatting, and the conversation is pleasant. I hope he finds me charming. My  roommates come home, tilting their heads and raising their eyebrows at me, pushing for details after I come back inside, a little flushed in a rosy, post-flirting high.

One day, Sam comes up to my third-floor bedroom. I have a full-sized keyboard at the foot of a lofted bed, underneath Zeppelin and Sid Vicious posters, 45s taped crudely to the wall. The room is swathed in maroon tapestries and glinty lavender fabric. I show him the chords I know, he plays me a sonata. I swoon. I daydream.

A couple weeks later, after sharing yet another a porchside cigarette, Sam asks me in his house, somehow or other we get to his bedroom. We are having a great time, it is an unexpected first date. At least, I feel like it is. It feels important, like something big in life is about to change. We’re listening to classical  music - that’s all he listens to - and I’m talking about my love for rock bands, pushing my hair-brained theories with a naive optimism that music is music, on a sliding scale of temperament, that what Jim Adkins and Jesse Lacey convey is no less monumental to me than what Sam feels for Wagner and Verdi and Mahler.

Sam says he wants to show me something, and he picks a book from his nightstand. It’s an early edition of the Tristan und Isolde score from the late 19th century, the opera we’re studying in class at that time and my absolute favorite by far. Sam's too. The book itself is a gorgeous thing, it’s hardcovered and bound gently, the ink clearly worn yet entirely discernible to the trained musical eye.

For the uninitated into opera, Tristan und Isolde is the tale of the original star-crossed lovers and their mixed up passions, their fevered pitches intertwined by faint and magic potions. I gasp and tell him it’s beautiful, he nods knowingly, and we talk about the Tristan chord, an augmented dissonant sound that weaves it way through the story - Wagner used certain chords and phrases to symbolize characters and feelings better than the rest. Inside the pages of the score, the music is lovingly printed, all the directions are in German, and the notes pile up on the pages in a language only the symphonic-minded can begin to decode. I read music, but not very well, and Sam explains the finer points of this score, what makes it fit so perfectly. I began to thumb through the pages, attempting grace then -

WHHHHHICK!

A tear. Right through a title page, about three inches down, straight but jagged with fibers of soft paper.

“ohmihgod. ohmugod imtheworst,” I agonize, unable to believe what I’d just done.

“What, oh, oh no it’s okay,” Sam is startled. He is sad. He is trying not to be sad, because he’s a lovely man and a gentleman to boot. But he is sad.

Does he know, maybe, that was fate? I comforted myself by thinking it was, maybe, it is my way to be with him, always. I will always be the girl who ripped his Tristan und Isolde score, marking our moment in time on a celebrated tale of the star-crossed, the unfortunate, the unrequited, unfulfilled lovers.

We never hung out again.

I think that things must work out for a reason, in this way, that the “bad things” that happen to us are there to teach us something. The really bad things - the deaths, the illnesses, the losses - those we learn from, too, but we’re often too wrapped up in emotions to notice our growth. It hurts, deeply and fully, but the pain is prolonged over time, a needle in the back of your spine going ever-deeper inch by inch. Those little bad things, the embarrassments, the unfortunates, the screwed-myself moments, those are easier to notice because it’s all so immediate - and yet, they shape us, too, to make different decisions and be different people.

So yes, I ripped the score. Yes, I told myself it was fate. I believe Sam knows it was fate, too, knows it was a moment between two scared kids too scared to take a chance, as kids often are these days. I hope, if he saw me again, he’d remember who I was, my face, my hair, my name.

But, chances are, he’d just remember be as the girl who tore his Wagner antique. So it goes."

-MD
4/3/12

4/27/12

Songs I Can't Listen to Sometimes 

These are songs that, even though I love them, I just press "next." I'm guessing you, reader, understand. You have those songs too. I challenge you to listen, purge, experience. Feels kind of refreshing.

 1)Now That You're Gone The saddest of the sad on "Cold Roses," in my humble opinion. It's a simple, sweet melody, but it doesn't take much for me after I hear this song to desperately crave a man with kind eyes and strong arms to hold me and never let me go, because the song heralds all the loneliness you could ever feel for one person in one night. It's the love song for the one who left you, and I can't handle that sometimes. Or anytime. I've been left too much, and done too much of my own leaving, to let Ryan Adams remind me of how sad I am about it all.


"Everything you ever touched is undisturbed and hangs out/Like crime scene evidence undisturbed in dust I don't dare touch anything because it's evidence of us/And it means everything/Well sort of/I'm alone and I'm dancin', with you now/In your old room, in your old house/I'm alone and I'm dancin', with you now, in your old room, but there's nobody there"
~Now That You're Gone
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, Cold Roses

2)Hear You Me
I loved this song real hard in high school, then I lost someone I loved. I needed to believe in angels because I still need to believe she's happy, somewhere, and I can't hear this song because it makes me think of her too much. Then I think of all the other people I love, and how desperately I need them to know that before life takes them from me, too. In any way, gorgeous song, but I don't listen to it anymore. Just easier not to.  
"on sleepless roads the sleepless go may angels lead you in" 
 ~Hear You Me
Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American

3)Girl in the War
Beautiful song. Probably my favorite Josh Ritter song, hands down, even though I've come to embrace a lot of his catalog. Something about this song just breaks me, just makes me feel something that brings me back to a place I'll never be again. So I don't want to listen to it, because I miss that place, with its subways and rainy days, its romance and pavement and prowess.
 
"Because the keys to the kingdom got locked inside the kingdom/And the angels fly around in there, but we can't see them/And I got a girl in the war, Paul I know that they can hear me yell/If they can't find a way to help, they can go to Hell/If they can't find a way to help her, they can go to Hell" 
~Girl in the War
Josh Ritter, The Animal Years

4)Baker, Baker
Simply a favorite. Incredible song, but I still press next, because it makes me want to cry. Or call people who aren't in my life anymore. It makes me want to reach out for what isn't there hold. It makes me crumble in ways I'm not always equipped to deal with when driving home from work or the grocery store or whatever. Tori is so soft, so sentimental in this song, it's so contrasting to so much of what else she does, but it stills me in a frightening way.
   
"I guess you've heard he's gone to LA/He says that behind my eyes I'm hiding and he tells me I pushed him away/That my heart been's hard to find/Here, there must be something here/Here, there must be something here" 
~Baker Baker
Tori Amos, Under the Pink

5)Konstantine 
I don't even think I have a version of this on a hard drive anywhere. I just don't listen to it anymore. Was it even that good? Listening to it now, I feel a little older, I feel a little beyond it, but it still makes me want to make out like a teenager. It still makes me want to reach out for someone, anyone, I feel like understands me, knows me, wants to know me and need me.
  "and if I hurt you then I'm sorry please don't think that this was easy"
~Konstantine
Something Corporate

4/19/12

I love this song, because it's kind of happy and sexy, but it's still so sad. Maybe it's just because I listened to it around 5 times in the span of four hours, but, I liked it before that, too. Today, though, it was kind of perfect. Made me think of what I'm leaving behind and what's ahead - and how, despite that, it'll be alright.

You know, you love *somebody* not some*body*. Know the difference, and notice. Speak the truth, it's the only part that counts.



"She ain't lonely now
See her shuffle across the floor
Yeah, she's happier now
See her smile and say "come on"

Let's dance all night
Let's dance all night
Dance all night
Yeah, I think she'll be alright

I ain't lonely now
Yeah, I got someone I love
Someone I think about
Someone for me to take care of

Dance all night
Dance all night
Dance all night
Yeah, I think I'll be alright

She ain't lonely now
See her shuffle across the floor
Yeah, she's happier now
See her smile and say "come on"

Let's dance all night
Let's dance all night
Dance all night
I think she'll be alright"
~Dance All Night
Ryan Adams and the Cardinals, Cold Roses