5/6/12

I keep a couple dozen old burned CDs in the center console in my Saturn. There's plenty more where these came from in a big and dusty faux leather binder that I spent around $25 on back in the day - which felt like a lot. But when I got the Saturn this past fall, with the first car CD player I'd ever had, it was a chance to rediscover the CDs that used to spin in my Discman on a daily basis.

Some are mixes, some are albums. Some are labeled in Sharpie, some are decorated in swirls and stars and colors with little pictures accentuating words in album titles. Some are not labeled at all. They're all a nice daily reminder of who I am, where I came from, what I stand for, etc. It's also a nice way to spice up what I'm listening to on my drive in, as there's always a surprise or two to be found.

So today I pull out a disc at random on my way to the grocery store and laundromat, and it's Something Corporate, "Leaving Through the Window." OK. I'll take that. From the opening bars of "I Want to Save You" I'm suddenly a sophomore again, and all I want is some boy with shaggy hair and kind eyes and a killer CD collection to hold my hand and wear my hair ties and rubber pink bracelets on his wrist.



"She drives away, she's feeling worthless 
Used again but nothing's different 
She'd stay the night but knows he doesn't care 


Home by three, a deafening quiet 
The porch light's off guess they forgot it 
She'd cry herself to sleep, but she don't dare" 
~I Want to Save You
Something Corporate, Leaving Through the Window

I keep listening as I go through my day and I remember how this album as a whole is still so, so good. It's real, it's raw, it's driving. It's part of the original class of pop punk that arrived at an early-decade apex right when the kids were really starting to pay attention and start screaming for more. But it's never too angry, and there's slower moments, hinting at the heartfelt sentiment Andrew McMahon would continue to shape on "North" and with Jack's Mannequin. He talks about skin and limbs and veins and cars as was the way back then, but it's never for surface value, it's just the poetry of it. Combine the lyrics with piano-driven melodies and key-change choruses, and you make an album that was as classic than as it is today.

Ask almost anyone who graduated high school between 2004 and 2007. They'll tell ya.

One song, "The Astronaut," was never a favorite in high school, but today it made more sense. That chorus kicked in and I kept driving, silent, onto my destination. Today it felt inspiring. Today it reminded me that if you're going to worry about any road, it should be the one before you, and what you saw on the way there is right where it needs to be, namely behind you, but also in memory.




"i've been sleeping with ghosts 
i've been watching stars 
crawling out of the sky 
and i've been hoping 
i'm close to the space man movies 
i call my life 


and i've been climbing ladders through time 
i've got tunnel vision 
but i'm doing fine 
and i've been 
watching stars coming off of the wall 
and maybe if i'm lucky i can catch them 
before you fall 
and you are not alone 


calling out to the astronaut 
i need some of what you've got 
i need to be high 
crawling out of the world she brought 
calling out to the astronaut 
i need to be high"
~Astronaut
Something Corporate, Leaving Through the Window

5/5/12

I shouldn't be surprised, that I always seem to end up in the same place. And I don't like saying "always," because nothing is ever truly permanent, but it's startling to me how easily I fall into the same traps. How the unreachable becomes a beacon. How often I mistake conflict for comfort - what a mess that can make.

Other things reoccur, too. Like how what I have and who I am is never good enough. And how I can't just let myself relax. How I can never decide if I made the right decisions, if I kept the right people around, or if I let the wrong ones go. These are secret traps of my mind, and when I fall down the chute it is difficult to climb back up. But the uphill climb is getting faster. With age comes certain types of agility.

This song makes me think of those loves that never die, the kind that I remember when I'm in a difficult place, like I am feeling tonight. It's entirely simple but entirely beautiful, with a slowly building structure that erupts into vivid glimpses of what makes up love and feeling and life. An ode to the best parts of life we all get to live out in one way or another. It will be enough. And the turn of phrase at the end - the following love home, to love following you. It's one in the same, isn't? Don't we carry our love with us, wherever we go? It may feel, often, that we're alone, that we've left and it's gone but it's all still there. In our fragile, selfish, scared heart. You can sense it in those places you know too well.

Something tells me this guy pours it all out on a stage.


"I will follow love all the way home 
I will follow love all the way home 
Though it breaks my back and leaves me all alone 
I will follow love all the way home 


Though I'm sad you've gone away 
I hear love, it goes by different names 
Though your parting dims the day 
Nearly put me in my grave 
I will follow love all the way home 


Home- where the bedroom smells like clean clothes 
Home- where it's alright in the cosmos 
Home- you don't think so, but you're so close 
Home- if it's not balanced, then it's almost 


I will follow love all the way home 
I will follow love all the way home 
Though it breaks my back- and leaves me all alone 
I will follow love all the way home 


For those afraid to die alone 
Think of all the friends that you have known 
And every blade of grass 
Every face that kissed you back 
All the sunsets and pouring rain 
Every joy and holy pain 
Every kiss and bloody stain 
Ah, the proof that we have lived
In no beginning and no end
Every flash of light you've seen
Every color, every dream
Will be forever singing on 
In the holy mind of God
The immortal burning sun with 
Every person that you've loved
And I swear it will be enough. 
And you'll be there 


And Love will follow you all the way home 
Love will follow you all the way home."

~I Will Follow Love All The Way Home
Tyler Lyle, The Golden Age & Silver Girl

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