I’ll admit: when I decided to give up my own music and let other people pick what I listened to for a year, I felt pretty macho. After all, this project was going to be a test of willpower: 53 weeks of ignoring the music I loved in order to rain all my attention on this or that random album chosen by this or that random person. It seemed like a good idea. I thumped my chest, primed my headphones: I was ready to listen. I was ready to have some fun.
Except I forgot to take into account music’s uncanny knack for worming its way into a person’s tender parts. Listening to new music is not a comfortable experience. Experiencing an album for the first time is like meeting a stranger: you have to size each other up, figure out where you stand, do you like each other, is this relationship going to work, or was it doomed from the first notes? With no comforting old favorites to fall back on, you get testy, raw, vulnerable. It’s like a diet: no chocolate, no carbs. I soon discovered that each new album stripped bare a different part of me—music the bedroom mirror I stood in front of, flesh exposed, scrutinized. And of course when you limit your listening to only one album a week, whether it’s Taylor Swift or Tyler, the Creator or Brahms, you begin to take that music seriously. It’s your lifeline: it drives you crazy, it keeps you from going crazy. You open up to each other. You fall in love. And, inevitably, you break up.
Music’s weird like that, the way it makes your brain fire out random memories that have nothing to do with that song or album, makes you miss that girlfriend with the pierced tongue or that VW Rabbit your best friend in high school used to drive, the one you smoked copious amounts of weed in. Or how it can even make you miss feeling heartbroken, dumb as that sounds.
Right now I’m working my way through week 38. The music keeps on stirring memories, of places past, people gone.
Week 3: III by Led Zeppelin
Day 6
Yesterday I had my first Thai yoga massage. As I lay on my back on the mat, the therapist instructed me that my only responsibility was to “stay as passive as you can,” that she would do all the work, or would let me know if she needed help from me with lifting one of my body parts. “Ok,” I said, wondering how much of me, exactly, she would be “lifting.”
Above my head the stereo droned an almost tuneless music, strings with the occasional drum punctuating an otherwise silent beat, a strange (though welcome) departure from Zeppelin’s aggressive blues, and as she began arranging and stretching my limbs into different configurations I quickly fell into a state of utter relaxation, gave my body up. I was the puppet and she the master.
So vulnerable. Such trust, that we give a near stranger control over our bodies, allow them to prod and crack and bend muscle and joint, stick their knees into our butts, gently caress our faces. Somewhere between having my arm stretched almost painfully behind me and my armpit being stepped on, a memory floated into my head: me and my brother walking down a backstreet in Bangkok, and seeing through a shop window a roomful of people stretched on mats on the floor, their bodies being worked over, bent and kneaded. We were catching a train south, but had a couple of hours to kill. “Want to go in?” Tom asked. I looked again through the window. Thin bamboo mats, sun-worn faces. “Nah,” I said. “Let’s keep walking.”
What was I afraid of then, to pass on an experience so affirming of the body? Was I not yet fully cognizant of my own human shell, the vessel that sloshes life’s waters? Or was I simply unwilling to lay bare my own vulnerability, to play puppet in a foreign land, the strings in someone else’s fingers, taking my limbs away from me?
In its own way III might be Led Zeppelin’s Thai yoga massage. Softer than its predecessors, the choice to make acoustic instruments more prominent and spot it through with more introspective lyrics laid bare the belly of this band. They weren’t just hard rock gods, they too were composed of the flesh’s sorrows, were moss and ivy as much as flint and fire. They ran off to a cottage in the countryside and made something different. The critics gave it flack. Fuck them. LZ is both puppet and master. Zeppelin gave us soul twisted about itself, gave us blues as a broken heart mashed to a pulp and served on cracked ceramic. Vulnerable, still beating.
Week 6: Symphony No. 2 in D Major byJohannes Brahms
Day 5
Brahms wrote that his Symphony No. 2 “is so melancholy you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad …” which is an odd thing to say about such a lively, seemingly cheerful piece. Perhaps he had a rather sarcastic wit about him, or perhaps he suffered from a case of emotional synesthesia, and his melancholy manifested itself in cheerful forms. His sadness our joy.
Brahms’ claim of melancholy made me think of another album, probably the one album of classical music that I have been obsessed with in my life, Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, or the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. I had the version played by the London Sinfonietta, conducted by David Zinman, with the soprano Dawn Upshaw handling vocal duties. It has been years since I listened to it, but the ghosts it conjured stay with me: the slow steady overlapping climb of strings like Dante up Mt. Purgatory, Upshaw’s crystal voice catching a lone ray of sun and refracting it all over the dark landscape below, the repetitions that might almost have been mistaken for silence, except for their eventual straying into other pattern fields, other wavelengths.
I spent hours stretched across my bed with headphones on listening to that symphony. My teenage self must have connected with some primal longing present in the music, my hormones must have been tuned to the same key, my sensibilities forged of the same contradictions. Because the thing about the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs was that it didn’t make me sad at all; instead, after listening I almost always felt uplifted, or maybe lifted up is the better term; this was music that stripped sadness and horror of their ugliness and left only their starkest, most abject beauties for the listener to wallow in. It did what so many great works of art do: made the world more simple, more possible, more complicated, more pure. It had much the same effect on me as that French film by Erick Zonca, La Vie Revee des Anges (The Dreamlife of Angels), where for half an hour after watching it I felt like crap, then later while washing dishes in the dank basement kitchen of my college co-op something clicked and the world seemed super awesome and amazing and beautiful for the rest of the night.
How lovely, somebody else’s sorrows.
Week 7: Hospitality by Hospitality
Day 1
My first response to this album was “cute.” After several listens, however, I realized that cute wasn’t the feeling (can “cute” be a feeling?) this LP invokes. For some reason, as I listened, images of Japan began to flit through my mind: riding the train, small houses flying past, leaning against a silver rail, face close to the window, minidisc player humming in my pocket, St. Etienne on the headphones; riding my bicycle in the rain, umbrella in one hand, trying my best not to crash as I dodged pedestrians and cars and other cyclists, trying my best to look cool; sushi and saran-wrapped cow tongue on the shelf of the 7-Eleven where I would buy whiskey and condoms; drunk and singing lots of David Bowie in the dark karaoke cubicle; etc. There is something very Japanese about this album, something about its mood that smells (in a good way) of natsukashii, or what we like to call nostalgia, fond memories, fond feelings.
Perhaps it’s singer Amber Papini’s whispy yet direct delivery, her voice undercut with a trace of lonesome on even the most chipper tracks. Perhaps it’s the often spare instrumentation, guitar and drums and strings and sometimes a tambourine and just the right amount of saxophone (barely any), the effortless melodies; shit, I don’t know. I guess it’s all of those things and none of them, who can say what exactly triggers memory, but here is an album that makes me all natsukashii for a time in my life that was strange and exciting and heartbreaking, and that can only be a good thing, in its own sad way.
Week 10: Chant by by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos
Day 4
These monks must live in outer space. This chant is a piece of “magnificent desolation,” as one of the first astronauts to land on the moon described the landscape up there, probably Buzz Aldrin, since I got that little factoid from Johan Harstad’s novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All the Confusion?, a book whose protagonist prefers Aldrin to Armstrong, prefers the strong and capable man behind the scenes, the less recognized but perhaps more important member of the mission, which is kind of the character’s whole life philosophy, to be seen without being put on a pedestal, or just to not be seen period, which is fine, too, he thinks.
The book (which I am currently reading, five days left on my library loan) echoes other aspects of my week of monkish listening. The bulk of the novel takes place on the Faroe Islands, a moonscape of an archipelago floating between Norway and Iceland, in a nearly deserted village where a psychiatrist lives with several long term “patients” in the Factory, an old industrial building converted to living quarters. Mattias, our main man, after suffering a series of minor and major personal implosions, finds himself a member of this small community, this monastery of sorts, a cloister of warmth stuck down in a desolate physical and emotional landscape.
But one of the things I really love about this book so far is NN, a woman who in her past was obsessed with making anonymous men on the bus fall in love with her, and they did, because she is that kind of beautiful, and who while in the Factory listens only to The Cardigans, their four albums, over and over. They’re everything she needs in a band, she says, and it made me feel a bit better about my own listening to albums over and over, that I’m not so crazy, even if she is crazy, or is working through her craziness. And maybe that’s what I’m doing too, working through some craziness I didn’t even realize was there, wanting the desolation, the simplification of only one album, one band, one anything, all of it’s broken anyways, bare, desolate, magnificent.
Day 6
This past week I’ve been talking a bunch about Susan Cain’s new(ish) book Quiet, a long treatise on the value of introverts in an extroverted world. My immediate family decided that out of the six of us, only my youngest sister has true extrovert tendencies. Of us bunch, I am probably the most introverted. I can go for days without talking to or seeing anyone and be perfectly happy (I might even amend that to weeks, though I’ve never isolated myself for such a long stretch). As introverts, we found Cain’s book both encouraging and disturbing. It is great someone is out there trying to give the introverts some props, but at this moment in American history introversion has fallen so far down the ladder of cultural approval (psychologists can now claim “introvert” as a clinical diagnosis) it appears the quiet folk have an uphill battle in front of them.
All the introvert talk made me think about the monks who sing Chant, about monks in general. Are most monks natural introverts? To sequester oneself in an isolated community and to seek solitude within that community—it seems one would have to be an introvert to undertake such a journey, though it might be a truer journey for an extrovert, a more arduous test, as introverts exist within that monkish space more readily, live out their days within the monasteries of their heads.
Heads as monasteries reminds me of the monasteries of Meteora, Greece. Perched on cliff sides atop towering outcroppings of rock, these cloisters could be said to resemble a body: the bustling brain atop a skeleton welded into a solid mass. My wife Kate and I visited a few of these struggling communities several years ago, and they are something to behold. Long stairways stretch up rock faces to their entrances. Perhaps their most amazing feature is that the stairs are a recent addition; the monasteries were built and spent much of their existence lacking access by foot. To enter, a person climbed into a net that was then attached to a hook and hoisted up by a hand-cranked winch, sometimes to heights of 40 meters, just cold, hard stone below. Trusting oneself to the winds, to the hands hauling you up. Fitting, as the literal translation of Meteora is “suspended in the air.”
Exhausted after a day of hiking up and around the spires these cloisters sit upon, back at the hostel we ate a dinner of roasted lamb and eggplant in front of a crackling fire, chased with a beer. Upstairs we wanted nothing more than to shower and sleep, but as we crossed the common room toward the shared bathroom we heard a strange, familiar sound.
“Are they having sex in there?” Kate said.
Yes they were. Moans, groans, climactic cries and deep purrs gathered themselves in the tiled bathroom and slid easily through the thin wood of the door, ecstatic ghosts. We flopped onto the sofa, blanketed ourselves with our towels, and spent the next hour listening to the waves of love making crest and recede. “Do they know it’s a shared bathroom?” Kate asked. “They must know, right?”
We were still on the sofa when they emerged, loosely garbed and glowing, the young Eastern European couple we had seen earlier that day, arguing on the side of the road leading to the highest monastery. They smiled at us and headed down the stairs.
Not introverts, those two, nor monks. Some days for no good reason that evening pops into my head, and I wonder about that couple, if they are still together or not, if they still reminisce about the hour they spent screwing in a shared bathroom with no lock on the door, if they laugh and fall into bed at the thought, if the word “Meteora” has become a secret code to them, drawing tender touches when uttered, if they smile at their youthful brazenness. I still do.
Even if they don’t, I will wear the memory for them, from my side of the door.
Week 18: Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
Day 6
I was going to leave “Thinkin Bout You” alone, but damnit, I just can’t. The reason is this: “Thinkin Bout You” may just be the perfect prom song. I know: prom? Really? That overly cheese-ified high school dance designed to induce hysterical Titanics of excitement purely so they can plow into that downer of an iceberg that is the actual event? Yes, that’s the one I’m talking about.
I forget what my prom’s theme was. Maybe “Lights” or “Believe” or something to that effect. I’m almost 100% sure our class chose something by Journey for “The Song.” I really didn’t care. I almost didn’t go to prom, but my mother convinced my teenaged brain that I would regret it later in life, so I spent a hasty week before scrambling to get a date, make dinner reservations, get a tux, all that prom stuff. Since all the girls in my grade already had dates I ended up asking Corey, a kind of cute and upbeat girl in the grade below mine. She was eager to go, not because she was going with me, I’m sure, but to check out the whole prom scene before it was her class’s turn to run the show.
I ordered spaghetti at dinner, and spent most of the meal trying to not splatter my shirt with tomato sauce. Bad idea, spaghetti.
Prom itself proved to be ok. Not as bad as I anticipated. It was a dance where the kids looked like they were trying to look like adults, is how I remember it. I felt distinctly un-adult, myself. I drank way too much punch. I ignored my date. I let myself have fun.
The worst part of the night occurred when I popped an erection while dancing with my best friend’s girlfriend, who was pretty hot, but who I’d never felt anything for (other than friendly feelings) in the countless hours that we’d spent hanging out. No lusting, desiring, flirting while my friend was in the bathroom kind of stuff. Oh, embarrassment! Not that I wouldn’t have been embarrassed popping a woody regardless who I was dancing with, but with her it was like my boner was a flag raised directing her attention to my true secret feelings for her, which weren’t true at all, it just happened that I was a teenager in a room full of girls in tight dresses and dancing with one a little too close triggered the hormones into action. She just happened to be my best friend’s girl. Hell.
Back to “Thinkin Bout You.” It is the perfect prom song because it manages to wrap excitement, amusement and disappointment into the sweetest sounding little package you could ask for. It’s one of those songs that’s not quite about what it seems like it’s about. “I’ve been thinkin bout forever,” sings Frank Ocean’s narrator, but you, maybe you’re not thinking that far. Do you still think about me?
Sung in a heartbreaking falsetto, the hopeful melancholy of the chorus is offset by playful verses, the lyrics tripping over one another, one thought morphing into the next without transition, tornadoes in bedrooms and beach houses in Idaho and fighter jets, all distractions to hide behind—this song is a teenager, crying the chorus while joking his way through the rest of it. This song is the climax of prom, the premature ejaculation; it’s the drudgery of every dang teenage day, figuring out how the fuck to feel about everything while feeling fucking everything.
Week 21: 151a by Kishi Bashi
Day 3
I’m having a small love affair with Kishi Bashi’s song “Manchester.” It’s been awhile since I’ve felt so drawn to a song, and “Manchester” is a strange one to fall in love with. The track’s narrator tells the story of writing a book, a novel, which, as the song progresses, seems to take on different guises; alternate endings appear: a page in the sky “cold and sweet like an apple”; the hero surviving that he might appear in the sequel; the hero, now conflated with the song’s narrator, dying in “your” arms. Throughout this section fragile strings pulse behind the storytelling, propelling it forward, lending this narrative of false doors a true narrative thrust.
An abrupt shift in the mood marks the song’s move into its chorus, and the lyrical mode shifts as well, turning to a direct address: “Oh, hello. Will you be mine? I haven’t felt this alive in a long time. All the streets are warm today.” It’s as if the artist is being shocked out of his imaginary world, his created world, and being forced to confront the world as it is, forced to again step out into life and finding it wonderful, magical, a gift. As the song rises on a swell of strings and vocals toward its final climax, at one point all extraneous sound falls away and a burst of violin takes over, the notes climbing up and down and over each other; it is the sound of a heart unable to contain itself, warm and heady and brimming with too much song, Oh, hello. Will you be mine?
I love those lines. The surprise, the acceptance, the immediate head-first dive into commitment. It is the artist’s relationship to his music; it is the music’s relationship to its listeners; it is the listener’s relationship to the world as perceived through the music’s lens.
This is an ecstatic song. Its naivety at moments almost overwhelms, but it is this same naivety that ultimately powers its emotional resonance. To hole up in a room and suffer the trials of imagination’s fickleness. To stand in the sun, on a warm street, alive. To fall in love with the first person you see, with everybody. To not know exactly how it all will end. “I haven’t felt this alive in a long time.” How despondently joyful. Take the moment in, and move on.
Week 22: Europe by Allo Darlin’
Day 1
Track 7. “Tallulah.” Wistful. A plaintive vocal over a slowly strummed ukulele. A whisper that echoes across canyons. Like Iz, the Hawaiian giant with the sweet voice, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as if it were the saddest song ever written.
“Tallulah” is a song about a song. Or about an album. While the lyrics aren’t specific (unless I’m missing something), I’m guessing the reference is to Tallulah, the 1987 album by The Go-Betweens. It feels right.
Anyway, the song speaks to me. A nostalgic song about music and missing. It makes me long for the comfort of my old music friends. The bands I can just fall into and not have to think about. “Tallulah” goes, “And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen all my old friends/but I really love my new friends/I feel I’ve known them a long while.” There are days when I feel this way, when the newness is still novel, when I can’t wait to see what the next week will bring, when an album I’ve lived with for three days seems like an old, old friend I can’t imagine letting go of. And when at the end of the week I have to do just that, I am cold, push it out the door, turn my back on it. Sad but confident I am doing the right thing, that it will find its way in the world just fine, that I will get along alright without it.
Then there are the days “I’m wondering if I’ve already heard all the songs that’ll mean something.” Those are the frightening days. The days the missing is a crazy deep chasm I’m standing at the edge of, and behind me a great crowd of all the songs I’ve ever heard and will never hear, bumping at my back, teasing me toward freefall. So many songs pushing, jostling. Guess you’ve got to be at the edge of something, for any of them to mean anything at all.
Week 25: Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
Day 2
It’s not a fair question, that Lloyd Cole propositions us with near the end of Rattlesnakes, it’s not fair and he knows it, uses it, wields it like a pen that’s also a middle finger, like a mouth that kisses then curses, like Satan sucking on grapes in a nonexistent Matthew Barney film, so nonchalant and so ready to fuck you over. Are you ready to be heartbroken? Are you kidding me? Who ever is? Nobody is. Ever.
But somehow Cole nails it with this song in a way that is way beyond 1984. He might as well have woken up early this morning, cracked a can of swill and penned it before breakfast, the lyrics reek that much of today. I couldn’t count on fingers and toes the people I know that are “pumped up full of vitamins/on account of all the seriousness,” or are “making all your friends feel so guilty/about their cynicism/and the rest of their generation.” Damn. Thirty years ago, this morning, a century down the road: human.
And the references Cole weaves in to “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?” are pitch perfect. The character portrait he paints pops with the names he drops, this person who listens to Arthur Lee records, frontman of the 60’s band LOVE, which pretty much says it all right there, and who Cole chides to get straight by reading Norman Mailer, the man who said, “I am convinced that the most unfortunate people are those who would make an art of love. It sours other effort. Of all artists, they are certainly the most wretched.”
Again, damn. Are you ready to be heartbroken? Are you ready to bleed?
Day 4
The couple in Lloyd Cole’s “2cv” were “never close,” we learn, but simply “shared … a taste in clothes.” I’ve heard of worse reasons for people to get together.
To Rattlesnakes’ Julies and Jodies I add Julia, a girl I met while living in Tokyo. Fresh out of college, I had taken a job teaching English to middle schoolers; Julia was a college senior on a semester abroad. We met through a friend of mine from school, Irene, who was in Japan for the semester as well, living with her father and somehow associated with the semester abroad group. The details fuzz together.
I first met Julia when Irene invited me along on an outing with the group to a beach in Yokohama. She was an artist, Irene told me, which I thought was cool, I’m sure I paid her more attention because of that fact than I otherwise would have. The day was typical fall, cold, gray, windy, the water irresistible; everybody jumped in with their clothes on; wet fabric plastered against skin, we splashed and dove and chased down floating sandals before they disappeared beneath the surf, swan till our fingers and lips turned blue. When we had gotten mostly dry we went and ate shrimp and fishes and squid at a nearby restaurant then hopped the train back into the city. I was going to stay the night at Irene’s house while the rest of the group went back to their apartments, but somehow Julia ended up crashing at Irene’s house as well, and soon she was spending nights at my place.
I still have one picture of Julia. It’s a shot of her on the streets of Tokyo at night, got up in a black jacket and lime-green scarf, her wide smile bright beneath the shock of her short bleached-white hair. The photo is slightly out of focus, her face a bit blurred, which is why I like it so much, because in it she seems her true self, the girl that could never quite be pinned down, who flitted where she would, to wherever and whoever whim took her. Even the camera failed to hold her in place.
Julia and I liked to shop together. We spent hours, days, wandering the stores in Shibuya, Shinjuku, Roppongi, laughing at the crazy fashions, trying them on—her tiny frame was the perfect size for Japanese fashion, while my tallness made it nearly impossible for me to find anything that fit; the arms of the shirts and legs of the pants always a few inches too short, I would pop out of the dressing room looking like an extra-long version of Pee-Wee Herman, ridiculous and loving it.
She bought entire wardrobes: clothes, boots, skirts, shirts. I bought some ill-fitting gray t-shirts and a winter cap she helped pick out. “You have to wear it like this,” she said, turning the logo on the hat to the back of my head. “That’s the way.”
We shopped and wandered through dozens of art galleries and down side streets where the people themselves might have been labeled Art, walked kilometer upon kilometer, and in the evenings wound our way back to my place. She left Japan that December. Never saw the spring cherry blossoms, though I thought of her as they fell. She confused the hell out of me. I’m sure I wasn’t an open book for her, either. Sad, exhilarating months, those. Ready to be heartbroken. I don’t think of them often, though I still wear my winter hats backwards.
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David Brennan’s recent essays and poems have appeared in Coldfront Magazine, Unlikely Stories, Heavy Feather Review, Atticus Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collection The White Visitation (2010) and the chapbook The Family Flamboyant (2010). He lives in Virginia and writes about listening to other people’s music at 53lps.tumblr.com.
