I have a habit of visiting places, and really just experiencing everyday life, with a pair of headphones on. I realize that old people think its rude to bop your head through art galleries and museums and stuff, but I'd rather that than listening to teenagers on school trips or supposed know-it-alls who mess up their history. (A group I am sure I have belonged to on at least one occasion. Even I can't remember everything.) But this habit has a strange side effect. There are songs and entire albums that are linked to certain places and certain moments in my head. I cannot hear certain songs without thinking of specific experiences.
SSLYBY (aka Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, i.e. the best band name of all time) reminds me of taking the bus around the UK. Specifically, night busing between London and Edinburgh, which was basically 9 hours without sleep listening to their album Broom on repeat, for the entire 9 hours, right after it came out. Although the song "Think I Wanna Die" reminds me of sheep filled fields in the green belt surrounding London on the bus to Oxford. Random? Kind of. But mostly because there is a line in the song that goes "traveled all alone through foreign meadows..." which I think reminded me of myself so much at that moment that it stuck.
A Fine Frenzy reminds me of Paris. I fell in love with her album Bomb in a Birdcage like two weeks before I went to Paris. And decided that to mark my generic looking wheeling suitcase, I would not only tie a piece of 60s bed sheet, aka a sheet I used to make into blinds because its ridiculously bright green, blue and purple flower print and was actually bought in the 1960s and then left, forgotten, in the back of a closet for 40 years, which is frickin awesome, but I also used white electrical tape to give me writing space. And I wrote the line "If we were children I would bake you a mud pie, warm and brown beneath the sun..." which is the opening line from What I Wouldn't Do, onto said electrical tape with black Sharpie. I could see people stopping the read it all the way to and at the airport, not to mention everywhere else I ever took that bag, followed by smiles, because, really, it is an adorable line. And song, really. And I spent most of the time I was in Paris listening to that album. It was beautiful and just kind of matched how lovely everything is Paris looked. And I am sure I will look back and have at least a half dozen albums linked permanently to Montreal. Library Voices. Said the Whale. Specifically, walking to volunteering listening to Said the Whale. The Islands Disappear album. The 2009-2010 school year was amazing for cd releases. I was very happy.
But I also have some songs where the visual memory is of the song live in concert, and certain lines of the lyrics are forever attached to what someone in the band did at the time. Nada Surf's "Blankest Year," which E is now in love with, is connected to a concert I went to in 2006 at Lee's Palace in Toronto. Rogue Wave had opened the show, and by the time that song got played it was the encore and both bands were pretty drunk. And the Rogue Wave bassist was drunken- ass- shaking- dancing. Which is now burning into my brain. But it was an awesome concert. So I'll live.
Star's "Ghost of Genoa Heights" is attached to a semi-awkward live experience when Torq dressed up in like, twinkle lights and looked all ghost-y. And as much as I love him, Torq is... unique in concert. He is like a little kid on Christmas morning. I am a fan of all things adorable today, I think.
Two summers ago, me and a couple of my friends decided it was a good idea to see Library Voices 3 times in 7 days. Wednesday-Saturday-Wednesday. It was a good idea, actually. And we learned a bunch of the songs off their then forthcoming album just hearing them live 3 times in a week. And now, the chorus of "Haunt This House" Reminds me of walking back to my car, trying to figure out the lyrics to the chorus of "Haunt This House" (which are: I saw the future escape from a crystal ball / it said the present is just an afterthought / it said that Love, is a forget-me-not / so I guess the past is all we've got, in case you were wondering). And I also remember thinking that the first single off that album, "Drinking Games" was too slow, not dance-y enough for a single, and had a trite sounding name. But the lyrics of that first single are: "There she goes again, mixing melody with the memory. She's got a song for everything, everywhere she's been and everyone she's pleased ... I'm too old for these drinking games ... She's not one for lies. But she'll sure stretch the truth ... Until you're saying that you love bands that you can't stand..."
And that song, that opening line, gives me a Nick Hornby moment. Where I didn't know how I felt and thought about something until I heard it sung by someone else. (Well, for Nick Hornby, until you've read how he's described it.)
So I stretched the truth. I don't think I'm capable of never referencing Library Voices in posts. So there's that then...
-K
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