This Feeling Has Got to Stay

Brain Hack Alert! I came up with a little thing to do if I can’t think of anything to write about on newsletter day, or if I don’t have much time. (Basically my method for this year being a Big Slay is tricking myself with the illusion of laziness.) I was on my Artist Date on Friday, and while I walked there I decided to put on a playlist I made years ago with all of my most unabashed favorite songs- the kind of playlist that might be too random and personal for a party, but I did actually play this at a party once as a sort of act of defiance. So I’m walking and thinking, wow all of these songs are really hitting! (because of course I designed it that way for myself, but you forget) and one crystal clear memory kept cutting through for each song- I could remember the first time I heard it, or a really specific vignette of the time it became Important. Why not write down these anecdotes, like little windows into who I am, and you get to listen to some good songs while we’re at it. (“Good” is relative, some of these are going to be inevitably stupid.) We’ll do five at a time. I’ll probably add in some of the songs that have been added to the mental list over the past (woof) eight years. And maybe later this week (… or next), I’ll write about that Artist Date and some intensely positive things I got to feel about New York and live music.

Other updates:

Twin Peaks Day is today.

If you want to do the Real-Time Rewatch (or first watch!), follow this schedule:

Monday Feb. 24 - Season 1, Pilot (it's an hour and a half long, so prepare accordingly)
Tuesday Feb. 25 - Season 1, Ep. 2
Wednesday Feb. 26 - Season 1, Ep. 3
Thursday Feb. 27 - Season 1, Ep. 4
Friday Feb. 28 - Season 1, Ep. 5
Saturday Mar. 1 - Season 1, Ep. 6
Sunday Mar. 2 - Season 1, Ep. 7

Season 1, Ep. 8 takes place on the night of March 2nd into March 3rd, and Season 2 picks up that morning. You can decide how you want to do that one! I bought half a dozen donuts and coffee is about to get brewed, I recommend you do the same, at least today. Maybe I’ll write about it in here. Wow, I’m so ambitimistic today! (Ambitious + optimistic.)

Cats.

They are starting to tolerate each other more but everyone is still a little anxious. My hands are destroyed from scratches but the last scratch was probably three or four days ago, so her chill is improving!

The Band.

We have practice tonight and a show on March 8! Feels very odd to have not played since October. Do I remember how? Come find out!

Without any further ado, Vignettes.

You’ll see that all of these memories found themselves a little theme.

Head On — The Jesus and Mary Chain

My dad has great taste in music, and this has always been a favorite of his. He got a new car in 1998, with the six-CD changer and a great sound system. I was probably at my worst as a human, being thirteen, and I was already making my parents very worried about me on a regular basis. In a moment when I was pulling away from them as much as I could, towards friends and boys, I still got a ride to middle school everyday from my dad. He would blast loud music at 7:45am and we’d sing along, and it was like this tiny sliver of child-self that was still inside me got to breathe, alive in this private bubble before I headed into the daily emotional devastation of 8th grade.

“Head On” is a great example of one of these morning songs, full of ecstatic adrenaline, and also probably definitely about heroin (“I can’t stand up I can’t cool down I can’t get my head up off the ground”). I remember we’d both snarl at each other, “and the world could die in paaain, and I wouldn’t feel no shame!” Fifteen years later, when I was getting married, he requested that we sing this with the live karaoke band we hired, but it was too close to the date for them to learn it and we were disappointed. Since the marriage didn’t last, I think that’s good. It’s still playing in the car for me- and just like then, it can hold the ephemeral magic spell that makes me fun and sweet instead of a grownup asshole.

Buffalo Stance — Neneh Cherry

My mom had this on a cassette tape that I was very, very drawn to when I was maybe ten. I wonder what it was about it!

I would listen to music in our family room on big headphones, and I don’t know, vibe the hell out or something. I wore this tape to shreds. It’s just cool and full of attitude, it has a crazy saxophone section and the sickest ascending synth sample, and lines like “wearing padded bras, sucking beer through straws” and a lot of words I asked my mortified mom about— what is a gigolo? I remember in sixth grade, we had a student teacher that I very badly wanted to be liked by, and she was friends with a classmate’s older sister. As a gag one day, she brought in one of those VHS tapes you could make in the mall in the 80s/early 90s, where you dance with your friends in front of a green screen and make a really shitty music video, with her and the classmate’s older sister lipsyncing “Buffalo Stance”. I was stunned. So fucking cool. Being very awkward, I think I tried to indicate that I knew and loved this song, but it didn’t really register for her. My last main memory with it was eleven years later, I’m in New York in my last months of college, living on Avenue D and going out to bars every single night. One night, we were at a now-defunct place called Uncle Ming’s (yikes), a cavernous space with lots of couches and a vaguely exotic style, I was at the bar ordering a round of lemon drop shots for my friends because I had money that week for some reason- and “Buffalo Stance” came on. I hadn’t thought of it in years, and I shrieked, alerting my friends of the Greatest Song of All Time. Can a little dork grow into the cool girl, the one who stands in the buffalo stance? Maybe. I know the truth- because I’ve held that cassette tape and been like “wooah, her bra strap is hanging off her shoulder”- but somewhere along the way, I do think you can learn how to fake it if you’ve got the right references. Listen, it’s a bona fide flex to say along with Neneh, “what is he like? What is he like, anyway? Yo man, what do you expect, the guy’s a gigolo maaaan [giggle]”, and I won’t be hearing any rebuttals.

New — No Doubt

I very much loved No Doubt in the mid-nineties when Tragic Kingdom came out, but I remember hearing “New” (off their underrated sophomore album Return of Saturn) on the little clock radio in my bedroom when I was fourteen. It was the lead single of their new era, and because time is really weird when you’re a kid, it seemed like such a long time since “Just A Girl”, I had practically forgotten they existed. But the way this song got me!

It’s a tease- it starts with a fuzzy, hollow drum beat, and a soft version of a really sweet chorus, then it takes until 2:11 to bust into that (I do not use the word orgasmic) orgasmic chorus again, after a lot of fake-outs and dips back into dark verses with an almost sinister riff. It became my theme song, my mantra, and a shorthand for a feeling that couldn’t be described. I would listen to it on my walkman backstage before going onstage in the school play, and as I walked to meet up with the person I wanted to kiss. It kicked off my major obsession with the band and with Gwen Stefani, which is why I ended up fronting a band and insisting on high-energy melodic pop rock above all else, despite it being very much not-on-trend for most of the time I’ve been at it. It’s why being “the girl in the band” was always the dream, nothing seemed more glamorous or awesome. My band used to cover No Doubt once a year at our fake 1998 prom, and one year I let myself play “New” despite it being released a year too late. I remember the night we practiced it and my heart felt like it would explode, because I was actually doing the thing that made the thing the thing. I didn’t listen to anything on my headphones when I biked home that night, I just sung out to the warm late-spring air (I’d had a beer or two at practice) “… and I can’t believe it, can’t believe it, can’t believe it, can’t believe it!”

I Was A Teenage Anarchist — Against Me!

I thought I had learned about this song embarrassingly late, but on further inspection, it was released in 2010. However, I didn’t hear the recorded version by Against Me! first. My memory of hearing it is probably from 2014, and I was married at the time. My ex got a DJ gig at Beauty Bar on Monday nights, and I needed to be supportive, even though I worked at 6am on Tuesday mornings. Sometimes I’d beg friends to come meet up, but usually I would go dressed like shit and just hang, and get a sandwich from KFC across the street. I’d go home a little before he did and eat mac & cheese and watch TV until I had to shower at 5am. He started having an acoustic act play each Monday, and there was this one with a female singer and a couple guys, and they covered “I Was A Teenage Anarchist”.

The small crowd all shouted along to one of the best choruses I’d ever heard: “do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?” I can’t think of a more poignant line. In the context of the song, the intensity of the rage you can muster when you still know so little- but also it hits on the feeling of all the pure things you can believe as a teenager, before experience complicates them. How significant your efforts will be, how powerful you are, your hope that people will do the right thing, your hope in your own goodness, that you and your comrades are incorruptible. Not that those things can’t be true. But growing up is discovering all of these colors, all of these anomalies, all of these disappointments and contradictions, and reckoning with who you are now that you know. When I think about the song, I have an immediate sense memory of how angry I used to get as a teenager when I heard someone use a slur or say something shitty about gay people, for instance. I’d get beet red and hot as I tried to dress them down, and I’d feel my eyes welling up with tears. I think about that idealism and it hurts a little. That idealism extends to how much I wanted to achieve, what I expected for myself, and so on. You want some of that fire back, even if it was so uncontrolled and thoughtless, so self-centered and simple.

Hot Child In the City — Nick Gilder

Ending on some much less painful nostalgia. This is a memory directly lifted from Sex and the City (Season 3, Episode 15 to be exact) and grafted onto my life. I watched a lot of random, out-of-order SATC near the end of high school and the beginning of college, but I’m sure I got to see this one for the first time in 2004. I was home from my freshman acting program for over a week (this is a big deal and they expressly do not allow it) because I had to get my chronically inflamed tonsils removed. I was in hell on the couch, watching the entire series while my mom made snide comments about it and I writhed in fury, unable to talk. I was still in a mindset that this was New York. I wanted to buy the expensive heels. I wanted to go to nightclubs and chic restaurants. I can’t understand it now, and I still regret the shoes I bought. This episode (titled after the song, which plays at the end) is special though, because it’s kind of a perfect summertime capsule, everyone is a little shiny with sweat and you can smell exactly what NYC smells like. Carrie dates this man-child who lives with his rich mom and draws comics, and has this episode-long escape where she feels like a teenager again. Ultimately it’s a bust (because she’s grown), so she takes his weed and struts off, sharing it with her girlfriends in her apartment that night with the windows open and they’re all laughing... and credits. Isn’t it great that you can feel like a teenager but without the rules? I had gotten a small taste of summer in the city when I moved in to college, but I was scared then, and I was so looking forward to the moment when I could strut around to this song and be That Girl. I still think of it on nights like that, when the air feels like a humid hug and I’m wearing short shorts and I didn’t need to carry a purse or anything so I was FREE. What could be better?