When you’re living in a city that’s slowly but surely being leached of culture Google bus by Google bus, it’s nice to discover a new DIY venue in an unlikely place. The Sylvan Annex is a house in the Inner Richmond that’s been hosting shows for a little over a year.
I first visited in March to see my friends’ band, Fears, play with The Saturday Giant, North Home, and Up! Escalator; and I returned last weekend for another show.
The Sylvan Annex is a unique experience. After you walk up two flights of stairs and straight through a living space, you’re welcomed by a gummy buffet, courtesy of host Dan Weiss.
Dan and the ten (!) other folks living at the house are warm and friendly. Some of the roommates live in closets, which is adorable.
The shows take place in Ashley’s bedroom (he’s the guy behind aforementioned drone-pop outfit Up! Escalator). Here he is at the sound board:
Dan opened the April 13th show with a couple of acoustic songs. The audience sat on the floor and happily sang backup. Then, S.L.F.M. played a set of fast and sweet punk songs on an electric ukulele.
Some people drink a cup of chamomile tea to fall asleep. Some count sheep. Others rely on a boring book or the soothing sounds of a white noise machine. But me? The summer before I turned 13, there was only one thing that calmed my mind at night: listening to Hole’s Live Through This on my Walkman.
On more than a few occasions, I fell asleep wearing headphones, listening to Courtney Love’s aggressive guitar and angry lyrics. I needed to hear someone else screaming about the same injustices that made me want to scream. If Hole could rage against sexism and conformity and the ludicrous claims that culture makes on women’s bodies, then I could take a break from it, at least long enough to sleep.
Just relax, just relax, just go to sleep. That’s a line from “Jennifer’s Body,” and sung soft and low, it’s the closest the album comes to a lullaby – if only it weren’t couched between hoarsely screamed verses and the machine-gun drumming and cymbal crashes that end the song. Live Through This is known for its “loud-quiet-loud” dynamic, and it plays with tempo in a similar way (“slow-fast-slow”). These sudden changes in volume and speed are among the many reasons why it’s a strange album to fall asleep to.
But then again, summer camp was a strange place. I lived in a cabin with nine other girls, and in those close quarters, anxiety and shame about our bodies hung in the air like bug spray. “You’re lucky,” my bunkmates would say, “you’re so skinny.” I didn’t think of myself as skinny or fat. I mostly thought of my body in terms of what it did, not how it was looked at.
Some of the meanest girls at camp were thin, and some of the nice girls were bigger. And of course, the mean girls would give the fat girls shit about their weight. Although I wasn’t heavy, I got shit, too: I was weird – I daydreamed all the time, didn’t have crushes on the popular guys, wasn’t in any hurry to start shaving my legs.
Live Through This was jarring and abrasive, sure – but it was also familiar. I’d listened to it countless times, and the intimacy was comforting. The cassette had been a birthday present from my friend Sara, the autumn before I brought it to camp with me. She knew I’d be happy to have my own copy, because we’d already spent hours listening to the tape in her room. After school, we practiced maximizing its cathartic potential, sitting on the floor by the stereo and rewinding over and over and over to the part in “I Think That I Would Die” when Love screams FUCK! YOU!
FUCK! YOU!
FUCK! YOU!
FUCK! YOU!
It felt good.
We didn’t know what the song was supposed to mean, but the lyrics were clearly about asserting ownership, then lashing out when that ownership is threatened. You can tell that without even hearing the words – just from the shattering violence of the clash between the moments of silence and the wonderful scream that follows.
It’s… [quiet guitar] Not… [same quiet guitar] Yours… [same quiet guitar] and then the FUCK! YOU!
Sometime between 1994 and now, I learned that Love temporarily lost custody of her daughter when she was two weeks old, and it makes sense that “I Think That I Would Die” was written about that traumatic experience.
But that didn’t matter to me and Sara. As we sat in her room, rewinding and rewinding and relishing the abandon of our favorite part of the tape, we were learning how to scream “fuck you.”
All 12-year-old girls have to learn how to scream “fuck you.”
Sara got her period before I did. I remember the package of Always pads that appeared next to her dollhouse one day. I remember she didn’t like to talk about it much. I remember boys making fun of her when they saw the pale green plastic of a pad wrapper sticking out of her back pocket. This was a signal. This was starting. Our bodies were not going to be our own anymore. They were becoming public; they could be commented upon, judged, held to sick standards; they could signify sex and whatever else, whether or not we wanted them to.
One of the main themes of Live Through This is the objectification of the female body: I am doll parts / Bad skin, doll hearts.
Something the girls at camp understood better than I did was that women are required to be thin. No matter how many YM articles I read about “Skirts for Every Body Type!” where “pear-shaped” readers were perkily assured that there were “options” to “camouflage” their hips and thighs, I maintained some amount of immunity to the poison of this body shaming.
But even though the angst I had about my own body was minimal, I felt an overwhelming sense of outrage at the injustice of this requirement. How it made my best friend at camp anorexic, how it made the other girls in our cabin waste time worrying about the calories in pizza, how it made someone (we never found out who) vomit into Diet Pepsi bottles and hide them on the dusty shelves above our cubbies.
Nobody talked about the Diet Pepsi bottles. Nobody talked about eating disorders. Nobody questioned how damaging these standards of “beauty” were. Well, nobody except for Courtney Love, who knew just how fucked up it was: They say I’m plump, but I throw up all the time (“Plump”). Be a model or just look like one (“Asking for It”). Anorexic magazines / It smells like girl, it smells like girl (“She Walks on Me”).
The cover of Live Through This shows a beauty queen in a tiara, caught in the camera flash, clutching a bouquet of flowers. Contrast this with the image in the cassette insert: a picture of a young girl in a flannel shirt, standing barefoot on a gravel road (a family photo of Love at age 8).
The first time I opened the cassette and saw that photo, I was startled to see myself there: messy hair, sleeves too long, not quite smiling.
What is the “this” in Live Through This? For me, it was adolescence. How to understand a world that rewards women with crowns and flowers for being dumb and fake and smiling just right, when it makes more sense to hang out in a flannel and no shoes and do whatever you feel like.
If you live through this with me / I swear that I will die for you / And if you live through this with me / I swear that I will die for you. When I heard Love sing those lines in “Asking for It,” they felt like a promise. She understood my pain, because it was her own. She was like an older sister who had been to hell and back, and was there to tell me about it: Someday, you will ache like I ache (“Doll Parts”).
So, I did live through this. And I still am. That summer was the last one I spent at camp, and I haven’t needed to listen to Live Through This to fall asleep since.
Still, I return to the album again and again. It’s part of me. It played a tremendous role in the formation of my feminist identity. It taught me how to be angry. And even after nearly 20 years of listening, its cathartic powers haven’t dulled. There are some days when the only thing I want to do after work is blast Live Through This on my headphones and aggressively wash a sink full of dishes. Run the water hot, turn the volume up, and FUCK! YOU!
First Show: It was the summer between 5th and 6th grade for me (1996) and Alanis Morrisette had just come out with Jagged Little Pill and was blowing up. So my mom and I went to the concert, and a band called Radiohead was opening! I knew very little about Radiohead at the time, they were touring on The Bends and I knew the songs “High and Dry” and “Creep.” I don’t recall a large part of the crowd being into them other than those songs. I remember Thom Yorke saying “this is a song about politicians” before “Creep,” so I thought that was cool.
Alanis and her band rocked it, played all the hits off that album, which at the time I remember sounded very different live since her album was very much given the studio treatment. If my musical knowledge timeline is correct, the drummer I saw that night with her was Taylor Hawkins, who went on to join the Foo Fighters, who he still plays with. Not bad for a first show, I’d say. Seeing Radiohead headline Bonnaroo this past summer was quite a trip, considering I’d once seen them play a very different, stripped down show to a crowd that barely gave them the time of day.
Worst Show: Last summer (2011) my funk band, Joe Keyes & The Late Bloomer Band, did a brief run with Angelo Moore from Fishbone up the East Coast. Joe has a longtime friendship with Fishbone, so we’ve done a few collaborations with Angelo and some of the other guys over the years. We did several shows, including a few festivals along the way. I don’t remember their name, but one band really stuck out at one of the outdoor festivals we played. The music was pure noise, just beating the shit out of instruments in unison, but leaving enough time between the “notes” so that every member of the band can make a mean face and give the crowd the middle finger. It was a terrible, negative outpouring and the singer was constantly screaming “fuck you.” I think we stuck around because of how astounded we were at the sight of these guys, and the fact that people were watching. He ended the show by saying something like “Come say hi to me, I’ll spit on you!” No thanks, dude.
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Dear Reader: Below you find a list of songs about Rock and Roll, or going to a rock club, and a short summary of why I like this song. I decided Rock and Roll and rock clubs were one in the same because I needed 5 non-lame songs to write about relating to Rock and Roll (be happy I didn’t decide to wax poetic on Billy Joel) and because going to a “club” and going to listen to rock music are basically one in the same for me (which is probably true for most readers of this blog, probably not true for most people in general). So, without further delay my selection of 5 songs that are sort of about Rock music:
“Rock and Roll” by the Velvet Underground
I tend to slip in and out of obsession with the Velvet Underground on a quarterly basis. I go clean every few months, and then, like a proper addict, relapse in a fit of nostalgia for the unremembered 60s. This summer, I can unequivocally blame Will Hermes’ book Love Goes to the Building on Fire for my rapid descent into my O.M.G you guys let’s listen to the Velvet Underground all the time neurosis. And if you haven’t read the book, I suggest you pick it up immediately, but be warned you’ll have to valiantly stave off a sense of New York bohemia just-chilling-with-Patti-Smith-lust that can be very distracting while you’re reviewing expense reports from Palestine.
Commence “Rock and Roll”: the guitar intro has just enough distortion to sound like a car with a booming radio rushing past on a bustling street.
Welcome Jenny, the girl whose life was saved by rock and roll. We all know what it’s like to suffer through the doldrums of Top 40 radio, waiting for that epiphanic moment when that song comes on and you’re consumed by joy, and also relief that there is good music in the world. As Lou Reed tells us, “it took no computations to dance to a rock and roll station.” Dancing to music that you love is an effortless affair: the body overtakes the mind and just moves.
Don’t we all kind of know what it’s like to be Jenny, plucked from our workaday existence and made exceptional by our love of song? Don’t we all kind of wish we were Jenny, grooving to the Velvet Underground on a crackling radio in our unheated loft somewhere in the village? Hey, isn’t that Robert Maplethorpe smoking on the street corner out there?
“Niteclub” by Old 97s
My longstanding love affair with Old 97s has been well documented on this website. They aren’t “rock and roll” in the same sense as the Velvet Underground: they earned their hangovers in bars wreathed with buffalo skulls and gazelle taxidermy somewhere in the steppe northwest of El Paso (as opposed to a filthy dive bar somewhere on the Lowest East Side). Fine, maybe I made that up based on every cliché I’ve ever met. But, the premise of “Niteclub” is as rock and roll as it gets – a vagabond musician with a tortured, romantic relationship with his favorite club.
The initial tumult of the parlor piano gives way to the lilting gait of guitar and drums. And then, Rhett Miller (O, Rhett! How we love the way you swing your hips on stage): from thousands of miles away, he yearns for the dank comfort of this club (Rock or country? We’ll never know) that stole so many hours of his youth, not to mention his one true love. It’s an easy song to sing, to mold your voice to every one of Rhett’s vocal inflections. He sings a cautionary tale of letting affection for a place, one that has housed your triumphs and tragedies, hold you hostage from the outside world.
“Rock and Roll Nightclub” by Mac Demarco
I don’t have a deep relationship with this song. I first heard it last week in the middle of a post-lunch comma at work and fell madly in love then played it for the next 3 hours of work.
Mac Demarco has that deep voice usually reserved for 70s soul men. On those men, it’s a smooth declaration of their virility. On Mac Demarco, it’s a mildly unsettling, seemingly deliberate strohbass. In other words, he sounds like that serious creeper in the corner of the dance floor trying to decide which drunk girl to cherry pick from her friends and subject to his unwashed armpit stench. Vocal tone aside, “Rock and Roll Nightclub” is a gentle song. It’s not paired with the usually pulsing grooves radiating sexual machismo (see, Iggy Pop, “Nightclubbing”), but rather the reverb fuzz of a plucked guitar, a musical analogy for the gradual haze of intoxication.
“Nightclubbing” by Iggy Pop
There’s a masterful, deliberate escalation of tension introducing Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing.” Each beat on the drum sounds like a footstep heavy with booze, treading towards the nightclub in blurred anticipation of the pleasures within. Matched with the sinister tone of the pianos, you can be sure something wonderfully debaucherous will come from this trip to the nightclub.
Or maybe I’m just projecting the club scene from Trainspotting on my listening of this song.
“Rock DJ” by Robbie Williams
Who remembers Robbie Williams? Not me, up until 30 minutes ago while I was scouring my iTunes looking for songs appropriate for my given theme. I clicked this song and suddenly, there I was, circa 2000 pasting pictures of No Doubt and Stone Temple Pilots I’d plucked from the Internet onto my bedroom wall, anxious for my first year at Art High School and desperately trying to fit the part.
It’s hard to transcend your reputation as late 90s British pop monster. I first heard Robbie Williams on the “Now That’s What I Call Music 2!” record, which I will go on the record to proclaim is a brilliant compilation—dare I say best in the series—commemorating music at the end of the millennium. His song “Millennium” is the second song on the album, sandwiched between New Radicals’ “You Get What you Give” and Semisonic’s “Closing Time.”
Where “Nightclubbing” is sinister, “Rock DJ” is bouncing off the walls just-get-me-to-a-dance-floor fun. There’s almost a sense of innocence to it—no one’s getting sloppy drunk and crying on the floor, no one’s going to nod off in a corner into a drug and drink haze. “Rock DJ” is an explosion of bass, synth, and Robbie’s smooth falsetto. You’re just going to put on something shiny and dance with your friends. The song samples both Barry White and A Tribe Called Quest, and quotes Snoop Dogg: how can this not lead to something fun? Obviously, there’s going to be a disco ball.
When I was 22, I had a lot of time on my hands. Too much time. Fresh out of college, and none too pleased to have been ejected from my academic cocoon, I was living at home and wallowing in the doldrums commuting to DC for internships and a part time office job. The cycle of MARC train rides, city walking, and data entry marathons took its toll on my playlists: even my favorite songs became stale, and so I found myself in constant need of fresh music.
Though year 22 announced itself with under-employment, death, and many unfortunate drunken “episodes,” I saw a dramatic improvement in my prospects as spring and summer rolled around. I embraced my, shall we say, relaxed schedule and went on road trips to visit friends. I started dating. I got into grad school. And, most importantly, once summer was in full swing, no job schedule could prevent me from skipping town and going to the beach any day of the week.
Sorting my itunes by “date added,” there’s a clear demarcation between the melancholy of December, January, and February, to the euphoria of the months that concluded year 22. In the list that follows, I could have chosen a representative sample of songs paralleling these developments, but decided to skew towards those that embody the exuberant portion of this year. I mean to say: summer has only just begun and I am in the mood to write about perfect summer songs.
“Dog Roses,” The Duke Spirit
As originally planned, December 2008 was supposed to have been a liberated, adventure-filled month. The itinerary included: my first visit to Scotland, a stopover to visit family in Switzerland, and lastly, my second Christmas in Lebanon (the first Christmas I celebrated in Lebanon, I was one month old).
I discovered “Dog Roses” a few days prior to leaving as I scoured the internet for new music to soundtrack my journey. The strumming guitars that introduce the song immediately set an ominous tone. Liela Moss sings of the dangers of living the shadows of memory. The central metaphor here is a house, which she and presumably a former lover revisit following the demise of the relationship. The house personifies their past – pictures, mementos, memories – they’re all there, reviving a long-lost life.
My grandfather had a house that came to embody our family. Nestled at the end of a village road in the Chouf Mountains southeast of Beirut, the house overlooks a terraced valley on one side, and an orchard on the other. Built by his grandfather then left in disrepair for many years, the house became my grandfather’s project for 25 years as he worked to renovate it. He meticulously tended to the garden. He installed indoor plumbing. Mostly importantly, he turned the house into a monument for our family. Hundred of pictures—from black and white portraits of fez-capped ancestors to graduation photos of all the grandchildren—line the walls, bookcases, and windowsills.
The day I left for Scotland, we received a frantic call from Lebanon. I was the first to pick up. There was a woman on the other line whose voice I did not recognize. I turned the phone over to my mother, who knew, instinctively, what the call would reveal. My grandfather was in the hospital, unconscious.
I went to Scotland that night. During the trip, I had my cell phone tethered to me, waiting for the inevitable phone call that he had died. It came on my third day in Scotland as my friend and I lay in her bed watching “A Knight’s Tale” on her laptop. My father flew to Beirut that evening, and spent the next two weeks making funeral arrangements, receiving condolences, and cleaning out his childhood home. I never made it to my second Christmas in Lebanon.
“Soul Rebel,” Bob Marley and the Wailers
I have a long history with a few Bob Marley songs. To me, Bob Marley is quintessential road trip music. Yes, many of his songs have an epic, journeyman quality to them, but this is more a product of my father’s musical tastes than my own. The Bob Marley & the Wailers album Legend had its permanent location in his car, and it played on repeat on any road trip undertaken by my family.
“Soul Rebel” is not on Legend. I probably found it on a Saturday night when I was bored, unwilling to drive downtown to see friends, and rummaging through my father’s CDs. The song is sung in minor key and led by Marley with significant vocal input from the Wailers. The lines that Marley sings independently are simultaneously mournful and hopeful. The Wailers harmonize on almost every other line, lending to the song a melodious, prayer-like quality.
What 22-year-old can’t relate to fantasist declarations of this song? In the song’s refrain, Marley’s voice swells into the lyric “I’m a rebel/soul rebel/I’m a capturer, soul adventurer.” He’s the wanderer trapped by convention, responsibility, and terrestrial limitation. When you’re 22, exorbitantly self-conscious, and faced with an uncertain future, this lyric rings true. At my parent’s house, I can’t claim not to have lived comfortably in a loving environment, but returning home from living on my own for four years, it felt like confinement. I loathed the MARC train. I felt stagnant. So when Marley preaches, “if you’re not living good/you gotta travel wide,” every escapist reverie that ever roamed through my mind came to the forefront as a welcome fantasy, yet ultimately fruitless distraction from my quotidian listlessness.
“40 Day Dream,” Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
How many times did I play this song with the windows down, my arm dangling down the side of the car, watching bugs splatter on my windshield? To be honest, how many times did I play this song after going to get ice cream is a better question.
I don’t particularly enjoy the larger catalog of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. It’s too—hippy for me. The visual of 15 shoeless, stoned, unwashed band members is superficially unappealing, and most of their other songs, with the exception of “Home,” sound as if they were recorded by high school pot heads who aspired to be the next Great American Jam Band. “40 Day Dream” stands as one of the exceptional tracks from the album Up From Below: it’s a buoyant love song carried by swelling cadences and a refrain that begs to be sung out loud.
“Detroit ’67,” Sam Roberts
Summer 2009 was the first summer that I had friends living in the city. Laura, my college roommate, lived in a ramshackle three bedroom flat atop a Bolton Hill row home with no air conditioning that was stuffed with three cats, discarded art projects, and an impressive variety of empty beer bottles. Dinners, dance parties, or really just sitting around and talking quickly turned her living room into a sauna, and so we’d seek respite at sunset on her tar roof, with its impressive panorama of Baltimore’s lilting rooftops.
Sam Roberts’ “Detroit ’67” is tied to this impression of the Baltimore skyline at sunset. As the song opens with the lyric “I went walkin’ at street level/feeling strange and disheveled/past the abattoir and the glory holes/like a film noire in the starring role,” you are overtaken by the urge to walk—no, strut—John Travolta-in-Saturday-Night-Fever-style down the cracked, weed-sprouting sidewalks of Baltimore City. Your feet move to the rhythm of the pounding piano chords. The song might be about Detroit, but who doesn’t know the feeling of marching down the street and feeling like you really own the place? You fit right into the history of it all.
As someone particularly prone to fits of nostalgia, the refrain of the song—“Does anyone here tonight/Remember those times?/Can anyone here tonight/Just tell me what they felt like”—hits at my obsession with mentally capturing those moments where nothing special is happening, but you absolutely do not want to forget. The mid-summer sunset from a Baltimore roof. Watching the firecrackers spitting flames on the street below on 4th of July. Ambulance sirens muted by Baltimore’s legendary humidity. It’s the Proustian dilemma: how do you describe and how do you remember the indescribable?
“My Last Mistake,” Dan Auerbach
“My Last Mistake” isn’t a song that most people would describe as uplifting or joyous. Its lyrics speak to heartache and regret. It’s about letting someone go, or being let go.
We all know that getting over someone is hard work. It takes immense resolve. It requires patience. It necessitates reflection on the whys, the hows, and the whens of the demise of the relationship. Like an addict in recovery, you make a vow, usually to be broken, that this time, you’ve learned from your mistakes.
I was getting over someone when I came to love this song but I somehow managed to avoid coupling the music to the memory. This songs makes me happy. It makes me tap my feet. It makes me want to play air guitar, mimicking Auerbach’s ascending riffs. And if I’m driving and it comes on, I feel like a racecar driver, tunnel vision to the finish line.
Who doesn’t love a good old history lesson? Don’t answer that. More to the point, I wanted to include on the same list a really peppy song in which “we took a little trip along with Col. Jackson down the Mighty Mississip” and an Australian dirge from a World War One amputee’s perspective. There is no boundary to the number of ways a songwriter can present a new perspective on an old event or time period or mythical epic poem. I was hoping to compare the ways in which these stories were told through song, be it through legend, humor, or wailing guitar refrains (looking at you, Lightfoot).
“The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton
To be honest, this song inspired me to create this list. It refers to the final campaign during the War of 1812, which future President Andrew Jackson thoroughly defeated a British Army force almost three times as large as the American force. It is pithy, catchy, and mentions Old Hickory by name, although it gets his rank wrong, as he was not a colonel, but a Major General. I also think it’s a great way to commemorate the drunks and criminals who outfought what was, at that time, the world’s most renowned military. Oh yeah, I also can’t get enough of the “they ran through the briars” refrain.
“Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot”
I can think of few things bleaker than a grey, overcast day on Lake Superior or more terrifying than the prospect of a cold drowning death between Minnesota and Canada. On November 10, 1975, this freighter and her crew went to the bottom of Lake Superior during a storm. Lightfoot weaves chronology and legend into a mournful ode to a vast, scary lake and the men it consumes.
“The Ballad of Charles Whitman” by Kinky Friedman
When it was released in 1971, this song understandably caused some controversy. The University of Texas shootings were fresh in Texans’ minds and this irreverent Jewish cowboy had the chutzpah to record a bouncy country number about a deranged shooter. Forty years later, he ran as an independent candidate for governor of that state. He’d have my vote.
“Victoria” by The Kinks
Ray Davies & Co. wrote this number as more of a tribute to an era than any one event, which allows them to masterfully blend satire and admiration. The narrator understands his station in life, yet still loves his queen. Britain’s cultural and political climates are the main subject of the song, but this man truly believes that Queen Victoria acts out of love for her subjects near and far, even if the nobles just below her are pompous snobs.
“And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by The Pogues
I specifically included the Pogues’ version because in my opinion, the original Eric Bogle song is missing some angst that Shane McGowan manages to capture. It is told from the perspective of an Aussie soldier during World War I, specifically the failed Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 for which First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Winston Churchill was fired. The narrator describes landing with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at the battle of Suvla, Ottoman Empire in August of 1915 and the misery he experiences before losing both legs to a Turkish artillery round and his life afterward. The song ultimately builds to an emotional refrain of Waltzing Matilda. If that doesn’t make tear up a little, you have no soul. Fun fact about this song, the title of its parent album Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash is taken from a Churchill quote regarding traditions of the Royal Navy.
Is this a perverse topic? It is definitely one for which I have a fondness. On screen, in film, and in books, accounts of first time sexual experiences tend to evoke a lot of tenderness, especially when they’re horrifically awkward (for the record, my favorite awkward sex scene ever (which would also make a great list) is in The Wackness). These recountings can also be quite varied despite their fundamental similarity, since they can be wistful, bitter, angry, nostalgic, or simply mushy. They can even be pressuring (for the record More Than Words was NEVER in the running). So here it is, a list of evoked sensations, memories, and life stages that I happen to find charming.
“December 1963 (Oh What A Night!)” by The Four Seasons
Bob Guadio’s 1975 hit is simply ADORABLE. Even an anonymous experience can be rhapsodized about in a sentimental young man’s heart. The melody is giddy, and seems very appropriate to immortalize someone enthusiastically trumpeting about that long-awaited formative milestone. The descriptions he uses are completely bombastic, which really contributes to the sense of innocence here. Also, “as I recall, it ended much too soon” always makes me snort.
“Like A Virgin” by Madonna
An obvious choice to consider for this list, yet also a very debatable one. Mr. Brown from Reservoir Dogs was very convinced that the song was just “a metaphor for big dicks.” I’m more inclined to agree with Mr. Blue though, and say it’s about going through the ringer a few times, and then encountering someone who makes you feel vulnerable, young, and new again. The costumes worn by Brittney and Christina at their infamous performance of said song at the 2003 encapsulated this perfectly, as they pranced around in dresses that were short, sexy, and yet still undeniably white and designed for weddings. I realize I haven’t talked about the song much in this write-up, but it’s so well known that at this point it’s more worthwhile to analyze some of its cultural accoutrements.
“We Looked Like Giants” by Death Cab For Cutie
This is hardly an unfamiliar sound. After the Postal Service exploded into popularity in 2003, for a while it seemed like every aspiring indie pop singer was attempting to emulate Ben Gibbard’s fey and somewhat nasal tones and cadences. However, no matter how saturated the radio gets with imitators, Ben still manages to be sweet and emphatic, and I think he sounds perfect for this song. This sounds like one spectacularly rosy youthful memory. Remember being young and having sex in cars because you didn’t have your own places? Remember cutting classes? Remember being in love in the spring time, and awkward fumbles? That’s the sort of affair that’ll make your heart sing to think about, even after it ends.
“Broom People” by The Mountain Goats
Here’s another song about youthful first time love consummated within a car, but with a vastly darker tone. The people involved are in junior high, and it seems like they are pretty isolated aside from each other. Lacking in close friends to confide in, surrounded by teachers who can’t really connect to their struggle, and saddled with neglectful parents who don’t mind raising their children in a filthy home, it seems like a grim situation. Except for this secret they have, which seems to be the pained young man’s only solace against his list of ‘good reasons to freeze to death’ recorded in a spiral-ring notebook. It’s terribly romantic in a way, but also terrifying to think that the only positive source of emotional fuel in your life coming from a tenuous relationship between 14 year olds.
“Paradise By The Dashboard Light” by Meat Loaf
If there’s any sort of unifying theme here, I guess it’s sex in cars. Anyway, what’s not to love about this song? Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley make a wonderfully impassioned duo. Even when they’re praying for the end of time, they still manage to be wondrously lively and upbeat. My favorite part is definitely the sports commentary, which is both hilarious and does wonders to escalate the anticipation. There’s a good life lesson in there too, kids: Don’t expect your teenage deflowerer to stick around for life.
Although the Walkmen have been around for 10 years and continue to receive a decent amount of press, their records have never commanded the over zealous accolades that grace (mar?) the websites of tastemakers. Sepia-tinged photographs from their upcoming record “Heaven” highlight the domesticity of the band members, dapper in their three-piece suits, smiling at their wives and children. This is a band of middle-aged family men: their lead singer, Hamilton Leithauser, wails in remembrance of his youth and long-lost loves, while the band provides a mournful, anxious beat to accompany his voice. They may not have the innovative spirit or impeccable branding of, say, Jack White and his various initiatives, and they don’t get into Twitter battles with their contemporaries or announce rehab stints via Facebook, but they put out impeccable records every two years and slowly but surely sell out shows across the country.
There is a reason why you’ll find a generous selection of songs by the Walkmen throughout my playlists: their songs are infinitely listenable, suitable for the most raucous and joyful dance party to the most solemn and mournful of occasions. I have seen the Walkmen live four times, and each performance left a unique imprint:
Opening for Kings of Leon in April 2009, they play to an empty arena at George Mason University’s Patriot Center. Undeterred by the lack of audience, the band powers through the set list in what, from our nosebleed seats, felt like a private performance.
At 9:30 Club, December 2010, nearly an hour into their set and playing to a jubilant hometown crowd, the pounding drums of “The Rat” roll in and the crowd starts to bounce. One fan, overjoyed by the performance, leaps on stage and flails in front of the band. Unamused by the intrusion, singer Hamilton Leithauser shoves the kid from the stage, sending him flying into the crowd. A collective gasp from the audience momentarily obscures the music.
At Williamsburg Waterfront, September 2011, looking out onto the Manhattan skyline on a warm, late summer night. I turned up to the venue a half hour before my friend, who had wandered to the wrong 8th street after exiting the subway, and so I perched on a fence at the edge of the crowd, waiting for her to arrive, unable to chose between watching the show and the brilliant purple and pink sun setting through disintegrating storm clouds.
In a spaghetti-restaurant-turned-music hall in Philadelphia, March 2012, for the band’s 10th anniversary show. They played all the hits, had the entire audience singing and swaying, and left us satisfied that they played every song we could have wanted to hear.
“In the New Year,” on You and Me
New Year’s Day, 2012: I insisted on playing this song and U2’s “New Year’s Day” on repeat. The song can be uplifting or mournful, depending on your own mood: the lyrics alternate between lamenting continuity and anticipating change. Hamilton opens the song singing “Oh, I’m still living at the old address.” But in the next stanza, as the beat continues to build and his voice gets louder, he proclaims, with confidence: “I know that it’s true/ it’s gonna be a good year/ Out of the darkness/And into the fire.” It’s the perfect song not just for New Year’s Day, but for any transitional period.
“Tenley Town,” on A Hundred Miles Off
The Walkmen are, originally, a DC-based band; they first came together here as students at the St. Albans Prep School. Tenleytown is a neighborhood in DC best known as a refuge for well-to-do white people and students from American University. “Tenley Town” comes off A Hundred Miles Off, which critics have determined to be one of the band’s weaker albums. This might be true, but “Tenley Town” is one of two songs I’ll write about from this album. The song doesn’t seem to have much to do with its namesake locale, but it has a ferocious, unrelenting tempo that recalls the frustrations and limitations of suburban youth. I hear Tenley Town and see a basement full of sweaty, anxious teenagers itching to leave the confines of their privileged lives.
“Louisiana,” A Hundred Miles Off
Louisiana also comes of A Hundred Miles Off. This is a road trip song: you play this with the windows open on a glorious, cloudless day with good friends and loved ones. Yes, this song fades out with a cacophony of French horn and jangling piano keys. The premise of “Louisiana” is simple: you’re running away, against your better instincts, with a lover. The soft drums and reverb in the guitar reflect the luxurious proposition—eluding reality—of the lyrics. Of all the lines in this song, I have a particular affinity for the phrase: “There’s thunder and there’s lightening/a hundred miles off.” Even as he’s basking in the splendor of this romance, Hamilton acknowledges and recognizes the storm on the horizon.
“Blue As Your Blood,” on Lisbon
Three notes in minor key, plucked in rapid succession, introduce “Blue As Your Blood.” Drums build in to the same beat, then the bass. The tension is palpable until Hamilton starts to sing at :40. Coming off the 2010 album Lisbon, this song is a stark contrast to “Louisiana.” This is a song about rejection and the haze of melancholy that accompanies heartbreak. The unacknowledged simile in the title is of a sky that is “blue as your blood.” We’ve all had days when we crave a cold, cloudy day to reflect a sour mood since glorious weather just seems to make a mockery out of emotional pain. But here, Hamilton contemplates love lost while reclining on a brilliant sunny day against a juniper tree.
“Little House of Savages,” on Bows+Arrows
The Walkmen are masters of the suspenseful introduction. “Little House of Savages,” from the 2004 breakout album Bows + Arrows, opens with a lingering wail that quickly reveals the pounding drums and raging guitars that accompany Hamilton’s vocals throughout the rest of the song. “Somebody’s waiting for me at home” is the primary recurring lyrics here, set into contrast by “and somebody’s got a car outside, let’s take a ride.” The guitar, the drums, the bass, the vocals: all work together to evince the tension between returning to a safe place or setting out on an unfamiliar adventure.
I thought I’d write a list of my top-five breakup songs, because there haven’t been enough of those on this blog. Just kidding! There have been plenty, and I’ve enjoyed reading each one. But this list is a bit different: All five of these songs are about breaking up and feeling no regrets. They’re about not liking the other person anymore, and feeling totally motivated to move on with your life. I personally think this is the healthiest mix a person could use to get themselves through a breakup. Sure, wallow around in a cat hair-covered hoodie humming “Nothing Compares 2 U” if that’s what makes you feel better, but I’ve found that listening to anything but these five songs after a breakup can be emotionally dangerous. You might wear that hoodie for two weeks straight and forget to eat. So here you go:
Note: Three of these five songs happen to have great videos. I think that ordering Papa Johns and staying at home watching YouTube videos with your best friend for one to two days is a pretty therapeutic thing to do, breakup or no. Definitely check out the videos.
“Black and White” by The dB’s
I’d say this is the best dB’s song. Some say this is the only good dB’s song. It’s the first track on their 1981 debut album, Stands for Decibels. I was at a party once where a girl put on this record and then dramatically got up to change it after “Black and White” because the rest of the album isn’t as good. It felt like an in-joke. I thought it was kind of abstractly mean. To be fair, If I were the dB’s, I probably would have sequenced the album differently. There are some total jams buried on side two, by the way (check out “Bad Reputation,” “Big Brown Eyes,” and “I’m in Love”). Anyway, “Black and White” is an amazing song. It does all the right things — it even comes to a complete silent stop in the middle! I love it when songs do that. And here’s the chorus: “Well I guess I just don’t enjoy you anymore.” Yes! That’s how it feels. You’re breaking up for a reason, you know? If you still enjoyed each other, you wouldn’t be breaking up. Another line from the song “Oh, we are finished / As of a long time ago / As of a long time ago.” That’s important to remember, too: If you’re breaking up, it’s been a long time coming. Things didn’t just suddenly get bad. In fact, you’ve been finished as of a long time ago — now you’re finally cutting the cord that’s been frayed for so long, and doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it feel like an impossibly bouncy guitar line that makes you want to get up and dance and wake up with a stranger?
“Amplifier” by The dB’s*
Breaking up with a self-obsessed musician? Great! I have just the song for that: It’s called “Amplifier,” and it’s another song by the dB’s. It’s got a strong narrative structure and sort of a country twang, and it starts: “Danny went home and killed himself last night.” Why did Danny kill himself? Because his ex-girlfriend broke into his house and stole everything — except for his amplifier. “She took his car, she took his bike / She took everything she thought he liked / And what she couldn’t take, she found a way to break / She left his amplifier.” Why is that especially depressing? Let’s look to the bridge for an explanation: “An amplifier’s just wood and wire / And wire and wood won’t do any good / When your heart is blazing like a wildfire / And all you’ve got to show for it’s an / Amplifier.” The music video is terrific. It features guitarist Peter Holsapple as Danny, who stands on a ladder with a noose around his neck, and later plays guitar while sitting on the ladder with the noose around his neck. Then, the other guys in the band heft up a piano so he can play piano while sitting on the ladder with the noose around his neck. Watch it until the haunting image of the towering amplifier rising out of smoke burns into your retinas. That’s how your self-obsessed musician ex-boyfriend feels right now: completely empty and lonely and starting to realize that he should’ve valued you more than his dumb gear. Or, he might be stoned and listening to Spacemen 3 and not thinking about you at all. But surely he’s having this realization on some level.
“No Guilt” by The Waitresses
This is really the best breakup song there is. And here’s a video of a spirited young woman lip-syncing it with a puppet — you’re welcome. The chorus goes: “I’m sorry that I don’t feel awful / It wasn’t the end of the world / I’m sorry that I can’t be helpless / It wasn’t the end of the world.” And the verses catalogue all of the improvements the singer has made to her life following the breakup, which are funny, quirky, inspiring, and spot-on. I’m going to quote some highlights: “Every day at seven, I’ve been watching Walter / I’ve been reading more and looking up the hard words / I’ve met people who get me on the guest list / My parents said that they would help me pay for grad school.” Also: “I know someone who really met Belushi / I fixed the toilet so it doesn’t always run / I moved a chair over by the window / I feel better if my laundry’s done.” In fact, you could use this song as a checklist to chart your own personal improvements after a breakup. Definitely move a chair over by the window if you haven’t done that already. It’s worth noting that the song starts, “Needed new posters, so I bought them.” This comes up a lot in breakup songs. Redecorating is important, and tearing down posters is very satisfying.
“Sleeping Aides and Razorblades” by The Exploding Hearts
Oh man, The Exploding Hearts. If you haven’t heard Guitar Romantic, the album this is from, you are in for a delight. I wish I could be there with you while you listened to it for the first time. Take a seat in that sunny chair I told you to set up and put Guitar Romantic on the stereo, and you won’t care about anything, because this record is one of the best things ever. Power pop from 2003. The vocals are so snotty and so sweet at the same time — yellow and pink, like the album art. And it’s not that the singer isn’t sentimental — he is; the song starts: “Well I felt so bad when I heard that song / Ya know it’s been such a long long time / It’s a little off-beat and it ain’t in tune / Ya know it’s just like this heart of mine.” But he also has his mind made up about how he feels about this girl and her decision to end the relationship: “And if it hurt (it hurt) when you left (you left) / Well girl ya know you only hurt yourself.” That is the takeaway from this song. Yep, he’s totally over her: “I got new girls and I’m runnin’ around / The house doesn’t look the same / I hung new posters on my walls / And the dog don’t remember your name.” What did I tell you? Another song about new posters!
“Picture to Burn” by Taylor Swift
This music video starts with a little scene — you know, like Bruce Springsteen’s video for “I’m on Fire.” Taylor and her best friend are spying on her ex-boyfriend with binoculars in his driveway (…), and they see him and his new girlfriend pull up to his house. Taylor’s friend is holding the binoculars, and exclaims: “He’s got a girl with him… She’s driving the truck.” Taylor, shocked, grabs the binoculars to see for herself: “He let her drive the truck? He never let me drive the truck!” And then the drums kick in, and the guitar, and we switch to a shot of a radiant and windblown Taylor performing the song on stage. She makes a wise observation in the second line: “I realize you love yourself more than you could ever love me.” I wish I’d thought about relationships that way when I was Taylor Swift’s age. I think it’s important to consider, after a breakup, the capacity that your ex has for love in general. It feels bad when someone doesn’t love you very much, but it’s nice to realize that it’s because they aren’t really able to love anyone very much. Moving on, the chorus is a perfect no-regrets breakup chorus, and it’s even better with her Southern accent: “I hate that stupid old pickup truck / You never let me drive / You’re a redneck heartbreak / Who’s really bad at lying / So watch me strike a match / On all my wasted time / As far as I’m concerned / You’re just another picture to burn.” Yes, Taylor, it was all wasted time. And that pickup truck you always wanted to drive? It is stupid and old. From personal experience, I do not recommend actually burning pictures. If you do feel the need to burn pictures, at least do it in a well-ventilated area.
* I’m going to be really nerdy and add this fun fact: There’s a They Might Be Giants song called “Twisting” (another really terrific break up song) that seems like it was partially inspired by “Amplifier.” John sings: “She doesn’t have to have her dB’s record back now.” And then the verse about amps: “She’s not your satellite / She doesn’t miss you / So turn off your smoke machine / And Marshall stacks.” Just like the amp rising from smoke in the “Amplifier” video, where the ex-girlfriend smashes the guy’s records. Just sayin. That’s probably why he picked the dB’s as the name to drop there. There it is: My contribution to all the epic TMBG song interpretations on the Internet.
I attribute the development of my musical tastes to two sources: my dad’s CD collection, and all the boys I played with in elementary school. In 5th grade, while all the girls skipped off to chorus practice, I stayed behind with the boys, preparing our entry for the Baltimore Museum of Industry’s Maryland Engineering Challenge. (For the record, we submitted the “Sneeches Swing,” a Dr. Suess themed carnival swing, and significant portions of it disassembled in transit to the competition. This marked my first and last foray into engineering.) Over the weekends, our basement work sessions would be soundtracked by Sublime, Pearl Jam, Third Eye Blind, Led Zepplin, the Wallflowers, the Beatles, and No Doubt — a selection influenced by the almighty 99.1 HFS, whatever everyone’s older brothers were listening to, and whatever CDs could be surreptitiously stolen from our fathers’ collections.
I’m going to go ahead and make a bold statement: for a girl growing up in the heyday of boy bands, I had good taste. In high school, financed by income from babysitting and swim lessons, I finally weaned myself off of my family’s CDs. Almost all of my money went towards CDs. But in 2002 and 2003—the pre-internet era—It wasn’t easy to find new music if you weren’t allowed to go to shows. Luckily, we had a great alt-rock radio station, and I received a crisp Rolling Stone in the mail every other week.
So, as a 16-year-old, what songs was I utterly, incomprehensibly, manically in love with?
“Fell in Love With a Girl,” The White Stripes
White Blood Cells was released in 2001, but it didn’t get to me until almost a year later. I was in the car with my mom, driving home from the mall. I remember exactly where we were – crossing the Dulaney Valley Rd. bridge over the beltway – when this song came onto the radio (99.1, naturally). There it was, 1:50 minutes of furious, passionate, dirty, uncultured rock and roll. It was an epiphany wedged between the rap-metal of Limp Bizkit and Korn and the remnants of grunge.
The idea of bands toiling away in obscurity in the shell of a factory seems banal at this point: it’s an expected right of passage for buzz bands from Brooklyn. But in 2002, this seemed to me, at 16, to be a novel idea. The unrefined passions in “Fell in Love with a Girl” sounds like they were experienced, then recorded, in the same dilapidated workshop, and its lyrics were simple enough to learn after just a few listens. There’s been a lot of ink spilled on this song’s role in precipitating THE RETURN OF ROCK MUSIC, but its impact on my tastes for years to come has been undeniable. I am a sucker for garage rock: I would have never crossed paths with the Detroit Cobras, the Von Bondies, the Black Keys, the Paybacks, and countless others had it not been for “Fell in Love With a Girl.”
I still try to get this song played in bars. For some reason, it never works.
“Crazy in Love,” Beyoncé
I didn’t know I liked to dance until I heard this song at homecoming 2003. Flash-forward 10 years, and the second thing strangers learn about me is how much I dig a good dance party. Let’s not forget that this song is absurdly catchy: it’s so good that I did and continue to relinquish all my indie pretensions to accept that this is just a great song.
And, do we remember the music video? Were Beyoncé and Jay-Z even dating then?
“In My Life,” The Beatles
This song was difficult to choose for the purpose of this list: I only wanted to pick one Beatles song, but so many could easily fill this position. I listened to Rubber Soul and Revolver repeatedly throughout high school, and they remain two of my favorite albums. These songs were perfect masks for the silence of my parent’s house at 1 am when I was up late explicating form poetry for class.
“In My Life” captured the anxieties I felt during high school. I was acutely aware at 16, as I have been at many later points in my life, of the transience of happiness: for me, even the most joyous and radiant of days evoke pangs of depression. “In My Life,” elicits nostalgia for lost for friends and lovers. This song remains, in my opinion, quintessential night-time listening: best played while writing after midnight, windows open to the warm spring breeze, and eavesdropping on the couple chatting on the back steps of the house next door.
“Always On My Mind,” Phantom Planet
Alright, so we all know Phantom Planet made it big after their song “California” just so happened to be the theme song to The O.C. And yes, that’s how I first got to know their music. Play their album The Guest, and you’ll be greeted by the familiar refrain of “California.” But wait three minutes, and the next song that follows is “Always On My Mind.” It’s more danceable, that’s for sure, and it has some killer crescendos.
“Atomic,” Blondie
Some people saw Titanic at the movies three times. I saw Bend it Like Beckham three times. I owned the soundtrack. I had pictures of Jonathan Rhys Meyers on my wall. During the movie, the song plays as the girls travel to Hamburg for their soccer tournament. In this scene, “Atomic” captures the urgency and tensions arising from the love triangle brewing between Keira Knightly, Parminder Nagra, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Yes, this song appeared in one of my favorite movies. But what’s notable here is that it led me to raid my dad’s CD collection for a Blondie Best Of album. What would my life be like if I couldn’t sing all the words to “Call Me”? (I won’t pretend to know any of the words in “Heart of Glass,” those are just too difficult to discern).
