The East Coast is alive and well in San Francisco. At a birthday party Saturday night, I compared notes with my side of a long table and three of us went to high schools so close together we could’ve run into each other at the same McDonalds. It’s New York, it’s Boston, it’s the suburbs of DC—and for a couple months of the year, it’s the same conversation: Isn’t it so nice to be done with winter?
Disliking winter is simple: Who wants to slip on ice or endure those long months when it’s bitterly cold without the chance of snow? Who enjoys those days when it’s just never-enough layers and cutting wind, and one sad grey face after another?
Summer is it’s own strange beast though, my first love/hate relationship. I was not built for summer in Baltimore. I’m hilariously pale, perpetually dehydrated, and fairly certain that my blood is just sugar and perfume, since having upwards of 20 mosquito bites at a time is very normal for me.
I loathed the long summer months—but I loved the surreal, magic tinged bits. Pale green fireflies outside my bedroom window, crackling thunderstorms in June, the warm scent of honeysuckles in the heat, an olfactory memory that sums up the word “luscious.” Driving at dusk to the snowball stand, slurping crunchy ice and cherry chocolate syrup from a Styrofoam cup, bare feet perched on the dashboard. The sweet, heady boredom of suburban adolescence in the summer, all tied up in movie theatre air conditioning and cheap sunscreen, drinking Evan Williams in a field or backyard and wondering what to do next.
Are these memories a little far-fetched? Do they ignore relentless sticky days where the outdoors seem sweaty and downright hostile? Yes. But I recommend embracing the idyllic and silly side of things—I recommend embracing that side whenever you get the chance.
So this is a soundtrack for staying out late with nothing to do, for driving barefoot while a storm gathers, for navigating leafy side roads as the sun sets and the day’s sweat cools on your bare arms and legs.
Here’s the truth: So Hot Right Now posts are always hard for me to write. I play those 15 songs obsessively, plucking many of them out of thin air and promptly devouring them over the course of the last week of the month. That’s supposed to quell my wandering attention span, that batch of new songs. I line them up and play them on repeat, I pledge my endless listening devotion to them, for the next month at least. I slide one in next to the other, drag it down, rearrange tracks 7 and 15, then 12 and 3, then think about transitions. What sounds delicious? What bridge between two songs is so luscious and unexpected that it has to be honored? A few months ago Joshua slipped “Flowers in Your Hair” by The Lumineers right behind “Summer Breeze” by the Isley Brothers and that movement from one song to the next plucked an emotional chord. It sounded like the first buttery sunshine filled day of summer or the rosy cheeked heat of a new crush. It was perfect. It was the ideal transition. I wanted every transition on my lists to sound as good.
I am obsessive. There are all kinds of corners and knick knacks in my apartment that get fondly pinged by my passing fingertips several times a day. I often listen to a song more than ten times in a row. And that obsessiveness is sometimes fun, but when it comes to making mixes, it’s easy for it to get exhausting. One of my favorite songs last year was “Closer” by Tegan and Sarah. It’s almost unbearable to listen to now because I listened to it so many times. At this point it sounds like construction or a loud clock—that low level jarring kind of noise that pinches your nerves. I wear out so many great songs, I have to shelve them and come back to them months later, if ever (Seriously, after waiting for the new Tegan and Sara album for months, it’s disappointing to have to skip the excellent kick off that is “Closer” every time I listen to it). So Hot Right Now mixes are lists of songs I’ve worn down to the bone. I post them here, and I run as far away from them as I can.
The past week of this brand new month has been full of big emotions, good and bad. I kept meaning to post my original list, but it seemed like it expired on February 1st. I didn’t want to hear all the stuff I’d listened to last month. I wanted the comfort of songs that I loved, songs I could never get tired of. I wanted Tom Petty and Etta James and Liz Phair. I wanted slightly less familiar songs from albums I play often, songs like “Where I’m Waking” by Slow Club and “Again Today” by The Feelies. I wanted the relief of new songs that I’m still charmed with, like “Young Adult Friction” by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and “Golden Haze” by Wild Nothing. I didn’t want to sort them out because they sounded so perfect and right just where they were, all in a row, where I wanted them to be when I needed to find them.
In case you were curious, and because it was a very good mix, that mix I made and couldn’t listen to for another second, here’s my original So Hot Right Now for February. I hope you enjoy them both—let me know what you’re listening to this month in the comments.
I had a new-agey pop-therapist type friend who used to always ask me, mid-rant, “But Claire, where does the anger go? Where does it go?” She wanted me to say something about chakras, or maybe my kidneys. She was hoping I would embrace veganism, meditation, deep-belly breathing. And that’s all fine. That’s all dandy, really.
But honestly, if you want to know where the anger goes, I’ll tell you: It goes right in my speakers.
“Cherry Bomb,” by The Runaways*
I’m pretty soft-spoken. It’s a drag. People periodically think it’s okay to treat me poorly because the volume lever on my voice goes more to 7 than 11. If I wrote a Top 5 Minor Infractions That Cause Me Searing Anger list, the old “I will now talk and behave like your quiet voice is a license to walk all over you” routine would be firmly planted at the top. (Word to the wise: It is possible to say “Hey this place is crazy loud, can you repeat that?” instead of screeching “Whaaaaat! Ughhhh I can’t heaaaaar youuuuu” while rolling your eyes.)
This happens less as I get older and much, much less nice about it. People also add this bizarre back story that paints me as some kind of pushover, uptight innocent. You want to know the real story? I CAN’T TALK ANY LOUDER. It is as much something I can control as the size of my hands or the color of my eyes. When screeching and judgey nonsense gets me fired up, I need to blast some vintage Runaways. I need to hear “Hello world/I’m your wild girl” followed by the gleeful shouted chorus of “CHERRY BOMB!” Cherie Currie barks and wails, and Joan Jett looks like the bad girl whose reckless life you might like to steal for a couple hours. It gives me a reinfusion of lost swagger, and makes me seriously consider dying my hair red again and buying a leather jacket.**
“Payback,” by James Brown
Sometimes, cooling off isn’t enough. Throwing a punch at a pillow, sitting fuming on the couch with a beer and a loop of 30 Rock episodes is a rage-bandage that lacks satisfaction. When you need to feed a good rage fantasy, elaborate movie style, James Brown is your man, and “Payback” is the perfect movie montage soundtrack. This is robbing a crooked casino in a catsuit music, this is what plays at that point in the movie when your giant wingbacked leather chair swings around and the audience finds out you were the badass orchestrating these righteous hijinks the whole time. It also works for really stylized kung fu movie fight sequences that allow you to throw imaginary roundhouse kicks at anyone who’s incurred your fury.
“Refugee,” by Tom Petty
“Refugee” is a perfect balm for a secret universal anger experience: Imaginary fights. I’m talking about those times when you’re taking a walk, or driving to work, and suddenly you’re in the throes of a fantasy argument with any variety of characters from your life, hashing it out over slights big and small, some of them long forgotten but somehow stored in some dank anger cavern in your memory. This time you stand up for yourself, or you stand up for yourself better—you have the cutting retorts, you get louder, you think of all that stuff you should’ve said then and would’ve if you hadn’t been deep in the actual argument fog. Instead of blowing all that adrenaline on a drawn out internal argument with a friend you haven’t talked to in five years, listen to Tom Petty. “Somewhere, somehow somebody/ Must have kicked you around some/ Tell me why you wanna lay there/ And revel in your abandon” and “Everybody’s had to fight to be free/ You see you don’t have to live like a refugee” are the perfect antidotes to enraged wallowing. Get empowered, get over past slights, play “Refugee” way too loud, and enjoy your drive to work for once.
“You Oughtta Know,” by Alanis Morisette
Alanis Morisette’s voice is raw and unflinching. She’s loud! She’s angry! She doesn’t suffer fools! Take that, Dave Coullier. This is not only a deeply cathartic anger song, but also a song that helps you build up necessary anger when you’re on the fence. Still making excuses for a terrible ex? Still turning some variety of blame inwards instead of towards the hallowed person who might deserve it? Let Alanis be your guide.
“Kiss Off,” by the Violent Femmes
I needed a tense song, because I was tense and growing tenser. It was the summer after college. Every day I was Metro-ing into DC from College Park in the same polyester interview dress, which was usually still damp from being washed in the sink the night before. And if a laundry miracle occurred and it was bone dry, it stayed that way for about a second in the thick, 90 degree humidity. My lease was running out, and so was my money. My car sat in the garage without gas and made pathetic mewling noises when I tried to drive it (“Feeed meee”). I ran from office to office and rattled off reasons I was employable, then went home sweaty and hungry, pretty sure this was another office whose waiting room I would enjoy, rather than their employment. I needed a tense, pounding heartbeat of a song to blast in my ears, to get me fired up enough to do it all again the next morning. I blasted this song a couple times a day. It was tense and taut, the guitar was plucked like a nerve and “They’ll hurt me bad/But I don’t mind/They’ll hurt me bad/They do it all the time” was the defiantly pissed off sentiment I needed to hear.
*Fun fact: If you listen to “Cherry Bomb” by looking up “Cherry Bomb” on Spotify, John Mellencamp’s “Cherry Bomb” shows up next. Worst musical transition ever.
**Is it just me, or does Cherie Currie look like Amy Poehler doing a Cherie Currie impression in that picture?
“I forgot how quickly I start narrating stuff out loud to myself when left to my own devices.” –Message to a friend about my month in Melbourne
The other night I walked around for hours, too afraid to listen to my iPod based on my current dreamy state and nervousness about not looking the right way when I looked both ways. I sang songs in my head, like I always do, except maybe at a more fevered pace. It was cold and I was hungry. I wondered, could a night have a Top 5 list? As I walked and shopped, ate and remembered, I came up with mine. Here’s what happened the other night, and what I was singing in my head.
“For the Young Sophisticate” by Frank Zappa
It was raining the first time I realized I had missed Rosh Hashanah. I slept until 1:30pm that day, a blessing when you work until 4:00am, but even all those precious zzs couldn’t help me shake the tired fog that surrounded me. That level of exhaustion veers in two directions: magical or depressing, but the depression is particular. It’s not real feelings and chemicals, even if you think it is. It’s little kid sadness—you’re so tired, you could cry over anything. A stubbed toe is a tragedy, a missed TV show is a reason to call it quits and crawl back into bed. As for the magical—well, sometimes you’re sitting at brunch and you wonder if you’re awake or dreaming. Rain drops twinkle and wink. You wonder if you thought about it really hard, if maybe you could fly.
It was raining and I was walking to my third convenience store, trying to find the perfect Cadburys bar or a flavor of Tim Tams I hadn’t tried yet. I remembered it was Rosh Hashanah. No apples, no honey, no family dinner. I burst into tears. I conjured the song that had been looping through my mind for days. “Dear Heart, Dear Heart, tell me tell me what’s the reason,” I hummed. I turned it into a Zappa mash-up, I imagined his voice saying “Is that a REAL poncho or a SEARS poncho?” I smiled.
“Pablo Picasso,” Jonathan Richman
I went to a souvlaki joint. I ordered a souvlaki, and while I waited, I killed a cockroach on my table with a handful of receipts I’d found in my purse. I wondered why people always ask me twice if I want chili sauce. Did I stutter? I read “Love Goes to the Building on Fire” and I thought about Jonathan Richman. What does his music sound like now? Is he good live? I tried to figure out what my Top 5 Jonathan Richman songs are, but I got distracted by the phantom cockroaches that I kept imagining scuttling across the Formica.
“Dry the Rain,” The Beta Band
High Fidelity showed up on TV a few hours before I left the house. I caught it a minute before it started. It was a Rosh Hashanah miracle. It wasn’t the first time that I felt like Rob Gordon knew I was feeling down, and had arrived to pull me out of a funk, or give me permission to embrace it. And what better song to walk through the rain, in need of cheer and food and a good soundtrack, then the Beta Band’s “Dry the Rain”? Yes, I will be alright. You’re right, Rob Gordon, you’re right as usual.
“Stupid Thing” and “Freeway” by Aimee Mann
I keep coming home and listening to Joni Mitchell. I keep resting my forehead against the cool, calm of tried and true singer songwriters. Joni Mitchell, Aimee Mann, Carole King. I play a little Etta James as the day winds down, I play a little Joni Mitchell during my first late night espresso. I play Carole King when it’s raining really hard, but I only did that once because she kind of bores me, and listening to “Far Away” started to seem downright maudlin. And I listen to an entire Aimee Mann album every night, so the low buzz in my head when I’m not thinking is replaced for days by “Freeway” and “Stupid Thing.” Musical comfort food, Aimee Mann.
“Listen to Her Heart,” by Tom Petty
My friend Amy Berkowitz did a reading from her new book “Listen to Her Heart” a few months ago. There was a line in one of the poems about going to the drugstore when you’re lonely, buying hair ties. I’ve done that a hundred times. I love moments like that in poetry—when you see a bit of yourself that’s always been there, but you’ve never noticed. When I went to the pharmacy in Melbourne the other day, hair ties cost double. No thoughtless buying allowed when they cost double.
My boyfriend was working late, and every day I tried to bring him a treat. I went treat shopping after souvlaki. I flicked through racks of Tim Tams, I dawdled in a myriad of brightly colored candy aisles. At the grocery store, I bought a chocolate bar with raspberry jelly bean bits and honey comb laced throughout. It reminded me of the kind of candy bar a child would make, the first experiment that would’ve come out of Willy Wonka’s factory after Charlie took over. “All sweets together all at once!” I ate half of it on the way home.
Claire’s List: If we named these lists, I would call this one “Napkin Songs” or “Margin Songs,” since they lived on napkins and in margins, scribbled over the course of several months. In a weird experiment, I listened to them in order, and they mostly worked as a playlist, with a few minor alterations.
When I was eighteen years old, I lived in a teeny tiny town in the middle of nowhere. I had my heart broken, wrote terrible short stories, and ate entirely too much chicken pot pie.
I used to smoke cigarettes. Not a lot, but for two years in college I smelled like an ashtray. I know now that smoking is terrible because I’ve taken the Real Age quiz about a dozen times and it took years to make my two-year smoking jaunt not impact my score. I knew smoking was terrible then too, but I didn’t have this handy quiz and I was very interested in looking cool. I usually didn’t.
I used to write poems. A lot, for most of my life. Poetry landed me at my first college. My love, and later abandonment, of poetry had a minimal impact on my Real Age score. Poems never made me very cool and I loved them terribly.
When I first started writing this post, I didn’t think poem-writing and cigarette-smoking would make an appearance. But there they were, two long ago abandoned activities that were huge parts of my identity at age eighteen.
My message to eighteen year olds? Don’t smoke. Maybe write poems.
“I Need Your Love So Bad,” by Little Willie John
It was late Fall, and my first college relationship was due to unravel. Every missed call was a tragedy. Every reunion was a ready-made poem, delivered raccoon-eyed and exhausted at Monday’s workshop. Every time he visited my dorm, a rarity, the song flipped and Little Willie John crooned, all due to the eery magic of my ever-shuffling iTunes.
“iTunes: It’s the soundtrack of your life,” I joked to my friend Elise. Wiser than I, and less inclined to cover all sins with unclever quips, she replied “How much longer are you going to do this?” I’m sure I said it was over. And it was, over and over and over, until it was over for good. Contrary to what I’d believed for that first semester, I didn’t need his love so bad. I just needed the trifecta of Freshman year breakup remedies: best friends, Boones Farm wine, and a box of red hair dye.
“Ms. Fat Booty,” by Mos Def
We went to parties at a big house off campus. The music was current and loud, lousy with bass. Everyone showed up too drunk and left more so. I couldn’t go there without running into someone I didn’t want to see, or a host of someones I didn’t want to see. This wasn’t unique—it was a place to see people you didn’t like, and acquire more of them. (It’s a pleasure to be an adult, sometimes. An off night at a bar now can render it obsolete. When you’re underage, you get stuck in the same social loop, unable to break free until you find a new town or convincing fake ID.)
Everyone you wanted to know was playing this Mos Def album that fall. Every dorm room, every party, you could hear the same few Aretha Franklin laced bars. I devoured this song, I let it push the Allman Brothers and the Garden State soundtrack into musical purgatory. I danced to it at that big house once, a few months before we were released back to our hometowns for the summer, where I would decide not to return to campus. It was the last blowout night I can remember, one that was purely fun and silly, full of friends and good music.
“New Slang,” by The Shins
I was hopped up on black coffee, which I’d suddenly started drinking by the gallon, when I landed on the front steps of my poetry professor’s office. He was a crusty cartoon of a man who liked to tell us “There are two things worth living for: Poetry and fast women.” We were meeting about my chapbook, the final project for the Senior Poetry workshop I was taking as a freshman. My poems had done well in workshops, and the professor kept sending me to classes to audit and lectures to attend on the side. This all felt like a giant vote of confidence, one that I was in desperate need of after a rough year. The coffee and confidence made me prolific to the point of literary mania. I showed up to the meeting caffeinated and hopeful with a head full of poems, their rough shapes hovering behind my eyebrows.
I got to his office and took a seat. He flipped through the pages of my chapbook, gesturing at passages, praising and editing different bits out loud. I thought it was going well. He closed the book.
“What do you want to do with your life, Ms. Moshenberg?”
“This,” I said, gesturing towards my chapbook. “I want to be a poet.”
“This isn’t for everyone. And dear, it isn’t for you.” He patted my knee.
Is it possible that when I left it started raining, as I tried to get rid of my shaky hands, my watery eyes? Could it have rained that whole year? Memories are funny. I went home and listened to The Shins. I stopped writing poetry long ago.
“Ruthless,” by Something Corporate
Before I escaped that teeny tiny town and teeny tiny school for good, I escaped for a few stolen hours with a few escape-loving friends. We ditched campus to take a chilly, mid-March walk on the deserted Ocean City boardwalk. We drank icy beers and played pool with locals at a dive bar where we convinced the bartender we were a couple of harebrained PhD candidates who’d left our IDs at home. We crisscrossed the Bay Bridge so many times it’s impossible to count. And when we did we played this song because it made us feel young and hopeful. It shouldn’t be hard at 18 to feel young and hopeful, but our heads were full of unearned bitterness and aged wisdom. It made us sigh and complain, it made our necks crack and joints creak. I was much older at 18 than I am now.
“You Don’t Know How It Feels,” by Tom Petty
At a diner over winter break, my dad mentioned my much too frequent use of this chorus as an away message and said something along the lines of “We get it. You’re trying to rebel. Noted.”
I was trying, and Tom Petty was helping as much as he could. I played this song so I could talk about listening to this song, so I could type the lyrics into my away message like a nod at some clandestine adventure, so I could slip the lyrics into my reference laden short stories, where apropos of nothing, characters quoted everyone from Tom Petty to e.e. cummings. (Rahnia, my friend and sometimes editor, once wrote in the margin of one such story “No one on earth has ever said the moon looks like an angry, rattling piece of candy. No one.”)
Was I a misunderstood rebel poet? Absolutely not. I was a homesick kid, not even that far from home, who smoked menthol cigarettes because she didn’t know what else to buy and preferred the quiet front steps camaraderie of being a smoker over the terrifying prospect of talking to strangers at parties. I thought I was on a big adventure, when really I was just eighteen.
