someone to feel normal around–songs for the search

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It’s weird hanging out with girls. Daniel was around ever since I was little, and other girls… I dunno. But being around Lonnie is, like, instantly just right. I gave her the grand Psycho House tour, and took my revenge on Super Nintendo, and it was like, I dunno, I finally found someone I feel normal around.

I drove her home and she gave me this tape and said “you have GOT to listen to this.” I haven’t stopped playing it since.

–from Sam’s journal in Gone Home

Mixtapes keep coming up around me lately, which has me thinking about the role they played in my life in the 90s. I remember songs that were on the mixtapes my high school girlfriend gave me as if they were a part of her. “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton especially. And how for me, those tapes sometimes seemed to be a way to express the things I didn’t know of any other way to express.

Music hasn’t lost any of its power to become powerfully, even painfully associated with specific people, places, and moments in my life. Songs sometimes get stuck inside me, not just stuck in my head but stuck in my heart. Sometimes selecting and organizing them onto a tape (a far more involved process than making the mix CDs that became the norm a few years later) and giving that tape to a person was a way of processing my feelings, of giving them a shape, not unlike I often give events from my life shape by writing about them here, which is something I sometimes need to do. By getting them on the page, I get them out of me, in a way; I free myself from them so that I can think and feel about other things.

Usually mixtapes were constructed around my thoughts or feelings about a specific person, whether that person was just a friend I wanted to connect with over music or someone to whom I wanted to express something more layered and intricate. The notion of making a mixtape for myself feels redundant. I’m giving my life a soundtrack every day, and parts of that soundtrack surface here, or in my Twitter feed. But what with all the talk of mixtapes lately, I feel drawn to the idea of throwing together a small collection of songs–an EP, not an LP–as a partial soundtrack for the main storyline in my life right now, for the things I want to let go of and the things I want to hold onto and the things I want to find.

bloc party - halo

I ask you for the time, but I am asking for so much more
A moth to your light bulb, you made my heart beat faster

Maybe we’re looking for the same thing
Maybe you’re the one who will complete me

Sometimes I think I would float away
If this sadness didn’t weigh me down

two songs of love and renewal by eels

Songs about looking forward. Songs about a present that is better than the past. I love their subdued sound. It makes them songs that seem realistic, songs that I can believe in and find hope in. Someday this will be the past. I’d make a safe bet we’re gonna get whatever we need.

You don’t have a clue
What it is like to be next to you
I’m here to tell you
That it is good
That it is true

Birds singing a song
Old paint is peeling
This is that fresh
That fresh feeling

Try
Try to forget what’s in the past
Tomorrow is here

I like your toothy smile,
it never fails to beguile.
Whichever way the wind is blowing
I like the way this is going.

I like the color of your hair,
I think we make a handsome pair.
I can only see my love growing
I like the way this is going

I like to watch TV with you,
there’s really nothing i would rather do.
Then maybe we can go to bed,
get up and do it all again.

I like the way your pants fit,
how you stand and how you sit,
whatever seeds that you’re sowing,
I like the way this is going.

I don’t care about the past,
none of it was made to last,
it’s not who you’ve known,
but who you’re knowing,

I like the way this is going
I like the way this is going.

jens lekman - another sweet summer’s night on hammer hill

The prices we’ve paid for being who we are, and how we can’t just be bitter about it all the time.

I had a friend, a girl who looked sort of like a guy
I can’t forget her dark painful eyes
When they burned her with a cigarette lighter.
When the cops came, they had to untie her.
Another girl was free to grow up a cynical writer.

But it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty,
An open window, someone’s playing Tutti Frutti
It’s a sweet summer’s night on Hammer Hill

joseph arthur - speed of light

Feeling something is better than feeling nothing. Wanting something is better than wanting nothing.

And if you hate your life
Just remember that there used to be a time
When we could not feel a thing

In my heart is a hunger 
That I will never give away

And, of course, always…

talking heads - this must be the place

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