my life in songs

Looking back at what songs define where I was or how – the xx still makes me feel lonely and quiet and drinking cider on the bus and maybe a little bit of softly-lit surface-level multi-heartbroken, too.  There’a a Butch Cassidy remix of a Band of Horses song that I listened to on repeat then – straightening my hair and spending my Saturday nights with an apple by myself in a rose-themed bath.

There’s a song I’m sure was only played to J. and I in Australia – it’s a dance song and you all know it but I’m perfectly sure – just perfectly, perfectly sure – that she and I are the only ones that have ever heard it, too.  It lit up nights out and days in and bus rides.  Those days were filled with Ben Howard’s Old Pine, too, a song that could make anyone feel little bigger and a little smaller inside at the same time.

There was a summer of Nicki Minaj – she makes me think of a boy I thought of then.  I spent that (distant, now) summer on my bike (like always, I guess) with Nicki or else spinning around secretly with someone I’d bounced right into, right off of meaning and into a pair of open arms.

The next summer was driven entirely by that song by Of Monsters and Men.  You know the one I’m talking about – your summer was driven by it too.  I lived that summer inside my skull and forgot to turn on the lights the entire time.  This song made me cry.  What didn’t?

Last year’s cold days in the library I floated on a foggy sea of Alt-J.  How could I listen to anything else?  I was alone again but it was okay this time – drifting from a summer of jagged unexpectancies and a sort of choking sadness into a year of ambivalent okayness. 

I’m kind of still there and it’s a little bit astonishing to me, sometimes, to realize that I’m as steady as a prairie road.  I’m surprised to see my body is ok with how I’m treating it in all but the most superficial manner.  Obviously, I listened to nothing but Major Lazer for months.  How could someone so oddly floatitioned listen to anything else, you know?