a Sea of Songs

Screenshots of our lives in music. Collecting the songs in our lives and the stories around them. A compan­ion to One Week // One Band, made by @hjasnoch & friends. Also find us on Instagram and submit your own.

[aseaofsongs]

It’s been a sea of summers, folks. First we had the #hotgirlsummer. Of course we had the #whiteclawsummer. Even notorious not #hotgirls Vampire Weekend tried their hand at the #songofthesummer. But today I must be the bearer of bad news. #hotgirlsemester is hereby postponed. The only thing that matters now is #cruelsummer.

You may have heard that last week Taylor Swift released her seventh album. Lover is an eighteen-track, full bear-hug embrace of pop music. Track 2, “Cruel Summer”, is the best pure pop song she’s written in a career that has already included 81 Billboard Top 100 hits, including 24 Top 10 hits, including 5 #1 hits… I could go on.

When your debut album includes “Tim McGraw” and “Our Song,” and your sophomore album has “White Horse,” its hard to believe there’s any room to grow. But somehow there was. What’s more mind blowing than the longevity of Taylor’s historic run is that she continues to switch her style up, bending the space-time continuum of the pop music landscape around what now must be considered the century’s best song catalog.

Look at her competition. Modern country has fully embraced the EDM/pop synthesis that she perfected on Red. And from the other side, hip-hop is inching every closer to country. But Taylor’s already two steps ahead, effortlessly dominating the Charli XCX/Carley Rae Jepsen/Robyn space. Watch out Iron Maiden — Taylor just might release a thrash metal double album opus. (Most importantly, this song achieves a major breakthrough for fans of  “Atlantic City,” “With A Little Help From My Friends,” “Paranoid Android,” and the entire Track 2 Partisan community. We may be few but we are growing.)

Finally, a word on the title. In 2012, Kanye West’s record label G.O.O.D. Music released a compilation album entitled Cruel Summer. Is this song a dig at Kanye? I don’t know. But it’s simply impossible that Taylor, whose intentionality as a pop star is surpassed only by Beyonce’s, accidentally swiped Ye’s title.

“Am I shooting from the hip?,” Taylor Swift asked GQ magazine in 2015.“Would any of this have happened if I was… You can be accidentally successful for three or four years. Accidents happen. But careers take hard work.” You’re officially on notice, Mr. West. Jesus is King better be hot.

[aseaofsongs]

With a cursory glance, it’s easy to diminish “Who” as just Another Synthpop Song, a generic redundancy crafted in MUNA’s comfort zone. 

But there’s a honed poignancy to the track found even in the minutia despite its lyrical clichés (“I thought your heart was stone,” “You sounded clear as a crystal”). The vulnerability in Gavin’s quavering voice during the first chorus as the production leaves her to fend off her emotions alone, the trepidation in the echoing synth kick like the beat of a heart waiting to be broken all over again, the resignation in the bridge when she smiles through the pain and croons, “It was like a dream to hear/ Such a sweet melody/ But I/ Knew it was not for me” – it’s all sewn together to create a bittersweet tapestry of yearning.

At the same time though, “Who” isn’t your usual break-up song carbon-copied from the works of Adele or Sam Smith. Beyond the stereotypical emotions of resentment and melancholy, MUNA’s lyrics are able to encapsulate the complexities of love, the need to bleed ourselves dry before we can truly achieve peace in the painful process we call closure:

“Every note was a lump in my throat/ But I knew I had to hear it all.”

And perhaps that’s the purpose of the second lead single from the band’s sophomore album Saves the World: That if we’re “committed to saving [ourselves]” and “becoming [our] own heroes,” as they’ve said in their Spotify bio, we must hurt ourselves in turning the page so that we can find even more beauty in the next chapter.

- Austin Nguyen

[aseaofsongs]

My ears immediately perked up when E-girls’ “Pain, Pain” started to play while I was mindlessly looking at school supplies. 

The only place I’d ever hear the J-pop single was from my iPhone hooked up to the car stereo via my AUX cord, but now the song was playing in a public setting. At a rather mundane place like a dollar store too? What kind of a once-in-a-lifetime moment could this be?

It took me a bit to remember that wait, no, I’m at a 100-yen shop in Japan: of course they would be playing “Pain, Pain” here. Backed by Avex Trax, one of the biggest record companies in Japan, E-girls is one of the most visible girl groups in the country’s mainstream. Musically interesting it may be, “Pain, Pain” in Japan is pop in the banal way that pop can be when a record or group reaches a certain strata of popularity: it becomes so well known, it becomes commonplace fixtures in everyday life.

A lot of my fascinations during my vacation perhaps aren’t too extraordinary to a local’s perspective. The morning news, supermarkets and pop songs: you have to almost actively try to escape them if you live in Japan. Hearing “Pain, Pain” as, essentially, a tourist may have felt incredible at the moment, but would it feel as precious if I lived there? What am I still taking for granted during my mundane days here in the U.S.?

– @sneek-m

[aseaofsongs]

“Cryptograms” is brittle and unsure of itself; “introverted,” in the words of its chief creator. 

It was cold, but not mercilessly so, during the weeks when it really inserted itself into my brain, coiling around my constantly-frazzled nerves and accompanying me during many of my solitary, mechanical walks through the city.

When I finally saw Deerhunter live, you suddenly appeared shortly before their set, repeatedly protesting, and eventually acquiescing to, my suggestion that you take the spot in the crowd in front of me, my being taller and all. They opened with “Cryptograms” that night, Lockett Pundt’s leads an overwhelming, thrilling cascade, Bradford Cox’s claustrophobic lyrics inverted—12 years having passed since the song was recorded—to fling doors wide open.

I at one point—hands firmly, anxiously stuck in my pockets as is my standard concert pose—realized that I had lost track of my keys. Hoping they were in the pocket of my coat, I kept reaching awkwardly, and in vain, into the bag at my feet to find them. I mean, who the fuck does something like that?

It wasn’t enough to bother anyone necessarily, but you mistook my flailing for restlessness, insisting, every time you looked back at me, that I reclaim my old spot.

You told me later that you were just making sure that I was still there behind you.

Where at first I heard only the anxiety of “Cryptograms,” and later its promises, now I hear both. I’ve never known how to choose between the two, but I’ll always appreciate that—whenever you turned back to me and smiled—the anxiety seemed so damn insignificant and the scope of the promises so incredibly vast.

— Jackson (on Twitter)  

[aseaofsongs]

I’ve often had difficulty accepting the ridiculous in art. I’m not sure why, though I imagine it’s rooted in a repressed sense that all is frivolous, life having no meaning but itself. 

My tastes are perhaps a reaction to this reality, a flight away from the knowledge that our sorrow is as weightless as our joy. Ill-founded as it may be, this inclination is present, and I turn away from a lot of what feels light-hearted. Better to focus on bigger issues, to question my vices, confess my desires.

‘Fly Boy Blue/Lunette’ is thus a provocation. An amalgam of divergent ideas, the song is hard to describe; it seems like two sketches merged into one, a love song to a life well lived appended to a comic narrative. This strikes me as something I’d dislike, fearing the seemingly inessential would undercut the allegedly important. But the dichotomy acts like dynamic contrast, the juxtaposition with the surrealist stomp amplifying the impact of the near-existential questioning. Life encompasses both levity and gravity, and they’re inextricably linked. Questions of why we drink, why we smoke, how to describe our love, would mean little outside the context of real life. 

To answer these queries, plenty can be said of the whiskey, wine, and cigarettes; our vices give us joy and grant us vigor. The compulsion to these things constitutes a desire to live an effervescent life to the fullest. The final question is harder, because there are no sufficient words for love, the trite and clichéd often the closest we get. If it means anything outside the lines of a poem, perhaps it’s just the feeling provoked by the seconds we spend together, anecdotes we enact, and vices we share.

At some point, I’ll need to give in to the frivolous. Time ticks away from us, whatever we might do; these precious hours that are our lives and loves are hopelessly fleeting. What better way to pass the time than a smoke, a drink, a love song like a prayer? I’d give up eternity for enough well-lived moments.

– Ben Joyner ( Twitter | Instagram )

[aseaofsongs]

The year I started living alone, I was desperate for love and attention, but I hadn’t quite worked out which one was which. 

Back then I always thought it was my fault, the way that men acted around me— comments at first mistaken for protective affection and later exposed as possessive cruelty. I cut my hair and kept it short because a man on the street leered and told me it made me beautiful. I learned to read quickly because a boy I wanted to impress made fun of how long it took me to reach the end of a page. I was too self-serious, so I became a loud laugher, a funny girl. I wanted to be cool, so I let my first love cheat on me, and acted like I was in on the joke (The joke, it turns out, was on me).

The year I moved to London I broke up with a boy I thought I would marry, and then another boy I didn’t think much about, in the end. I still didn’t know what love looked like, and I was worried that I had given up the only two chances I thought I had at it. I was twenty one and convinced my life was about to end, and I had thrown away all of my chances. So when I first heard that acknowledgment: “I understand how a girl gets bored, too old to play and too young to mess around”, I started crying in my bedroom. I felt fifteen again, listening to a song a thousand times and thinking I might be the only person who really understood it. I had taught myself about destruction. I had lived in a world with my doors wide open, and I had taught myself to close them, having invited the wrong people in.

I keep my doors closed now, but they are french doors, with big windows so I can see outside in case I get another chance at love, in case I get another chance at attention. I still haven’t really learned to tell the difference. But listening to this song, filling my room with guitars and drums like a teenager finding her feet, I don’t feel guilty for it.

- Lia

[aseaofsongs]

It started out as a joke, recognizing that the candidate I was voting for, the only candidate I could vote for, has the same name as the one in the song. 

But still, the song is more than that. It’s probably the ABBA song that Mamma Mia did the most injustice to, reverting it back to a Latino lover romance and taking out all the guerrilla. By the time this is posted, fascism may have already won in Brazil. I’m gonna listen to this song until then, so I can try to keep some balance between fatalism and hope and keep myself sane. I voted against fascism today, and if I have to to the same again… you know how it goes.

[aseaofsongs]

I can’t really explain why Muse are my favourite band and why I’m 99% sure they will always be. 

I’d like to keep a list of reasons, and to check it from time to time to see if anything changed. If they failed to have me in awe at their ambition, their urge to go further, to do more and more until every idea has been thrown at everyone willing to keep up with their pace; to make me laugh (oh, how I laughed when I first listened to »I Belong To You«, and the clarinet solo came after the operatic intermezzo, icing on an already over-the-top cake), to make me feel like I’m home, every single time I’m at a concert.

Reapers represents reason #4 I can come up with off the top of my head: they can read my mind. They just know what’s going on inside my head and they release new music accordingly. They did in 2009, by calling an album The Resistance when I needed to resist the most. They did in 2012, with an album built around the concept that in an isolated system, entropy can only increase – me being the system, entropy being a nervous meltdown in the making.

They did in 2015, with this song. “Home, it’s becoming a killing field, there’s a crosshair locked on my heart.” 2015 had a body count, to put it in a pertinent war jargon, and I was constantly afraid it would have got higher, and it would have involved me or my family (again) as well. It didn’t, but still. It was a tough year, and Matthew Bellamy found a way to put what I feared the most in words.

As the Drones era is fading into the new album’s, I wanted to pay homage to it. And to celebrate what’s to come. Let’s make that list even longer, guys.

— Maria Lucia ( Instagram | Tumblr ) 

[aseaofsongs]

The Hellion/Electric Eye

Okay, this is a twofer because of how I first heard it. Let me set the scene: I have barely listened to metal in my life, and I am loading up the game Brütal Legend for the first time. When I hit the menu screen, I hear this, and it is a… shining moment, more or less.

I have never heard Rob Halford before, and in the next few weeks leading up to my leg surgery I find myself obsessed.

Sci-fi imagery, a fast almost grand sound that (in an odd way) makes me think of Queen, and it settles in my ribcage like the beating of a heart.

Post-surgery?

Oh, god help me, after crying to a nurse while still flushing lingering meds from my system, I admit to wanting to be him. I want to be a man, goddamnit, and stop lying to myself any more. I miss my combat boots I haven’t worn in over a year, I miss my first leather jacket that ripped beyond repair.

I watch the live concert video of this they have on their channel and, I won’t lie, I dream of strutting onto a stage like that someday with a guitar in hand rather than a mic. I listen to every album of theirs I can buy while recovering at home, and find new friends in the form of a Discord server who understand this interest in a way no one else in my life does.

Whenever this comes on, I’m not a body shaped wrong or oversized clothing. I am shining, I am present, I cannot be ignored.

‘I’m made of metal/ My circuits gleam/ I am perpetual/ I keep my country clean’

The way he draws out the word “clean” kills me, I steal the way he punches the air from the live video, and for a little while I can be someone else who struts like he owns the world, with a grin and a gesture to command an audience.

Someday I’ll have a studded vest, or another leather jacket, and the backpatch will be the Hellion screaming for vengeance. Screaming the same way I was, the same way I am right now, because nothing can stop me unless I let it.

- Nathan G

[aseaofsongs]

I am 18, and I am walking along a sidewalk to the house of a boy I have a giant, messy, uncontrollable crush on. 

My iPod is playing Tegan and Sara’s “Back in Your Head” on repeat, as it has for the two solid months since that album came out. The propulsive energy of the song and the slightly staccato delivery of the lines (built—a wall—of books—between us in our bed) plays out in my pounding heart, sweaty armpits, the imperfectly applied eyeliner I fussed over.

Over a decade later, I can see that I didn’t really like the boy, at least not in the sense that I desired that I as a separate being wanted to be near him. I wanted to be the boy, I wanted to inhabit, not make out. I thought he was cute, sure, but more importantly for me, then, I wanted to move easily through the world like he did, to talk confidently about my passions like him, to lean casually against walls and counters at parties like him. 

I was drawn over and over to men who seemed to be confident in the way I wanted to be, as though through proximity I could absorb their way of being in the world. Instead, I was always (am still) someone who “built a wall of books” in her bed, who “jerk[ed] away from holding hands with you,” who stood very straight clutching a bottle of beer at the party until it nearly sliped from my sweaty teenage (adult) hand.

I still want, as in the song, to be “back in your head,” but not at all like the song claims. I didn’t (don’t) want it because I want him (you) to think of me. I want to be in the head, for someone to finally teach me to move slowly and easily and confidently through the air. I want to not be walking too quickly along a sidewalk while Tegan and Sara sing that they will “run run run,” to want less but I still don’t. I still move too sharply. And I still love this song for making that part of myself more visible.

– @kashampersand

[aseaofsongs]

A few years ago, I tried to answer that insufferable, impossibly difficult question: “what is your favorite song?” 

After a few days of painful soul searching and attempts at pinpointing my favorite song through a botched “process of elimination,” I resigned. 

Then I decided to change my approach and go through my music library with a fine-toothed comb to make a playlist, no matter how long, of all the songs I hold close to my heart. Songs I grew up with, sometimes not even knowing their names but feeling that unmistakable joy and sweet nostalgia whenever they came on the radio, songs I want to live in, songs I’ve listened to thousands of times, songs that feel like I wrote in a previous life etc… Even this process was painfully difficult but I managed to narrow it down to about 100 songs. However, one song that instantly came to my mind with the certainty of the sun rising in the east, was Billy Joel’s “Vienna”.

This is a song that I grew up with, grew apart from and then re-discovered in my late teens, during the toughest months of my life. As it overtook me with that sweet childhood joy, mixed with the sadness and pain of maturing that weaves in and out of each note and lyric, I knew the song would forever by etched into my heart. The unfiltered honesty and sincerity that surges from the song makes it one of Billy Joel’s greatest triumphs in the middle of a career full of uptown girls and rock and roll denial.

I remember throwing away my emotions as I tried to navigate through the difficult terrain that is growing up in the middle of all the uncertainty of the future. I was plagued by an acute sense of self-awareness that made me feel as the smallest misstep would send me into a spiral of failures, from which there was no escape. I stayed in my room out of fear that if I stepped outside I would be thrust into the adult world that I just wasn’t ready to face yet. As a late teen, I still had a lot to learn, even though I felt simultaneously at the top and the bottom of my world. As a late teen, I held everything so close to heart in a desperate attempt to feel anything other than the emptiness I had forced upon myself. I wanted so desperately to grow up, to move away from home, and to be someone to admire, that I put so much pressure on my naïve shoulders and turned a blind eye to the fact that I was crumbling. I wanted to grow up, but I had no idea how. “Slow down you crazy child/You’re so ambitious for a juvenile.” In the middle of my defiance to myself and everyone around me, and in the midst of all the noise, Billy Joel’s voice was the one I heard. Even more miraculous, it made me listen.

Something about the certainty that “Vienna waits for me” gave me the courage to face the uncertainty I feared.

“You got your passion, you got your pride But don’t you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true.”

It’s okay to fall, it’s okay to fail. Billy Joel taught me that. 

– Noemie Benaudis

( @streetside-serenades | instagram )

[aseaofsongs]

There’s something about Carly’s voice in this song, echoed by the music, that electronic mournfulness. 

The sugary earnestness of it, like a whine, almost sliding to a stop before it leaves her mouth; she always sounds desperate but politely so — remember oh! my baby! — an unstoppable force, a rush, that takes you to the place (by which, I mean the feeling) she describes so often in her songs that neither she nor I have words for but we all know exists, that isn’t love yet but might be considered to be with good lighting or with good hindsight. He always makes me cr-iiy-ahhhh! The way her voice breaks when she has to reach that little more. Sometimes the loneliness is worse than the loss.

Cry is about a guy who can’t open up, in that love is about opening up, that unpeeling of independent self to become an ‘us’. In Gimme Love Carly sings I like the feeling, how you make me shy/ I still think about you, think about you a few lines before she demands fall into me! I would rather have you as you are, this sticky web of despair, then not have you at all. He always makes me cry but you know, I want you to stay tonight. I do, I do. How can I not?

At a party a few weeks ago, in a house by the beach tucked in by the hips of the hills, I drunkenly kissed a boy whose abs I could see through his shirt, as distant and circular as the light on the ceiling. He was very warm and tasted of beer. I felt a murmur of want, like a motorbike starting up in a backstreet. The evening heavy like a shroud, a hot parching anticipation, how his arms were heavy round my neck. My friends and their grins shaking like bracelets on arms, all the girls with their painted toe nails glimmering like jewels on the wet floor. People we love! The things we love! He kept texting me. My ex-boyfriend kissed someone else at a party when we were together. I know because I saw them, their hands holding the rims of glossy wet bottles like presents, entwined like vines, while up by the large drive the boys who tried to look hard fixed their hair in the rear view mirrors of cars just like the Bruce Springsteen song. Skin pressed firm and smooth against skin, in the effervescent dark. I didn’t cry. I want you to, but also, also do you want to? Even with hello, I hear goodbye. I saw a girl so beautiful once I felt I couldn’t breathe going up the stairs, my body stopped but my heart kept going, soaring, I thought it was like a drum clashing in my throat, my ribs, every single piece of me, I just thought oh! and she didn’t even look around at me. What I mean is, we all like indifference. But not to the point of no return — he takes me to the feeling but he never wants to strip down to his.

This is what Cry is saying: we change ourselves and we try to change others, we try to move them, we move ourselves but really we remain the same. Nothing you can do to me will ever be so bad as what I can do to myself. He always makes me cry — so do lots of other things. Sometimes a person is both the future and the present, sometimes a person is none of the things — how did Lana put it? The road gets tough sometimes and I don’t know why. We are both things and none. Just because it was short doesn’t mean it was precious. Just because it was a lie doesn’t mean that when you believed it, it wasn’t good. And sometimes we want and we want and we want but it never happens. The song doesn’t last as long as we want it to. Sometimes he’s a dick. The end, we’re done. It will end, it will end. We all finish. She sings goodbye! but also, also goodbye! Thank God we get to say goodbye, you know. What a relief.

[aseaofsongs]

My mom is dead and I miss her. Over a year ago, at the end of the summer, when she was dying I sat on warm concrete. I ate lime popsicles and jumped in the cold, salty sea to feel tingly and alive. 

The night she died, I went to the Boardwalk, and watched G ride roller coasters. When fall arrived, she was gone, and I moved to a new city. And then winter and I stayed in bed in the dark. I read books all day and drank wine every evening to stay numb. 

I did that for a year then stopped drinking last month. Now G says we have to live apart. He’s right but I feel raw and some days I think I have done nothing, and wanted nothing all year and am completely empty and useless. 

When “Just Hold On” was released I downloaded it right away. The lyrics are simple. But by the first chorus my throat was achy and tight. You can dance to it if you need to. When I’m panicked and angry at myself and hurt that I can’t call my mom, I listen with my headphones nice and loud.

Each time Louis echoes over and over

if it all goes wrong/ darling just hold on

I cry and smile at the same time. Rain when the sun’s out. Then there’s a good beat for jumping up and down in my house slippers. 

Louis’ mom died right before he released it. He’s 24 and so am I. 

When my mom died, I had a completely illogical desire for the world to stop. Like that W.H. Auden poem, “Funeral Blues”, where the moon and sun and stars are put out. 

Then Louis sings

It’s not over ‘til it’s all been said/ It’s not over ‘til your dying breath

So what do you want them to say when you’re gone?/ That you gave up or that you kept going on?

I’ve recently started to lose the apathy. But on days when I don’t feel good and I don’t care about the future, I listen to this song.

I bounce around and Louis sings, from one grieving kid to another, darling just hold on. 

- Zoe (on Instagram)

[aseaofsongs]

You were my favourite person. You said I was yours too. This was (is?) your favourite song.

You are still my favourite person (sometimes / most of the time / I don’t know).

I am no longer yours.

I understand now why you like this song.

– Levi ( Twitter | Instagram )

[aseaofsongs]

I kept envisioning this girl in the middle of the country somewhere crying her eyes out in the field with a drink in her hand and her kid in the other, going, “I can’t believe that Lady Gaga understands how I feel.“  —Lady Gaga on Joanne

I had a best friend, let’s call her C, and she disappeared from my life five years ago. It happened out of the blue—I called her during a time of personal duress happening in my life, and she never answered. I called her multiple times over the period of a few weeks. I texted. Messaged her on Facebook. She never answered. I briefly thought about going to her house, to ask her what the hell is going on and why she was being a piss poor friend, but I never did. I never heard from her again. 

I heard about a year ago she was in Texas, doing god knows what. I didn’t really care. I was pretty fucking bitter. I moved on. She showed up at my door earlier last week, and it was awkward and uncomfortable and I told her off. She rattled off some excuses and explanations that didn’t make sense in the scheme of things. I rolled my eyes and threw them back in her face. She was affected. We were both near tears. We said goodbye and I didn’t give her any contact info.

I think about that scene every time I listen to “Hey Girl” now, have been since I downloaded Joanne. I have such a fraught history with friendships, but one thing that my failed ten year relationship with C was I shouldn’t throw away or give up on friendships, especially my platonic relationships with women / femmes because it truly is some of the best things that have ever happened to me.

Joanne prioritizes those relationships, boosts them and lauds them as exceptional and precious and tender. (See “Grigio Girls”.) I want to scream hey girl, hey girl to my girlfriend at karaoke, drunk and happy, floating a little on the sticky floors. Sometimes I wish I was able to see C five years ago and ask everyday a heartache / I’m just tryin’ to keep it sane / but I know you believe me / baby don’t you leave me, hope that she still wanted me, ask her what the fuck. Please. Why. But realizing now, I still have people to ask that of, to make happy and be warm with, to grasp and care and love. It surrounds me and I have learned to say goodbye.

Lady Gaga has always made music purely and unafraid, but it came off muddled. With this new album, she’s able to be unfiltered in ways that can come off good and bad, and that’s what makes this album so relatable and her most direct version of herself. And that’s beautiful.

“I might not be flawless, but you know / I gotta diamond heart"  »Diamond Heart«

– Daniella (Twitter | Music Tumblr)

[aseaofsongs]

I’m fresh out of college, dropped into the middle of Wisconsin for my first try at adulthood. I’m paying three hundred dollars a month to rent someone’s spare room—a vast queen bed, a dresser and not much else. I work at my minimum-wage internship, I walk home through the little park by the apartment complex, and then I go into the room and flop down on the bed and listen to this song over and over. 

Or I’m 22 and in a brand new city on a leap of faith, housesitting for the only person I know among all those millions, scrolling Craigslist for jobs and apartments and listening to this song again. My friend’s tortoiseshell cat leans her head on my knee and I sing to her, “I am shy, but you can reach me.” When will someone reach me?

“Lakes of Canada” is my theme for transitions, the music I hold on to when I’m coming unmoored. This song builds like a crisis, the third verse more painful and urgent than the first even though the words are the same. I can change, I swear, I’ll finally be what I’m always striving to be. It’s shot through with the kind of hope that feels more like desperation: things will change because they have to, because we can’t go on any other way. 

Whatever our future holds seems remote and unknowable, like a distant northern lake. We row frantically after the small lights, the sudden joys, splashing away from us like fish. What keeps us afloat? Whatever we can reach, whether it’s a friendly voice in the fog or a song that helps us feel understood, even if just for a moment.

– Kathryn

[aseaofsongs]

I listen to new music to shake things up. Because I’ll associate those records with my own experiences that will be grounded in a certain place and time.

I think of senior year of high school when I listen to Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest or I think of college graduation and my move from a small city in Michigan to Chicago when I revisit Mac Demarco’s Another One.

But sometimes I’ll revisit an older album I haven’t listened to in awhile. I’ll let the singer’s voice and lyrics sink in, I’ll sync my body with the rhythm, and I’ll let the sounds soak into my imagination.

And on the day I quit my retail job, I came across Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” off of Transformer.

I was taking the redline train back to my apartment after a follow-up interview for a paid internship. By the end of the interview, I was told I got the gig.

Although I serve as the editor of a nonprofit as a part-time contractor, once my student loans kicked in I needed more stable income. After graduating and moving to the big city, I applied my hard-earned BA in History by making salads at a Whole Foods.

“Perfect Day” struck me because I could say, as Joan Didion would write, goodbye to all that.

I could say goodbye to the feeling of latex gloves sticking my hands, or to coming home smelling like onions and garlic, or to scraping off the rotting gunk off my work shoes, or to the boss who harshly micromanaged every single minute we spent in the kitchen.

Midway through the song, I could already hear the outro playing in my head: “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” The strings sound lifting—not triumphant but instead softly reassuring.

The song’s lilting piano notes and the lines of drinking sangria in the park paints a Monet-like landscape. Yes, I know the song’s about heroin and how it keeps him hanging on. But the song reminds me of what perfect means.

Perfection may not exist, but sometimes you hear a song at the right moment and you can be convinced otherwise. – Colin S. Smith (Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr)