I was in bed last night, writing, and whatever music service I was using was somehow on a “80s/90s emo nostalgia” kick, which was not helping. But, I was finally getting into the groove of the scene I was trying to paint with words when the first notes of instantly-identifiable (to me, at least) piano started playing.
Open Arms by Journey (in case the media link wasn’t making that obvious).
My brain did some bizarro instant defense mechanism thing, and refused to consider the lyrics, because fuck that. “For once,” I think. “Good brain.”
Instead, I was transported back 30+ years (then took a moment to realize the album is 40 fucking years old this year (and then my brain did another defensive maneuver, and shut that line of thought down, because we were having issues enough with the “30+ years” thing) (good brain))… where was I?
Right. Transporting 30+ years.
Sitting on the wood floor of my bedroom in the tiny house my parents rented. Light streaming in through louvered windows, the scents of orchids and hibiscus and just a hint of salt on the trade winds billowing my curtains. Pencil in hand (or behind my ear, or between my lips (but not my teeth, I never bit my pencils), or in my ponytail), scratch paper with songs and runtimes and math on a clipboard.
Cassette tapes (look it up) and their cases littering the floor, my lap, the shelves supporting my stereo, my bed. Most of the cassettes have hand-made labels, in my bizarrely neat handwriting, with extravagantly hand-made liner notes and codes identifying them. Some of the cassettes are professionally produced, in real cases, with professionally-made liner notes.
There’s a half-size 3-ring binder containing pages corresponding to the codes on the hand-labeled tapes. More titles and artists and runtimes. Extra notes detail how much of the song had been overlaid by DJs or commercials or ambient noise or whatever (because these songs were recorded from the radio, of course), and how badly those things detract from the song. Some titles are marked out with a notation of a new code. (I’d obtained a cleaner from-the-air grab, and the new, better version was on another cassette, as indicated by the code.)
(At this point I feel it is important that acknowledge what you’re all thinking: Yes, I am, and have always been, a huge nerd. Cope.)
It was a challenge, a game of sorts, figuring out the right sequence of songs. Needing to tell the story in the appropriate order, but also not wanting to leave too much blank space at the end of either side of the cassette. (Because you had to fast-forward through that stuff, you know.)
It was because of this game that Open Arms first became so familiar to me. I was often creating, well, “80s/90s (but only the early bits, at least in that location) emo” mix tapes. I was a teenaged girl surviving a fairly unhappy home life with dubious prospects at a future. To say it was an emotional time would be an understatement.
So, back to Open Arms. If I was in a hurry, working from a place of anger or fear or pain or horniness (teenaged girl, right), I’d say fuck it and put what I needed on the cassette, story and dead air be damned. But usually, by the time I’d worked through almost 120 minutes (I got the good blanks, damnit) of assembling my latest musical masterpiece (or abomination; art was in the ear of the listener), I’d start twitching at the dead air, knowing it would break me out of my groove when listening to the cassette, auto-reverse (look it up) be damned.
Most of the songs I was collecting onto dark-brown ribbons ran between 4-5 minutes long. (Unless I was in a mood for Rush or Pink Floyd or big band or classical something, in which case all bets were off.) But sometimes, no matter how hard I tried, I’d end up with a sub-4:00 gap at the end of a side, sometimes closer to 3:00 than 4:00.
And that’s where Open Arms came to the rescue, time and again. At 3:18, it was the shortest song I had in my collection, and was put into play way, way too often as the musical equivalent of crumpled newspaper. Not to say I didn’t love the song then, or even have strong emotional responses to it now (as evidenced by the mental defensive driving needed to not think of the lyrics), but more that it will always hold a unique place on my mental roadmap for reasons that have nothing to do with its musical or poetical artistry.
