[Mix Tape Memories is a series of posts looking at music that is so important to me that it seems to have affected my life or outlook on it. It originally appeared on The Road Meanders.]
“The problem with thinking about your own past is you forget its genesis and start to feel useless awe towards your earlier self.” - Brian Eno
There are only a few.
Tens of thousands of songs have washed over me. They’ve flitted by barely noticed. They’ve hovered about, only to continue past on the breeze never to be thought of again. They’ve slammed into me like a hurricane altering my landscape, not always for the better. They’ve wiggled into my brain, despite erecting a tower of iron will to keep them out. They've produced smiles and tears, excitement and indifference. A few of them…well, it seems a few have woven into the double helix of my being, becoming part of me.
This continuing series will explore some of those few. They’re not always good. Some of them I don’t even like anymore. Some I still hit repeat to hear a second time, even though I’ve heard them more times than I can count. There really is no order to how these will appear, nothing chronological or theme driven; well, not intentionally anyway. Perhaps you’ll find some along the way.
(I’m fully aware of the fact that a Radiohead song worms its way into nearly every playlist I’ve ever made. I’m also fully aware of how much fun it is for certain people to bring up this fact. To provide joy in your life, I’m committed to placing one in every one of these installments.)
VOLUME 1
“Wave of Mutilation” The Pixies Doolittle
This was one of those gateway drug songs. I’m pretty certain this was the first Pixies song that I heard and listened to over and over, thanks to Pump Up the Volume. (Oh the halcyon days when Christian Slater was cute and dated Winona Ryder) This led to a passionate love affair with Frank Black/Black Francis and crew. Memories of driving my first car at 16 to the mall in Huntington, WV with my best friend Paul. Cut me some slack…it was Appalachia. Where else do you go when skipping school? It was either that or drinking beers at the local hot spot: the Dairy Queen parking lot.
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Pixies front man, Francis, described the song as being about "Japanese businessmen doing murder-suicides with their families because they'd failed in business, and they're driving off a pier into the ocean."
“A Better Son/Daughter” Rilo Kiley The Execution of All Things
The unofficial anthem for Depressives since 2002. I already loved this song, but when in one of my “delicate states” during the ’08 election while working in Ann Arbor, MI, one of my organizers took me to see Rilo Kiley after work. I was barely holding it together, working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, travelling between five cities running offices, and technically not even having a permanent address for six months. Seeing this song performed live somehow struck me like a tuning fork. I swam in it. Time slowed and the song stretched and warped and created a bubble in time. All of this and I was not even on drugs. To this day, when I hit one of those “lows so extreme that the good seems fucking cheap,” this song holds as much a chance of pulling me up as a handful of Klonapen.
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The album that “A Better Son/Daughter” appears on, The Execution of All Things is strung together by a song that is broken into pieces and that trails between several tracks. Called "And That’s How I Choose to Remember It", it tells the story of lead singer Jenny Lewis' childhood and her parents' divorce. This theme is visited throughout the album, which is lyrically filled with childhood recollections of loss, displacement, anger and hopelessness.
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” Tears for Fears Songs From the Big Chair
One of the earliest ones. A hot summer, one of those impossible summers that only exists in the memory of your childhood, endless and full of those things that have become clichés to our adult selves. Music was playing. A festival. I was painfully shy. Thousands of people. Excitement and fear mingling impossibly together. Bright banners or possibly flags. My first encounter with people from another country. And that music playing. Background really. Until this song somehow cut through all of the chaos and possibility. I don’t remember actually stopping and listening to it exactly. It just was. And is.
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Ironically, considering the song's overwhelming success, "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" was somewhat of an afterthought during the recording of Songs from the Big Chair. According to Roland Orzabal, he initially regarded the song as a lightweight that would not fit with the rest of the album. It was producer Chris Hughes who convinced him to try recording it, in a calculated effort to cross over into American chart success.
“Nemesis” Shriekback Oil & Gold
If my brother is responsible for introducing me to the love of and depth and breadth of music, then “Nemesis” was my training wheels to explore on my own. The solid base he provided led me to explore early 80s Goth and Industrial. I also found my first way to communicate with others with some measure of confidence.
I met brothers Scott and Todd, friends of Jason, the de facto leader of my band of misfit toys. I instantly was enamored with the two of them (my proto-straight boy crushes). I had no way to connect with them. What did I have to talk about that they would find interesting? My foray into discovering new music on my own had produced Sisters of Mercy and their album Floodland. That was to become my currency. The brothers were music geeks, and I offered Sisters of Mercy. They re-paid with Shriekback. “Nemesis,” it turned out, was more than a fair trade. My first transaction complete, I opened up and made friends with two people I had previously elevated far above me.
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The song "Nemesis" is apparently about the hypothetical star orbiting the Sun, although the video makes it clear that the comic-book anti-hero Nemesis the Warlock was also on the band's mind.
“Subterranean Homesick Alien” Radiohead OK Computer
My first Radiohead entry (and obviously not the last). The narrative of this song is what struck me. The dreamer is granted an amazing experience and on return is not believed. Upon first hearing this song, I instantly related. I may or may not have played it while “on a country lane, late at night while I’m driving.” Oh, who are we kidding? Of course I did.
One part of the lyrics has always stuck out to me and stymied me as to the meaning. I see two options, but it’s most likely I created the second option:
“Take me on board their beautiful ship
Show me the world as I'd love to see it”
Now the obvious choice, I think, is that he sees the world from high above, from a perspective only ever imagined. I like to think, however, that it also means they show him the world in a better state, more peaceful, with meaning and hope. I suppose it could mean either or both. It’s one of those things I don’t want to know the answer to or even if there is an answer. Each time I drive down that country lane, late at night, with just slightly more than a casual glance at the stars, I want to hold that sliver of wonder.
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The title is a reference to the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and the science fiction-inspired song describes an isolated narrator who fantasizes about being abducted by extraterrestrials. The narrator speculates that, upon returning to Earth, his friends would not believe his story and he would remain a misfit. The lyrics were inspired by a school assignment from Thom Yorke's time at Abingdon School to write a piece of "Martian poetry", a British literary movement of works that humorously re-contextualizes mundane aspects of human life from an alien "Martian" perspective.
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