All the Songs We Loved in May

WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY

Fairfield Parlour, “Aries” (LJ)

The first morning I ever heard Aries, a bunch of cool things happened: 

1) The Universe stopped doing whatever else it was doing. It stood up, and walked to the archive it keeps about everything that ever happened, which it keeps because, sweetly, it's proud of itself. It located the notebook it keeps to document all the moments from all history when all the different creatures from all the different galaxies fell in love with songs the hardest, and then it wrote my Aries story down. I’ve probably been featured pretty heavily in that notebook, and I’d like to think that the Universe is proud of me for that, that it makes the Universe feel happier than usual about inventing the 1960s and electric guitars and Charlie Watts and so on.

2) I synaesthetically heard it as being the colour pink. There is some other music I hear as being pink but not a ton of it. I hear the entire album I’m Going Away by the Fiery Furnaces as being the really dense and pure glossy bubblegum pink and pastel purple combo that I found out about from its being featured on the plastic Babs Bunny purse I had when I was a kid, & then there's a trio of early Pink Floyd singles— Apples & Oranges, Candy & A Currant Bun, Arnold Layne— that I hear as being a very dark hot pink and also they are Christmas songs.
        Aries by Fairfield Parlour vacillates between being the palest seashell pink that could possibly count as being pink and the dusty rose of a velvet fainting couch in a black-walled room. All the lights are turned off in the room, except for one fey little lamp whose prissy aesthetic I would not be attracted to in an antique shop, which is shining directly onto the person sitting on the couch, who is either me or the guy singing the song, depending on my mood.

3) I didn’t believe it actually existed, or that anything in the world existed, except myself, which is narcissistic of me, but like... yeah. It was impossible for me to believe that a song so perfectly-suited to my own sensibilities was a real thing that a person who wasn’t me had conceptualized, written and recorded; the only logical conclusions I could draw were 1) that I was asleep and dreaming and the song is a song I made up in a dream. In the world where the song didn’t exist I would wake up in the morning and feel so sad that it didn’t exist &/or 2) that nothing in the entire world existed except myself and that everything I’d ever known to be real had only been a projection of my own mind. I’d made up London and Montreal and Los Angeles, and Paul McCartney, dogs, and wine. Every man who had ever broken my heart had broken my heart because I’d wanted my heart to be broken.

There are a lot of beautiful sentences in Aries. Here are some of them.

1) I used to collect cigarette cards.
2) Pilot Boat Park was our paradise.
3) Oh the summers with the girls, if you want I’ll show you the scars.
4) I really don’t know why & just now I can’t think back that far.
5) We smoked a million cigarettes.
6) I love the Beatles.

Those sentences were not written by me, which is weird. They were written by a man named Peter Daltrey who looks like a wizard. In 1967 he was in a band called Kaleidoscope, who sang a song called Black Fjord that I was really obsessed with four summers ago. In 1969, Peter Daltrey gave up on the dream of Kaleidoscope and changed its name to Fairfield Parlour, which was a good call. Peter Daltrey is an Aries, a March one, so when I listen to Aries I usually devote a chunk of my listening-to-Aries time to thinking about how cool it is that Peter Daltrey wrote a song named after his own Zodiac sign, which is totally something I would do, except that if I wrote a song named Cancer it wouldn’t have the same amount of impact as Aries because people would probably think it was about the disease or a metaphor about the disease. I wonder if Aries is about a girl Peter Daltrey met who is also an Aries, or about the idea of a girl who is an Aries, or if it’s about a girl at all. I hope it is. The vaguely-incestuous experience of falling in love with a person who has the same Zodiac sign as you is an extremely valid topic to write a song about.

There was a time in my life when I cared about shitty campy psychedelic rock singles written by unpopular bands who made no impression on the world more than anything. In my heart I loved the Beatles but I thought it was lame to like popular shit so I rarely let on that it was true. I was a dipshit with a DJ night. My DJ night was amazing, but also very lame, so lame it took place on a Tuesday, not even cool enough for a Sunday or Thursday. The Tuesdayness of it provided me with the only effective pick-up line I've ever known: “What are you doing Tuesday night?” (The answer was always “Nothing,” because nobody ever has Tuesday night plans, which gave me the opportunity to force them to come watch me bop around to Idle Race B-sides while drinking blueberry Stoli & tonics.)
        I remember, back then, feeling scared that at some point in my life the thrill of it would reach its finite conclusion: there are only so many shitty campy 60s psych singles that exist, and one day, yes, it’s true, I will have heard them all. I’ve been terrified that I might’ve finally hit that point since the summer I fell in love with Black Fjord, and it’s reassuring to find out that I still haven’t. But if Aries by Fairfield Parlour really is the last shitty campy 60s psych song ever to steal my heart, I would consider it a fucking honour.

"No Problem" by Chance the Rapper + "No Feelings" by Handsome Furs (Liz)

 



These songs are next to each other on my phone; I like to go back and forth and live in their different vibes and colors. "No Problem" is Day-Glo and fruit-punchy and all the happy colors of the world, "No Feelings" is black and white and silvery-gray, all fuzzed up together like the snow of some broken TV channel. So they're way different moods but they both give me energy and make me run a little faster, if I happen to be running at the time. The most energy-giving is the last minute of "No Feelings," when Dan sings it like a cheerleader. I wish lots more rock songs would sound like cheerleading.

Wolf Parade, "What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)" (Liz)



I like putting on my makeup to this song. My last morning in New York, the day I went to Veselka and thought about magnificence, I did my eyeliner and mascara and lipstick listening to it on my phone. I'd gone to see Wolf Parade the night before and bought a t-shirt of Godzilla putting on lipstick, then slept in that shirt and kept it on the whole day. That thing of putting on makeup without having taken a shower + wearing the shirt I slept in made me feel 26, grubby and careless in a way that used to seem glamorous to me and still kind of does. 

And I was going to type something about how I wish my 26-year-old self had gotten to hear "What Did My Lover Say?" by Wolf Parade, but then I realized I don't actually agree with that. I'm no longer concerned with the wellbeing of my 26-year-old self, I'm over it, who cares how you wasted your time or didn't waste your time when you were younger? Or how you fucked up or didn't fuck up. It's so much better to hear songs now, especially this song, with that cool verse about beaches turning into earrings, and all the other good lyrics about the ocean and the sun. My favorite is: "I got a sandcastle heart, made out of fine black sand/Sometimes it turns into glass when shit gets hot." I hope all the ocean/sun metaphors keep getting more slapdash and grand as we get older and older.

All The Songs We Loved In August

WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY

The Beatles, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” (LJ)

Once upon a time it was a zillion years ago and I didn’t live in London and I was really young and I lived in a room that felt like an attic. And in that atticky little place, which I loved, and miss dearly, I sat at my desk with the top drawer pulled out and my laptop, with the broken screen that refused to show me anything but a series of crackling rectangles in saturated pastel, resting precariously upon that drawer and connected to an ugly Dell monitor with a series of cords that always got jangled up in each other and knocked over bottles of Diet Coke, I wrote a thing.
        It was for the dead old blog that Liz and I used to write for. The thing was called "If People Were Beatles Songs," and it was about which Beatles songs all the different people would be if they were Beatles songs instead of people. Like, for instance, Jay-Z would be “Baby You’re A Rich Man,” and God would be “Hey Jude.” I like that kind of thing; I think it’s really comforting. You can’t just limit somebody to being only their name and address and phone number and birthday and personality. People also have to have zodiac signs and spirit animals and spirit Beatles and spirit wine grapes and Spice Girl names from the parallel Universe they were a Spice Girl in. They have to know which Hogwarts house they’d belong to, and they have to know which Beatles song they are. If People Were Beatles Songs is the most important people-category of all, because Beatles songs are just about the only thing that exists that are as complicated and nuanced as actual people.
        Over the years, since I was twenty-four and first thought of the idea, I’ve been Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Girl, Wild Honey Pie, and Tomorrow Never Knows, in that order. I was Tomorrow Never Knows for longest of the four and I did once believe that I’d be Tomorrow Never Knows forever. But ever since I moved to London and ripped myself out of my comfort zone of being a big fish in a small pond, Tomorrow Never Knows has seemed to have less and less to do with the way I perceive myself— or, more accurately, to the way I perceive the way I’m perceived by other people. I used to feel like I was this, like, weirdo psychedelic, like, guru who came along to shake up other peoples’ perceptions of, like, what life is all about or whatever…
        I don’t feel like that at all anymore! I feel really drab in a cool way. Drab In A Cool Way. I’m so disinterested in psychedelia, and being involved in other peoples' perceptions of things. I like for things to be simple and intense and funny and honest. I wear tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses and some variation of plain button-up shirt with either jeans or a miniskirt and black pointy-toed flats or penny loafers. I boringly/elegantly eat eggs and English muffins and white Burgundy and red Burgundy and pieces of fish and coffee and bagels. My favourite weather is: eighteen degrees, grey sky, makes me nostalgic for several Septembers ago. I don’t want a Dalmatian but Mark does so I’m like, fine, whatever, let’s just get a fucking Dalmatian, as long as we can name her Francine. My favourite shape is: rectangle.
        I listened to The Ballad of John and Yoko like twenty-five times over the course of two very grey days at the beginning of August. I became obsessed with the perfection of the bassline, and I thought about how special it is that only two Beatles play on that song. You know which two Beatles? John and Paul.
        Paul really smashes out that bassline. It’s the same little phrase over and over again and you can hear in your head the way you want him to switch it, to satisfy you— it’s some weird bodily impulse that explains why music exists at all in the first place— and he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t— but then… he does! And he’s been depriving you of the thing you wanted for so long that once he does it tricks you into feeling like it’s so generous of him. What a classically Paul McCartney thing to do. (Side note: earlier today, I read an interview with Art Garfunkel where he talks about how George Harrison once came up to him at a party and said “My Paul is to me what your Paul is to you.” I don’t really know how I feel about that yet but… food for thought, you know?)
       The day I realized The Ballad of John and Yoko is my new Spirit Beatles Song was- of course- perfectly, gorgeously grey. I was on my way to the beigel store to go buy myself a (chopped herring) beigel, thinking about the bassline, and then hating on myself for thinking too hard about the bassline. What I actually should have been thinking about was the words. The words!
        John Lennon wrote them. They are my exact style and shape of words, perfect words, the way my and/or all perfect words should be. Brown and slack and lazy, like all the chillest John songs ever written by John. I’m So Tired, Mother, Jealous Guy… I love when he just writes the simple, easy truth. The truth is sharp and dull and usually a little bit funny. It’s a shrug, smirk, and an eye-roll. He says they’re going to crucify him because he gets a naughty thrill out of saying it, pronounces “Seines” incorrectly and name-drops the irrelevant Beatles Inner Circle member Peter Brown. Marriage is supposed to be the best thing that ever happens to a person but when it happens to John Lennon it’s just, you know, fine.
        The most important part of the song, to me, personally, is when he sings the word “London.” London is the name of the place where I am, the place where I am always standing or moving when I hear him say it now, and that means something very very heavy to me about the trajectory of my own life. I did it! I got myself to the place where the Beatles were! The place where John and Yoko caught the early train back to.
        And he sounds so coolly indiff, so bored of saying words out loud, when he sings it. He kind of makes it sound like his own last name: “Lon'in.” I feel so proud when I hear him sing that word.
        I am thirty years old and have accomplished so little of what I thought I would have accomplished at this point but I have accomplished two very, very major things. 1) I moved to London, and 2) I didn’t die. I’m thirty years old, my spirit Beatles song is The Ballad of John and Yoko, I should buy something tweed, or maybe I won’t, and I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I’m feeling very coolly indiff about how intensely Ballad of John & Yokoey it’s gonna be.

The Breeders, "Safari" (Liz)

"Safari" is one of those one-in-a-million songs that, whenever it comes on, puts my head into a cool place that's completely impenetrable to whatever's going on all around me. I'm just instantly sunk into the weird world that the Breeders built from those guitars and bass that're so heavy and boxy and blocky and thick, and Kim Deal's voice is a lullaby but for staying awake and warping into some other dimension.
        I'm so fascinated by Kim Deal and the way she puts words together; I don't understand how this woman from Ohio who was a cheerleader and a lab technician ends up writing a lyric like:

I wait for you in Heaven on this perfect string of love, and drink your soup of magpies in a pottery bowl that looks as I am now: brown, round and warm

- I mean that's crazy, right? Those words were from "Fortunately Gone," and "Safari" has words about a safari and a guy, and the vocals are some kinda tropical air. In the video Kim's wearing a bomber jacket and art-teacher earrings and Kelley's dressed like a high school administrator, Tanya Donelly has hoop earrings and a scrunchie. It's too bad that lineup of the Breeders didn't exist for at least three more decades. But it's also neat that it's this flash-in-the-pan kind of situation that's so faraway now, it may as well have been completely made-up in the first place: a band as perfect and imaginary as something from Greek mythology or Norse folklore, or an ancient-Egyptian love poem inscribed on a tomb.

All The Songs We Loved In November

WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY

The Cranberries, “Dreams” (LJ)

A girl I know from home wrote Songs you will never ever get sick of even though you’ve heard them thousands of times and will probably hear them thousands more on her Facebook wall as a way of asking all her friends “Which are yours?” It was late and I was drunk and I started writing down the names of a bunch of different songs into the pale Internet-blue box but when I got to and dreams by the cranberries to be honest Mark asked me to be quiet. He was not being an oppressor by asking me that. It was late, he had to wake up early, and I’m a very loud typer.

        Dreams by the Cranberries isn’t cool, I know that, but it doesn’t sound uncool to me— I’m just saying it’s uncool because I know that it is. It just is. I don’t hear it and think “This is really cool,” mostly I hear it as sounding delicate and spidery and ephemeral the same way a piece of white tulle would be ephemeral. It sounds like the life journey of a piece of white tulle, or lavender-grey, or cream, or rose gold tulle that started existing as part of a ballet costume at the end of the 19th Century in either Austria or Germany but has by 2014 faded away entirely. Not decomposed but what’s the other word? I want to say evaporated, since I am thinking of something so light. But the word I am looking for is disintegrate.

        I’ve loved it since I was nine. It was on the Boys On The Side soundtrack, and I would rewind the cassette tape so we could listen to it over and over again. I was in my mother’s car. There were pool noodles in the back of the car.

        I Tweeted about Dreams once. It was the winter I lived at my Dad’s apartment and worked overnight shifts at the Gap and my knuckles were always chapped and my lips were always bleeding. I worked out at a little gym across the street that still sends me pleading emails asking me to come work out at it again. I know I could and probably should unsubscribe from the gym’s email list but my time is really precious to me and I feel like it’s more the gym’s responsibility to notice that I’m a lost cause and deal with it than mine. One probably depressing afternoon I worked out to Dreams over and over again and then came home and Tweeted about how when I work out to Dreams by the Cranberries I feel like I’m wearing a t-shirt that says I’M WORKING OUT TO DREAMS BY THE CRANBERRIES across the front, because I was younger and cared more about whether things were or cool or not, it embarrassed me to be listening to such an uncool song, but that was the tail end of me caring about whether a song or something was or wasn’t cool, that’s how old you are when that impulse evaporates and decomposes, twenty-five I would say— and a girl I knew replied to that Tweet, I don’t remember what she said, but she’s dead now. She died a few weeks ago.

        Home is so weird now that I don’t live there. It snowed there, and then they had a warm day, and I don’t know if any of my friends are happy or sad, and everyone is dying. No young person died the entire time I lived there, and then I moved away, and everyone started dying. My dentist died.

        I really liked my dentist. Once my dad and I went to the liquor store and my dentist was outside the liquor store smoking and it turned out the liquor store was closed so my dad and I walked to a different liquor store and then we ran into him again, and we joked about it, how we all wanted to get drunk bad enough to go to a second liquor store rather than just give up and not drink. Another time, he said to my dad, “I get you, you’re like my dad, you’re a laid-back dude.” He was my dad’s dentist too.

         I listened to Dreams by the Cranberries the next day, not the day after my dad and I ran into my dead dentist at the liquor store (though maybe that day too), but the day after my boyfriend asked me to stop typing loudly at three in the morning. I was walking to the Drapers Arms to go meet Vanya; the Draper in Drapers Arms refers to the old-timey profession of a retailer or wholesaler of cloth but I like to imagine that it is Don. Don Draper’s Arms. I took a detour to holler at 157 Hemingford Road along the way— that’s where the main character of my novel lives. There was a little pale aqua Volkswagen Beetle parked out front that I’d never seen parked out front of it before, which was a nice touch. The little pale aqua Volkswagen Beetle is parked out front of 157 Hemingford Road on Google Street View, too, in case you need to see it to believe it, or just want to.

        I was wearing a chartreuse turtleneck. The lady from the Cranberries breathe-sang about her life changing every day in every possible way and I wanted to cry but didn’t, since I wasn’t actually sad. I was significantly less sad than usual. I felt very conscious of, and very grateful for, gravity. For my feet being planted firmly on the ground. I felt very earthy and solid; I was a Taurus for a second. A few days later I was thinking about my parents on the bus, about how weirdly well your parents know you— you forget it about them. My parentes knew me when I was a baby and then they watched me turn into a child and then a teenager and then a grown-up, nobody else really did that, observed the narrative of my life from the vantage point of already being an adult--

        I have some friends who I’ve known for a long time and they’ve also seen the whole thing unfold, but they were just little kids and little teens the whole time too. They wouldn’t have been able to put it into a proper context, wouldn’t have been able to decipher the relationship between the way I was growing and the way I was aging. I guess I feel like Dreams can see me the same way. It knew me when I was nine and pool noodles were an object I interacted with, when I was fourteen and pretended to like anime because… I don’t know. I don’t know why I ever did that, when I was twenty-five and worked out at a shitty gym, when I was twenty-nine and looked at a house on Hemingford Road I didn’t live in but still could remember living in it because I am a fiction writer and my weird brain works like that. And that was a beautiful feeling, nothing at all like a piece of flimsy fabric decaying. I felt like I was my own little planet. The world around me was the flimsy thing.

Kurt Vile, "Puppet to the Man" (Liz)

A few Fridays ago I got to go to a special screening of a movie called Cake, starring Jennifer Aniston. Jennifer Aniston was there and she did a Q&A afterward; she was very fluttery and Rachel Green-y and stunning in her smart pink dress, which you can see in this mediocre photo of mine. After the screening there was a Kurt Vile show at a church in Koreatown and I really wasn't in the mood: I wanted to bask in Jennifer Aniston's pink-and-golden movie-star glow a little while longer and then go home, but in the end I sucked it up and drove over to the goddamn show. The thing about seeing Kurt Vile, I remembered, is that as long as you can find a place to sit or a wall to lean against, you can just zone out and be off in your own world, but in a way that's enhanced by Kurt Vile's cool draggy voice and spacey vibes. It's restorative, like communal naptime, only with pretty guitars and no post-nap hangover.

        Anyway, Alisa and I drove to the show separately and I got there first, so I went to the upstairs bar and paid ten bucks for a glass of bad white wine. The opening band wasn't my thing so instead of watching them I went to a nice little room outside of the women's bathroom and charged my phone. There was a vanity there and I touched up my eyeliner and lipstick and drank my wine and responded to some texts and Instagram interactions, and by the time Kurt Vile came on I was all refreshed and ready to go. I felt entirely accommodated by my surroundings, and I decided that's going to be thing for 2015 and beyond: total accommodation at all times, no matter how unfavorable and potentially irritating the circumstances. All you need is some imagination and willingness to look like a weirdo, and fortunately I've got both those things in spades.

All the Songs We Loved in August

(WORDS BY ELIZABETH BARKER & LAURA JANE FAULDS, ILLUSTRATION BY JEN MAY)

Harry Nilsson, “I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City” (LJ)

Harry Nilsson is a weird and perfect guy. He’s a Gemini. I don’t relate to him at all.

       I’ve always loved Harry Nilsson or at least liked him. When I was a kid my mom would sing me Coconut but I’d never heard actual Coconut, just my mom singing Coconut, but I knew it was sung by a guy named Harry Nilsson. When I was fifteen my high school best friend made me a mixtape and she put Coconut on the mixtape, and The Drowners by Suede and also Good Day Sunshine by the Beatles. She bought Revolver on the same day I bought The White Album so we each had something the other didn’t but we were equal in our having and our not having, which is a beautiful equilibrium.

       Harry Nilsson was John Lennon’s best friend. I don’t know if he was John Lennon’s official best friend or not; I wish I could just ask him, “Who’s your best friend, John?”— I would be dissatisfied with any answer that wasn’t “An exact tie between Paul McCartney and Harry Nilsson.”

       My friend Kritty and I have a thing, an in-joke I guess, a weird fantastic in-joke, that we’re John Lennon and Harry Nilsson together. That’s the theme of our friendship, a never-ending Lost Weekend; I’m John and she’s Harry. Together we are surrounded by a general haze of being up to no good.

       Kritty calls us both beautiful geniuses and believes that we are. I’ll only ever call myself that if it’s really late and we’ve just killed like three bottles of wine in two hours. There’s a part in the Harry Nilsson documentary where a guy says: he was the best singer. Not just the best singer but the best singer. Eventually he fucked up his voice from partying too hard and that was a tragedy but who even cares. It’s not like he didn’t record all those excellent albums in the first place and at least he had a fun life and it’s not like he didn’t die anyway. When I watched that thing for the first time I texted Kritty to tell her: that’s you. You’re the best singer.

        Other than Nilsson Schmilsson I’d never listened to any full Harry Nilsson albums until I moved to London one month ago. I highly recommend intersecting your moving to London phase with your getting crazy-into Harry Nilsson phase if you are the type of person who’d be inclined to live out either. Harry Nilsson and London go kookily but decadently together like dipping bacon or crinkly-cut potato chips into a fountain of chocolate fondue. Harry is an American but he’s got a sort of jaunty Penny Lane Britishness about him, that whole Vaudeville soft-shoe nostalgia thing that came into vogue for about five minutes in the late nineteen-sixties because of Paul.

        I’ve been responding to music made by a Britishy American guy because I’m a Britishy American guy! It’s one thing to live in Canada and tell people you’re moving to London and have them say “Well you certainly look the part!” because your shirt has a collar. But once you’re actually in England it becomes really obvious that you’re, you know, not from around here. Nobody cares that you wore a vaguely British-seeming shirt that had a collar back when you lived across the ocean. You’re a foreigner who calls the pavement a sidewalk and pronounces her rs like a commoner and thinks a courgette is a gherkin. The only way to get through it is stumble through the confusion wide-eyed and exuberantly because who in the hell doesn’t love a wide-eyed exuberant person?

       I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City was the theme song to my wide-eyed exuberant phase. It’s a bit of a bummer to admit to myself that my wide-eyed exuberant phase is over but like what do you even expect of yourself and the concept of life Laura Jane. Do you want to be Don Draper when he’s on the phone with Dr. Faye and she tells him she hopes Megan knows he only likes the beginning of things? Nope.

       Three weeks ago, it was still the beginning, and I didn’t realize it was the beginning or that the beginning would ever end, I didn’t have a job, and I’d just figured out how to take the bus. I’d sit on the very front seat of the upper deck and watch the city unroll like a carpet. Listening to this song. That’s the opening credits. In the movie it would cut to some shots of me looking dejected in the middle of an unforgiving Toronto while Harry says he’s so tired of his prayers going unanswered. Then it switches to the part where Harry sings, “Well here I am Lord, knocking at your back door,” which is not in the movie, because it’s just me thinking about it. But I like how knocking at the Lord’s back door implies that you are going about getting God’s attention in a kind of roundabout way. Being so sweet and bad that God can’t help but relent. You to him are like the best dessert, lard cut with butter laced with sugar, so fucking excellent and illicit that in the end even He has to admit you were the point.

       The nicest part of the song is when Harry Nilsson sings, “Ain’t it wonderful to be/ where I’ve always wanted to be,” which has been true for me loads of times and is still true generally, but was truest once. I was on a bus riding past a liquor store somewhere around Tottenham Court Road. The liquor store advertised all the cool weird whiskies it was selling in a well-executed window display, and it was sunny enough that I was wearing shorts but cool enough that I could wear a long-sleeved t-shirt. And I wanted to take my Dad there, to the whisky store. I wanted to show it to him like, “Hey dad hey look dad look at this wonderful place I live in, look how wonderful we have it here, this whisky store, I did it I did it, I made it,” but I didn’t write down where it was or remember where it was. I can find it again if I take that same bus and stare out the window the whole time until I find it which sounds like the dullest and lamest thing I could possibly do here. I would rather look for something new or ideally not even look for anything.

"Rock the Casbah" by The Clash (Liz)

The last time I flew from Boston to L.A., I watched the video for "Rock the Casbah" seven times. It was a night flight and the punk-rock couple behind me brought a box of Munchkins on board with them, which was so cute and inspired. The couple sitting beside me were not very punk rock but seemed vaguely with-it; I had some silly hope that they'd notice what I was up to and later say to each other, "How interesting, that the woman beside us watched the 'Rock the Casbah' video seven times during our flight. How very peculiar.'" Instead they watched every existing episode of Dating Naked, which is kind of like the opposite of The Clash. I don't think they picked up on my "Rock the Casbah" marathon at all - and that's all right, I got along fine without them. The "Rock the Casbah" video is kind of ugly but I love it intensely. These are some of my favorite things:

-Mick Jones's stompy/semi-aggro dance moves, and also the fact that he's wearing a veil. Before last month I hadn't seen the "Rock the Casbah" video in ages and misremembered it as Mick wearing a gas mask, so it was kind of a letdown to see that he's not. And when I got home from LAX at like 2 a.m. I Googled "why is mick jones wearing a veil in the rock the casbah video," and learned that it's got to do with Mick being a big prima donna and uncooperative brat, and then I loved him even more.

-the pool scenes. Cute that Mick is smoking in his inner tube. I really wish there were an alternate version of the "Rock the Casbah" video that was just "The Clash by the pool" 

-how committed and earnest Joe Strummer is about acting out the lyrics. The most earnest lip-syncher of all

-basically everything else except for all the stuff involving the Arab man and the Hasidic man and the armadillo. A few nights after my "Rock the Casbah" plane ride I had a nightmare that the "Rock the Casbah" armadillo bit my finger, which I feel like is a pretty unique nightmare to have

-oh and somewhere around my fourth or fifth viewing, I remembered how in ninth grade I had a crush on a sophomore boy named Dana, who was widely recognized as looking like a shorter, rounder-faced, slumpier Mick Jones. In 11th grade I worked at an Italian bakery and Dana would come in some afternoons and sit at the coffee bar and drink coffee and chainsmoke and eat cake, all slumped-over and probably stoned and not very Mick-Jones-sparkly-eyed - not in the slightest - but still totally sweet. He had a gorgeous sister who looked like a witch and a skater and had pictures of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Pixies up in her locker; I probably wanted to be her. Dana also had this long-sleeved black t-shirt that said "TECHNO" in big neon green letters, which possibly sounds lame now but at the time it was cool and exciting and just added to his beautiful mystique. Anyway what I'm trying to say is: DANA IF YOU'RE OUT THERE - no, I'm kidding. What I'm really trying to say is I'm glad I'm old enough for "looking like Mick Jones" to be a characteristic almost universally understood within my peer group. I started high school five years after The Clash broke up (eight years after Mick got fired), and I'm newly proud of how narrowly I missed "being in high school while The Clash were still together." It makes me feel so deep and wise.

Harry Nilsson, The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Songs on the album Harry (LJ)

My favorite Harry Nilsson album is called Harry. It’s from August of 1969. On the cover of the record is a picture of little kid Harry. He is skinny and his head looks too big for his body. If he were a cartoon character his neck would only be as thick as one pencil line. His face is peaceful but in his eyes it looks like he’s trying to make you do something. You can tell that he’s going to grow up to be a genius which is probably why he picked the picture.

       I like the album title Harry for an album written by a guy named Harry. I wish there was a Paul McCartney album called Paul and a George Harrison album called George but for some reason it seems less cool to imagine a John Lennon album boringly entitled John.

       The first song on Harry is The Puppy Song and it’s great because a cute man saying “puppy” is a really lovely thing but the walk from my flat to the Caledonian Road & Barnsbury Overground station is only as long as the fifth, sixth, seventh, and about half of the eighth (or sometimes the whole eighth if I am in a particularly lethargic walking mood) songs on Harry and I usually sacrifice The Puppy Song to avoid potentially missing out on the end of number seven. Songs Number Two through Four kind of blow.

Number Five is called the Fairfax Rag and it’s pretty peppy but it’s about cops being jerks to you since it’s the sixties and you’re a scuzzy-looking dude who they suspect is a drug user and is probably/definitely a drug user. At the end he goes a little nuts and screams wokka wovva wah wah wah wah wah wah wah. He always screams it around the time I’m walking past a grey brick building called The Gin Palace. I don’t know why it’s called The Gin Palace but I’m happy it is. It’s beautiful.

The sixth song on Harry is City Life and it’s often about me. The city is London; the life is Laura’s. It’s about wishing you could catch a plane to your parents’ house and feeling guilty about how you don’t write your parents too many letters. There’s this part where he sings “Just temporarily” very smoothly in a way that reminds me of an elaborate calligraphic g or y or j. He devotes quite a bit of his time and self and energy to that “temporarily,” and I like that “temporarily” got to be featured in a pop song lyric for once in its life. If words were people temporarily would be a severely boring but ultimately well-intentioned nerd. All I want is the best for temporarily.

      Harry Nilsson singing temporarily usually means it’s about time to pop into Costa to get my coffee, an iced black Americano in the size “Massimo.” I have written extensively about how fucked up it is that iced Americanos at Costa are actually iced lattes and what the fuck, but as it turns out, they are not iced lattes. They just blend up the espresso with water and the oils from the coffee bean make it a little bit frothy. It’s pretty useless to do that but I accept and slightly prefer it. I do a lot of useless shit to make my life a bit frothier too.

Once I have my coffee it’s time to listen to Mournin’ Glory Story and walk past Her Majesties’ Prison at Pentonville which is pretty cute as far as prisons go. Everyone living in there must have been imprisoned for either stealing boiled sweets or treason. So old-timey. The prison’s bookended by a bunch of places with sun-bleached photographs of fry-ups taped into the windows, a place called The Breakout that smells like smoke and fat and ketchup, a tavern called Tawny’s painted in pastel lavender and toothpaste where a band that sounded like a rougher Pogues played on Bank Holiday Sunday. The words THE CALLY are painted across the Overground track in white on blue letters, Cally for Caledonian Road.

       Mournin’ Glory Story is the most beautiful song on the album. If it were flavors it would be: clover honey, vanilla bean, bruleed banana, macadamia nut. It’s an obvious rip-off of For No One by the Beatles but with a bit of a darker edge. In it he rhymes “dirty” as in dirty FEET with “seven-thirty,” which is obviously brilliant. I also like that he doesn’t specify whether he means seven-thirty AM or seven-thirty PM so you can decide for yourself. It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure.

       After Mournin’ Glory Story I get on the Overground and stop listening to music and do a bit of reading on the train, a book by a man who drove around France buying wine, and after I get off the train I walk to work in silence. I think about the people the man who wrote the book met and then I go to work. Work’s alright; it’s pretty good; it’s getting better. I work at a restaurant and I’m not in charge of anything and I don’t make a ton of money. Oh, city life. 

"Broadway" by The Clash (Liz)

The second week of August, my friends and I went out to Joshua Tree to see the meteor shower. The first night was the night of the perigee full moon, which was being a show-off and radiating its majestic supermoon-y light all over the sky and blinding out everything else, so I only saw one or two meteors. And the next night was so cloudy, I only saw one or two meteors then too. But the supermoon was something else; I kept telling everyone that it looked like a giant fluorescent light in the shape of a bloomed rose, and no one believed me about that but I stand by it.

        It was my third trip to Joshua Tree and we stayed at Hicksville again and went to Pappy & Harriet's and that Blake Babies graffiti's still on the bathroom stall. One of the other groups of people at the trailer park was a family from Hawaii; they had two little girls named Chloe (who was about eight) and Layla (who was probably eleven). Their last morning there, Chloe was crying because Layla didn't want to play with her; she'd taken her summer-reading book and put on these rad neon-yellow sunglasses and gone to sit in the shade of the Cramps-themed trailer and read. I felt bad for Chloe, but obviously I was on Layla's side. 

        Later on in the day, around dusk, I bought the Joanna Newsom album Ys on my phone because I really wanted to hear the song that explains the difference between meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids. But then I got a few minutes in and all I wanted to hear was the song that I'd wanted to hear my whole time in the desert, which was "Broadway" by The Clash. I put my earbuds in and sat on the little front porch of our cabin and listened to "Broadway" and watched the big pink puffy sky and felt a heavy kinship with the piano and with Layla and with all of the desert. The desert used to freak me out with its evil energy and Manson-y vibes, but somehow Joe Strummer made me feel completely safe. I love how he refuses to take responsibility for it being six o'clock in the morning.

All The Songs We Loved In June

BY LIZ & LJ/ ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

Paul Simon, "The Boy In The Bubble" (LJ)

Every year, the week before my birthday, there is a festival on College Street called Taste of Little Italy. College Street is barricaded on either end of about fifteen blocks. They put up carnival rides and those types of games where you throw a ring around a doe-eyed plastic frog to win a stuffed animal of a Pokemon and there are a lot of carts selling all the different countries' interpretations of meat on a stick. The air is full of smoke that smells like the meat. For a street festival named Taste of Little Italy, it has only a very small focus on the actual country of Italy.

The day before I left for New York, I had to walk to the drugstore to buy a tube of superglue and- for better or for worse- forgot that Taste of Little Italy was on. I was listening to Graceland on headphones- no new music really found or grabbed me last month; it was a nice homey time for focusing on reliable old favs. I was born in 1985 so obviously dancing to Graceland in my living room was a magical and significant part of my childhood. I feel like recently a lot of people born in the eighties have decided to throw in the towel and accept Graceland back into their lives and hearts like the rattiest and softest old t-shirt this collective band of nostalgic twenty-nine year olds has ever known. 

The drugstore closest to the eastern barricade was closed for no reason and at first I was pissed off but then decided it would probably be a cool experience to start Graceland over from the beginning and walk through the festival to the next-closest drugstore while watching people eat funnel cake and interact with bouncy castles and reach some sort of conclusion as to whether everything was horrible or not. Clearly every song on Graceland is fucking brilliant but when I say "listen to Graceland" I usually mean "Listen to Boy in the Bubble three times and then listen to I Know What I Know twice and then listen to Boy in the Bubble another couple of times and then listen to Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes and then go back to I Know What I Know and then listen to the whole album all the way through." To give credit where credit is due, Graceland the song is pretty beautiful too, but I always find the line about the girl in New York City who calls herself the human trampoline a little grimace-inducing. And I don't understand how he arrives at the conclusion that her calling herself that means he and his son are bouncing into Graceland. Sometimes you just have to accept that some of Paul Simon's "I'm a forty-two year old man" logic will be lost on you. 

If the opportunity to walk through a street festival or carnival-type environment while listening to The Boy in the Bubble ever presents itself to you, I urge you to take it. "Paul Simon is really tolerant of the human condition," is the thought it made me think. It made me feel like Paul Simon and I were a little team together, on a sort of Ghost of Christmas Past-style expedition. The point was for me to walk through an event populated primarily by normies and basics while thinking the least amount of hateful and negative thoughts possible. I feel like Paul Simon believes that to be a great artist you have to see the beauty in everything which I neither do or wish I did. But it's a nice take to have on walking from one drugstore to another. 

"BEST OF FRIENDS," Palma Violets (Liz)

"Best of Friends" by Palma Violets is a very mean and sweet song, but mostly sweet, I think. The lyrics at the chorus go "I wanna be your best friend/I don't want you to be my girl," which is a story I'd like to see made into a novel or a movie. In fact: if books had opening credits, I'd want "Best of Friends" to play during the opening credits to my book (although in the movie version of my book, the opening-credits song is totally "Pretty Persuasion" by R.E.M.). Anyway: the reason I'm linking to SoundCloud here is that the version of Palma Violets presented in the "Best of Friends" video is wildly incongruent to my own vision of the band. In my mind, they all should look like this picture of Jim Reid, which is how I want you to see them when you listen to the song - "scampish but soulful," I suppose is what I mean:

"WOULD YOU FIGHT FOR MY LOVE?", Jack White (Liz)

I guess at some point in the past few years everyone decided to turn against Jack White for being a megalomaniacal drag, but whatevs: I think it's great that he's so aggressively and flamboyantly his big weird curmudgeonly self. I bought Lazaretto the day it came out, and I only love two songs on it (this one, and "I Think I Found the Culprit") - but I love them enough that they're absolutely worth the $10.99, or even more. I love "Would You Fight for My Love?" partly because it sounds like a haunted house in some black-and-white movie from the '30s that Jack White would probably make a big annoying deal about loving; it's so deep how he sings the word "ghost" and then the background singers actually turn into ghosts. Also I think it's fun how Jack's always yelling at women for failing to love him as immoderately as he expects them to. His commitment to his own macho bullshit impresses me.

P.S. Reading all those Lazaretto-related think pieces (especially this one), I wonder whether Jack White is really as obsessed with Meg White as music journalists are always saying he is. I guess I hope he is, because it's romantic. Last month Filter ran this thing where Jack shared a few of his Polaroids and wrote paragraphs about them, and I loved the Meg picture/paragraph so much that I'm just going to include the whole thing here:

All The Songs We Loved In May

BY LAURA JANE & LIZ/ ILLUSTRATION BY JEN

A TRIBE CALLED QUEST, “Can I Kick It" (LJ) 

I remembered that Can I Kick It was a song that existed back in February, when at the end of Tuesday night service one of my co-workers and I would play as drab and weird of music as could possibly be deemed appropriate in an appeal to get all the customers to leave. One night I was like “Oh, I’ve got it”- the grim opening chords to Cat Power's I Don’t Blame You sounded unthinkably hilarious. We started referring to that point in the evening as “Cat Power time.” Either before we figured out about Cat Power or after we couldn’t take another night of listening to Cat Power as a group of negligent losers nursed the glasses of water we’d poured them several hours ago and couldn’t take a hint we played a Best of Lou Reed album and when Walk On The Wild Side came on my line cook Johnny said “Oh, that’s where it’s from,” and I said “Where what's from?” and he said “Can I kick it?” and it would have been really cute if I’d said “Yes you can!” but I didn’t. I just said “Oh, yeah,” or whatever.

One weird night at the beginning of April I came home drunk and accidentally deleted my entire iTunes. Most of it was backed up on my external hard drive but before I remembered about my hard drive I freaked out and started buying a bunch of albums off the iTunes store. Just whatever albums I felt I couldn’t live without that happened to hop into my head. I bought the Tribe Called Quest Anthology and the next day I listened to Can I Kick It on the subway and it sounded the same as every other time I’d ever listened to Can I Kick It but for whatever reason I liked it better now. I don’t know why all the life decisions I’d made and events that had taken place since I last listened to Can I Kick It on a regular basis, in 2005, made Can I Kick It sound a thousand times better than it used to. I wonder if maybe it’s because I used to smoke a ton of pot and therefore was a chiller person. And now that I’m a career-oriented liquor-drinker AKA not a very chill person the chillness of Can I Kick It means more to me. Does more for me.

I wonder if I’ll ever get into smoking lots of weed again, I wondered. Maybe once I get a dog, I thought. There’s nothing much better to do when you’re stoned than look deeply into a gorgeous dog’s soulful eyes. It makes me so sad when people get their dogs high. I feel like a dog’s natural state of existence is way more pure and beautiful than our sloppy dirty stoned and a high would just sully it. Dogs don’t pick up on a ton of nuance in the world like humans do and that must be pretty confusing in itself. Throw pot on top of that haziness and it just sounds like a pretty sad place to put your dog in.

I would like to smoke pot in my dog’s vicinity but definitely make sure to blow the smoke out the window. I would like to keep the window open. And it would be the kind of weather where you could wear a hoodie and shorts. I’d be wearing my new Nike Frees and no socks. I’d be lying on a couch. I’d look over at my dog and I’d tell him he’s cute or he’s my best friend or whatever. Something nice like that. I’d play this song and either I’d ask him “Can I kick it?” and then I’d pick up his paws and mime like he was saying “Yes You Can!” and I’d feel so cool about myself for having received his approval. Or I’d pretend that he was asking me if he could kick it. And I’d point at him with both of my index fingers in a cool, sly way like a rapper would. It would almost break my heart to imagine him ever thinking that he couldn’t.

SHAKEY GRAVES, "Halloween" (Liz)

Shakey Graves is this boy Ali who's friends with Emily. A few times in 2009 the three of us went surfing together at nighttime in Venice; I remember Ali being a very graceful surfer, "a natural." When The State of Texas Vs. Alejandro Rose-Garcia came out I bought it to be a bro, and then I sort of forgot to listen to it. But a little while ago I put my iTunes on shuffle and "Halloween" came up and the creepy/creaky guitar me stopped me and I listened close and loved it. And I still agree that the guitar's creepy and cool, but the words are what got me: he sings about drinking too much and being stuck in your hometown forever in a way that's romantic but lazy or maybe insouciant, there's lines about living in the woods and the chorus has lyrics about liquor stores and crocodiles. I really like that boys can sometimes think about crocodiles when thinking about liquor stores. That's so encouraging.

HARRY NILSSON/LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, "Jump Into the Fire" (Liz)

I think I hate the LCD Soundsystem version of "Jump Into the Fire." I mean it's great and amazing, but I hate it, because it leaves out the best lyric. My favorite part in the original is when Harry Nilsson sings "We can make each other happy," but James Murphy changes it so he's just singing "We can jump into the fire" again, and it's such a tease. I've listened to the LCD Soundsystem cover of "Jump Into the Fire" about a gabillion times over the past month, and every single time some dumb part of me thinks James Murphy's going to sing the lyrics right, and he never does. That's always so frustrating to me, in a way that's almost physical. "Does James Murphy not believe in making each other happy?" is something I usually joke-ask when that happens. I just don't get the point in getting rid of what's maybe the most hopeful lyric in the song - but at the same time I don't really care about "getting James Murphy's points" in general, so ultimately it's okay. I'd much prefer to get Harry Nilsson's points, partly because during Moonlandingcon last week LJ made the cool decision that if Mad Men were the Beatles, then Stan Rizzo would be Harry Nilsson. Also, here's a photo that LJ's friend Matt found of Stan Rizzo wearing a headband and watching a hockey game. Perfect.