(Of course, that entire lost-pop-gem phenomenon has been slaughtered by the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-selling iTunes, which (among other things) sees/knows/sells that it’s called “More Today Than Yesterday,” and is by Spiral Starecase. Cue one less magical radio-only moment; ninety-nice more cents spent.)
Archives for 2005
Nothing Left to Win; Nothing Else to Lose
(There is a high probability that you are reading this post because you searched for the lyrics in its title. They slightly misquoted from the song “With or Without You” by U2, released in 1987 on their album The Joshua Tree. (The actual lyric is “nothing left to lose”).
Purchasing that album, which also includes “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” was one of the major reasons i wrote this post.
I’d love it if you would stick around to check out my writing and my original music. I’ve embedded an MP3 of the original “With or Without You” elsewhere on this site – you might bump into it if you do enough browsing. You can read the full lyrics here.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled post.)
There are some songs I’ve only ever heard on the radio. Those magical hits, disembodied from albums, never seemed meant to be played at my command. I might not hear one for years, but one day be bestowed with it in a restaurant, or in someone else’s car. All a matter of chance.
These songs are different for everyone. Certainly some are more universal than others. They are each quicksilver, resolving in your aural canal as quickly as they will trickle away. You may not even remember them from one listen to the next, maybe not even if you see their names.
When people come to my house sometimes the marvel at how many of these songs – otherwise lost to them – exist in my record collection. Can they listen to this one, or borrow that one? It’s a wonderful role of fantasy fulfillment, being able to render the songs more real for my friends by offering them in the context of albums, cases, and liner notes.
I can’t possibly own each possible slippery tune, mine or anyone else’s. Not without buying all of the “Best of DooWop” and “The Big Eighties” collections there are to be had. Yet, sometimes you are in Tower Records, and there is an inexplicable $7.99 sale, and your fingers are dancing across the tops of plastic cases, and suddenly you see it – one song easily worth a penny under eight dollars just so you can capture it, like lightning in a jar.
Will you listen to it once a day? Will it hold up? Or, will you content in knowing that the next time you catch a snippet of it you can return to your home and release those notes into the air to light up the room, if just for three brief minutes?
Whoever’s Listening
You know, back in the day i might not have understood what chords i was fretting, or what key i was playing in, or even how to sing, but god bless me, any time i didn’t think i’d remember how to do one of those things i made little notes in the margin of my lyrics or recorded the song. Which is more than i can say for my current state of affairs.
My goal for this week’s free time (made even more free because E isn’t even here, so i’m completely alone and to my own devices) is that i had to play each one of my 140 completed documented songs all the way through – researching how to play them, when necessary.
It’s funny, spending the better part of your free time listening to lo-fi recordings of yourself from six years ago trying to pick out the bass notes of chords. If i’m ever famous enough to warrant one of those The Early Years collections… oh boy, there’s plenty of crappy early years to choose from. I mean, aside from the hundreds of recordings from the beginning of CK forward. Early.
Anyhow, after 20 minutes of fruitlessly rewinding a real audio file from 1999 that i think was recorded in a spectacular 8-bits of digital sound in a futile attempt to figure out the bridge of the song i wrote on my last day of high school i finally pulled my old lyric book off the shelf to discover that the four weird alternate tuning chords i had been so desperately trying to replicate were printed in neat numerals at the top of the page, dated 6/19/1999.
That makes song 48 of 140 complete.
Fingers just starting to get sore.
Anyanka
One day i will be able to watch the finale of Buffy and not cry every time Anya is on screen.
If only we could get a little teevee running the finale at the side of the stage, i could cry in the play.
CarSeat Flashback
When I was two and a half I learned that you only get credit for something you have the courage to do.
My mother contests my memory of this event.
I remember single frames of it almost more clearly than any other memory I’ve ever had. It was summer, and I was in the back seat, on the left hand side, in my car seat. The car was the Golden Nova, a two-door nugget of vinyl-seated glory from the mid-late seventies. We were at a gas station, but it wasn’t the Gulf station we always went to. We may have been in New Jersey.
It was hot. We may have been returning from a lake or pool. My mother, who does not like to pump her own gas (maybe because of this story), got out of the car to pump gas.
My mother, lest we forget, was only about two and a half years older than the mean age of my four favorite drinking buddies (i.e. she was pregnant at the age of my four favorite drinking buddies). What any of the four of them would do if they locked their two-year-old in the Golden Nova on one of the hottest days of the year I can’t say.
(That’s a lie. Two of them would McGuyver it open, one of them would have a panic attack and then do something highly logical, and the other one would helplessly flirt with someone who she suspected could open it for her.)
(I’ll leave the four of you to figure out who you are and which thing I think you would do.)
In any case, when mom got out of the car to pump gas she pressed down the lock on her car door before slamming it shut. Was it a reflex? Had she forgotten that tiny Peter was in the back, strapped securely into his car-seat, already beginning to die a slow death of asphyxiation?
It didn’t take her very long to realize our predicament. What had she done? I am missing the still memory picture to go with this part of the story, so have to extrapolate from the bits on either side. After yanking the door handle to no avail did she cup her hands to the glass, peering in and tapping frantically as if bothering an animal at the zoo?
I may have waved back at her as she peered into my vehicular cage. The whole situation was amusing to me – my mother now frantically seeking out a station attendant. Didn’t she know I could unbuckle own car seat and unlock the car door? Surely I had unbuckled my carseat in front of her before?
No, no, she didn’t know, because now she was back with a man who was wielding a curiously bent coat hanger. What was he doing with the coat hanger?
Never mind the coat hanger, mom. I tried to signal to her as she stood behind the attendant. Look at me! I was about to perform my toddler houdini routine, unbuckling the car seat strap and crawling up to the front seat to pull up the lock. How amazing a feat! Oh, the congratulations I would reap! She just had to watch… Watch, mom, watch.
I got her attention, I think, and I made a big show of reaching out to the lock, as if I was just working out in my toddler head that *I* could open the door for her. Yes, let her see the baby head wheels turning. Such a smart toddler. I would just have to… *gasp* unbuckle the car seat on my own! Could I? Dare I?
My chubby little fingers crept to the red release button on the car seat buckle, brow knitted in concentration. Would I be able to figure it out? Through the window my mother frantically motioned that I should release the buckle, though I studiously ignored her.
Then, there was a pop. The man’s wire hanger triggered the lock on the door, and the chipped metal knob had popped up into the unlocked position. Open went the door, the sticky outside air hardly a relief from the sticky inside air. My in-progress escape act quickly forgotten, my mother was all coo and apology for leaving me to suffocate alone in the Golden Nova on such a hot day.
To this day she insists I was too young to remember the story. I’m sure I’m making some of it up, though she confirms that it occurred. What I know to be true is that I *knew* I could unbuckle the car-seat and unlock the door, *knew* I could easily solve the problem myself.
But, I didn’t. I was too interested in making sure someone was looking on, as if only that affirmation would enable me to do anything. Having someone watch the process, though, wasn’t as important as achieving the result.
You have to be brave enough to try whether or not anyone will see you fail, because they will surely notice if you succeed.