A Song That I Listen To When I’m Happy | Headlights Pointed At the Dawn

I have a weird relationship with the Smashing Pumpkins. I can barely stand some of their (qualitatively) best work, but some of their least palatable I find endlessly fascinating. They’re a band that definitely defined a fairly significant chunk of my musical awakening, both for their music in and of itself and, more tragically, for the fact that they were the girl to whom I sang Depeche Mode’s favorite band.

The fact that I use that word, “tragically”, and mean it makes me probably a very pathetic individual. If not pathetic, then at least sad. But that’s not where we are.

“1979″. A song that I don’t think I am capable of listening to unless I’m in a good mood.

This is different than a song that actively makes me happy; while I suppose it’s theoretically capable of achieving that, it’s never really been given the chance. It’s not sneaky that way; I know it and listen to it as a happy song. That means, unfortunately, that whenever it comes up and I’m not in the mood for it, whether I’m listening to Mellon Collie or have my music on random or even if I’m just driving around in Grand Theft Auto, I’ll pass it over.

It’s just… happy. It’s difficult to explain the why, but it’s easy to explain the feeling. The first time I heard it, I thought of the title and flashed instantly back to Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69“, which is a song about young and dumb and having fun more than anything else for me. That connection, “Summer of ’69″ to “1979″, seemed like the logical connection to me, a generational shift.

The song itself backs me up, at least in my mind. It’s driving and bouncy and a little ominous. Rather like my adolescence, I think. The video supports all that, too; it is, literally, kids running around and having a good time. I don’t know if I understood the metaphors when I was 13 and 14; I know I’ve come to understand a lot of what the Pumpkins were on about a lot better now than I did then.

But “1979″ isn’t ever going to get that chance. It lives in its little capsule for me, a little place for me to go when I remember that I’m young and dumb and having fun, no matter how much I feel otherwise sometimes.

It’s a little way for me to never grow up.

A Song That Reminds Me of Someone | Words Are Very Unnecessary

Sitting behind the passenger’s seat of the car on that hot day, displaced by the only person who trumped me in the best friend rule, and who I would have gladly given up shotgun for a hundred times out of a hundred anyway, I should’ve already known there was nothing there.

I was seventeen, and I thought I was in love. The fact that I might have no idea what love actually may be never entered my mind; it becomes clear to me later that the reason every teenager makes the same mistakes is because there are certain things you have to experience for yourself. For me, one of those things was hanging myself up on a girl for half a decade.

We’d had the whole relationship in a flash, cycling through the whole process. Meet, flirt, kiss, girlfriend/boyfriend, make out some more, “I love you”… answered with evasion. Too stupid, too soon.

I made promises then that I had no reason to make, no way to know if I could actually keep. Some of them are seared into my mind, repeated so often in memory that I can’t honestly tell you if they truly happened or if I just imagined they should have and made them part of the story. Others are lost entirely to me; in my mind, it is a linear narrative, and when you’re crafting a narrative, it is often best to jettison anything that doesn’t further the plot.

It’s not easy living your life that way. When you expect everything to have exposition followed by rising action followed by climax followed by falling action followed by denouement, it has a way of being self fulfilling.

Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad for someone who also believed in happy endings, but I happen to believe that everyone gets, at most, one of those.

She wasn’t mine.

In the back seat of that car, I put my hands over the seat and on her shoulders when “Enjoy the Silence” came up on whomever’s mixtape was in the deck that night. I sang along with the song, “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed…” and I felt her stiffen and I sat back, in my place, by myself.

That night she pulled me aside and said she wanted to talk to me. I knew what was coming; even then I could read the signs.

And Depeche Mode can take me back to that night any time I’m in the right mood.