A Song That Reminds Me of Somewhere | If You’re Looking for Something Lifelike

It was cold there, that late in the winter and that close to the water. I didn’t expect the first time I ever saw seagulls to be concurrent with a snowfall; I’d always associated them with warmer climates and those beaches that I still had not ever visited. Yet there they were, wheeling through the air in their presumably inexorable search for food, occasionally blowing out of existence when the wind gusted and threw a blast of snow across the scene.

I was huddled in the tunnel under the pedestrian bridge in the park at East End Avenue. It was the only place I could go to get away from my house, not the most wonderful place in the world at the time.

I hadn’t yet grown accustomed to living in a city where I was actually exposed to the weather. I didn’t own an umbrella yet, something I managed to regret every time it rained hard. I only had a scarf because I’d received one as a gift, and a hat because they’d given them out at Domino’s in the winter time when I was delivering for them. Most crucially for me under that bridge, though, I didn’t have any gloves.

I palmed my CD player and thrust my hands deep into my pockets, hoping to keep them warm long enough for the storm inside to blow over so I could go back home. I sat; I must have looked for all the world like a scared, cold kid to every passerby. I was 21, older than I’d ever been, and now I’m even older, and I thought I was dealing with the situation in as adult a way as I was going to manage.

I didn’t want to go wait inside the coffee shop where I worked, even though it wasn’t far. I, for some reason possibly related to my pride, felt it was a better idea to stay close to home and let myself suffer. Maybe I wanted to be a martyr. Maybe I wanted to prove a point. That was never going to work, something disastrously easy to see in hindsight.

I put on “Hustle Rose” by Metric and moved to the melody line of the vocal, trying to keep warm to its repetition and rhythm. The third or fourth time through, I started to get more cognizant of the song’s component parts, the keyboard or organ or whatever line that traced the vocal in the background of the opening, the complex changes engineered by altering the song’s instrumentation, things I’d learned to notice by spending almost all my time around and among musicians for as long as I’d had the slightest shred of independence.

It was clear in retrospect that I should have tried harder at music myself.

Emily Haines sings “throw me a bone” and I can follow her wherever she wants to go. I hadn’t heard of Metric before a random unexpected instant message from a friend of mine earlier that fall had implored me to look them up. We weren’t quite to the torrenting stage yet; I must’ve downloaded their EP and first full length from a peer to peer network, back before those became so laughably archaic that the record labels figured out how to beat them.

I hadn’t heard of them, sure, but no mixtape I made that winter didn’t have a Metric song on it, and since the only thing I could afford to give for gifts over those first far from home holidays were mixes, I used most of the songs they had at the time. It was obviously love at first sight.

I dared to expose the bare pale skin of my hand to the biting cold so I could tap a few buttons on my CD player and set the song to repeat; there were other songs that day, but none of them mattered.

None of them mattered.

I wonder if I knew even then that I was imprinting a memory on my mind, defining a moment of my life, embossing one of those things that would come to explain what New York is to me into the flat stock of my life. I don’t think I did; I wasn’t that smart.

I imagine I was just cold and lonely and alone in a city I barely knew aside from a few too many nights spent at a gay bar with $10 all you can drink on Thursdays and a few too many regrets that didn’t involve nearly enough bad decisions.

I imagine I just hoped it would get better.

My Favorite Song | Play Me Something Like “Here Comes the Sun”

It seems that I, perversely, don’t have a favorite song.

A few years ago, when I first started using iTunes and got an iPod, I made myself a playlist called “The Five Favorites”. It included, in no particular order, “Only in Dreams” by Weezer, “Another Space Song” by Failure, “Interstate Love Song” by Stone Temple Pilots, “For Me This is Heaven” by Jimmy Eat World, and “Singing in My Sleep” by Semisonic. I think.

The fact is, I can’t remember with 100% certainty what was on the list, and it has to do with more then changing tastes. Yeah, new music’s captured my heart, and old favorites have snuck into the rotation. And yes, I still love each and every one of those songs with a pure visceral feeling that I can’t explain, which is lucky, since I don’t have to, given the fact that anyone who cares about music at all knows exactly what I mean.

But I don’t have a favorite. There’s no one song that speaks to me across time and across my whole life, the way some people feel about “Blackbird”. There’s no all-timer for me.

I put forth the question a few days ago to others: “What is my favorite song?” There were a few good answers, some of which will come up later in the month. However, none of them seemed right.

There was one response that really caught my eye, ultimately: favorites are for people who have settled.

I don’t have a favorite because I don’t have something I’ve loved always. In fact, I jettisoned nearly all the music to which I’d been exposed throughout my childhood as an adolescent when I decided to start listening to “my music”; even if I came back to large swaths of it, realizing I’d been wrong to dismiss it, anything that could be considered a “favorite” from then had been stripped of its luster.

(It bears mentioning now that the music of that I jettisoned, the music of my parents, was mostly ‘80s hair metal. It taught me to love music, but it didn’t stand up to the giants that rose in the early ‘90s when I was coming into my own. I still stand by that.)

Right now, I can’t stop listening to Metric’s “Gimme Sympathy”, so I suppose that right at the moment, it’s my favorite song. However, ultimately, I think it comes down to this: there’s no all time favorite for me, which means my favorite at any given moment is at the mercy of caprice, or my brain, or my ears, or, maybe on that right spring day when the world feels fresh and I want to skip down the block, my heart.

And I guess I’m all right with that.