A Mixtape of Memories | #TheIsolationJournals
Today's post is inspired by Suleika Jaouad's The Isolation Journals project, something I've been quietly participating in for the last week in an effort to keep my creativity flowing in quarantine. I love this project so much and hope you'll join in if you're looking for a little inspiration.
Today's prompt from essayist Hallie Goodman had us revisiting the songs that shaped certain eras of our lives in a kind of mixtape of memories. As someone who deeply associates her memories with music, I couldn't resist this one. So here is my mixtape, five songs from five moments in my life, a mini mixtape of memories.
1. "I Love You Always Forever" by Donna Lewis
I remember hearing this song for the first time in the back seat of my babysitter's janky redSaab, as she shuttled me from some after school activity to the next. It was around twilight and we were driving past the local YMCA. Aside from housing a gym and pool and meeting rooms for various 12-step groups, the Y was also home to one of those man-made lakes that gave you the sense of being at the beach in land-locked northern New Jersey. The lake itself was…honestly kind of gross, but it was surrounded by low-hanging trees and weeping willows that gave it a kind of magical quality, particularly at night. It looked like some kind of fairy realm, something I, having watched almost every animated princess movie released between 1989 and 2000, felt like an expert in at the time. There was something about this song that was the perfect soundtrack to my lakeside fairy princess fantasy - maybe it was the rhythmic, almost meditative guitar that drives the track, or the chant of the chorus, or the message of loving someone through the ages. All of these things, combined with the solitude of the backseat, led me to imagine my own magical princess story set on the banks of Spring Lake. I eventually turned this story into my first play, cast all my second grade classmates in he roles of princesses and knights and…never actually produced it. I've always had trouble with follow-through.
I have since been told by the best pop authorities that this is a "bad song." Maybe it's because the song completely shifts tone at the bridge, or because Donna Lewis's voice is kind of creepy, or the message is ten layers of 90s pop cheese - who even knows. Who cares. It'll always hold a special place in my fairy princess heart.
2. "My Immortal" by Evanescence
2004 was kind of a dark time for music. We were deep into an age of radio-friendly goth rock and nu metal, and no song embodied this trend better than Evanescence's "My Immortal." Weepy, melodramatic and honestly kind of beautiful, the song was inescapable that year. I look back on it with a pretty cynical eye (it's hard to separate the song from the epically terrible Harry Potter fan-fiction of the same name), but at the time I couldn't help but resonate with it.
The song is ultimately about grief, something I was becoming all too familiar with at the time. One of my mom's best friends, a woman I considered a surrogate aunt, passed away the year before after a long and ugly battle with cancer, leaving my family a bit unmoored. A few months after the song was released, the first person I knew to die by suicide passed away. She was 13. On top of my personal grief, the whole country was still trying to make sense of the events of 9/11. No wonder the radio was so dark.
There was ultimately something comforting about having a song at the top of the charts that mirrored my grief so well. Uncomplicated, consuming and constant - that's what grief feels like at 12-years-old. The song became so visceral to me that at a certain point I couldn't listen to it all the way through. It still gets me! While writing this I almost had to turn it off because I felt too many feelings! The good news is that I'm starting to learn that that's okay.
3. "Overkill" by Colin Hay
In the summer of 2009, I shipped off to Syracuse University for six weeks, the longest time I'd spent away from home at that point, to attend a program for high schoolers looking to get a head start on college credits. You should know (I wish I did, at least) that there isn't much to do in Syracuse in the summertime, at least for a 17-year-old. The mall had a 4 PM curfew on weekends for anyone under 18and campus was generally pretty empty. So naturally, most of my time outside of class was spent in my dorm, watching various things on Netflix, which had just introduced streaming.
That was the summer I fell in love with Scrubs. The show had so much heart, more than most of the sitcoms on at the time. On top of that, the show had some of the best music supervisors in the history of television. Through Scrubs I was introduced to Colin Hay, lead singer of Men at Work, and his song "Overkill," a song he actually performs in Season 2. I listened to that song all summer and probably tried to learn it several times on the ukulele before realizing that power chords don't translate all that well on that instrument.
The lyrics about losing sleep and overthinking things dialed into my mounting anxiety. It's another one of those times where I felt like someone actually "got it," like someone had figured out how to describe this thing I was carrying around. The anxiety eventually came to a head later that year during the college application process, but I think I really started to recognize it that summer, alone with Scrubs and Colin Hay.
4. "The Woodpile" by Frightened Rabbit
I lived at home throughout my junior year of college, commuting into Philadelphia for classes and work. Naturally, I spent a lot of my time in trains and cars, escaping my own thoughts through music and podcasts. One of the many bands I discovered on my commutes that year was Frightened Rabbit, who had recently released their fourth album Pedestrian Verse. The album's second single "The Woodpile" is this big anthem of loneliness, something I was definitely feeling as I was separated from my campus community and dealing what had (once again) become a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend at the time. Everything Scott Hutchison sings feels like some kind of prayer, although I'm sure he would've fought me on that phrasing. That's what it felt like - and still feels like - to me, at least. A prayer for someone to come and rescue you with some light. I think we could all use that right now.
5. "Huarache Lights" by Hot Chip
The summer of 2016 felt incredibly painful in so many ways and we still didn't even know what was coming. And yet, I think that was the summer I really fell in love with NewYork City. It was the summer I went to festivals and saw so many shows and joined my chorus and finally felt like I was starting to create a life for myself in a city that can be incredibly isolating.
I'd discovered this song the summer before, probably through the Spotify algorithm, but it resonated even more that year when I actually started to discover what the city had to offer. The beat feels like the pulse of the city, big and ultimately hopeful. I'd put it on as I walked to meet friends at bars on the Lower EastSide and in Brooklyn and feel like I was absolutely in the right place. I wasn't sure if I would be there forever but I knew there was so much available to me. I'm still figuring out my place in it all, four years later, but I love New York more now than I could possibly imagine at the time.