Oneida – Busy Little Bee
There comes a point, I’ve discovered, when people decide to kill themselves in order to start living. It’s more than a foray into adulthood. There are bills to pay, the threat of bills to pay, the threat of the inability to go to work and thus pay said bills because you used up your gas driving four hours to that Tom Waits concert…
It’s difficult to keep up. Suddenly, writing passionately about music is the least of your worries. You’re struggling just to acquire and skim what’s coming out, and you can’t really write about that, right? Isn’t that what record reviews are for? Then again, they judge albums; you judge songs. You wonder how people make time for profundity, and what ever happened to your knack for finding those tracks that convinced you, despite all physics, that a part could be greater than the whole?
The Ronettes – Do I Love You?
“Well it’s okay”, you say to yourself. “I love music, and damnit. I’ll write about it,” but there’s more. There’s the music that made you love the world, and you’ve lost it somewhere along the way in the desire to be a productive, self-sufficient member of the human race.
Right now there’s obligation splattered everywhere; it’s on the tiles of my kitchen floor and across my fridge. I want to write about the song “Killian’s Red” even if Nada Surf is (below?) average. I want to write about the Doves even if this website wasn’t fond of Some Cities.
Screw indie cred, and screw guilty pleasures; I’m not looking for a fight from the snobs or praise from the Poptimists. I know Nada Surf is far from the best band in the world, but that song meant something to me three years ago when I was less adventurous and underexposed enough to have that song mean something to me. I don’t care that I went through a Goo Goo Dolls phase at 13 because I’d never heard of The Replacements. Some things just stick.
Explosions In The Sky - Time Stops
It occurred to me that my Titus poster of Anthony Hopkins may be a good representation of how life will be for the next few months, but I sweat and swagger on this 3AM. I want to make a joke that “I must be lonely,” but I also don’t want to deal with sneers, even if they’re from coming from me, regarding Rob Thomas. I think I’ve just realized that respect isn’t a matter of other people thinking you’re respectable, and that while life will always be busy, I will always have the ability to make time stop just enough to let me find the things I love most in this life and, of course, bring them to you.