Revisitations
Music as a doorway to memory or a way to shut it down
I’ve never understood people who only listen to the music of their youth. Inertia is a powerful thing, and I guess it’s easier to play the same old Bad Brains or Led Zeppelin songs on repeat than…click on a generated Spotify playlist? No. No, that’s actually really easy.
(I know, I don’t love those playlists either, and it’s like the app knows when I can’t pay attention to my screen and picks that exact moment to insert some random track into my carefully curated driving playlist. Grr, Spotify, grr.)
So maybe it’s that people want to recapture their halcyon days. But repetition robs memories of their emotional power: sooner or later the association becomes less “driving down a summertime road with friends in a borrowed convertible” and more “tuning out the sound from crappy computer speakers while you type an email.” Some things (coughcough Morrissey) are better left in the past, okay?
Plus, if you listen to nothing but the albums you owned when you were 21, you lose out on the distinct pleasure of rediscovery. Not everything holds up, but it’s a joy when it does.
Recently I fell down a Cranes rabbit hole. Cranes were a band who became prominent in goth/shoegaze/ethereal wave circles in England in the 1990s. They weren’t obscure (they toured with the Cure) but they were one of those cult-favorite bands you think about twenty years later and wonder if they only existed in some alternate, Mandela-effect universe. Even in the late ‘90s, hardly anyone I hung out with listened to them.
I’ve loved a lot of bands, but Cranes are one of the few where I can remember my exact location when I first heard them (summer after high school graduation, riding in my friend’s boyfriend’s car, hatchback speakers blasting Wings of Joy and blowing the top of my head off).
Cranes performing “Leaves of Summer,” which starts slow until about 1:00 in. VHS format did not age well, but you get the gist!
I’d gone through my classic rock phase, my grunge phase, my punk and postpunk phases, but this was different. A wall of sound, blistering yet delicately melodic. I was no stranger to unintelligible lyrics, but the majority I’d heard up to that point had been snarled by disaffected, drug-addled men in leather pants or holey flannel. Alison Shaw’s vocals were intense and emotional, with an otherworldly quality. One of those voices people either loved or hated. (Though if you’re a female singer, is there any other kind? Everyone has an opinion about what a woman’s voice sounds like.) What words I could make out were unabashedly sentimental, but Shaw made them sound serious and vulnerable.
I got into the Cranes before social media or even the internet were mainstream, so I took them in the bits I could find: cassette tapes dubbed from friends, brief conversations about how they were “British, I’m pretty sure, maybe a brother and sister?” I didn’t know anything about them as people, never got to see them live.1 Most of the actual information I’ve learned has been in the past month. My engagement with them was wholly through their songs.
Thinking about this band, reacquainting myself with their music and watching them perform in self-consciously arty MTV videos and grainy VHS rips, got me thinking about what makes a certain song or artist take up residence inside our heads and become scaffolding for our personalities. Yes, sometimes drugs are involved, but they tend to heighten an experience rather than create it. For me, the key has always been intensity. Emotions not worn on the sleeve but sublimated in pounding drums and distorted guitar, in lyrics more evocative than straightforward, in a certain raw vulnerability. Highs and lows. Fucking catharsis, maaaan.
This song is so ‘90s it hurts, but just listen to those breaks around 1:55 and 3:00
I think a lot of introverts gravitate to intense music because it lets us express or experience feelings that are usually latent. I’m just not an outwardly emotional person! I have to make a real effort to bring emotion into my writing in a way that registers with other people. I’m turning it up to what I think is eleven, when it’s really about a six. Sometimes a scene calls for the prose equivalent of Alison Shaw close-mic’ing a metaphor about floating down a river, but sometimes you need Taylor Swift putting her extremely autobiographical heartbreak into a ten-minute film! I’m the first to admit that late millennials/gen Z kids are more in touch with their feelings than earlier generations ever were, and this is a good thing.
Though maybe people are on to something when they strip the nostalgia from their old favorites. You can drown in feelings if you’re not careful. You have friends you once loved dearly who have died. Other friends who are alive, but with whom you no longer speak for very good reasons, or stupid reasons, or no reason at all. The person you yourself were back then is gone forever: every day the truth sinks in deeper that even if you wanted to go back, even if you could, it wouldn’t be the same. Listening to a much-loved band after years away drives that truth straight into your solar plexus. Maybe it’s better to let it wash over you softly, track by repeated track.
Author updates
My second novel, WHEN I’M HER, has a publication date! It’s coming out March 26, 2024. As I mentioned in my previous newsletter, the writing of this book was not quick or easy, but I’m truly happy with how it came out. Stay tuned for a cover reveal and preorder links in the not-so-distant future!
I was interviewed by Barbara Genova for her riveting newsletter RUNAWAY. We talked about various toxic things (codependent relationships, online mom culture, Florida’s authoritarian turn) as well as the fact that women have been writing speculative worst-case scenarios for years, and lots more.
Reading/watching/listening
GIRLS AND THEIR HORSES by Eliza Jane Brazier
Silo and (finally) Season 3 of Ted Lasso
If you enjoy my ramblings, you might like my book! NPR said The Other Me “resists categorization, blending the impossible with the probable with the downright plausible.”
Out now in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and ebook!
I just found out they’re playing a one-night-only reunion show in London ON MY BIRTHDAY, with the original lineup, for the 30th anniversary of the release of Forever. It’s sold out of course, but if anyone wanted to somehow get me a ticket it would be the most badass birthday present ever. Manifesting it.
I loved this newsletter so much! You're so right about everyone having an opinion on a woman vocalist's voice. I'll never forget a conversation I had with a big Music Snob Guy who just straight said, "I don't listen to female vocalists" like that was a valid thing to say. And I never really thought about the fact that being an introvert/having difficulty outwardly expressing emotions might be one reason why I gravitate toward really intense or emotional music. That resonated!