My eight-year-old son Joey, much like me, gets overwhelmed when life is too busy. And this month, with Thanksgiving, and Halloween, and birthday parties, and the uptick of general activity that comes with the beginning of the school year, has been a lot for both of us. He was grouchy last Wednesday so I took him along with me when I went to pick up a grocery order. It wasn’t going to be the most interesting trip, but at least it got him out of the house and gave me some company as I waited in the dark, mostly deserted, grocery store parking lot.
He is the most musically easygoing of my two kids. When his older brother gets in the car he immediately demands my phone so he can program a playlist of Broadway hits and pop anthems.But Joey is fine to let me pick an album and put it on. I don’t know what led to me selecting Guided By Voices Bee Thousand but I clicked on it and hit play as the car rolled out of the driveway.
The opening lines of the first track, “Hardcore UFOs”, always take hold of me and pull me back to another time. The first time I heard that album was when a new boyfriend brought it to my apartment in the early days of our courtship in 2000. I liked it so much he let me hang on to the CD and I don’t think I returned it until we moved in together a year or so later. By then it didn’t matter. We shared our CD and record collections, even though we didn’t always have similar tastes. Guided by Voices was one band we both loved. And Bee Thousand will forever be associated in my mind, with the heady, early days of that relationship. (The sour, bummer-filled later days of the relationship were set to a soundtrack of The Ergs! but that’s a different story.)
Was it weird, you might be wondering, to listen to an album so associated with falling in love with one dude who I eventually broke up with? Was it made even weirder because I was listening to the record while driving around with the child I had with a whole other man? (The opening days of THAT relationship were all Death Cab for Cutie “When Soul Meets Body” but that was all on me, since my husband is not a music guy.) (I know.)
It isn’t weird, is my answer to those hypothetical questions. When I leave a relationship I keep my memories and my attachment to their soundtracks. I have a librarian to thank for that mindset. When I was a never-been-kissed high schooler who worked after school at a local library there was a librarian who worked sporadic shifts and sometimes arrived on a motorcycle. She wore band t-shirts under cardigans and had vintage cats eye glasses. One time when I was replacing books on shelves and moping about a guy I had a crush on, she asked me what was wrong and I relayed my tale of rejection. I mentioned, as a mopey postscript, that I didn’t even want to listen to my favourite REM song anymore because it reminded me of him (he’d said he liked it when he saw I had the cassette in my bag in French class) the librarian put her hand on my shoulder.
“If you start letting people take songs from you, you’ll have a miserable, miserable life.”
She didn’t ever say much else to me, but I am eternally thankful for that piece of advice. It’s allowed me to keep Guided by Voices and REM as my own, but has also saved me from losing Sam Cooke, Dar Williams, The Silver Jews, Fleetwood Mac, Paint it Black, and Mary Lou Lord. I don’t know what happened to the motorcycling librarian, but I’m willing to bet she didn’t have a miserable, miserable life.
October 2023 Songs
Of course I’m starting with Hardcore UFOs. But also, the song that made Joey laugh, as we drove back from the grocery store was Kicker of Elves.
After reading my friend Sean Carswell’s column about them in Razorcake, I have been very much enjoying The Globs, especially What Is The Sound of Nothing and The Tugboat Captain.
In a total departure from the types of music noted above, I want to say that every time I sit down to write a newsletter I have to talk myself out of writing a rapturous essay about Katy Perry. I have Katy Perry Stockholm Syndrome, because my older son loves her so much, I have become a fan through prolonged exposure. And sure, you can tell me she’s problematic and cheesy and terrible but okay sure, whatever, I eat your hate like love. And what I also love is the marching-band style drums in Never Really Over.
October 2023 Feelings
My actual real-life friend, Lisa Whittington-Hill, wrote about the Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat for the Bloomsbury 33 1/3 series. If you haven’t seen this series before, the premise is that each book is about one album. The press opens for pitches periodically and people who want to write about a particular record prepare an exhaustive proposal and then research and write a small book about the album. I’d been eagerly waiting for a Go-Go’s book and I could not be more excited that Lisa, who is smart, funny, and a great writer, was the one who got to write it. Lisa gives the band so much respect and also zooms out in a way that is really illuminating, talking about the place of female musicians in the industry over time (spoiler alert - it’s never been awesome). I also especially enjoyed when Lisa inserted her own sarcastic commentary amongst the deft research. I laughed out loud more than once and also cried a little towards the end.
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang was one of the many books I read earlier this month when I was stuck at home for two weeks recovering from pneumonia. Before I settled down on the sofa with my antibiotics and the dog, I went to the Express Loan shelves at my local library and grabbed everything that looked good, figuring that I’d have plenty of time to read books quickly, since I had very little else to do. This one was the kind of book I probably would have read quickly anyway, because it was so gripping. The plot keeps building and building, with the main character making worse and worse decisions. There is no one likeable in this book and the narrator is wildly unreliable, but I could not put it down.
Thanks for reading! See you next month.
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J.W.
Instagram : @JenniferWhitefordWrites
Razorcake columns, reviews, interviews etc
My debut romance novel, MAKE ME A MIXTAPE is coming from Doubleday in 2024.