What are your tiniest, most insignificant regrets?
When I was 19 or so, I met a guy at a show at the 40 Watt, the way one does—or I assume the way one does when the music is too loud to carry on an audible conversation—a lot of you noticing them noticing you noticing them and so forth. I was there with my brother, which might have complicated matters, except it didn’t somehow. My brother was a generally good sport, having regularly invited me to accompany him to a variety of shows during his college years, though this was the first show at which I’d ever gotten hit on. This surprised me. Not that it was the first time getting hit on, but that it happened at all. I wasn’t someone this sort of thing happened to. Who thinks they are attractive enough to get hit on by a random, cute stranger at a concert when they are 19 (or so)? I certainly didn’t.
After the show, the three of us went to The Grill—the third-wheeling of the moment being at least partially due to my brother’s recognizing my naïveté and mildly insisting that I not take off with this guy alone. Things went as well as they can while eating and talking with a guy you’ve just met while your brother sits there, not-so-silently vetting him. Surprisingly, this did not scare the guy off—
He was in Athens until the next afternoon and would I like to meet up with him for breakfast and a walk around town?
Yes!
The next morning things went well, at least through breakfast and up until halfway through our postprandial stroll, when he asked me the dreaded question:
What music are you into?
To this day, I have a self-consciousness around my taste in music that is wildly disproportionate to the degree to which it actually matters. To say that this self-consciousness was exponentially worse in my late teens and early twenties would be an understatement.
And so—and I cringe as I prepare to type these words—I answered him,
“I don’t know. What are you into?”
I
don’t
know.
What
are
you
into?
He politely answered (with me most likely nodding along in pathetic agreement with his choices—it pains me to dwell on this memory too deeply) as we finished our loop back to where we started. He left town with a promise to call me sometime, but—unsurprisingly to just about anyone but 19-or-so year-old me—that sometime never came.
And there’s nothing to say that if I had spilled the list of the artists on regular rotation in my beloved five disc CD player—whose purchase I agonized over as it felt like such a tremendous splurge, only buying it when the lower-priced one disc model was out of stock at the Best Buy in Kennesaw, GA and the employees gave me the five disc one for the same price—that the cute guy from somewhere other than Athens would have actually called me later. But I did wonder. Do wonder.
What if I had told him?
What if I had told him that I religiously listened to Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele, singing along with almost all of it, from being a “starfucker, just like my daddy” to having “an angry snatch, girls, you know what I mean,” but still being far too superstitious to so much as mouth the words to “Father Lucifer”?
What if I told him that I listened to Rage Against the Machine, even though at the time I really couldn’t tell one song from the other and hadn’t even fully figured out what I should be mad about yet?
That I listened to NIN and Liz Phair? And that I liked Exile in Guyville so much more than Whip-Smart and maybe it was because of the music and maybe it was because of the Polaroid pictures in the liner notes of my cassette copy of Exile? “I Kinda Lost Track My Self.”
That I took the two CDs from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness quite literally and played “Dawn to Dusk” when I wanted to be awake and “Twilight to Starlight” when I was ready to fall asleep?
That I listened to the Putumayo World Music samplers that my brother would bring home from the freebie stash at work and danced around my room with the lights off so the neighbors wouldn’t see my shadow through the blinds?
But I didn’t.
I didn’t tell him any of that.
I was so desperate to be liked that I wouldn’t reveal a “me” for someone to like. To reveal what music I listened to and then be rejected for it would be like having my very essence rejected. Your tastes are bad and therefore you are bad, as well. So, instead I let myself be rejected for my blank slated-ness. My “what do you like? I can like that, too. I can be the kind of person who likes what you like.” My “I end where you begin and I never pick myself back up again.”
(And you learn. Or you hope you learn. You learn that the ones who will not reject your blank-slated-ness are the ones who don’t really love you. Can’t really love you.
So you learn to make yourself truly vulnerable and in doing so, less vulnerable to losing your you.)
And perhaps this is no longer a regret.
And perhaps this is not so insignificant, after all.
kfw 2021
Some thoughts on all of these thoughts: I did not wake up this morning expecting to write this. In fact, I had planned to share some music that I find myself liking/listening to lately with some words about why I find myself liking it (as though liking something requires an explanation at all) and as I unpacked the feeling that my tastes require justification somehow, all of this came up.
There is a reason I changed my Spotify profile picture to this early this year:
I am still a bit more timid about sharing my musical tastes than I would like. Sharing a playlist is as close as I will ever get to sending nudes (and not on account of my bare shoulders).
Since you’ve stuck around this long, I’ll share an extremely small sampling of what I’ve been listening to lately (and why). One request as you engage with these songs: Please read the explanations before you listen.
“Here and Heaven” from The Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile and, on this track, Aoife O’Donovan. Yes, this is 10 years old.
Here’s what I like about it:
1) The use of dynamics, tempo and rhythm. They leave you a little off center and then raise the urgency as the song moves to its climax.
2) Chris and Aoife just sound amazing together. They kind of always do, really.
3) Lyrics like these: “…we are staking our claim/
On ground so fertile we forget who we’ve hurt along the way and reach out/
For a strange hand to hold someone strong but not bold enough to tear down the wall”
“You Give Death A Bad Name” with Sufjan Stevens
and Angelo De Augustine off of A Beginner’s Mind.
(This is probably the only “new” one of the ones I’m going to share here.)
Here’s what I like about it:
1) I am kind of always here for Sufjan Stevens and his sort of too-enigmatic-for-this-plane-of-existence-ness. His whole being is purely apocryphal. There’s a reason that The Best Nonrequired Reading 2007 (with an introduction by Sufjan Stevens), purchased at my local “Friends of the Library” sale a few years back, sits perched atop The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, and Conceptual Physics – 12th Edition on the shelf in my bathroom. Give it a read next time you visit.
2) That and this lyric:
“Can you explain all our divided pain / What still remains after the rigor mortis”
The use of the words rigor mortis in a song lyric is right up there with Wye Oak managing to make the use of the words “prepositional phrase” work in their song “Glory.”
Roma di Luna’s cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In The Aeroplane Over the Sea.”
Here is what I like about it:
1) Its sort of understated and innocent earnestness is an interesting contrast to the original.
As an aside:
“The kids” are now labeling an enjoyment of Neutral Milk Hotel as a red flag in a potential partner. I’m sorry, but NMH manage to make “semen stain[ing] the mountaintops” sound reasonable. (See also the use of “rigor mortis” and “prepositional phrase” above.)
I’ll still be listening to them when the mood strikes. Do with that knowledge what you will.
“As I Am” by Paper Bird from their 2013 album Rooms.
To be honest, I am not 100% a fan of this song, musically, as it’s a bit more twee than I can stand a lot of the time, but here’s what I like about it:
1) These lyrics:
“These arms of mine were made for lifting up/
And when I set things down again/
I hope they are better than they were/
These eyes of mine/
Like what they see when they’re looking at you/
If ever I can’t see you anymore/
I hope you’re more beautiful than before”
I like the sentiment of leaving the people you love better than they were when you first met them rather than worse for having known you.
“Summer in the City” by Regina Spektor from her album Begin to Hope.
Every once in awhile, after she’s fallen off my radar for a while, something reminds me that I like Regina Spektor and I go back to her for a bit.
Here is what I like about this song:
1) The title offers the expectation that this will be some light, airy, fun piece and it is decidedly not that. This is a song about an absence and the holes left by it.
2) These lyrics:
“So I went to a protest / Just to rub up against strangers /
And I did feel like coming / But I also felt like crying”
3) But really the whole thing. Just listen to the whole thing. All of the words.
4) Bonus: “Summer in the City / Means cleavage, cleavage, cleavage.”
Are you still here?
Here’s the playlist I made for my flights back and forth to Florida to see my mother in hospice before she died. No explanations will be provided. (If you do listen, it’s meant to be shuffled.)
Undusted Corners 