You didn’t miss anything—check out 675 desperate and 676 cross my mind.
I read this poem recently that has a really beautiful line about autumn waiting on the edge of the woods and it keeps coming up in my mind, apropos of nothing. Gun to my head, I think I’d say that autumn is my favorite season, if only for the return of clouds and rain to the region of California where I live. I love the wet cold, the condensation in my hair when I bike to class. I love the yellow leaves in the gutters, the imprints of shoe soles traced onto their delicate skins.
I made this playlist in late summer, but it feels appropriate for the changing of seasons, the encroaching darkness every morning and evening. I feel like I’m molting, moving through my life one layer outside myself. I’m sensitive to everything; music sounds fuller and my relationships feel more intense and sharp, like someone turned up the brightness on a screen. I wonder if I’m becoming more myself or more someone else, unrecognizable to me now.
Sometimes I get tired of myself and I look forward to change. I’m interested in pursuing new art, of the visual persuasion, and emptying myself out to make room, like coring a melon. I will tilt the hollow part up to catch the autumn rain. I feel restless and creative in a chaotic way, like I’m still trying to channel the energy into something concrete.
My friends have been going through transitionary periods as well, breakups and moves and career changes. I imagine that I am holding and being held by our collective searching, that our hands will shape our own and each others’ lives. Everything is in flux—I’m trying to view it as opportunity for new growth, despite autumn traditionally being a time of pause.
Sabrina Carpenter’s album emails i can’t send (2022) is full of material about change and moving on, or trying to. “Already Over” has a biting chorus:
Yeah I say I’m done
But I'm still confused
How am I supposed to close the door when I still need the closure?
And I change my mind
But it's still on you
How am I supposed to leave you now that you're already over?
I fell into the trap of underestimating this album, expecting a vapid revenge piece in response to what I’m calling rodrigo-gate. I was wildly impressed by the range of the record, the depth and nuance of the exploration of her experience. She admits that there were good moments scattered among even the worst periods of her relationship, that despite the pain there is no regret. The terribly sorrowful admissions of compromising herself come at surprising moments, the way that those emotions crop up unexpectedly when you’re going through something. By the end of the album it seems as though she’s ready to let go, but it took all thirteen tracks to get there.
“Magic” is a song that I’ve known since I was a teenager but haven’t heard probably since then. I remembered all the lyrics when I rediscovered it in making this playlist, probably because it was with me through some of the biggest transitions of my young life. I posted recently about this song and received a lot of feedback from people about how much this song has affected their lives as well. It’s something about the simplicity, the repetition, the completely consistent rhyme scheme:
And if you were to ask me
After all that we've been through,
Still believe in magic?
Oh yes I do
The very last line of the song moves away from the repetition momentarily:
Oh yes I do
Of course I do
This almost accidental slip into profundity is to me what songwriting is all about. This tiny shift imbues the song with so much gravity; believing in love is still a given, despite all the difficulties and complications. I can’t imagine a more hopeful statement.
“august” by Taylor Swift is perhaps the very first song I think of to embody the shift from summer into fall:
But I can see us lost in the memory
August slipped away into a moment in time
'Cause it was never mine
And I can see us twisted in bedsheets
August sipped away like a bottle of wine
'Cause you were never mine
Actually, the more I think about it, Taylor Swift’s entire discography has an autumnal tinge to it, an amber tint, if you will. It’s only gotten more noticeable as she’s grown into herself, especially in the Taylor’s Version recordings and accompanying media:
I’ll devote an entire issue to this music video sometime soon, but I am simply not strong enough to do so in this moment.
The older I get, the more I accept that I’m constantly changing. The seasons are a good reminder that everything ends, and begins again.
Listening through your playlist. August is a cool song, Taylor Swift seems to capture those teenage/young adult feelings really well. I was looking for songs to accompany my just-turned-14 granddaughter on guitar. We gigged a few songs from the Nashville series together in the past, so we did those while looking for what else we could do, without me having to learn anything, and I still had an old sheet with Betty, from the same album as August. So we did that, that feels Rodrigo-ish. We found another couple of songs and she wanted to sing one of mine, which was nice. I'm making the most of it, because other people are now discovering her voice, and she has been asked to do do lead vocals on a new single from an up and coming artist. You might be hearing about MJ sometime soon. I asked her to remember our jams when she is famous :)