I’m home this weekend in Phoenix, for just over twenty four hours. So much has changed since I moved away, but I still know every neighborhood intimately. The water tastes the same as it always did, a little bit metallic and salty. My dog still knows me and greets me at the door. I can still name, in order, all the freeway exits on the I-17.
It’s hard not to feel as though I’m regressing when I’m here, slipping into my teenage skin. I feel drawn to the music I used to listen to in high school, the playlists I made up through the early two hundreds. I spend a lot of time looking in the mirror where I used to get ready everyday and wondering at how much I’ve changed, both internally and externally, in the years since I left this place. I think about my relationships here, the people I’ve been and will become through them.
It’s almost shameful to me how cyclical my life is, how much my emotions are tied to the changing of the seasons. I remember to take care of myself when the weather starts to cool, feel a sudden urge to take meandering trips through the grocery store, touching all the vegetables gingerly. I become interested in my neglected creative projects and endeavor to make time to complete them. I want to read more, light candles, go to sleep early, spend time in the hills alone.
I think that my emotions and beliefs are so important, I think that I am so evolved—I’m really just an animal. If you visualize growth in the canonical direction, up, I’m climbing a spiral staircase rather than a straight one. I can only stray so far in any one direction before making an imperceptibly slow turn and coming back the other way.
Blake said something to me on the phone recently that I’ve been thinking about a lot: getting older is nice because there are only so many emotions that our little rat brains can process. All of the feelings start to rhyme, he said. It’s a relief to know that however big and contextually unique my experiences will be, the feelings themselves will be familiar. Scientists recently discovered that there are twenty seven human emotions, with gradients between them like bridges. Twenty seven isn’t a huge number, I reason. I can handle twenty seven.
My playlists are evidence of that phenomenon of repetition. Listening to the guitar intro on the Jeff Buckley version of “Hallelujah” still makes me feel a twinge of perverse anticipation for the tragedy of the next six and a half minutes. While I’ve associated many different situations and people with this song across the years, it always evokes the same thing in me.
Of the eighty some verses that Leonard Cohen wrote for the song, the ones in the Buckley version have become definitive, a cover that transcended the original, in part because of his emotional vocal delivery. He started performing “Hallelujah” first at Sin-é cafe on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan in the early nineties, weekly sets that captured the attention of Columbia Records and earned him a contract in 1992. He recorded his version of “Hallelujah” on Grace (1994), his only completed studio record before his death in 1997. Grace started charting years after Buckley died; the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry inducted “Hallelujah” in 2014.
I first heard “Hallelujah” when I was a child. It’s stuck with me through every different phase of my life, taking on new meaning as I climb that spiral staircase. Music is good in that way, its many facets and faces that show themselves in different lighting.
I’ve recently become fixated on Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago (2008), an album that I don’t think I had ever listened to front to back before this fall. I’ve always preferred Bon Iver (2011), which I’ve realized recently is probably my first ever favorite album. I couldn’t really tell you why For Emma has gotten so lodged in my brain, but I’ve been listening to it everyday, usually in the morning. It’s so deeply perfect for the season, the cool of the mornings and the gray of the sky.
Justin Vernon’s versatility as an artist and his recent shift into electronic production is so exciting and fresh that I sometimes forget how good his earlier work was. I shared this video with paying subscribers last week, but I like it too much not to include here:
“I Wish I Was the Moon” was the first song of Neko Case’s that I loved, as I was growing into the more complicated sounds of her later records. There is so much emotion to unpack in the country melody and simple lyrics:
How will you know if you've found me at last?
'Cause I'll be the one, be the one, be the one
With my heart in my lap
I'm so tired
I'm so tired
I wish I was the moon tonight
Interestingly enough, “Hallelujah,” “Skinny Love,” and “I Wish I Was the Moon” were three of the first songs that I learned as covers when I started playing shows. I used to play the Birdy version of “Skinny Love” on piano when I was a kid, not knowing at all what it meant but knowing that I loved it. I have compassion for that child, for all of her big ideas about adulthood. I have compassion for the person I was when I made this playlist in 2017, with similarly grandiose convictions. And I have compassion for the person I am now, growing all the time.
Grace really is an amazing album to feel everything <3
I'm not a big Bon Iver fan (I know, I know), but am absolutely fan of his hometown of Eau Claire, WI. It's cool little college town, and the perfect incubator for good music.