I’m doing back-to-back Archive posts because as it turns out, in the spirit of the new year, I’m feeling reflective. I’ve been journaling extensively, talking to my friends about growth, quietly pondering what it all means. I’ve made a few new playlists, but mostly I’m listening to albums that I’ve loved before, sinking myself into the past.
I made this playlist after I watched A Ghost Story (2017). “I Get Overwhelmed” plays over the trailer and aptly sets the tone of the whole film: very anxious and very sad. I’ve only seen the movie once but I think about it often; the banality of death, the incomprehensibility and inevitability of moving on, the vastness of time in which everything comes and goes. Casey Affleck gives an incredible performance for someone entirely encased in a sheet. Rooney Mara eats a whole pie and the scene is five minutes long, two shots. Kesha makes an inexplicable appearance and apparently all of her dialogue is unscripted.
I think the most interesting thing about the movie is the subtlety of the performances paired with the use of simple cinematography techniques like focus and long shots to convey something as complex as distance in a relationship. Rooney Mara wears the same look of dull surprise in the majority of the scenes, and yet, as she moves about the house where most of the movie is set, the slight shifts in her body language imply grief that slowly slips into forgetting. The song reflects the narrative arc, if it can be called an arc, of the ghost’s entrapment:
Am I runnin late?
I get overwhelmed
All the awful dreams
All the bright screens
Is my lover there?
Are we breakin up?
Did she find someone else?
And leave me alone?
To me, “I Get Overwhelmed” is a pop song used so well in the context of a film it gets permanently attached to the scene in my head. Other examples include “Life on Mars” in Licorice Pizza (2021), “Love My Way” in Call Me by Your Name (2017), and “Helplessly Hoping” in Annihilation (2018). I’m no film buff, and these associations are definitely influenced by a preexisting adoration of the songs mentioned, but I think hearing a well-placed song in a movie is one of life’s greatest small joys.
While I was home for the holidays, I listened to a lot of playlists that I made when I was still in high school. I have a visceral memory of blasting “Dark Side of the Gym” in my old car as I pulled up to the freeway exit nearest my house. I can’t get that exact feeling back—too much has changed, too much has not—but I got close, playing my current favorite National songs, “Lemonworld” and “Sorrow,” as I drove around my neighborhood. This playlist features “Day I Die” off of Sleep Well Beast (2017), the first record by The National I’d ever heard.
Sleep Well Beast is on the surface a breakup album, but frontman Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser are not broken up. In fact, they co-wrote the lyrics for the album, including the songs that are directly about her. One layer down, it’s a political record, about the American power landscape and fascism. Beneath even that, it’s about Berninger’s relationships with his bandmates, two sets of brothers, now all living in far-flung locations across the world. This multi-dimensional thematic space is a trademark of Berninger’s writing, tangibly real scenes set within the parentheses of heavy, ambiguous statements of fact or belief:
Don't do this, I don't do this to you
Don't expect me to enjoy it
'Cause I really don't have the courage not to turn the volume up inside my ears
For years I used to put my head inside the speakers
In the hallway when you get too high and talk forever
LCD Soundsytem’s record american dream (2017) is tied to Sleep Well Beast for me. The whole calendar year of 2017 is soaked through with this sound: tense, jittery indie music with electronic elements like bionic appendages, their construction and content reflections of the social and political landscape. “call the police” is a driving, two-chord anthem, a reactionary U2-esque rock song about the Trump presidency. While the subject matter is a bit on the nose if you’re listening too closely, I think the practice of ridiculing musicians for writing about anything other than falling in or out of love is tacky, ahistorical. Some of the best and most omnipresent music is rooted in protest, now stripped of a lot of its original context. While I don’t think “call the police” is the most graceful expression of frustration with society, I hope that musicians continue to feel empowered to give voice to movements.
Your head is on fire, your hands are getting weak
We all, we all get stupid in the heat
You've basted your brains with the shatter and defeat up on the street
And this is nowhere
“I can’t get that exact feeling back—too much has changed, too much has not…”
I might be too old to write “I felt this,” but it sure was relatable. When I go home now, I still know exactly how to get anywhere in the city but don’t recognize a thing along the way. And yet, it all still feels so… unchanged?
also was a huge huge fan of the a ghost story soundtrack — it and licorice pizza feel so much like ~vibes movies~ where i really can't imagine them without the soundtrack
(p.s. got here from our latest shoutout thread! https://on.substack.com/p/shoutout-8/comment/4853549)