And now I'd rather haunt you
Let's appreciate a little-known singer named Madonna, cook a whole chicken, and spend New Year's Eve two ways, many years apart, from Great Barrier Island to Greytown.
Welcome to All The Songs. We use “soundtrack” as a verb here.
Listening
I’m on a Madonna kick, listening to full albums from throughout her whole career. I won’t present a thesis to you now about the value, contribution, cultural significance and straight-out fun of Madonna. Her music has been with me my entire life and I’m enjoying it. That’s all I have to say for now.
Reading
Tamar Adler’s book ‘An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace’ has transformed and amplified the way I cook. It has encouraged me to follow my instincts, lavish vegetables with olive oil, spend hours prepping meals but to experience that time as a joy rather than a chore.
Like Samin Nosrat of Salt Fat Acid Heat fame, Tamar Adler worked for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse restaurant. The principles shared in this book are similar for they are that of the Chez Panisse manifesto: cook well, cook simply, use high quality ingredients, take care.
With a poetic tendency, she advises readers to “anchor food to somewhere deep inside you, or deep in your past, or deep in the wonders of what you love”.
She recommends you serve a fish cooked whole because it is “noble” and “picturesque”. She tells you “leaves and stalks are parts of a vegetable, not obstacles to it” (I started sautéing celery leaves after reading that). She describes in detail her process for buying fresh in-season produce weekly and preparing it so her fridge is full of ready-to-eat veggies to build meals from during the week ahead.
My one criticism is that it is a solely European lens on food, mostly Italian and a little French. But it’s one woman’s perspective, and that’s ok.
This book may encourage you to, like me, buy the best free range chicken you can find and boil it with water, carrot, celery, star anise, onion, salt, parsley, olive oil. Then you may cook orzo pasta in the chicken stock, add some of the meat from the chicken, grate over parmesan, add fresh parsley and a drizzle of more olive oil. It may just be the most comforting meal you’ve ever eaten. You may decide it’s the meal you’d like your grandchildren to remember you for. You may declare you’ll make it once a week for the rest of your life. It’s that good.
Now I’ve started reading Life With My Sister Madonna by Christopher Ciccone (her brother), for my Madonna kick is comprehensive.
Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them
For this memoir-by-playlist project, I write 500 words on my memories of a song. These vignettes offer a glimpse in to the rich and varied emotions we all experience in our lifetimes through showing a brief slice of my life at a particular time, in how I relate to a certain song. What the music brings up might be shallow or it could be intense. The memory may be joyful or thick with sorrow, a reflection on pleasure or a heavy exploration of fear. Whatever emotions a song dredges up from the spectrum of human feeling, they are true.
I remember snippets alongside songs. This is the soundtrack to my life. Let me be clear: Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them is not a curated selection of the coolest songs I want to associate myself with. Some of them are my jam, others are trashy and catchy - all manner of music has been part of my life.
This project invites the reader to consider, where does this song take you? What does it remind you of? Where were you in your life when you last listened to this track?
‘The Seed (2.0)’ by The Roots
Perched on the edge of the retaining wall, I am as I have been for most of this holiday so far: sitting close to G.
He parked himself beside me when I arrived on Great Barrier Island two days ago by the smallest plane I’ve ever flown on (another passenger had four pineapples and one small dog with her). Everyone else came earlier by sea on the barge, a longer but cheaper journey.
My face is make-up free, my hair thick and ringletty from the sea. My skin feels tight with the warning of a sunburn I must have obtained today while we leapt over and over again from a tall rock into a deep pool of calm ocean, giggling and breathless. The spot is one my friends who grew up here claim is a secret outside their circle. You get to it only by scrambling down a hill on the land their father owns. My partner grew up here too.
On New Year’s Eve, G and I sit on the retaining wall drinking Żubrówka with fresh lime. I look over at the skin around his eagle tattoo, longing to touch it, and tell him he got some sun today too. My partner appears and tells us, exasperated, to come and have dinner. G and I don’t eat meat so we pick at salad and bread while everyone else enjoys sausages. I’ve been hungry and tired all this holiday but high on the people around me.
The song of the evening is ‘The Seed (2.0)’ by The Roots. We play it on repeat, interspersed with Interpol, The Editors, The White Stripes, Massive Attack. N says we don’t even think about stuff like how the lyrics to this song are inappropriate for children to overhear.
L’s boyfriend, the one who is studying psychology, comes over to me when the sky has darkened. He’s always asking me questions.
“So how long have you been doing this Parisian waif act for?” he challenges me.
I lift my hand-rolled cigarette to my lips, take a drag, and hold the smoke in my throat as I answer, “Forever.”, then blow out the smoke in a thin controlled stream. G, by my side, chuckles.
My partner sits with us for one drink before he goes to bed early. He doesn’t smoke. He tells us his New Year’s resolution is to finally learn how to drive. I laugh meanly at this.
At about 2am, N comes out from his tent on the lawn behind us and asks us to turn the music down. “I know you think it’s very uncool and you’ll never be old but honestly, some of us are trying to sleep.”
When G makes to go to bed in his little pup tent, I taunt him until he agrees to stay up until the sun rises. We lay flat on our backs on the chilly grass and stare up at the stars, brighter out here than I’ve ever seen in Auckland. 2007 has begun.
‘Bye Bye Baby’ by Madonna
It was raining so much last night at the Greytown Campground that I slept in my car instead of the tent, cozy in my sleeping bag with the passenger seat as horizontal as possible.
In the morning Dave brings me a blue plastic mug of black plunger coffee that I accept through the wound-down window, declining to sit with the other adults until I’ve had some time alone.
I slowly rouse inside my private bubble of the car while watching everyone bustle outside. I half-heartedly wonder which of the dads at the campground I would like to fuck. I am grateful that I cooked breakfast for everyone yesterday so that today somebody else will prepare my morning meal. The campground is a great democracy.
The kids are entertaining each other. They’re calling themselves ‘girl gang’ and holding ‘meetings’ inside tents (no grown-ups allowed!). One of them has a little digital camera that takes video and they make a music video for a song with the lyrics ‘Police stole my car’ sung to the tune of Feliz Navidad.
The other women and I go into Greytown for espresso, leaving the dads in charge of the girl gang.
I drive over the hill back to Wellington to collect my dog from the kennel in the afternoon, listening to Madonna’s Erotica album on the way. I watch fifteen minutes of a Christmas movie on Netflix while charging the car at Featherston. This year I’ve become a Christmas movie person, embracing the wholesomeness and blandness and certainty the guy will get the girl. The charm and simplicity is exactly what I need after the stressful rush of starting a new job in an unfamiliar industry in the final quarter of the year.
I’m still listening to Erotica when I pull back into the campground. I turn down ‘Bye Bye Baby’ so it won’t come on too loud when my family gets in the car later.
We’re going to ring in the New Year with dinner at a pub, partaking in free bubbles. The restaurant has a Christmas tree set up in one corner.
Our kids quickly initiate the children from a neighbouring table into the girl gang. They perform a skit about the (fictional) origin story of candy canes, and play as a wild bunch throughout the whole room. We apologise repeatedly to a young couple dining at a table for two.
After dessert, we’re ironically drinking Baileys on ice and playing charades. I guess but do not perform, for I am too shy.
My friends’ daughter, who likes practising hairstyles, asks if she can play with my hair. “It’s so soft,” she tells me. I’m pleased: I’ve recently started using the Blake Lively method of masking instead of conditioning (just, like, leave your conditioner on for half an hour - revolutionary) and using a honey-infused oil applied when it is damp.
“Does anyone have a hair tie?” She asks, then resorts to securing my ponytail with the green paper crown from a Christmas cracker.
Previous instalments of Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All the Songs That Remind Me Of Them
Thank you for reading! Jazial x