Blow your mongrel mind, babydoll
Yearning to see TV On The Radio perform live, let's think back to listening to their songs when we were 21 and furious at our lover, and recall them soundtracking a calm holiday our mid-30's
Welcome to All The Songs. We use “soundtrack” as a verb here.
Listening
New York indie rock icons TV On The Radio have announced they’re playing their first shows in years - but only in the East Village, LA and London. The gigs are timed to promote the twenty year anniversary of their debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. It is being re-released on vinyl.
It pains me to miss out on these shows. I’ve been saying for a long time that TV On the Radio are the number one band I would travel for - but budget-wise, I mean I’d go from Wellington to Melbourne, for example. I can’t quite make a quick short-notice trip to New York before the end of the year. Here’s hoping they’ll tour more widely in 2025 and announce the shows with a little more warning.
In honour of this exciting but torturous news, I’ve been listening to them a lot and thinking how different my life is to when I was first introduced to the band. A bartender I was in love with when I was 21 first played me their music. At 23, living in Sydney, I was asked to write a review of their then-new record Dear Science for a magazine.
Below, I write to you about listening to their music when I young and mad at my lover, and listening to them when I was in my mid-30s having a simple pleasant day travelling. This week I listened to them while on the bus home. We might age but the songs stay the same, and they stay with us.
Reading
I enjoyed reading the novel Joan Is Okay by New Yorker writer Weike Wang, although the reader soon worries Joan is not doing so good. The main character is an obsessively hard working doctor processing her father’s death as the pandemic hits.
I liked Idol, Burning by Japanese author Rin Usami. It is about a teenage girl with wild obsession for her oshi or idol. She is vividly repulsed by her own body and the whole boring business of living: it bothers her that fingernails keep growing, when she just wants to be left alone to focus on the obsession of her choice. Events force the main character to make some changes in her life.
Fiona Davis writes fantastic historical fiction where the novels are always set around iconic buildings in New York. The Lions of Fifth Avenue is set in the New York Public Library, The Dollhouse follows women living at the Barbizon Hotel in the 1950s and Magnolia Palace is a mystery set in mansion-turned-art-gallery The Frick. Her latest novel The Spectacular is set at Radio City Music Hall (I’ve been there once, for a Feist show!) imagining the life of a young Rockette and weaving in the story of a mysterious bomber.
I read Australian author Jessie Tu’s second novel The Honeyeater, which The Guardian describes as fast-paced, biting and memorable. It’s about a translator who has been having an affair. It’s about family, anxiety and sex. It thrills me how bold Tu’s writing is.
Watching
At the New Zealand International Film Festival, I attended no less than fourteen (fourteen!!) films. I had a week off work between ending one job and starting another, in case you’re wondering how I found the time for so many movies.
While I won’t tell you about them all, my favourites were:
Sterben (Dying), a German drama following a splintered family. It features a moving scene set to Bill Fay’s heart-breaking cover of the Wilco song ‘Jesus, Etc’. This review tells you more about the plot.
Janet Planet, written and directed by Annie Baker, about an American eleven year old girl’s summer in 1991 and her evolving relationship with her mother.
All We Imagine As Light, an Indian drama following two nurses in Mumbai.
Drinking
As mentioned above, I recently ended one job and started a new one. My wonderful colleagues at my old job farewelled me in the best possible way: with a generous gift of cheeses and a bottle of natural wine. It was the organic bio-dynamically grown Sicilian red Vino di Anna Don Alfio Qvevri. One reviewer describes it as “like my little brother - uncouth but with potential”. It is natty and raw with mega dry tanniny mouthfeel, and lots of sediment in the bottom of the bottle. Just how I like it.
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?
‘Wolf Like Me’ by TV On The Radio
I add drops of fruity oil from The Body Shop to an aromatherapy burner on our mantelpiece every day.
On the wall above the fireplace that I do not know how to light, I have tacked up photos of us. They are bedroom selfies. No one has ever been more in love than we are.
When his ex comes over, she remarks the photos are pornographic. Although all you can see is my face, snuggling up to his, I glow in the images.
We moved in together six weeks after we met. I am young enough to think it’s romantic rather than unsettling.
I have just turned 21. My boyfriend is in his mid-30s.
We rent a one bedroom flat on Arthur Street, off Franklin Road in Auckland. Our place is half an old villa that’s been divided into two rentals. The other half is home to a white-haired vegetarian gentleman and his two cats. When he plays classical music we hear it crystal-clear through the thin walls as if the speakers are in our own living room.
When TV On The Radio’s new album Return To Cookie Mountain is released, my boyfriend illegally downloads each track and puts them on my iPod. He mislabels some of the songs, titling what I later learn is called ‘Wolf Like Me’ as ‘Playhouses’.
In the mornings, when we can afford it, my boyfriend walks to the nearest coffee shop on Ponsonby Road and gets me a takeaway “nuclear strength” soy flat white.
He tells me one of the reasons he loves me is that I absentmindedly pick things up with my toes, something he’s only ever seen his mother do.
The internet and the power bills are in my name. We do not have a washing machine, so he rinses his work shirts from the bar under the outdoor tap nightly and I take our laundry to my mum’s once a week. I borrow her vacuum cleaner because we don’t own one.
In bed at night, we can hear rats scurrying in the wall behind our heads.
This evening I am angry with him, but instead of talking about how I feel, I put on my headphones and play the track I think is called ‘Playhouses’ as I walk to get groceries from New World. I need to get out of the house, away from him.
My breathing is shallow and ferocious. I can feel rage tumbling in my chest and press the back button on the click-wheel to make the song play again as I pass pristine villas.
It is already dark at 6pm this time of year. The trees lining Franklin Road are bare, having lost all their leaves. Back in autumn the leaves would gather on the pavement in sumptuous amber gold brown piles that were satisfying to kick. At Christmas time those same trees are decorated with soft fairy lights. Now, we’re in bitter winter.
I turn the music up and pull my leather jacket tighter around me.
‘Ambulance’ by TV On The Radio
My whole New York day stretches out ahead without an agenda. I can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. No one from home will contact me. I can choose to ignore social media.
I walk around the Meatpacking District with the TV On the Radio album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes accompanying me. I listen to the acapella track ‘Ambulance’, the fifth song on the album, twice in a row. My mind begins to clear out. I wish my mind were a placid lake. I take very few photos. I take my time.
There’s the Whitney, the art gallery. There’s an Andy Warhol retrospective on. What could be more New York than Andy Warhol?
The exhibition covers his entire life and all the work he produced.
I get the audio tour option, wearing the borrowed headphones and pausing long in front of each piece.
It takes me about three hours to walk through slowly, attentively, reading and listening to the background behind every single piece on display.
There are newspaper clippings advertising Velvet Underground shows.
I see more of his early cat illustrations. I have a print of one of them at home, the outline of a cat, painted blue inside, with the handwritten caption ‘One blue pussy’ underneath. I like it for the provocative factor. There are more cats here, he drew lots of them. I read about his artistic development and the various scandals of his life, including his injury and the complicated way he managed it for the remaining years he lived by wearing a corset every day.
The gallery has a rooftop you can venture out on to. When I discover it, I think this is the best part of my day so far. It shows me an expansive view across the Meatpacking District and Chelsea.
The sky is perfectly grey.
I’m in love with every brick on every building.
I want to stay here surveying the city from this exact spot forever. It’s really fucking cold. I stay outside for as long as I can stand to.
The final room I see at the Andy Warhol exhibit is his celebrity portraits bathed in colour. I didn’t realise there was a whole series like the iconic Marilyn Monroe repeated images. There are pictures of many, many famous people given the same treatment. I take photos of my favourites.
At the gift store on the way out I purchase a small pin, unrelated to the Andy Warhol works. The round blue Joy Division-inspired pin is cute and tasteful. It reads ‘Love will tear us apart’.
I have a party banner back home that says the same thing in large cardboard letters sparkling with red glitter, but it usually lives stored in a box under my bed. In my old flat on Howe Street, off K Road in Auckland, when I strung it across the living room above the window facing the grounds of Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, my flatmate told me, “Maybe it’s not for every day”.
Previous instalments of Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All the Songs That Remind Me Of Them
Thank you for reading! Jazial x