I dare you to take me on

A natural wine bar in Tokyo, 'All I Need Is A Miracle' by Mike + The Mechanics, the Alanis Morissette song that most reminds me of my friends, books about aliens and video games and love

I dare you to take me on

In this edition of All The Songs, we’ll listen to ‘All I Need Is A Miracle’ by Mike + The Mechanics while driving up the North Island of New Zealand, we’ll visit a wine bar in Tokyo, we’ll reflect on which Alanis Morissette song reminds me most of the friendships that have sustained me since 1996.

Listening

I’ve been listening to a lot of Björk’s Homogenic, the album she released in 1997, rich with electronica and strings. As the record demands, I usually listen to it through in full from start to finish. But the song from this album I’ve been playing on repeat lately is ‘5 Years’. It is a wise, challenging and bitter break up song where she demands “I dare you to take me on, I dare you to show me your palms” to a cowardly lover who has let her down and become boring. “You just can’t handle love,” she spits out with disdain over the distorted programmed drum beats.

At the Reykjavik airport in her native Iceland, there is text emblazoned on the glass of windows that overlook the tarmac. It says: “I feel emotional landscapes, they puzzle me - Björk”. The line is a quote from her song ‘Jóga’, the second track on this record, where she describes the mess of feelings love brings and the urgency of attraction as a beautiful emergency. That theme is echoed again in the joyful later track, ‘Alarm Call’, which contains one of the best lines of the album when Björk cheekily describes being in love as: “I’m no fucking Buddhist, but this is enlightenment”.

This is an album that has grown with me. As I get older, as a woman, I relate to Björk’s music differently. I respond to her artistry, the yearning and drama in her voice, the vivid way she describes love using English as a second language. It is a more nuanced listening experience than the shallower response I had enjoying her music when I just admired the sound and dug her vibe. The emotional landscapes I travel through, guided by her, have now become richer. I can’t wait to see what the experience of this album is like in another ten years.

Reading

‘Audition’ by Pip Adam

In this science fiction style novel, Wellington writer Pip Adam addresses the faults she sees in the prison system. She advocates for the punishment-based prison system to be abolished - in the acknowledgements section at the back of the book, she is direct about this message behind the story.

Alba, Drew and Stanley are giants, still expanding, and trapped on a spaceship when we meet them. The start of the book is purposefully somewhat maddening, an introductory section that is modelled masterfully on the circular conversations Beckett characters have - going nowhere but hoping endlessly for resolution that won’t come, chattering to fill the time while they wait without knowing what is ahead. The book then slips into more typical prose narrative as it takes us back earlier in the lives of the giants and reveals more about how they each came to be in prison. The story explores how they have been judged, held down and written off by society.

Amongst all this seriousness, there are delightful references to films like You’ve Got Mail and Clueless. When I spoke to the author at her reading at the Good Books shop, she said it’s because she loves those films, and because the characters each have a meet-cute moment of their own somewhere in the story.

‘Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow’ by Gabrielle Zevin

This bestselling novel uses the charm of snappy banter and the compulsive pull of an engaging plot to tell the story of two characters whose relationship refuses to resolve in romance. Sam and Sadie are best friends and creative partners. “It’s not a romance, but it is about love”, the description on the back of the book says.

We meet the characters as children in a hospital where they bond over escaping in to video games, then as students interested in developing their own games. Their intense close bond allows their creative relationship to thrive. Their output benefits from the way they connect. They get each other’s ideas, they bring a shared vision to life, they make each other’s work better, they can’t achieve their work highs without each other. They spark and spar. They create a game that becomes a classic. They fight, they face tragedy, and after they both have their hearts broken Sam takes an astonishingly intricate approach to winning back Sadie’s friendship.

When I finished reading Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’, I felt so bereft to be done with the characters that I looked up t shirts online printed with the names of the four people the story centres on - ‘Will & JB & Jude & Malcolm’. ‘Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow’ left me with the same feeling. You can buy ‘Sam & Sadie & Marx’ t shirts if you trawl the internet right, just in case you’re wondering.

Watching

A natural follow-on from ‘Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow’ to tell you about is the Korean romantic drama Past Lives. Like that book, it also features childhood best friends who reunite when they’re older with such a powerful connection that romance seems inevitable…but is it?

I chose this movie from the NZ International Film Festival line up because it was partly set in New York, my heart’s home, and the trailer won me over with the way the two main characters have once-in-a-lifetime chemistry. I went to see it with a friend and when the movie was over we sat in The Embassy Theatre awkwardly pretending we both hadn’t been crying a little, unable to move from our seats until the cinema almost completely cleared out. “Aw,” he said as we traipsed up Kent Terrace, “I don’t think I’m ok after that.”

Neither was I. Past Lives depicts a deep bond between two people who are each other’s closest friends as children. When they reconnect as young adults, they find a new equally intimate relationship and bring each other great comfort. Timing is against them with one of them in New York and the other back in Seoul. They’re supporting each other and enjoying each other’s company at that phase of life where one feels the world is alive with opportunity. The grind of study is ending and your prospects are blooming. You want to reach for the stars when it comes to work and that seems like the most important thing in life, so surely soul-enriching connections with people who inspire you will be abundant in the glittering world you’re now entering with all the optimism of a high achiever in their early 20s? Not really - you’ll find other love, we always do. But fated love or in-yun may not come along every day and the relationships we’ve had since childhood are irreplaceable. It’s one for fans of the Before Sunrise trilogy.

Cooking

The highlight of our home-cooked meals lately has been Ottolenghi’s curried cauliflower cheese filo pie. The recipe is even on their website, so you can try it at home. It’s also in the book ‘Shelf Love’, which I have on my shelf and do indeed love. Broadsheet describes this recipe as a hot mess - “It’s like cauliflower cheese but in a messy, “molten-hot-cheese lava” pie”. Full disclosure: I didn’t make this, my partner did. But I’ve made it once before and can concur it’s simple to make, and wonderful in the middle of winter’s most brutal days.

Drinking

In Tokyo earlier this year, I visited a wine bar in the Nishihara shotengai in Hatagaya, Shibuya. It had been recommended by a mate who I used to kick around with in Auckland when we were both young women working in the music industry in the mid-2000s. She now lives in Tokyo and has excellent taste so I took the time to try out Sanita, a bar she frequents.

It is run by an American ex-pat from the East Village and has a focus on “skin contact, maceration "orange" wine, original and classic New York style cocktails, interesting beer and New York City-style southern Italian small plates”.

I tried the Il Censo Siciliane Bianco "Gurte" 2020, a wine that Hop, Cask & Barrel describes as “delicate, high-toned and zippy”, and a Bressan from Northern Italy. While the wines were gorgeous, the most fun thing about the bar was that its playlist kicked ass - I remember hearing Velvet Underground and the grunge-esque band Bully.

Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them

Photo by Ebony Lamb

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?

‘All I Really Want’ by Alanis Morissette

My friends and I want some patience. We have each other’s backs. We meet when we are in our first year of intermediate school, when life isn’t easy for any of us - and puberty is the least of our worries. When you’re facing poverty, absent fathers, troubled mums and unsettled homes then getting your period seems like nothing.

At lunchtime we stay inside and listen to music. The other kids have trickled out to enjoy the fresh air and our brunette teacher has wandered off to eat her own lunch or supervise the playground or smoke a cigarette in the staffroom. Once, she brought in her acoustic guitar to play our class the song ‘Smelly Cat’ that had been on Friends that week. She’d learned how to play it specially, just to entertain us.

We don’t play sports or anything lame like that. Jagged Little Pill is one of the cassettes we play in the tape deck in our classroom.

Jessica, always a ham, takes off her teal crewneck school uniform sweatshirt, pulls the sleeves through to turn the garment inside out then puts it on backwards with the size tag underneath her chin. “Do I stress you out?” she asks. In our twenties, Jessica will die. She has moved to the Gold Coast and goes on the back of a motorbike. We’ll gather and drink, music loud, and it won’t be until long past 11pm that someone says “So, are we going to talk about Jess?” even though we’ve all been thinking about nothing but her beautiful face all evening.

The silent pause after Alanis asks “Why are you so petrified of silence? Here, can you handle this?” in this song when the music cuts to pure quiet - right in the middle of the song! - feels audacious, radical. We’re too young to brush it off as a gimmick.

We are each other’s soul mates. We catch each other’s drifts.

We’re not team players. We gather strength from walking around in a pack sharing secrets and we don’t participate in the extra-curricular activities other kids somehow have spare energy for. The deputy principal refers to us as a gang and it is offensive. Why is our group of friends a gang yet other girls, the ones who play netball, are not? I write a letter to tell the deputy principal in my smartest words how offensive her comment was but she criticises me for opening with the phrase ‘To whom it may concern’, which I’d been taught was polite.

When I’m almost forty I listen to ‘All I Really Want’ as I drive to see my friends and I want to return to 1996. I’ll take each of us by the hand, including me, and lead us to the car with a full tank of gas and brand new brake pads and we can drive to the future where we get to decide how we live. All I really want is for us to grow up. Most of us will.

‘All I Need Is A Miracle’ by Mike + The Mechanics

A pink rubber hot water bottle, freshly filled from the kettle, sits on my lap. I am behind the wheel of my car in Wellington at 6am and there is icy frost on the vehicle’s roof. I tuck the hot water bottle under my sweatshirt. I buckle the seatbelt over the wobbly bulge, laid protectively over the wobbly bulge of my own tummy. The car’s heater is broken so I need this improvisation to make the journey to Auckland more comfortable.

I am spending a whole Saturday driving North to see my oldest friends. The playlist I’ve prepared features our favourite albums from the year we three met each other peppered in amongst newer releases. Jagged Little Pill starts playing when a Prado overtakes me.

In Levin, I break in to the sugar coating of a glazed donut while waiting for my Wild Bean flat white. This is breakfast. The last time I took a big road trip alone was in California, before Covid. I drove the Pacific Coast Highway listening to a lot of Hole and Counting Crows. By the time I got to L.A. I’d decided I was ready to try a dating app for the first time. I wonder what spiritual transformations I’ll experience today on State Highway 1.

A Toyota Vanguard overtakes me as I near Taihape. I pull over for more caffeine. The song ‘All I Need Is A Miracle’ by Mike + The Mechanics is playing at Brown Sugar cafe.  I eat a slice of blueberry custard cake beside the cafe’s woodburning fire. This is morning tea.

As I drive through Rangitikei I see white coating the hills of a farm and think surely that’s not snow. A truck with the ‘Owens’ logo is tipped over on its side, crushing the fence between the road and a paddock. The Desert Road was closed just yesterday. A Nissan Navara overtakes me as I note more white hills ahead. “Oh my god. It is snow, that’s crazy”, I say, then repeat in a Kermit the Frog voice for no reason, “crazy”.

Mt Ruapehu is majestic when it comes in to view. I feel the same about skiing as I do about space exploration: why not just admire this natural phenomenon? Why do we need to somehow conquer it? I don’t get it. I have no desire to ski, or go to space.

The hot water bottle is cold by the time I enter Auckland. I put on that Mike + the Mechanics song as I pass a sign for Drury. It is pronounced Mike and the Mechanics not Mike Plus the Mechanics but there’s no sense seeking for band names to be logical. I mean, explain 5ive.

I overtake a Mazda Demio and sing along to the chorus - one sentence, repeated three times. My right hand is on the steering wheel and I swing my left arm out from the shoulder, sweeping it back and forwards through the air above the passenger seat and clicking my fingers theatrically.