Nothing in the past or future ever will feel like today
Nothing in the past or future ever will feel like today
Let's think about the saddest/best Bright Eyes songs, be shamed out when singing along to MC Hammer, and totally charmed by a whole flat when we learn they listen to The Dandy Warhols
In this edition of All The Songs, we will read a novel about being in your early 20s in Ireland during the global financial crisis, we will watch Labyrinth and question its message, we’ll think about the saddest/best Bright Eyes songs, try a lovely soft chardonnay from Gisborne, be shamed out when singing along to MC Hammer, and totally charmed by a whole flat when we learn they listen to The Dandy Warhols.
Listening
I’ve been listening to nothing* but Bright Eyes since booking tickets to see them play soon in Wellington. The indie emo-folk band from Omaha fronted by Conor Oberst, whose voice Interview magazine once described as “uncouth”, is adored by people my age with too many feelings to fit inside their chests.
Apparently, copies of the 2002 Bright Eyes album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground were sold in the US with stickers on the front that said “Conor Oberst owns a voice that quakes with the tumultuous energy that only youth can produce.”
That was not true.
He’s 43 now and sounds the same. If anything, his born-wary voice now carries the gravitas of having been around the block. His energy remains tumultuous.
My go-to Bright Eyes album is Cassadaga. It’s the most significant for me because I was given the CD to review for a magazine, so I did my standard devotional music critic thing of listening to it in full three times before putting pen to paper. I got to know the music before articulating opinions about it. I let it sit. We grew close.
I will be going to their Wellington show no matter which songs they’re currently playing on the road, but I did check the 2023 set lists online from recent Bright Eyes gigs.
I’m not sorry to tell you they’re not playing ‘First Day Of My Life’ (do you remember the first time someone played you that song? Of course I do, and I’ll write to you about it another day). But I am sorry to say fans can’t expect to hear my personal favourite ‘Lua’.
That approach to live song selection reminds me of seeing Broken Social Scene in 2007: from the stage they said, “Look, we’re not going to play ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl’, but after the show you can go home and light a scented candle in your bedroom and cry while you listen to it if you want.” Some spare, beloved tearjerkers are intentionally absent from 2023 Bright Eyes set lists. I guess it’s not the tone they’re going for.
They are, however, playing ‘Poison Oak’. I listened to that song for the first time in honestly over a decade today while I walked home from work. Oh my, friends, we’re going to be covered for sad songs - don’t you worry.
I’ll be one of the girls squashed up the front, fist in the air ironically on the line “I’ll fight like hell” in ‘Another Travelin’ Song’, one of the tracks from I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning that we can expect to hear.
* ”Nothing but” is an exaggeration, I listened to Skee-Lo and Kanye while running this morning.
Reading
I have just raced through the novel ‘The Rachel Incident’, by Irish writer Caroline O’Donoghue. We meet the narrator Rachel when she is in her thirties and pregnant. She returns to her hometown and encounters an old university friend who informs her, with significance in his words, that their old professor is in a coma…you know, the one everyone thinks she had an affair with. The truth, like all truth, is more complicated.
The narrator then tells us the truth. It is the story of what happened when she and her friend James, who was on the cusp of coming out, lived in a squalid flat in Cork in 2010 in their early 20s. They were struggling to keep warm and barely making enough money at their bookstore jobs to cover food and the cheap booze they relied on as entertainment. There were no creative or satisfying jobs in that economy for hopeful, talented young people. Their house had ants in summer and in winter, it was so cold that they snuggled in one room and watched Absolutely Fabulous DVDs on James’s laptop under a duvet, too chilled to endure the arctic journey to their kitchen. I winced at these passages, remembering a flat in Mt Vic where I spent an earthquake-ridden winter in my 20s watching Twin Peaks with two heaters going, while wrapped up in a duvet and wearing a beanie indoors.
Rachel and James get themselves caught up in a complex and damning scandal that becomes public with all the facts skewed. Reputations will be tainted forever.
Alongside its plot twists, the novel’s strength is how vividly life is drawn as a struggling but ambitious student. One wants desperately for opportunities, one feels hunger literally and metaphorically, one is too young to know how to do laundry properly, one messes up romantic relationships with outlandish drama. There’s a brilliant line about Rachel thinking she’s a blazing young woman during one night out in 2010, but when she looks back from her 30s she sees herself that night as just “a drunk girl in a tiny dress, and I was cold”.
Watching
Family movie night is a tradition we’ve put in place for Friday nights. We take turns choosing what to watch, ensuring it is suitable for the child who lives with us half the time (she chose Inside Out for her last selection). Recently we watched Labyrinth, a classic that I saw a few times as a kid and once as an adult.
There are plenty of think-pieces out there about the meaning of the film (like this, and this, or this) but my take away this time around was the feminist reading that Jennifer Connelly’s character Sarah is punished for rejecting caring for a baby. Sarah, I’m just gonna put it out there, while it’s not cool to wish your brother be abducted by a goblin king, it’s totally fine to have no interest in looking after babies.
Cooking
We’ve revolutionised/bastardised the Caesar salad with a Kiwi spin, you’re welcome.
I sliced raw brussels sprouts finely and tossed them with cooked free range bacon pieces, shaved parmesan, a squeeze of lemon, croutons baked from French bread I’d abandoned last week and, crucially, a dollop of Kiwi onion dip leftover from entertaining friends.
This scrabbled-together salad had all the Caesar-ish elements of crisp greens, salty hard cheese, acid, protein-rich bacon and fatty creamy goodness of the reduced cream, onion soup powder and lemon mixed together in the dip. This was a quick fridge clear-out light dinner that was surprisingly successful.
Editor’s note: my partner made the Kiwi dip. Personally, I use vinegar for the acid element. Each to their own.
Drinking
While listening to Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, we tried Millton’s orange-blossomy, honeyish, soft Opou 2020 Chardonnay from Gisborne. It was lovely.
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?
‘U Can’t Touch This’ by MC Hammer
Your friend Jasimine has the same nickname as you: Jaz. But hers is spelled Jas, although they sound the same.
You are six years old and your mothers are friends. Her dad lives in Australia, just like yours. You find this out when you’re watching TV at her house one day and an All Blacks rugby game fills the screen and she tells you her dad is an All Black. You ask which one, hoping she’ll point him out amongst the men moving about the field. She says oh, you just missed him, as the image on screen changes.
You tell your mum later and she laughs and says, no, her dad is not an All Black, he lives in Australia. You instinctively know not to tell Jas your mum had said that.
You stay over at her house in a sleeping bag on the floor next to her single bed. She asks if you know what sex is and you say no and she says she does, it’s what adults do in bed. You say you think it’s when they go like this and you wiggle and wriggle. You both shriek with laughter and her mother calls out from another room, ‘You know I can hear you’. You both giggle louder but don’t talk about sex again, whatever that is.
Jas has dirty blonde hair chopped at her shoulders, with a fringe. Your hair is long down your back, brown and ringletty. Your mum likes to be different so instead of putting it in two plaits, she sections your hair in to three.
At Jas’s house you help her with feeding the cat and you get some of the jelly meat from the tin on your hand and panic, quickly washing it off under the kitchen tap. Ewww, she says. Ew, her mother echoes, we don’t like people who touch cat food. You want to cry and her mother apologises when she sees your face. I was just teasing, she says, rubbing your back.
Her mother drives you both and Jas’s younger brother to the dairy to buy some of those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cheese and pizza Bluebird corn snack chips. You play a game in the car with their MC Hammer cassingle. When ‘U Can’t Touch This’ plays, you all sing along and their mum will hit the stop button when he says ‘Stop! Hammer time’ but also at random moments when you least expect it. It’s kind of like musical chairs but whoever doesn’t stop singing when she stops the tape loses.
You all shout “my, my, my, my”. You don’t know all the words but you let go, your voice loud. Your voice rings out as the music suddenly stops. You got caught out. They all laugh and you freeze, embarrassed. Her mum pushes play but you don’t sing again.
Back at their house, Jas puts the bowl of chips on the ground and dares you to eat them like a dog, without using hands.
‘Godless’ by The Dandy Warhols
The first flat I go to see in Sydney is the right one. I know it in my spine without having words to explain why.
This often happens to me. The first wedding dress I’ll try on years later in the studio of a local designer in New Zealand is the only dress for me. It is ballet length and made of vintage lace, with a tight waist and a 1950s Dior silhouette - pretty, without being prissy or princessy.
When I go to see a litter of puppies that a family’s dog had recently given birth to in Tawa, I hold one in my hand and just know that this particular animal, and only this one, is my one. Our companionship and care for each other and significance in each other’s lives is already fated and I can feel it.
Standing in the kitchen of a two story flat in Newtown, I see a bowl of citrus in the centre of a round table where the two guys and a girl who live here eat their breakfast. The battered table has three rectangle placemats, navy with a gold border, clearly picked up at a thrift store - they are chipped and weirdly swollen in places from things some previous owners spilled in years past that affected the cork underside. I’m charmed that these people use proper tableware even on such a damaged and lived-in wooden surface. It’s earnest, polite.
The aesthetic of the house is adorably dusty and scented with sandalwood incense, the decor layered up with items inherited from previous tenants and gifted from parents and found on the side of the road or at the Vinnies on King Street.
There is a 1970s television that has been hollowed out and turned in to a fish tank on the kitchen bench, goldfish swimming through an underwater landscape of seaweed and rocks that one of the residents lovingly and diligently keeps clean.
The song that had been playing when I walked in the door a few moments earlier fades and ‘Godless’ by The Dandy Warhols comes on as they offer me a cup of tea.
I say yes, certain from the core of my soul that we are destined to be great friends.
One of the guys, Ben, has a crooked nose and a tangle of brown curls. The other guy is out when I visit.
The girl who lives here has a short pixie cut. She is warm and high energy, but not in that way some extroverts can drain me. She is effervescent.
A Samoyed bounds down the stairs from her room, where he sleeps. I hope you don’t mind dogs, she says, I have a big fluffy white dog. His name’s Marvin.
She gives me a steaming cup of chamomile tea.
The house is walking distance from that Maltese place with the to-die-for spinach and ricotta pastizzi, and from the Enmore Theatre where Conor Oberst is playing soon, and I want to live here with all my heart.