Something Good #52: What Life Is Less Without
I recently had the idea to create a playlist of songs that mean something to me.
I delineated the following criteria. The songs had to evoke at least one of the following:
a specific, discrete memory
a period of my life
a person
a place
a particularly strong emotion
(Or any combination of the above.) At first I restricted it to only one song per artist, but I ended up being flexible on that point. I also only added songs I actually still like; otherwise this would have been a very different playlist indeed.
When I started, I had maybe a dozen songs in mind. Less than one day later, the playlist was 17 hours long. As of this writing, it’s at about 28.
Though music has always been a very important part of my life, it was still startling to see this autobiography of sorts laid out in front of me; how much of my mental and emotional matter is inextricably bound up with these recordings. The years I spent researching Sad YouTube were a constant reminder of how intricately our memories are bound up with music, but I had never turned the investigator’s spotlight on my own brain so specifically.
There were songs that evoked the thrill of teenage musical discovery and independence; of big nights out DJing and dancing; of hangovers; of love affairs; of travels; of transitions; of periods of loneliness; of friendship. Songs with YouTube comments so affecting their memories somehow imprinted on me. The record that played, over and over again, the night that Charlie was born; the songs sung and played at our wedding.
Every song in these 28 hours of music vividly evokes something for me. While many of these selections will be familiar to people in or out of my life, and may even conjure up some of the same memories, this playlist is ultimately a self-portrait only I can see.
There’s something kind of sad about that. But maybe there is something you can infer, or at least imagine, about me if you play it.
In the middle of all this playlist-making, I had one of those experiences of unexpected musicological/technologically-assisted emotional catharsis that I seem to specialize in. I had been thinking about mid-00s electronic act Booka Shade, and I searched my gmail account history for any mention of the duo, vaguely recalling a conversation I’d had with a friend about meeting them in an airport or something.
I didn’t find any trace of that interaction, but I did come across an old email exchange with my friend Chris Wrench, dated April of 2006.
Chris was the counterman at CD Esoterik, a tiny little music store tucked away downstairs on Ste-Catherine near Concordia. This was in an era prior to the vinyl renaissance, where a store could literally just sell CDs—nuts, I know—and just before file-sharing and streaming wiped that format seemingly off the earth.
Chris was a quiet guy, deadpan in that record store clerk way, but actually very sweet. He would sometimes pass me promos the store had been sent of stuff I liked, no charge. We would see each other at shows and bonded over our love of music. His email style should give you a sense of his gentle, soulful demeanour.
CD Esoterik eventually closed (probably shortly before this correspondence). I would still see Chris at shows and increasingly late at night at parties and after-parties at lofts or similar spaces around town. He seemed increasingly into the nightlife thing, with all of its temptations, joys, and evils. He seemed lost. I was a bit lost myself, but not quite like that. I remember vividly a conversation we had where he described standing on a dance floor, trying not to feel anything.
Eventually I stopped seeing him at all. He seemed to have vanished completely. I would occasionally google his name, but nothing ever came up.
Two years ago, motivated by I don’t know what, I punched his name in again, and found a death notice. There were no details, and what little information there seemed to be was hidden, horribly, dystopically, behind a funeral home paywall.
I later found out through a third party that he had taken his own life. But we had almost nobody in common. There was nobody I could talk to about him; we had been connected by a filament-thin love of music and mutual affection and almost nothing else. Trying to figure out how to grieve the loss of a person I hadn’t been particularly close to, and who I hadn’t seen for over a decade, is a puzzle I am still trying to figure out.
Around the time I heard the news, I found the picture of him above when re-arranging my hard drives; I hadn’t even remembered taking it.
This week’s #nojacketsrequired comes from my wife Karen Messer, who found it among her late grandmother Betty Andrews’ (1926-2021) belongings. It sat by her chair and was much-used.
In all fairness, the dust jacket put in a lot of work protecting that book.
As always, send your de-jacketed finds to me at [email protected].
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