Category Archives: Songs That Saved Your Life

Indigo Girls, “Kid Fears”

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indigogirls-indigogirls.jpgWhat would replace the rent with the stars above?
Replace the need with love?
Replace the anger with the tide?
Replace the ones that you love?

 

 

One of the least important things about this song is intimately connected with one of the most significant. Life’s funny that way. Laura was the first person to play it for me. In the days of my earliest infatuation with her, we were sitting on the floor of her room, listening to music, and fiddling around with her guitar. She was practicing a variety of things (many of them from Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” album, which I had also just heard for the first time). At the time, I had no idea who the Indigo Girls were { “I mean, c’mon, they’re a girl band” – I would have said}, but I did know and love R.E.M. Every member of R.E.M. performs on this record, but none so spectacularly as Michael Stipe. { Honestly, has any other band ever done so much mentoring? Eddie Vedder discussed this when he inducted R.E.M. into the rock and roll hall of fame, and you can find that here, here, and here. But seriously? Peter Buck contributed great things to albums by The Replacements. Michael Stipe shepherded Thom Yorke in his time of crisis. Then Eddie Vedder. And a host of other bands from the Athens, GA area – including the Indigo Girls. And I’ll never stop thinking about what might have come out of the “acoustic” stuff he was working on with Kurt Cobain. The man really is a dynamo…} Now, as anyone who will have heard old recordings of band practice will know {And yes, I realize this represents a small, miserable population of people who will likely never speak to me again.}, I once had the uncanny ability to sound just like Mr. Stipe when speaking into a tape recorder. So, naturally, Laura thought I would be able to sing this song with her. And, naturally, that I’d be able to play along with her.

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The Smiths, “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out”

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thereisalight.jpgTake me out, tonight.
Where there’s music and there’s people
And they’re young and alive.
Driving in your car,
I never never want to go home…

 

 

When I think back on my life in high school, and the friends that were there, it’s hard to overstate the immenseness of Chris‘ importance to me. We were, of course, members of the ill-fated band. But before that, we were often to be found driving across the landscape in Chris’ venerable { Read: decrepit (but lovably so). And I suppose we were, on occasion, not so much driving as watching others drive from the sidelines. Bless that little car… }Ford tempo. Most nights, we didn’t really have a destination. We’d make loops of our suburban town, wander up to Nashua, and then eventually head home. Yet, despite the relative simpleness of these outings, and their rather generic nature, I can think of few things in my life that I treasure more. And the reason for that, of course, was a shared love for loud music, and a mutual lack of concern for the passing of time.

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Soma, “Orange”

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If the story of my band were turned into a film, or even a VH1 “Behind the Music” special, I’m certain that the opening credits would be superimposed over the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young.” (“God, what a mess / on the ladder of success. / Well, you take one step and miss the whole first rung.”) {In fact, in the screenplay I have co-written on this very topic, this is precisely the case. Do I have a gift for clairvoyancy, or what? } Yeah. I often feel that way when I think about the little band that couldn’t. Or, indeed, that could have if not for a series of prototypically teenage miscues. (Or, perhaps, some media-perpetuated heresies. That sounds better, right? Yeah. Damn the Man.)

We were, or, in all honesty, I was preoccupied with the band’s “image.” There is, of course, the necessary teenage device of signifying “I’m in a band” by dressing/acting like dizzy, beflanneled messiahs from the Pacific Northwest. (This was the early-to-mid nineties.) Beyond that, there’s the leftover punk/grunge remnant which suggested that playing instruments well was secondary to the atmosphere which the band affected. (This continues to this day. I’m looking at you Marilyn…and, I suppose if we switch out “atmosphere” for “train wreck,” then I’m averting my gaze from you Britney, Paris et al.) Beyond that, there was the fact that I was a teenager writing the sort of stuff that everyday teenagers write. And, more or less, that’s how the first twenty minutes of our VH1 special would go – stuck in my parents’ basement, and wondering, as Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted (Theodore) Logan once did, whether or not we should learn to play our instruments.
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Sigur Rós, #1

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sigurros.jpg

There is an archway in Oxford – a replica of the Bridge of Sighs – and it stands, for no particular reason, at the head of Queen’s Lane. The only prison it joins is a library, and, yet, its decontextualized nature allows it to become part of the essential semiotics of Oxford. It is fitting, then, that I should pass beneath it as the first humming sounds of Sigur Rós’ #1 came through on a foggy, October evening. The experience of listening to this song, and the untitled album from which it comes, did much to realign my perception of what was possible, and, indeed, what was in my life.

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Genesis, “Home By The Sea”

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Images of sorrow, pictures of delight
Things that go to make up a life
Endless days of summer, longer nights of gloom
Waiting for the morning light
Scenes of unimportance like photos in a frame
Things that go to make up a life

 

 

The very first concert I ever went to was one given by John Denver at the Worcester Centrum in 1982. I don’t really remember a lot about this particular concert, as I was about three, except for this strong mental image of the lights going dark, and then coming up over the stage as John made his way through the crowd. Now, there aren’t a lot of ways I can spin this experience as cool, and, to be honest, it really is incidental to the story. Suffice it to say that this was the first time I’d ever seen so many people in one place, and it has come to mind at every concert that I’ve attended since. Really – even at Nine Inch Nails concerts. (How’s that for street cred?) I suppose, though, that the reason I was there in the first place was that my mother’s albums had largely consisted of singer-songwriters from the 60s and 70s. People like Don McLean, Joan Baez, and so on. I will admit that I still know the words to almost every John Denver song I’ve ever heard, though. And, between you and me, I even like some of them. Continue reading →