a little friendlier, a little less jaded
[this is a post from the archives - originally sent november 5th, 2017]
I've got a lifelong fear of one day forgetting everything, but in spite of that, I've never been terribly good at documenting my life. Events get jotted down only in fits and starts, piles of notebooks agonized over / purchased / opened / abandoned, but for the last year and change I've managed to make a playlist every month. What started out as a dumping grounds for everything that caught my ear at inconvenient times has evolved into tiny time capsules. Monthly snapshots of the songs that meant the most so that I can go back and put them on to remember how that moment in time felt even when the day-to-day details escape my memory.
This time around, mostly to see if I could, I wrote down why these particular songs made the cut. I'm not sure I succeeded but my attempt at articulating why these songs mattered (and goddamn it, they mattered) is below.
Two songs in, this started feeling like an incredibly self-indulgent exercise. My hope is that somewhere in here you'll find a song or two to love but you may have better luck doing that by letting the music speak for itself. If you'd like to listen along (or listen alone), you can find October's playlist here.
If you're worried about what you got into signing up for this - I promise each week's dispatch won't be as long, as winding, or as vain as this one. Gram Parson's birthday is today, which means his music will be most of what I listen to in the coming days, so next week you'll get a little bit about why I love the Cosmic American and a lot of links to smarter people talking about him in better ways than I ever could. Also, probably at least one picture of Gram and Emmylou because that is everything that really matters.
Anyway, here's Wonderwall.
1. Sorry You're Sick - Ted Hawkins
This song climbed its way toward the top of the list of my favorite love songs the very first time I heard it. (When and how I became a less of a cynical asshole and more the kind of person who has a list of favorite love songs is not something I can pinpoint, but here we are. It's a brave new world.) For months, this song was the only song on my Love Songs for Cold and Flu Season playlist and has been on more of my playlists in the last year than any other song. The way Hawkins pronounces 'canal', twisting the syllables into a charming-but-still-only-kind-of-rhyme. Magic. The grammatical gymnastics involved in lines like "There's no place on earth I wouldn't hasten to go to cool the fever, this I want you to know" and "I was okay, but these words from you stating you're sick made me sick, too." Magic.
There's also something about the honesty here - the acknowledgment that try as hard as you might, swim as many oceans and plead with as many doctors as you can find, there are still limits to what any one person can do for the person they love (and that sometimes that limit is a desperate store run to get anything that'll make the pain stop for a moment) - that gets me every damn time. If this is as far as you get in this list, fair. I've been there. It lasted two weeks. If you decide to instead go get something sour or something sweet, I won't blame you so long as you play more Hawkins while you do.
2. Highway Anxiety - William Tyler
The liner notes for William Tyler's album Deseret Canyon conclude with this:
"I was reading something not too long ago about Martha, the last known passenger pigeon in the world, who died at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, just a few weeks after World War I had woken up over in Europe. When the Europeans got to America, there were billions of passenger pigeons, the most abundant bird on the continent. They were hunted into extinction over the course of a few hundred years, and just like the Deseret script, they're now a curious footnote in American history. We don't tend to like those footnotes. We only like the success stories and the grand myths. I like to think about the things that got left behind, the odd memories that still come up from time to time when the Big Noise has died down."
This song isn't on that album (it's on the more recent - and actually wikipedia-acknowledged part of his discography - Modern Country) but I think this note offers a good glimpse at what you're in for when you put on a William Tyler album. Tyler's music wanders in a way that encourages your mind to do the same - picking up various facts, memories, footnotes along the way and stringing them together into something new.
I've carried this song with me for a while and it's served different purposes, all equally well. It's the kind of song that brings something new on each listen but is particularly good at meeting you where you are. It's been the soundtrack to long and empty stretches of road as the sun comes up. It's been the wave I've ridden off to sleep in too humid, too small, too not-home hotel rooms. It's been the first thing I've listened to in the morning to remind myself that the world may not always make sense but is worth wandering through. This month, it's been the thing I've turned to most often when I needed to lay on the ground, stare at the ceiling and wander without actually running away. It's the kind of song that exists to carry you safely through road trips and escape fantasies alike.
3. Oh babe it ain't no lie - Elizabeth Cotten
Elizabeth Cotten was, to be frank, a badass. Hers is the story of a dream born early, lost for a while to the demands of what we refer to today as "adulting" because we've decided we're too good, too busy, too... something for non-abbreviated thoughts, but picked up again with a vengeance. I'll spare you my own rambling about all the ways she's one of the raddest and point you here and here for context and towards any one of her recordings for proof.
4. Heart of Gold - Neil Young
I spent a lot of time staring at the sky in October and also a lot of time thinking about Neil Young, though not always at the same time. I sat on a curb in a parking lot watching the international space station fly overhead, remembering what it felt like when that was the dream. I tried and failed to catch a meteor shower. I spent a lot of time looking at the Harvest Moon which meant listening to Neil (because how could you not?) and remembering that this song and not that one was where it's really at. It meant thinking about how until this past year his was the only concert that ever made me cry. It meant thinking about that weird period of my life years ago where I could only fall asleep to Cortez the Killer on loop, of all things, and wondering what that time would have been like if I'd conditioned myself, Pavlovian-style, to sleep to this song instead of that one.
5. Killer - Phoebe Bridgers
October's the month where things should get a little creepy and they should get a little weird but instead of the Monster Mash, I think it's best to come at the soundtrack a little sideways (the exception that proves the rule by being so incredibly literal - #11 on this playlist.) I actually prefer the EP version of this song for the more directly confessional, "wait, should I really be telling you this?" feeling it brings, but the plodding piano and foggy layers of sound on this version haunt more thoroughly. The opening lines are disarming, the second verse lingers long in its morbid beauty, but it's the second and closing chorus that really goes for the gut punch.
6. Sleepin In - The Postal Service
The chorus to this song was my wishful-thinking mantra for every weekend in October, and something I managed exactly zero times. I did find that listening to this song on my way to work felt ironic in a blissful sort of way and did that more times than I could count.
Let's talk about how good this album still is. Let's talk about how some of its tracks are still some of the best things to sing along with at traffic lights. Let's maybe not talk about how quickly we're approaching having had this album to sing along to at traffic lights for 15 years.
7. Walls (No. 3) - Tom Petty
"Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There's not some trick involved with it. It's pure and it's real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things. It's been so good to me that I want to be good to it." - Thomas Earl Petty
A lot has been written about why Tom Petty was inimitable. I won't touch that. The day that Tom Petty died, it seemed like I couldn't walk into a new room without someone making sure that I knew. This was startling the first time but after a while it started to feel less like a confrontation and more like shorthand for "Hey, this is shit news but I want you to hear it from me and we can talk about it if you want" and by the end of the day it was an odd sort of comfort. I didn't really want to talk about it and it hit me a lot harder than I would have guessed which means I still can't really but the fact that I have surrounded myself with enough people who knew I'd care without me having to say anything was a surprise that shouldn't have been.
I think you can tell a lot about person by which Tom Petty song is their favorite. This song is damn near perfect, but is still not mine. This one is here because this is the one I could listen to on repeat for four solid hours, multiple days in a row and hide away in.
8. Devil Town - Bright Eyes
This is a Halloween staple for me. This is Conor Oberst doing a Daniel Johnston song. This song is perfect taken at face value for creepy holiday vibes. This song is more perfect than perfect interpreted as a somber meditation on the days where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed with the blinders removed.
9. Promises - Fugazi
October was a weird month in general, but the 24 hour period where I listened to nothing but 13 Songs was probably the weirdest and most cathartic part. I have a long-standing habit of overanalyzing the things I say (read as: Reason #1 Monica is Abysmal at Small Talk and Terrible at Parties and Meetings and Makes Approximately Two Friends Every Five Years) but some circumstances in the last few months have involved even more careful weighing and measuring of the (stupid fucking?) words I string together. Words started to feel heavier and it started to get too easy to just bite my tongue. My Fugazi marathon, and this song in particular, served as a reminder that I'm not alone in sometimes wanting to hurl the dictionary and niceties out the door.
10. One of These Days - Bedouine
In an article/interview with Azniv Korkejian (who performs as Bedouine) about her debut album this song was described as an "easy-going country-funk gallup" which means its exactly the kind of thing that would immediately burrow into my brain and take up residency. It's got a laid back, ambling vibe that feels like its coming at you from another time but a winking lyrical confidence that anchors it fully in the now. This is the kind of song that says everything I wish I knew how to with the kind of confidence I've often wondered how people pull off. Casually too-cool-for-school and yet unflinching in the face of capital F Feelings.
"But I've been singing the same old song
and I ain't feeling nothing wrong.
One of these days,
You know I'm going to set our hearts ablaze
If it's the last thing I do."
I missed seeing Bedouine open for Fleet Foxes when they came through town this past summer which meant I stubbornly shelved this album for a while but it (along with Natalie Prass' self-titled album, also from Spacebomb, also from another time, also fucking rad) crept back in this past month. A masterclass in optimistic yearning, this song is another one of those things that I reached for when I needed to lay on the floor and think about Things.
11. Halloweenhead - Ryan Adams
When I was in high school I was a janitor at a gym which meant I had the distinct misery of cleaning toilets for minimum wage to all of the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Maroon 5 et. al. a person could ever need. I don't know if I believe in hell, but if it is a place and I have to go there, I imagine it looks a lot like the laundry room of a Lifetime Fitness. Somehow this song, with its "shit"s and its "fuck"s swapped out for a white noise pause, made it into the gym radio rotation one year. It lasted about three days. Three glorious days during which I took a lot of pleasure from uncensoring it.
I don't think there's been a Halloween in a decade where I didn't listen to this song. It's a staple for me, and even after all this time I still find it oddly charming that Ryan Adams, bless him, thinks his audience isn't with him enough to know there's a guitar solo coming up if he doesn't give us a heads-up.
12. My My My - Elyse Weinberg
I bought Weinberg's album Greasepaint Smile because I started to feel guilty about just how many times I'd listened to the song Houses without doing anything really to support where it came from. Weinberg's story (or Bishop's, really, since she's reinvented herself, changing her name to Cori Bishop somewhere along the way) is an interesting one and this interview with her from 2015 is a good read. Houses is a perfect song and the reason I bought the album, but it ended up being this one that I lingered on. This album was shelved for decades before a release and Weinberg stepped away from it to walk a different path. She couldn't have known the weird journey this album would take, and yet you can almost hear her giving a wink and a nod across the years when she delivers the opening lines and especially when the song meanders to my favorite reminder to let the little things go - "all kinds of trouble just make me laugh".
13. Abacus - Fionn Regan
I flew to New York to see Fionn Regan perform in September and still haven't emotionally recovered from the experience. This is the kind of statement that could be read as an exaggeration, but is meant in all embarrassing sincerity. Leaning against the stage (I'm not usually that person but you don't fly across the country to not be that person) I realized this was a show I'd been waiting more than a decade for. You can build up a lot of expectations in a decade and as the stage was set I drank one shitty beer and half of another and did what I could to prepare myself for the let down.
There was no let down.
If you've listened to Bon Iver's "1000000 (Million)", you've heard a snippet of this song. I'd be lying if I said that sample didn't knock me sideways with the way it came through as a hazy beacon - a lighthouse winking across all the years and hard times Fionn's music has carried me through, reminding me what it feels like build a home in a song and have it still be there for you no matter how far you wander. I didn't not cry. If you haven't listened to The End of History in its entirety, do so.
(Sorry, Christine, I had to. Fuck hurricanes, forever)
14. Dearly Departed - Shakey Graves (ft. Esme Patterson)
This is another October staple for me. Sometimes I'll catch myself thinking about it as an extended metaphor for all the ways love that's died can linger but most times I let that go, clap louder, and take particular joy in the breakdown - "Well, I'm all grown up now - I don't scare easy no more."
15. Trains to Brazil - Guillemots
When I was in high school, I thought the Guillemots were the coolest and my mind still reaches back for this song (quite literally, okay - "And I'll still think of you on cold winter mornings, darling, they'll still remind me of when we were at school") whenever the weather starts to change. I've always appreciated this song for the way it pairs a joyous cacophony with lyrics as biting and brutal as the ones here. This is, at its heart, a song about terror and the people it leaves behind but layer in the horns and it's also a reminder to cheer up and appreciate the fact that you can.
16. Detroit or Buffalo - Barbara Keith
"But I'm gonna be just fine -
a lot of friends, a little wine"
I have no idea how I found this song, but I do know that I have not since managed to listen to it any fewer than three times in a row. This song found me at exactly the moment I needed it and you're lucky that this playlist isn't just this song however many times it would take to fill every minute of a month. For me this is one of those songs that came out of nowhere and became a part of my DNA. Keith's lyrics hit exactly the right emotional notes for me in a month where I really really really needed a song to belt to. That second verse became a confession and a mantra and when, about three minutes in, the song starts to fade out and then comes charging back in with a drum beat that should be cheesy but just isn't - know that I spent an absurd amount of time driving around in circles in the middle of the night so that I could air drum to that part at traffic lights.
17. Pick Up the Change - Wilco
Considering that Wilco doesn't even get a podium finish if I were to list my favorite bands, I'm a person who has spent an overwhelmingly stupid amount of time trying to figure out which Wilco song is my favorite Wilco song. Over the years (yes, years), the top contenders have been: Shot in the Arm, ELT, I'm Always in Love, How to Fight Loneliness, California Stars (I know this isn't really a Wilco song, but Billy Bragg is great and it's Guthrie lyrics and there have been times where this song has been everything), Hummingbird, She's a Jar, I am trying to break your heart, and Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again) with Passenger Side holding steady at number one for a long time.
Anyway, I've finally put all of that behind me. Pick Up the Change wins and it wins forever. This is A.M.-era Wilco which means Tweedy's still got just the right amount of twang and the guitar lines are jangly and right up front. This is a straightforward love song which means it may not be as clever by half as some of the others, it may not be as Important or Political but it's intimate and personal in a way that doesn't feel like it's ever reaching to be something it's not. It doesn't need to. This is a straightforward love song that acknowledges that minds will wander but can be called back with the simplest of things. This is a straightforward love song that acknowledges that really caring for someone can sometimes mean feeling completely out of your depth and that finding the courage to ask for their help in closing the gap might just be the whole damn point.
18. Dry Town (demo) - Gillian Welch
September, a year ago, I found myself at the Ryman to watch the Americana Music Awards because when you set out to drive across the country to runaway from yourself and along the way...
Get run off the road by an 18-wheeler the minute you roll out of Texas
Have to have a junkie with a funny-the-first-thirty-times-but-a-little-alarming-the-next pick-up line thrown out of a hotel bar decorated with jeering monkeys
Think for a moment that you just might die in an observation tower on an Arkansas mountaintop when a thunderstorm rolls in and makes the whole world sway
...you start saying yes to and throwing money at things you wouldn't normally. My seat ended up being in the very back but unlike the other rows came with a seat cushion and a ledge to set my drink on and was therefore, the best. At one point, a wave of stillness washed over the people milling around the aisle behind me. I thought it meant the show would be starting soon but then I saw them - or, first, saw other people seeing them. Gillian and Dave. It was an odd thing to witness, the sudden hush when they walked through the balcony doors - you could almost see the unfinished sentences hanging in the air because in that instant there was nothing worth saying. All the posturing and preening that had been going on (the hats too large and the boots too shiny and the denim too crisp and the drawls too affected and the belt buckles just plain absurd) was shown for the pointless peacocking it was. Most of the hushed crowd bowed its head and parted around them because when Gillian Welch and David Rawlings walk into the room there's no point in trying to look cool. You'll never, ever win.
Gillian Welch is a national treasure and I like this song and that's all there really is to it.
19. One of Us - Dawes
There are some Dawes songs that I think should be locked away and never played again (Have they ever actually had champagne when the tequila ran out? It's not a good time - or, it is until it definitely isn't and the next day is the absolute pits). This song is not one of those songs. This one has all of the things that I like about a Dawes song when a Dawes song goes right. Here, the storytelling manages to deftly weave together details so specific that they somehow feel universal, the earnestness comes off at the right pitch and the beat knows it's job is to keep things moving right along before it all gets to be a little too much. This is an existential crisis song to boogie to and sometimes that's all a person can really ask for.
20. Get Lost - The Babies
I saw Kevin Morby twice in roughly a week back in September, which is bordering on extreme, even for me. The first time, I was in New York and dragging along a friend of the oldest and best kind and worried about whether the show would really be good enough to count as a valid 'thank you for letting me crash on your couch' gift. It was late. The train ride was a longish one. It was a work night. I'm not always a great friend. The second time, was an inverse - I knew going in that the show was worth it but was anxious and 98% sure that the company'd find me ridiculous. Morby wore the same full suit at both shows (more courageous in the Texas heat than in Brooklyn) and played the same Townes cover, too (more confusion in the Yankee crowd than here at home).
He didn't play this song because this song's from another band and time but this is the one that's been rattling around in my brain since.
21. When Your Dream Lovers Die - Townes Van Zandt
This is a perfect song about patience and acceptance and the kind of love that knows that sometimes you have to leave to build castles in the air and also knows it'll still be waiting to welcome you home when they prove hollow. This is a perfect song and I've got nothing else to say here that wouldn't distract from that fact.
22. I Ain't Got Nobody - Earl Hines
I've had Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch on my bedside table for years now, but only started reading it recently. I'm only a hundred pages in but learned two things very quickly:
I had not lived enough to be ready for this book when I bought it and the fact that it had to age on my nightstand for years while I did is something I'm no longer embarrassed about.
I don't know shit about jazz.
Cortazar weaves references to jazz music throughout the text - not as tossed off song titles or artist names but as part of the engine driving the whole thing forward and I've enjoyed taking his descriptions and trying to imagine first what the song will sound like before listening to them. I used to do this with lyric booklets when I was younger - whenever I bought a new cd I'd read through the lyrics before ever hitting play to try and guess what the songs would sound like so it'd be a pleasant surprise whenever I was sort-of-kind-of-right.
Cortazar's passage (chopped up some because this is already a million years long and you should just read the book) for this song was:
And suddenly with cool perfection, Earl Hines was giving his first variation of I Ain't Got Nobody, and even Perico, lost in some remote reading lifted up his head and listened. La Maga had rested her head on Gregorovius's thigh and was looking at the floor, at the piece of Oriental rug, a red strand that disappeared into the socle, an empty glass next to a table leg... Helpless, she thought sublime thoughts, quotations from poems which made her feel that she was in the very heart of the artichoke, on one side "I ain't got nobody and nobody cares for me," which was not entirely true because at least two people were present who were in a bad mood over her, and at the same time a line from Perse, something like "Tu es là, mon amour, et je n'ai lieu qu'en toi," where La Maga took refuge snuggling up to the sound of lieu, of Tu es là, mon amour... Ronald would never be able to play the piano like Earl Hines, Horacio and she should really own that record to listen to at night in the dark, to learn how to make love to the phrasing, those long nervous caresses, "I ain't got nobody" on the back, on the shoulders, fingers behind the neck, nails working in and out of the hair, one last whirlwind and... tu es là, mon amour, and nobody cares for me.
I didn't imagine this song right because I don't know shit about jazz. But I'm trying.
23. Trains and Boats and Planes - Astrud Gilberto
I found this song by way of another Cortazar reference (Stan Getz this time) and a wikipedia wormhole and found myself putting it on in the moments when I'd normally have gone for Nico's version of These Days.
24. Starborne Eyes - Trevor Sensor
Most of the time I try not to give in to my more superstitious tendencies, but I cut myself some slack in October because it was a month where I needed the occasional nod from the universe that I'm on the right track, in the place I need to be. One of those small nods came in the form of an inexplicable portrait of Andy Warhol in a parking lot the day that I first heard and spent hours listening to the album this song comes from.
The lyrics to this song are brutal - it opens with "The pages of the past never seem to last and everyone is wanting something they can't have" and doesn't cheer up from there, but it's a beautiful brutality and sad songs have always been my favorite anyway. My favorite moment is this one - "And three years has left me drunk, alone, with starborne eyes. I see now how everything goes away from you in time 'cause my life hasn't changed or grown with my age. I'm still young they say, until the flowers all die and melt away." The later lyric about drinking bad beer and laying on the ground hit a little too close to home.
I'm capable of acknowledging that Sensor's voice probably isn't for everyone, in so far as I'll acknowledge that I count myself lucky that it is so so so for me.
25. Me and Bobby McGee - Janis Joplin
The subject line for this email comes from a Janis Joplin interview with Howard Smith from 1970. Talking about why she liked the West Coast, Joplin said:
"I guess I just like the people's attitudes better out here: they seem to be a little friendlier, a little less jaded, a little less anxious to be critical, out here, and more willing to just accept you and float with it."
I'm working on being less anxious to be critical. It's a work-in-progress, but one of the best ways I found to float with it all lately is to cruise down the big hill on my commute, hands off the wheel to the last minute or so of this song.
Other good Janis lines from this interview:
"It's sorta like - you are what you settle for. Do you know what I mean? You are only as much as you settle for. And you know, if they settle for being somebody's dishwasher, that's their own fucking problem. You know, if you don't settle for that and you keep fightin', you'll end up anything you wanna be. How can they attack me? I'm just doing what I want to and what feels right and not settlin' for bullshit and it works; how can they be mad at that?"
"That's the way my life has evolved. I think in terms of Holiday Inss, good audience rapport, and a good bass sound, right?"
"I don't think you can talk anybody into fighting against it if they don't have it in themselves to need more... Just plain need more, then that's that. If they do need more, they'll get more; they'll demand more."
26. The Sorcerer - Twain
I'm obsessed with this song. I'm obsessed with the moment when, about three minutes in, Twain hits that long "gone" and holds it and holds it and holds it and holds it and holds it (fellow members of the stupid driving society: this is another good moment to take the hands off the wheel to). I'm obsessed with trying to hold onto that one word just as long and laughing at how I definitely cannot get even close.
The artist put together a really interesting reflection on this song here and it's better than what else I have to say so go wander that way. I'm very excited to see this live in December.
27. Occapella - Toussaint, Lee Dorsey
Try not to dance to this song, I dare you. I spent a lot of time in October taking life too seriously. To balance it out, I'd put this song on to brush my teeth.
28. Every Time the Sun Comes Up - Kyle Craft
"People say I'm a one-hit wonder, but what happens when I have two?"
A good cover can take a favorite song and show you something you didn't notice before. This is a good cover.
I have Sharon Van Etten's original version of this song on my should be / could be sleeping playlist and I'm usually enough of an insomniac to get that far before I fall asleep. Craft's version - with it's more insistently driving take is a more obvious "yeah, I know, so what?" than the original that sometimes comes across as a lament which makes it's another good song to get ready to in the morning.
29. Masterpiece - Big Thief
I think Big Thief might be my favorite band. I think Big Thief might be NPR's favorite band. I don't think I've made a monthly playlist without a Big Thief song on it this year and I don't plan to. Please listen to Big Thief.
30. Let Me Down Easy - Gang of Youths
I was listening to this album at work one day and emailed myself the following:
Albums are important because
a song may make you cry but a perfect album as the power to wrap you up and make you weep.
re: string instrumentals (that cello, fuck) on gang of youths' - 'go further in lightness'
This is the most arena-reaching rock album I've liked in a very long time and there are moments that are so close to cornball that I question myself for how much I love it (because I love it a lot) but then the string section comes back in, or the lyrics pack just the right punch, or I remember to just lighten up and I question anyone who can't love it too. This isn't my favorite song off of the album but this is a song that has a level of earnestness I've needed a lot lately, it has that cello, and both of these lines: "If it's late, you're drunk and wanting a reason, some reason, to live - I always, I always say, just put on some Whitesnake" and "Honey, it's no secret that I've been losing my way in the weirdest of moments and the stupidest of ways. But, hey, I'm still young and it's gonna be okay - I got solipsism, baby, and I brought lemonade." which means it's Exhibit A for why I love this album so much I send myself emails about it.
31. Slow Disco - St. Vincent
There are moments on the new St. Vincent album that absolutely gutted me. None of them are on this song because when I make these playlists, I tend to listen to them at least once a day as a soundtrack for the month and I can't hit those feeling levels on a daily basis.
The last song on a playlist is the one I usually spend the most time thinking about because it's the one that sends you back out into the world. The first time I heard this song I knew it'd be the end of a playlist. It'll probably the end of a lot of them because it's the perfect ease out.
Holy shit. You did it. Or you scrolled all the way to the bottom just to see if this really was as long as it looked. It was. Sorry.
Either way - what songs did you like? What Wilco song are you going to fight me about? When are you going to listen to Gang of Youths so I have someone to talk to about how good those instrumental tracks are and don't have to email myself like a lonely weirdo about it anymore? What did you listen to in October?