and will give myself completely to the moving and the strange
[this is a post from the archives - originally sent april 4th, 2018]
Somewhere in Chicago there’s a bar with the best jukebox in the world.
It has the hits, sure, but more than that it's updated regularly and curated carefully. And this isn’t one of those soulless digital pull-any-song-you-want-down-from-the-magical-cloud jukeboxes that has every song at its disposal and somehow still only plays the Top 40 night after night after night. No, the songs on this jukebox are there because someone loves them and wants you to love them too.
Or so I’ve been told.
Turns out I’d used up my luck for the evening on meeting strangers who knew that there is a very important difference between Desaparecidos and Despacito, that revisiting the music that you loved when you were younger is an embarrassing but necessary part of coming to terms with who you are today, and that sometimes a song is just a song but no, that’s not usually the case.
Turns out I’d used up my luck for the evening meeting strangers who let me pet their dog and crash their plans so when we got to the nameless bar with the best jukebox in the world it wasn’t open. Neither was the next (also nameless) bar we tried, and I started wondering if maybe I’d used up all of their luck, too.
But - in our wandering we found a fancy jewelry store with a Star Wars action figure display, lovingly curated by a nine year old and that seemed like an important thing, almost as good as the best jukebox in the world. And we found a bar (with a name) that was actually open, played shitty music and served PBR (Lonestar, I miss you), and it didn’t really seem like an important thing but it was still a good one.
Somewhere in Chicago there’s a bar with the best jukebox in the world. I may never get to go there, but I did get to try.
There’s an Italian restaurant in Seattle’s Pike Place Market that plays Nina Simone.
And I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me want to cry.
Stepping off the train in Seattle was the first time I stopped to wonder what the hell I was doing and why. It’s a small miracle that it took five days and over 3500 miles to get to that point, but the constant motion of a train and the blur of a changing landscape can outrun (or out-numb) most emotions.
I’d meant to make plans on the train but stared out the window instead so when I got off in Seattle I was staring down three days of nothing to do and what felt like everything to prove. With five hours to kill before I could check in to the place I was staying, I ditched my bags at the station and started walking.
Wandering the streets of Seattle, I was in a foul mood - the pigeons were too fat, the street lights too slow to change, the sidewalks too crowded. I almost got run over. I might have kicked a curb.
My wandering took me through the tourist trap that is Pike’s Place Market and a crowded alley where everyone inexplicably needed their pictures taken in an alleyway covered in chewed gum (humans are gross, y’all). It was there that three days of being asked “And - you’re really doing all of this all alone?” caught up with me.
I wasn’t hungry but I needed to sit down and there was a counter service Italian food place away from the gum and the fish tossing and the line for donuts that was sixty people deep. I wasn’t hungry but I needed to sit down and as I did so the lady at the counter queued up Little Girl Blue.
There’s an Italian restaurant in Seattle’s Pike Place Market that plays Nina Simone. I wasn’t hungry, but I was home. **
Almost every Uber in Los Angeles plays Bruno Mars.
And basically, fuck that.
And it made me realize I’d put away the music that I wanted to hear in exchange for the sounds of city streets, was feeling weird for it and really missed my car.
They say LA’s not a walkable city but I wore out my shoes and my ankle wandering from Echo Park to Hollywood. I don’t think I ever found the stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard that could possibly have inspired Sheryl Crow to sing but I did find the grave of Johnny Ramone. Dee Dee’s grave was covered in lipstick but the fence posts around Johnny’s were topped with badges bearing the names of the whole band; a reminder that there are many kinds of love.
It seemed like every show I would have wanted to see happened the week before I got to town, or would be happening the week after I left but I found a Connie Smith album for three bucks in the bin of a vintage store and a Milt Jackson one for two at Amoeba where they had no Townes Van Zandt records but had Emmylou for cheap on the eve of her birth.
There are at least two Car Seat Headrest billboards in Silver Lake. “DAMN” is spray painted on the sidewalk at least a dozen times - another city with another reminder to sit down, be humble.
I had to explain to a stranger who Buck Owens was after I waited for them to get off of his star. There were flowers on Selena’s the day after Easter and I’d like to think they still haven’t been swept away.
LA’s a loud town where it seems like you might never get to listen to that one thing that you really want to, or, you have to be willing to try harder every day.
Almost every Uber in Los Angeles plays Bruno Mars but there’s an elderly man named Michael who drives the same kind of van my mother does and plays classical and it almost works to cut through the noise.
--
** Seattle, I love you, honest. It got better once I got to what might have been the most magical airbnb in existence, with a host who knew by looking at me that I might need a music store to go sit in, had an old radio with a tape of The Eagles’ Greatest Hits and the jazz station flagged. There’s an old man who plays the bagpipes for the sea lions and they follow him along the shore. I made a miserable first impression, thank you for letting me stay long enough to get to know you better.
Turns out traveling means a lot less time spent listening to things and after two weeks away from home I've got not a lot to mention. According to my phone, I walked just over 15 miles in Chicago, 35ish in Seattle and an un-godly 57 in LA. That's a lot of time spent not listening to things because I'm not brave enough to wander strange city streets plugged in.
I'm still working on the wrap-up for March's playlist (coming next week), but here's what I listened to when I wasn't trying to not be an oblivious pedestrian (I still almost got runover by a car with the license plate SXECHKN in LA, which would have been a sad way to go):
Freedom by Amen Dunes kept me company in the airport when my flight time got changed seven times and LAX felt like anything but.
Not a unique opinion but the new Kacey Musgraves album is very good, makes me very happy and was the first thing I put on when reunited with my car. I definitely drove around in circles for half an hour listening to Space Cowboy and High Horse over and over again because it was nice to be able to again.
I made this playlist during SXSW, but listened to it a lot in LA because if there's any place to be sunburnt and sad, it's that one.
If I haven't convinced you to listen to Gang of Youths yet, I really don't know what else you want from me but please do. I didn't catch them at SXSW (I was tired. I wanted BBQ.) but it seems like a lot of people did because now a lot of their tour is sold out and even if I can't catch them anywhere, that makes me happy because the fact that their album was one of the best things to happen to me sonically last year is one of the hills I would die on. Anyway - listen to Go Further in Lightness, other people do too. Not just me. And listen to this live session / interview they did with the Current here.
Cheers!