“REMEMBER THIS FEELING
THAT YOU’RE FEELING
RIGHT NOW”
RIGHT NOW”
This story is a love song between me and the band The Music Tapes.
Their album For Clouds and Tornadoes first crossed my path while I was
working at the radio station WERS. It had been tagged as "the band with
the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel," a group that I had become obsessed with at that point. I was well familiar with the singer and main songwriter, Jeff Mangum, as he is often treated like a mythical creature due to that band's history, which I won't get into here. I had never really heard anyone talk about the music of the banjo player, Julian Koster, and it didn't get much attention at the radio station. Eventually, I would realize that it was way better that way.
I did the review of For Clouds and Tornadoes and I could not stop listening to that album all year. It was full of big fluffy white carols and childhood euphoria to freebase as a wintery adventure into the imagination of Julian Koster. And it was a great place to be.
I never could have imaged that the album would be a door for me into a vast universe loaded with adventure, wonder, a sense of community that I had never experienced before, and, of course, actual real deal magic.
Cue
the opening credits music::
TRACK
1. “The Minister of Longitude” by The Music Tapes
from
For Clouds and Tornadoes
“How in the
world can you say the world is a sad place?”
Julian’s
imagination came to life back in August of 2009 when he came to play a private
show at my apartment in Jamaica Plain, part of Greater Boston. A friend of mine
had initially given me the intel about the tour, because she hosted Julian at
her apartment the previous year for a night of Christmas carols played on a singing saw.
I was more than intrigued to discover that the
band had been doing these sorts of unconventional concerts for a while. Places
like living rooms and basements were the venues, spaces that the band had to be
invited to by fans. The show they put on for us was, however, a little
different. It was part of their
"Lullabies at Bedsides" tour. The idea was to go from house to house,
kind of like Santa, and play for people all across the city just as they were going to
sleep.
Initially,
I had invited Julian to play at the Whitehaus, because the Jamaica Plain art
collective would’ve suited The Music Tapes quite well. However, I received an
email back from the "Minister of Lullabies" that read:
"This
endeavor really is best suited as bedtime hour entertainment, and is not meant so
much to be a traditional ‘show.’ You seem to have a lovely place where people
go often to see shows. The only thing I wonder is, do you think something meant
sincerely as a precursor to dreams would work in that setting?"
It
was signed by “The Strangely Nonexistent Email Reading Polar Bear.”
It seemed
he wanted to play for small groups of pajama clad and sleepy spectators, even
“bed-bound audiences of one,” as he said, were acceptable.
What
ended up making the performance memorable was the people that it brought together.
It was part of the magic of The Music Tapes: there were serendipities and
coincidences everywhere, gathering around them in a lovely swirling mess, like clouds and tornadoes.
It was
what Stephanie and I would jokingly call a better version of one of those
quirky indie romantic comedies with a hip soundtrack that were frequently
targeted at our demographic at the time.
TRACK
2. “If You Rescue Me (Chanson des Chats)”
from
The Science of Sleep Soundtrack
“Hello, you’re
my very special kitten!”
The scene in The Science of Sleep when the two characters meet for the first time is when a piano falls down a flight of stairs. Meeting
Stephanie was like that too: unexpected, funny, fast, and overall a good story. At a mutual friend’s party in
Allston, I couldn’t help but notice this girl with long blonde hair beaming at
me with her goofily enormous smile as soon as she entered the room and sat on
the floor. She was wearing stripes, had a
miniature pan flute around her neck and was using an old
Pokémon themed Gameboy carrying-case as a purse.
Our
first conversation was marked by us saying things like "Get out of my
head!" and "Where did you come from?" We somehow discovered that we had the same favorite color that was a specific shade of blue and that were interested in a lot of the same things. She had just started reading Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera and I was in the middle of his One Hundred Years of Solitude. All topped off by our mutual obsession with Jeff Mangum's
adorable time traveling crush on Anne Frank, the pseudo backstory for the album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea.
“If
You Rescue Me” or “Song for Cats” is from the film The Science of Sleep. It’s
the little diddy Gael Garcia Bernal plays to woo Charlotte Gainsbourg in a
dream while he is wearing a bear costume. Later that night, we were talking about our favorite movies. When I told her mine was The Science of Sleep, she nearly fell off her apartment balcony
where she had been sitting, because she was just about to say the same. I had to explain
with this dumb joke that I used to like to make, which was that I was actually psychic, but only one second into the future. She responded
that it was like the time machine from the movie that Gael builds for Charlotte
which can move you only one second into the past or future.
TRACK 3. “Spieltier” by Emperor X
from
The Blythe Archives, Volume II
“I’ll
make sure you’re fed.”
Stephanie
used to get hunger headaches and I would joke, “Do you not know when to feed
yourself?” She really liked to eat honey mustard chicken fingers from this
wings joint in Brookline. Whenever I hear the line from this song, I think of that and
of sitting cross-legged with her on her bedroom floor while eating wings out of
a styrofoam container.
Emperor
X was a band I got into through Zoey. If I didn’t know her, I wouldn’t have met
Stephanie. I met Zoey at a show for the local band Spitzer Space Telescope, which is a wonderful fantasy themed folk
minstrel type project (and also fronted a Boston University classmate of Zoey's). We worked together on some music writing projects and she also helped me with an event for a short film I had made. I had tried to set up a few screenings around Boston in order to raise
money for recouping expenses and to enter it into film festivals. The entire
soundtrack for the film was either segments I had composed or local music by
friends.
TRACK 4. “Skinny Fists” by Christians & Lions
from
More Songs for the Dreamsleepers & The Very Awake
“I told her
once, ‘there’s a great line in this song I heard, but I can’t tell you unless
something really big happens to us.’”
“Skinny Fists” was another bit
of local music on the soundtrack (as was Spitzer Space Telescope and Greg Mullen coming up next). As a dabbler in music promotion, Zoey
graciously offered to host a screening and help plan other concerts featuring
bands from the film. We raised one hundred percent more funds at Zoey’s apartment
than I did at any other event. Stephanie had gone to that screening and later
would tell me that she really liked the film. However, she
had been too shy to talk to me. I couldn't believe that I didn’t
even see her there, but it was probably because I was so stressed about trying to fix the malfunctioning projector and
oddly shaped sheet that we were pretending was a screen.
It
was actually the second time we were at Zoey's apartment that Stephanie and I met. It was Zoey's going away to Germany party a month or
so later that I jumped to sit on the couch at the same time as
Stephanie. Later, while the
rest of the gang was outside lighting off firecrackers on the sidewalk, we had
our first kiss in the poorly lit lobby of the grungy Allston apartment
building.
TRACK 5. “Ten Thousand Years” by Greg Mullen
from
The Hungry Ocean
“It feels good
to be understood.”
All of the songs in this mix that form the structure for this story come from the CDs that we made for each other.
The album The Hungry Ocean by Greg Mullen came out right around the same time that Stephanie and I were hanging out. And this line, “It
feels good
to be understood,” really stuck with me, because that's what it felt
like discovering all the things I had in common with Stephanie and just
talking to her in general. Out of all the coincidences in this story, the one that I'm most happy about is that I met Stephanie in time for The Music Tapes to come crooning and lullabying through our lives.
PART
I ::
LULLABIES
AT BEDSIDES
The
night of the "Lullabies at Bedsides," Stephanie came over early to help make a gift basket of
peanut butter sugar cookies to give to Julian Koster. We shaped a couple of dinosaur
ones by hand that strangely looked like genitalia when viewed from the wrong
angle. We even put some milk into an old timey milkman jar. The cookies went
into a wicker basket with an unnecessarily tall handle that I randomly found in
my place, along with some money in an envelope as donations to the band, because they hadn't even asked for a penny.
The
Minister of Lullabies had specified that pajamas were strongly encouraged. Yet another fun coincidence happened when Stephanie bumped
into a stuffed animal I had hanging from the draw string of my ceiling
light. It was Max from the children's book Where the Wild Things Are and she laughed, pulling out her PJ T-shirt, which was also Where the Wild Things Are themed.
It was a really hot night, so I cut a pair of pajama bottoms into shorts.
TRACK
6. “Two-Headed Boy” by Neutral Milk Hotel
from
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
"Two-headed
boy with pulleys and weights, creating a radio played just for two in the
parlor with the moon across her face. And through the music he sweetly displays
silver speakers that sparkle all day made for his lover who's floating and
choking with her hands across her face."
I
hadn't received an e-mail or a phone call or anything from the band that day.
They had only told me that they were coming somewhere between eight and eleven
that night. A friend and I
switched off playing some freshly written original songs. We also had a
sing-a-long to "Two-Headed Boy." I had always been a sucker for the lyrics in that song, which I saw as strangely sexualized but very sweet radio constructing nothings.
TRACK
7. “Smells Like Content” by The Books
from
Lost and Safe
“The quiet
becomes suddenly verbose.”
The
Books was a band that I strongly associated with Stephanie, because of her fervent
love for them. The group's music is similar to The Music Tapes’ album, First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad, which toys with audio collage and song, sound effects and instrumentals. The
voice recording at the end of “Smells Like Content” is a boy saying,
“Expectation leads to disappointment. If you don’t expect something big, huge
and exciting…” He then trails off, exemplifying what he was trying to say
better than words would’ve.
When
eleven o'clock rolled around, I was starting to feel a bit foolish, like I had lured everyone to
my bedroom in their pajamas for a nonexistent concert. However, the buzzer rang
and I called down asking who it was. The exasperated voice mumbled consonants
for a second before saying, "Uh, lullabies?"
TRACK 8. “Thirteen,” Elliott Smith covering Big
Star
from
New Moon
“Won’t you let
me walk you home from school?”
“Thirteen”
was another song we had a sing-a-long to while waiting for The Music Tapes to
arrive. Stephanie and I always joked that our actual ages were anywhere from
eight to thirteen. During this show we got to indulge, because the wonders that
started filling up my room when the band got there released everyone’s inner
child.
The
tableau was quite Christmassy, including rows of plastic gingerbread men and
women, a giant snowman and a few plastic sheep - all of which had lights in them.
Playing alongside Julian and helping to decorate the room was his musician buddy
Ian. The chairs they brought in became resting places for the singing saws,
bows, banjo, guitar, bell lyre, pump organ and other instruments.
Atop an old fashioned
trunk was the third animatronic musician, made out of a watering can. When
activated, its arms would move to simulate playing the block of wood in front
of it that had been carved into a piano. Julian had also brought his brown and
white shaggy dog Rudolph, who didn’t play anything, but just watched the
performance quite attentively.
My
room was already well suited to their aesthetic. I had Christmas lights
dangling from behind a tapestry on the ceiling. The wall behind my bed was a
chalk board and on it we had drawn a multi colored forest as a backdrop. I even put their record For
Clouds and Tornadoes on my record player, to make it look like we had just been
listening to it, because I'm an idiot. The bedroom was kind of small, but the guys managed to squeeze
in all of their props, gadgets and fusion instruments in a circle around the
bed.
When
they tried to start the show, something went wrong. It seemed that the
robo-minstrel that was the watering can buddy had stopped working. Julian spent some time with grease all over his
hands, trying to fix it. While he did, he told us some stories. His family was
Russian and as Ian lifted up my LP of For
Clouds and Tornadoes, Julian told us that the group of musicians on the
cover was an orchestra of his ancestors. He also told us an anecdote about a
trick he and his cousins would play on his grandfather when they were little.
They would ask him to say a specific phrase and he would respond in a thick
Russian accent, "Why do you always ask me to say this? It means
nothing." Then finally relenting, his grandfather would unwittingly quote Rocky and Bullwinkle saying, "We must catch moose and
squirrel!"
Julian
couldn't cure the laryngitis of their robot friend, so they were forced to improvise. When we asked Julian what the show he intended to put on was
like, he told us that there's really no way he could explain it. I caught a
glimpse of a cassette playing inside the robot, so I think it would've been
like some kind of audio collage, a combination of song and story like their album First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad.
Although that was unfortunate to miss, we kind of got a personalized performance.
TRACK
9. “Majesty” by The Music Tapes
from
For Clouds and Tornadoes
“The majesty of
life and fear and trust.”
The
show began and somewhere in their set they gloriously played the bouncing
joyous "Majesty." Julian had his eyes closed and was jumping around
in circles as much as he could with the space he had. They also played several
lulling singing saw solos like "Kolyada" from the same record. I wish I could
remember the name of the song where Julian played the banjo with a bow, because
it was beautiful. They also did plenty of tunes that I had never heard before.
Stephanie was cradling my little blue Where the Wild Things Are stuffed monster
in her hands and giving me that grin of hers that I could always psychically
translate as, "I can't believe this is happening right now."
Halfway
through the set, Julian stopped to ask us if we wanted to try something
special, but that we had to be blindfolded for and could potentially put us in
physical danger. I'm pretty sure we all unanimously and simultaneously agreed
with, "Of course we do." Normally, if someone you've never met
before, wanted to come to your bedroom in the middle of the night, blindfold
you and do something that could hurt you, you might be a bit cautious. However,
it was unspoken between us all that a mind that helped score In The Aeroplane Over the Sea could do
us no harm. It was the kind of absolute trust you have when you're a child,
before you know that it’s possible for people to take advantage of you.
We
were all blindfolded and of course I was trying to make sure mine was
loose enough so I could peak from underneath. They told us that we had to make
a space between us on the middle of the bed. So we did, without knowing why.
They took their places and we heard something that may have been the click of a
tape player.
TRACK
10. “A Warning” by The Music Tapes
from
First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad
"All those
who continue to listen from this point onwards are doing so at the risk of
their very lives!"
What
followed was a slightly altered version of the cautionary vocal recording, “A
Warning!" A man spoke of a famous
knife throwing magician with us on the bed as his assistants. He began his act
with the sound of knives being scraped against one another, which we heard very distinctly in the room. "Our sincere
hopes that you will conclude this record still in full possession of your
life." There was a rush of real air whooshing past our faces and then the
boi-oi-oing of a knife against the wall behind us. "This sound recording
will conclude leaving you, the listener, in mortal danger!" Luckily, we
all survived.
After
the mysterious magician vanished and with our blindfolds still on, Julian told
us a tale in a soothing hypnotist’s voice that his father used to tell him
before he went to sleep, so he wouldn’t need a night light. It personified the
dark, telling of how it was very lonely because everyone was afraid of it.
When, in actuality there was nothing to be afraid of and the dark was your friend
that would always be there for you, to wrap you up all night long so you’d
never have to feel alone.
The
strange thing about Julian telling this story was that Stephanie and I had some
run-ins with her quite real and quite adorable fear of the dark. The night I discovered this was right after we had yet again another strange coincidence. I've mentioned this now a few times before, but it's hard to really hammer home how strange it was that it kept happening. I don't remember what the coincidence was, but she got freaked out about it and ran to hide in her closet (as a kind of joke). I shut the louvered closet doors on
her to be very, very funny, and she nearly had a panic attack. I don’t think Julian’s story cured her,
but when we went to sleep that night, we didn’t need the closet light.
After
the show, The Music Tapes packed up their gear and wonders into their red 80’s style van, which was hard not to see as Santa's sleigh, and they were whisked off into the night, to some
house party in Allston.
TRACK
11. “Theme from Piñata” by Bright Eyes
from
Digital Ash in a Digital Urn
“I wish I had a
parachute, because I’m falling bad for you.”
At some
point, Stephanie and I talked about the art of mix CDs and the subtle subtext that
people can include in them. When it came to her mix, she curiously said she
wasn’t sure if there was something in there. Which made it easy for me, because
I didn’t have to explain whether or not there was one to mine. By the end of
the first night with The Music Tapes, I had forgotten not to expect something
big, huge and exciting.
PART
II ::
ST.
NIKOLI’S WONDER WISHING GAME OF CANDLES
The
next night Julian had planned to play a mysterious game called “St. Nikoli’s
Wonder Wishing Game of Candles.” All we knew about it was that we had to meet
the band at a specific field in Cambridge, which neither of us had ever
visited. And we had to bring candles.
For Stephanie and I, the adventure began with a bike ride.
TRACK
12. “Cave Kids” by Girlfriends
from
Cave Kids b/w Eat Around the Bad Parts 7”
“We underachieve
and live below our means, woahohohohohoh. We can’t get to sleep, because we’ve
got oversized dreams, woahohohohohoh. The cave kids of Boston.”
Girlfriends
is led by the same Boston wordsmith from Christians & Lions. However, the
band is a bubble gum garage trio that had just started up that year. If anybody
was, Stephanie and I were the cave kids of Boston. Chasing each other around on
our bikes, riding down hills in shopping carts, crashing playgrounds to climb
jungle gyms and have jumping contests off of swings. Then we’d come home and be
insomniacs together, tracing constellations on each other’s arm and shoulder
freckles with magic markers.
That
night, I cycled up from Jamaica Plain to Allston to meet her and then we both
ventured on to Cambridge. All we had was an address and backpacks with a few candles in them. We found the meeting point
and eventually were joined by Julian and Ian, a couple of kids from out of
state and about five or six others from The Music Tapes’ Allston performance
the night before.
We
wandered our way over to the grassy field. At one end of the large space, there was a marble bust spitting
water into a pool and on the other, there was a someone sleeping
off at the edge of the woods. Julian set up a chair for his saw and everyone
got out their candles. As we were walking over, hand in hand, Stephanie stopped
and said, “I can’t believe this is really happening right now.” I don’t know
why, but I always distinctly remember that detail. Right on cue, we saw a
little white rabbit appear at the edge of the field, staring everyone down. Julian made everyone stop to look at it, and it felt like time stopped too.
TRACK
13. “Woodcat” by Tunng
from
Comments of the Inner Chorus
“We all had a
lovely time.”
Animals
were a constant motif, particularly cats. Stephanie swore that she was going to
end up a crazy cat lady with a house full of fleabags. “Woodcat” opens up with
a story about a girl who turns into a cat and a boy who wishes to be turned
into a hare. Tunng was a band that she had gotten me into that was similar to
The Books.
It
was obvious that Julian felt a strong connection to animals, the way he had us
all staring and mesmerized by that rabbit for a good five minutes. His dog
Rudolph was very sick, had trouble breathing and had coughed a lot the night before. Every time,
Julian cradled her and rubbed her throat until she was better.
When
the rabbit finally ran off and we had all the rules of the game explained to
us, we discovered that it was essentially freeze tag with candles. However,
there were a few special bonus parts to it. The first part was writing wishes
down on little scraps of paper. While Julian was playing the saw, we all stood
in a circle and passed the folded wishes around in alternating directions so
they were good and shuffled. Then, we were instructed to put them into our
shoes.
The
next part was the game. The ten or so of us were wandering around the field,
trying to capture an antique gas lantern, while keeping our candles lit. All
the while, Julian was playing the singing saw. Our team lost both times, and the same thing happened between Stephanie and me each time. We were on
defense and we were very very good at blowing out the attacker’s candles. Our
duo was quite formidable, until Stephanie’s flame would go out, usually from
her moving too fast. I would try to relight her, but I could never make it in
time and would lose my flame as well.
TRACK
14. “Bluish,” an Animal Collective cover by Sondre Lerche
from
an internet only release
“When you claw
me like a cat, I’m beaming.”
I
found this cover of “Bluish” by chance after randomly hearing the song being played in the streets, well after the night of the candle game. The original song comes from Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, Stephanie's favorite album from them. I had had trouble getting into the album up to that point, because I was going through a deep folk appreciation phase. My favorite of their albums at the time was the freak folk Sung Tongs. I always worried about being too into sad music and having a kind of subconscious disdain for happier music, which made me worry about being an outcast because of it. I remember being afraid (like an idiot) that our preferences for Animal Collective albums was a sign of a foreboding difference between Stephanie and me.
One
night we were show hopping and wandering around Harvard Square, and we stopped in for
a beer at the diner/bar/venue Charlie’s Kitchen. Afterwards on the street,
there was this guy standing there singing and playing guitar with his case open
for change. Instantly both of us recognized something in the tune he was playing and watched the familiarity bloom across one another’s faces. The guy was playing the loop heavy, digital bliss of “Bluish”
from Merriweather on an acoustic guitar. I remember clearly how she took my hand in that moment.
It was really hard not to feel like the moment was full of meaning. It was already strange for someone to be playing specifically that song out in public. But it was a song in a style that I had trouble getting into and it was translated into the style that I understood better and delivered right to me on the street to calm my fears about someone I cared about. It was only later that I realized that there might have been a reason why I was feeling like something was off about our relationship in that moment. And I think it could even be traced back to the night of the candle game.
The rules for the game were that once our lights had been blown out, we had to remain
frozen in place until the game was won. Then, when the lantern had been captured and brought back into the other team's endzone, everybody had to freeze where they were. This is where it gets wild and complicated to explain, but bear with me.
From the positions everyone was frozen in,
Julian plotted out our "constellation." He had an old star map that he spread out
on the grass and lit a tiny tea light in relatively the same places as the
remaining lit candles on the field at the end of the game. We were then supposed to huddle over the map and stare at the lights, shouting out suggestions of the form of the constellation that we saw by connecting the candles.
Once
we had found a resembling animal or object or whatever, we would all stand in a
circle and the person who had captured the lantern to win the game would spin around in the center. That person
would then walk backwards and whoever they bumped into would have to pull out
the wish from their shoe (which if you remember from earlier, were the wishes that had been put there at the beginning of the game). Someone else from the circle would then volunteer to read it
out loud, and we were supposed to see how it related to the constellation we found.
After a couple of games, Julian remarked on the strangeness of the coincidences
with our constellations and wishes, saying that there was something special
about our group, which of course went right to my head.
We
stared at the first constellation for a while, not quite sure how the game
worked, and mumbling things what we thought it maybe looked like. Julian stared down with
a hand on his chin, like a soothsaying wizard. Then Stephanie said that it looked
like a turtle. Julian agreed and his reasoning, without explanation, was
because, “a turtle always has his home on his back.”
Then the person who got the lantern to win the game spun around and walked backward to stop in front of a girl. She pulled
the wish out of her shoe and gave it to another guy randomly to read. He immediately said: “Woah.”
The wish was “I wish I could feel at home wherever I go.” It was exactly what Julian had said about the turtle.
TRACK
15. “To Build a Home” by The Cinematic Orchestra
from
Ma Fleur
“This is a place
where I feel at home.”
We
were lying in bed, just reaching the end of her mix CD, and she said to me,
"I've always wished I had a good moment to associate with this song.” She
had a thing about that concept of home. Her family life was a bit tragic, but
she talked about it with remarkable ease and even made jokes about it.
It
was also how we first started talking about another one of these indie film classics that were everywhere at the time: Garden State. There’s a
moment, after they jumped into the pool in their underwear, when the main
character is trying to define home as a group of people that miss the same
imaginary place.
Knowing
what I did about her and her family, I thought of her when that constellation
appeared. Especially since she was the one who had seen the turtle.
The second constellation was just as strange. Julian stared at the
map for a good while and finally proclaimed, “There’s no constellation here." We were puzzled and he continued, "This is weird. This has never happened before in all my years of playing this game.” So when the wish was opened up, it of course matched the constellation by not having any words on it at all, and all that was written on the paper was
a scribble.
TRACK
16. “Tambourine-N-Thyme” by Nana Grizol
from
Love it! Love it!
“So tell me not
to fall in love with you. Frankly, my friend I think that’s the sweetest thing
you do.”
Another
time, Stephanie and I were lying in bed and just musing late into the night about
relationships and our pasts. I was thinking about this line from "Tambourine-N-Thyme" and how it had been
used on me before and how it’s the worst kind of reverse psychology. And the evil temptation crossed my mind that maybe I could use this line on Stephanie. And it was exactly then that she came out with, “Don’t fall in love with me,
kay?”
I had to confess to her how I was literally just thinking of telling her the
same thing. We talked about how telling someone not
to fall in love with you just makes them fall in love with you. At that point it became a contest to see who would fall first, which
quickly escalated to a pinky swear. But the fact remained that she said it first. And this was how I learned that there's a reason why someone will say that to you.
When it came to the third candle game, we wanted to avoid what happened the last time, when we didn't have enough candles to find a constellation. So we all collectively decided that before the game ended, we would light up everyone's candles to try to make a more interesting constellation. It was something
that Julian said he had never seen before in the history of the game.
Staring
at the constellation we were overwhelmed by the various shapes that could exist
with so many candles. I said that I thought I saw a wizard hat and Julian exclaimed excitedly,
“Like Merlin!” There was a circle below the wizard hat that he said was like
the Knights of the Round Table during King Arthur’s time, a subject he was
thrilled to bring up.
So we spun the lantern again and when Julian asked if
someone wanted to read it, I felt a wave within me telling me to not even
think, but to volunteer. And oddly enough, I got my own wish. It was something
like, “I wish that my own art could create this same kind of magical moment to share with the
people I care about.” Julian immediately matched the magic to Merlin, and
the people and sharing with the Round Table, and the "art" with King Art-hur.
TRACK
17. “Dinosaurs” by Christmas Island
from
Blackout Summer
“Dinosaurs, I’m
really bummed out that I missed it. Dinosaurs, I really wish we coexisted.”
This was a song from Stephanie’s mix CD, and we both related to the message of wishing
to hang out with extinct reptilian monsters.
Before Stephanie had met me, she had booked a trip to go to California to visit her best friend for a week. The
night before she left, she gave me an orange brontosaurus silly band (the trendy toy of the moment) and she also gave herself
a yellow dinosaur one. She told me not to
fall in love with anyone while she was away.
Early the next morning, she left
and I stayed in her bedroom to catch a little more much needed sleep. When I
woke up, I made a little drawing of a brontosaurus with a speech bubble saying
something stupid like, “you’re dinosauriffic!” I left it on her night stand.
The
trip was something that we both already knew was coming, even after the candle game when we were
standing in a circle on the grass and I had just randomly read my own wish. Everyone knows that you can't tell people your wishes, but immediately
afterward I had to let the group know that it was mine. It was strange because not only were the
wishes randomly distributed amongst everyone’s shoes, but someone had to
volunteer to read it, making it even less probable that someone would read
their own. Julian assured me that the magic of the game made my wish impervious
to bad luck.
Then,
the first guy admitted that he just happened to read his own wish as well. We tried to get
the person who wrote the scribble to come forward, but whoever it was didn’t say a word. Julian deduced that the scribble
must’ve had some kind of Rorschach significance for the person who wrote it and that we shouldn't push them.
Afterwards everyone else took out the wishes from their shoes and burned them,
which Julian informed us was good luck. It was something that his grandparents
had always done.
TRACK
18. “Which Will” by Nick Drake
from
Pink Moon
“Which do you
dance for? Which makes you shine? Which will you choose now?”
I
gave Stephanie a mix CD just before she left for California. I called it, “Remember
this Feeling that You’re Feeling Right Now” and drew a candle on the cover. This line came from something Julian said while he was playing his lullabies at bedsides in my bedroom. While we were still blindfolded, he told us a sort of meditation story that was supposed to help us fall asleep. At the end he repeated that line over and over again.
On
the back of the track listing for the mix, I had drawn a quick three panel
comic. Stephanie was really into Pokémon, so I had made a battle where the trainer sent out: “Stephanie-guin-fox.”
It was a Pokémon version of Stephanie I had created that fused her favorite
animals, a penguin and a fox. The main attack was “honey mustard wing attack,”
flinging her favorite fried snack to save a starving Pokémon by the last panel.
"Remember
this feeling that you’re feeling right now.
Remember
this feeling that you’re feeling right now.
Remember
this feeling that you’re feeling right now. "
After the third candle game, when
Stephanie pulled out the wish from her shoe, by chance she had gotten her own.
I tried to get her to tell me what it was, using the ruse that “the magic of
the game” would protect her wish, but she wouldn’t budge. She lit it on fire
and looked at the burnt spot in the ground for a long while as everyone in the circle was
talking. Thinking back on it now, I think I know what she had
wished for.
TRACK
19. “Overnight” by Yes, But Slowly
from
In the Company of Others
“And if it seems
like I’m scared, it’s because I have never been this close to something that
I’ve wanted so bad.”
“Overnight”
is a song by a solo musician from Boston. He played alongside
Christians & Lions at one of their first shows I saw. I had always really
liked this song in particular, but had never been able to share it with someone that had appreciated it the way I did. Stephanie told me that she loved it so much that
she put it on a friend’s mix CD.
It
turned out that the person Stephanie went to visit in California wasn’t just a
friend. It was a boy that she had been stuck on for a very long time, named
Guy. She told me that every time she thought she was over him and with someone else, he would
come back into her life just to mess with her.
I know now that the "friend" who she made a mix CD for to put "Overnight" on it was the same person she went to California to see. It crushed me to think of her putting her own intention for someone else behind the line, "if it seems
like I’m scared, it’s because I have never been this close to something that
I’ve wanted so bad."
TRACK
20. “Meet Me in Montauk” by Circa Survive
from
Juturna
“I’ve been
wandering around, making up movies in my mind.”
Coming from a similar musical upbringing, Stephanie and I had strong musical connection. In high school, both her and I had been fans of Circa
Survive as well as bands like Brand New and Bright Eyes. This song is largely
inspired by Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, which was director and
writer Michel Gondry’s film before The Science of Sleep. It’s about literally
erasing a past lover from your memory.
Ironically,
this film and Garden State happened to be the anthems for Stephanie’s
relationship with Guy. Apparently, he used the line from the airport
ending of Garden State, telling her that he was putting an ‘ellipsis’ on their
relationship. When she went to California to go see him, she put a period on her relationship with me.
As
we sat there in the grass after burning our wishes, everyone talked about random stuff, still kind of dumbstruck at how the game of candles had turned out.
One of the girls showed us a tattoo she had on her back of the Neutral Milk
Hotel airplane record player. It was the pen and ink sketch from the insert for
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Julian
told us he was planning another unique tour that would be like a carnival
complete even with rides. He also explained how he was trying to make a story
he had written into a movie, called Second Imaginary
Symphony for Cloudmaking. It’s about a boy named Nigh that
discovers a cloud-making factory. Due to the creative obstinacy of the studio
thinking that the story wouldn’t sell, the project was sadly dead at that time.
Since we were talking about movies and I happened to have a copy of my short
film because I was making DVDs earlier that day, I asked Julian if he wanted
one. He promised to watch it once he wasn’t living in a van.
Stephanie
and I left that night on our bicycles. As we rode by the group around Julian’s
van, I shouted “Hullo good souls!” which was how Julian began every one of his
e-mails.
TRACK
21. “Two-Headed Boy, Part II” by Neutral Milk Hotel
from
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
“Two-Headed Boy,
she is all you could need. She will feed you tomatoes and radio wires and
retire to sheets safe and clean.”
I
had always thought the tomato and radio wires line from “Two-Headed Boy, Part
II” was a tragic and brilliant way to call back the motif of the radio from the
first part (also earlier in this mix). It’s a mellow song, but the brilliance of that album as well as the music of The Music
Tapes, is that indecisive emotion wavering between somber and sweet, depressing
and hopeful. That was just the kind of acceptance that In the Aeroplane over the Sea leaves you with. The last line on the album is,
“Don’t hate her when she gets up to leave.”
We
hung out a few times when Stephanie got back. We went to the amazing bizarro-music
fest put on by The Whitehaus Family Record, called Weirdstock. Afterwards, I
went through a few weeks of nagging doubt and agonizing worrisome indigestion
when I knew that I was being ignored and avoided. Eventually, I got the truth
out of her about the way she felt about Guy, the way she had always felt, and
that was really all I ever got to know. I had been accepted into a program to teach English in Spain for a year and I had been very undecided about it for a number of reasons. After all that happened, it seemed like it had been decided for me. I left a month later.
Of all the things I could’ve done differently and all the things I wish I'd said, now it just seems like it would’ve been nice to tell her that we had a good story. It really felt like a movie and, as a film student, I’d always dreamed of my life feeling like a movie -- especially a cliché indie flick. Even if it didn't have a happy ending and afterward it sucked, and it sucked for a while, I still hoped Stephanie got her wish.
TRACK
22. “After Hours” by The Velvet Underground
from
The Velvet Underground
“If you close
the door, the night could last forever.”
“After
Hours” inspired the first track in this mix, which was the song that appeared in the film, The Science of Sleep.
Those two songs were how I bookended the mix CD I gave to her and it always seemed like a few
good notes to leave things on.
The Music Tapes came storming through our lives for two nights, and it was a
crazy way to fall for someone. But you
can’t be sad when the show ends and the band packs up and drives away, because
no matter how unbelievable and fun it was, some things just have to
end sometime. If it never happens to me again, if those crazy bedroom lullabies never
wind their way back to my door, I'm really glad that at least I now know that something like that is possible. No matter how many people I try to tell about it, it still feels like a secret thing that only those
involved will ever really understand. I set out to write this story to document the most unique concert experience I had ever had in my life. And I think that the story with Stephanie helped to capture what it felt like to experience it. To borrow another line from Bright Eyes, that’s where I’ll keep it so it won’t
bother me.
