I still haven't told you about unstoppable sorrow
◊ You know when you love a song so hard that you keep playing it over and over again? It's become a lot easier in the last ten years � when I was a kid and nobody believed I needed a portable CD player even though I was so freaked out with hunger for music that I bought my first CD (DGC Rarities Vol. 1; they never made a Vol. 2) about a year before I had a CD player all my own, I would make fun of my siblings for filling one entire side of a 60-minute tape with one song looped over and over because I here was 13 years old and I was already a track-selection snob. I think I was born bilingual, speaking English and Mix Tape.
(First music tape I owned: a Carpenters greatest-hits collection; blame my dad. Second tape: Madonna's "Immaculate Collection," from my favorite aunt. Third tape: Radiohead's "Pablo Honey," copied from a friend's CD in 1994 so all you OK Computer geeks can just back down already because I was there first and I have dibs on Thom Yorke.)
Anyway. The last song I had a mad crush on was Ed Harcourt's "Apple of My Eye," for pretty much all of this spring I sang this song all the time for two months. I killed many, many drives from Campbell to Woodside � pretty much an hour each way � singing this song, over and over and over and over. I didn't just belt it out; I practiced vocal techniques on it. I made my voice go dark and husky. I crooned. I harmonized. I improvised new melodies and lyrics. I squeaked a shaky falsetto half an hour at a time, trying to extend my range and falling (and singing) flat.
Now it's "The Opposite of Hallelujah" by Jens Lekman. I cue it up in iTunes and play it and play it and you know what? You know how sometimes a song will end and you'll just think "fuck it" and restart it from the beginning and howl along to it all over again for the millionth time in a row? I can't even make it all the way through the song. I get about a third of the way into it and it all sounds so good that my toes curl and my ears feel all glowy and my tongue curls a little bit too in my mouth and I can't help it, I have to hear it more, so I slap the arrow key on my keyboard that starts the track from the beginning and I listen to it again.
There aren't many many things I love this hard, that absorb me so completely that I act like a total goofball. Drop me in a party, fill me full of drugs, and you know what'll happen? I'll end up lurking along the edges of a room, either combing people's iPods for bands I like and rarities I don't have and things I want to hear, or I'll borrow a camera and wander and crawl around taking pictures of inanimate objects that only I think are interesting.
I turn into the mutant that I am when nobody's looking.