Can't Get It Out of My Head
I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of the morning. While making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God ...
I sit in the kitchen at the rear of the house and drink coffee and smoke and watch the sky growing light before sunrise, the trees of the woods near the barn taking shape, becoming single pines and elms and oaks and maples ... I sit and give myself to coffee and tobacco, that get me brisk again, and I watch and listen. In the first year or so after I lost my family, I played the radio in the mornings. But I overcame that, and now I rarely play it at all.
- Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story"
I've been listening to music on my clock radio lately, whatever's on when the alarm goes off. It just started happening. I kind of fell into it by accident when I changed the station to Rewind 94.9, which plays mostly old hits from the 80s but also a sprinkling of songs from the decades on either side of that one, and occasionally a song that might technically be considered a hit but that I hadn't heard or thought about for a while. There was something about the combination of hearing those songs leaking out of that single shitty speaker while lying there in bed, floating in that transition between asleep and awake -- awake but still dreamy -- that made it feel meditative. It took me by surprise. So I've taken to just laying there and listening: to the song if it's not crap (sometimes it is), to the dog breathing, to water dropping in the downspout, to the neighbor's wind chimes.
Dubus talks about this in "A Father's Story," and Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches is all about this idea -- of getting up early, of lighting a fire in a stove, of sitting and being quiet by yourself, sipping coffee, gathering strength. This period of silent meditation. So there's some literary precedent there, which is nice because it means I'm not just pissing ten minutes away doing nothing. I'm meditating. I just happen to be doing it in bed, and for only about six minutes or so -- two songs' worth at most. And instead of talking to God I'm listening to Spandau Ballet.
The thing is, I used to listen to music on a clock radio. I'd kind of forgotten about that. I'd forgotten that, at one point, the radio had something to offer me. I'd lay in bed and listen on the weekends, on summer mornings. I'd lay there and let the radio go and listen to somebody five yards away mow their grass. I listened to Casey's top 40 countdown on Sundays -- I'd record the top ten onto cassette and then transfer the songs I liked onto another cassette. Widdle that shit down into a solid mix tape. You could track the progress of a song you like from week to week, watch it crawl towards number one, see how many spots it would jump, how many weeks it would stay in exactly the same place, your song, One Night in Bangkok, just hovering there, and then either it would break and shoot forward or it would just drift softly back down the list without a struggle, two spots, ten spots, until it would slip out of the top 40 altogether and disappear with a little pluf.
This goes back all the way to my very earliest tastes in music, the first songs that I consciously liked or disliked. Some songs you listened to just because they were there. A song like Angel is a Centerfold -- who does that really appeal to? Some songs I actively disliked: anything by Air Supply, really. But some of these songs are the first songs I genuinely loved (even if it wasn't exactly love at the time), the first songs that I recognized were resonating with me, within me, for reasons I couldn't possibly begin to analyze then and don't care to try to now. Songs that I loved simply because they sounded good. Songs like Our House by Madness, which I've recently decided is my favorite song of all time for reasons that completely escape me, reasons that don't even matter. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Africa. Owner of a Lonely Heart. And other songs, too, songs that I hesitate to mention because, objectively, they're way worse... like Don't Answer Me by the Alan Parson's Project. I mean, Jesus Christ, the Alan Parsons' Project! But I love it, and I can't deny it. ELO's Can't Get it Out of My Head. Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride (shit!). Even a song like Olivia Newton John's Magic makes me feel something that I can only classify as "good." Certainly nostalgia's a big part of it, but more than that I don't care to think too much about. I prefer to just listen and be still.
And enjoy that moment in bed before the day forces itself to begin.
I sit in the kitchen at the rear of the house and drink coffee and smoke and watch the sky growing light before sunrise, the trees of the woods near the barn taking shape, becoming single pines and elms and oaks and maples ... I sit and give myself to coffee and tobacco, that get me brisk again, and I watch and listen. In the first year or so after I lost my family, I played the radio in the mornings. But I overcame that, and now I rarely play it at all.
- Andre Dubus, "A Father's Story"
I've been listening to music on my clock radio lately, whatever's on when the alarm goes off. It just started happening. I kind of fell into it by accident when I changed the station to Rewind 94.9, which plays mostly old hits from the 80s but also a sprinkling of songs from the decades on either side of that one, and occasionally a song that might technically be considered a hit but that I hadn't heard or thought about for a while. There was something about the combination of hearing those songs leaking out of that single shitty speaker while lying there in bed, floating in that transition between asleep and awake -- awake but still dreamy -- that made it feel meditative. It took me by surprise. So I've taken to just laying there and listening: to the song if it's not crap (sometimes it is), to the dog breathing, to water dropping in the downspout, to the neighbor's wind chimes.
Dubus talks about this in "A Father's Story," and Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches is all about this idea -- of getting up early, of lighting a fire in a stove, of sitting and being quiet by yourself, sipping coffee, gathering strength. This period of silent meditation. So there's some literary precedent there, which is nice because it means I'm not just pissing ten minutes away doing nothing. I'm meditating. I just happen to be doing it in bed, and for only about six minutes or so -- two songs' worth at most. And instead of talking to God I'm listening to Spandau Ballet.
The thing is, I used to listen to music on a clock radio. I'd kind of forgotten about that. I'd forgotten that, at one point, the radio had something to offer me. I'd lay in bed and listen on the weekends, on summer mornings. I'd lay there and let the radio go and listen to somebody five yards away mow their grass. I listened to Casey's top 40 countdown on Sundays -- I'd record the top ten onto cassette and then transfer the songs I liked onto another cassette. Widdle that shit down into a solid mix tape. You could track the progress of a song you like from week to week, watch it crawl towards number one, see how many spots it would jump, how many weeks it would stay in exactly the same place, your song, One Night in Bangkok, just hovering there, and then either it would break and shoot forward or it would just drift softly back down the list without a struggle, two spots, ten spots, until it would slip out of the top 40 altogether and disappear with a little pluf.
This goes back all the way to my very earliest tastes in music, the first songs that I consciously liked or disliked. Some songs you listened to just because they were there. A song like Angel is a Centerfold -- who does that really appeal to? Some songs I actively disliked: anything by Air Supply, really. But some of these songs are the first songs I genuinely loved (even if it wasn't exactly love at the time), the first songs that I recognized were resonating with me, within me, for reasons I couldn't possibly begin to analyze then and don't care to try to now. Songs that I loved simply because they sounded good. Songs like Our House by Madness, which I've recently decided is my favorite song of all time for reasons that completely escape me, reasons that don't even matter. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Africa. Owner of a Lonely Heart. And other songs, too, songs that I hesitate to mention because, objectively, they're way worse... like Don't Answer Me by the Alan Parson's Project. I mean, Jesus Christ, the Alan Parsons' Project! But I love it, and I can't deny it. ELO's Can't Get it Out of My Head. Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride (shit!). Even a song like Olivia Newton John's Magic makes me feel something that I can only classify as "good." Certainly nostalgia's a big part of it, but more than that I don't care to think too much about. I prefer to just listen and be still.
And enjoy that moment in bed before the day forces itself to begin.