Category Archives: Music

The man in 119 takes his tea all alone.
Mornings we all rise to wireless Verdi cries.
I’m hearing opera through the door.
The souls of men and women, impassioned all.
Their voices climb and fall; battle trumpets call.
I fill the bath and climb inside, singing…

A girl who loved me more than I could love her once made me a mix-tape with this song on it. Yes, I’m of the generation that made mix-tapes. I was reminded of this having just seen ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ for the first time this week. It was gorgeously done, with a soundtrack to match. (No doubt some of them will inform future posts here.) For now, we have Ms. Merchant with her plaintive coo of ‘Verdi Cries’ – a song that brings me back to the end of my high school hijinks and early college mishaps.

He will not touch their pastry
but every day they bring him more.
Gold from the breakfast tray, I steal them all away
and then go and eat them on the shore.

It’s interesting the way a good song like this changes when you revisit it twenty years later. Back then I was mostly entranced by the sad piano melody, barely able to make out some of the lyrics, not caring enough to try to decipher the poetry contained within. Today, I’m slightly better to make sense of things, and to appreciate the stories of others. Growing up for me has been the arduous job of finding value in other people, of opening up to others, of risking pain and love and trusting that even the hurt will be enriching.

To see the seas and shores of someone else, to get a glimpse of how they see the world, and knowing that we each have our quirks, some loved, some lamented – it makes me ache in the best way. We remain so separate, even when connected, but once in a while we manage to break through, to touch one another and become something else, something more than two. Back in high school and college, I thought it was all about finding a perfect match, a person who would complete and fill in everything that I lacked, some wondrously complemental component keeping us together. So desperately did I want that, I gave my heart away, tossing it out like a message in a bottle, bobbing aimlessly in the sea, waiting for the nudge of waves, the terrible storms, the carelessly-passing ships.

I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand,
sing of a lover’s fate sealed by jealous hate
then wash my hand in the sea.
With just three days more I’d have just about learned the entire score to Aida.

Sometimes I wonder if I did it all to see what I could still feel, whether my heart was still capable of such passion, such treacherous emotional heights and dips, and it’s both glorious and ruinous to find I can. At each end, for there were many ends, I thought the same thing: I will recover from this, but I will never be the same. I wish I’d hung onto some of them. No one can rend a soul like that and not mean anything. At least, I’d like to think so.

Holidays must end as you know.
All is memory taken home with me:
the opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing, the verging sea, all years ago.

It came upon me so suddenly, just when I thought it was safe. Too young to know better, too old to let it go, I felt the slow turmoil work its way through my head, my heart. I thought I had learned to separate them, but no. Not in his eyes, not in the world of possibility he dangled before me. I challenged everyone to say no to him, and my friends, fools and disbelievers, did their best. I would not hear of it. My heart longed for him, and he was so bad for me. The kindling was thin, and bone dry, splintering in the fireplace, preparing for the combustion. The flames always came for him, but he was quicker. It was madness to follow, madness to trail in such fiery wake, and I ran into the burn with watery eyes, daring him to singe me when he couldn’t even be bothered to care.

The stranger sang a theme
From someone else’s dream
The leaves began to fall
And no one spoke at all
But I can’t seem to recall
When you came along
Ingenue

In those days, it happened in much the same way. A careless but kind gesture, a simple unintended innuendo, a crinkle-eyed smile just a little less than vague ~ and me, reading too much into it, hoping and craving some sort of intimacy so badly I pushed reason and wisdom aside. As if a twenty-something guy could have much of either. I don’t know… I don’t know why I fell, so hard, so often, so stubbornly, but there I was, and there I will be.

The nights spent pacing cold hardwood floors, the cool embrace of rumpled sheets, the sad sounds of solitude – the rustling of fabric, the creak of a floorboard, the sigh that filled the room, spilling into other, empty rooms, and more empty rooms after that.

Slowly, those rooms filled, with some who stayed, and some who stayed and then left. They held quiet nights of close friends, and loud gatherings of boisterous parties. The rooms grew in size and scope, widening and lengthening, leaving the past a shrinking corridor growing darker ~ the doors opened and closed, and the parade went on and in and through, and all the while one or two would capture my attention and interest for a while, and when I was lucky I’d capture theirs too. Those were the moments that mattered. Those are what I will remember – the times when our trajectories mingled, side by side, hand in hand, following the same trail of stardust, casting our own shadows upon the moon, making our mutual mark on the firmament. But it was never enough, and few can travel in such perfect tandem for too long. That didn’t stop me from trying, from flailing with pathetic desperation, a fish fallen from the sky, squirming in mid-air before the scoop of a net – savior and killer, and just let it be the end.

Then the release. The unsteady righting of oneself in the deep rolling sea, the return to darkness. And the rise all over again – too many fish in the sea indeed. After a while a hunter learns, follows the patterns, senses the signals – but even the best get tricked sometimes. I smiled at the subsequent falls, after crying for a while, and I learned to love the danger, the ebb and flow of the heart, the strange fickle fascination some men held over me. Every time I gave my heart…

Ingenue
I just don’t know what to do

These days, I find myself just starting to miss those days, when I was so ready to thrash and throw myself upon the mad shore of crashing waves and brutal, raw, uninhibited passion. The access to obsession wanes with each passing year, slowly dimming as time fades, closing itself to the smallest pinprick of light – yet from such a small vantage point a picture of immeasurable wonder can yet be seen. The possibilities open up, upside down and reversed and righted in the end, for it always goes right in the end, always goes the way everything is supposed to go. Maybe that’s the reason for the growing calm. Or maybe that’s why it’s still such a thrill.

My fire burns for you.

The tree-lined avenue
Begins to fade from view
Drowning past regrets
In tea and cigarettes
But I can’t seem to forget
When you came along
Ingenue

This is high on the list of the silliest songs I’ve ever heard, but it goes back to my days at Structure. Lately, I’ve done a bit of reminiscing over what may have been the most fun job I’ve ever had, so it’s the perfect time to put it up and remember when summer was nothing but carefree college-break fun and lack of responsibility. At that time, I was working the summer at the Faneuil Hall Structure store (where an obnoxious Abercrombie & Fitch complex now smells stands).

I was turning 21 that year, but to be honest, that was less exciting than might be assumed. I wasn’t an early drinker, so I couldn’t care less about being legal. It was more fun to go into work and banter with my managers and co-workers, interact with people who were on vacation and passing through Boston, than to get rip-roaring drunk at the local dive bar. (God I was young and stupid.)

On the speakers in the store was this song, which we all learned inside and out because 35 hours a week of the same tape playing over and over, well, you learn every word, every beat, and every sequence – so much so that to this day when I hear one of these songs I immediately listen for the follow-up that never arrives. (This was still not as annoying as the holiday tape – that mofo could threaten the most level-headed person’s sanity.)

And so I’d try to cajole my friends into doing the choo-choo train whenever the beats kicked in, teasing one of the lone straight guys named Spencer into following my fist pumps (which he never did), and otherwise making the time fly faster than I wish it had. If I’d only known to slow things down, to relish the moment, to savor the minutes… I would have had so much more fun. But then again, how much more fun would have been possible? It was a damn good time, and we rode that party train to the very end of the rail.

Incidentally, how can you help but love a song that has ‘The Train’ as its subtitle? C’mon…

I think I can, I think I can…

You’re right next to me
But I need an airplane
I can feel the distance as you breathe

The voice carries over the phone. Weightless, thousands of miles apart, no longer by wire, no longer by signal, only by heart. No matter how far, the same sky flies overhead, the same moon and stars, the same sun in the morning. It is small solace.

China decorates our table
Funny how the cracks don’t seem to show
Pour the wine dear
You say we’ll take a holiday
But we never can agree on where to go

Twisting in damp sheets, then rising like someone who forgot they were underwater, gasping from a demon dream, I wake in the heart of night. But I am not in bed, I am beneath a small blanket, and the pilot has turned the seatbelt sign on. Next to me, the other passengers sleep.

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you
How can I when you build the great wall around you
In your eyes I saw a future together
You just look away in the distance

I look out the window. The first light of dawn begins shading the sky. Down the aisle, the night lights glow. I close my eyes.

China all the way to New York
Maybe you got lost in Mexico
You’re right next to me
I think that you can hear me
Funny how the distance
Learns to grow

On the other side of the world, I wake up. Alone. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be… The world without end.

Sometimes I think you want me to touch you
How can I when you build the great wall around you
In your eyes I saw the future
Together you just look away in the distance

The ocean laps the same way on every coast. The waves fall under the spell of the same moon. We are all connected by water. Never so far… never so dear… never so.

I can feel the distance
I can feel the distance
I can feel the distance getting close.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning.

There’s not much to do when it’s 4:30 in the morning.

Well, there’s tons to do, but none of it is very interactive, none of it very inclusive.

It’s the best time to do something.

I walk into the backyard, which for the first time in a long time is warmer than the house at this time of the day. I take a few pictures of the pool in the earliest light. It might double as dusk if it wasn’t so quiet. Even the birds are subdued at this early hour.

I search the line of pines high against the sky, and behind a dying one I see it. The moon. Remnants of its super-version a couple of days ago remain. It nestles in the crook between brightening sky and silhouetted tree. I don’t think I’ve seen the moon at 4:30 in the morning, at least not on this continent. Endless summer nights in Russia and Finland come to mind, a bride arriving by boat across the lake, walking beneath branches of birch that we all held aloft. A lake-side cottage I shared with my mother. The burning stones of a sauna, and a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop.

There was a statue of bears at the bottom of the hill, and a castle of stone that had stood forever, is standing there still, will be standing there long after we have all departed. The bold strokes of Sibelius fill my mind, memories of a tyrannical conductor explaining the piece of music like a carriage pulled by wild horses through a winter forest.

How strange that the morning moon should bring me half a world away, and back so many years. Whatever that boy wanted to find on the steps of all those castles, in the trampled forest paths, in a dark lake beneath a sky of stars – I still don’t know what it was.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The birds are up now. The family of robins is back on alert, chirping and warning and feeding. The moon has gone, back behind the pines, lost in the brighter sky, the high clouds. I listen for the first airplane of the day, wish that I was on it, going somewhere, anywhere. A change of scenery. Even on its most beautiful mornings, summer inspires that.

Calling back and forth, the robins break the day. Other birds join in the chatter. The silence is gone but the stillness remains. The hanging ferns that spun so wildly in last night’s breeze are motionless. The fountain grass, already head-high, stands still, its banners of green no longer fluttering in the wind. Even the loftiest branches of the pines, usually swaying ever-so-slightly in the smallest shift of air, do not betray movement.

What a precarious place to be… 4:47 in the morning, when thoughts are so pure and clear. Those who people your mind at such a time are the ones who will haunt you.

But who has a claim on anyone?

For many movies, the mood is all in the music. For summer movies that seems especially true. Give me a good movie theme and I’m a happy popcorn-munching fan. With the exception of John Williams, no other composer instills more atmospheric music into the movies than Danny Elfman. He does most of Tim Burton’s movies, including the first two ‘Batman’ reboots. More than even Madonna and ‘Cherish’, this is the music that made the summer of 1989. Give it a listen and see if it brings you back.

Operator the lines are down, are down

And I’m traitor, a traitor to a beautiful cause

God made me to her own design

Bad planning, too many flaws

How long will it take to get used to me?

How long will it take to get used to me?

Don’t wait that long, won’t wait that long

Don’t wait that long, don’t wait that long…

The end of my first year at Brandeis. Back in Amsterdam for the summer. The girl I was dating thought I was a better man than I would ever be. I knew it. She would come to know it, years later, but I couldn’t show her that then. I tried. I think I tried. Maybe we were just pretending though, both of us.

In the days leading up to that summer, in the messy fumblings of backseats, in grass cool and wet with dew, we thought we could find a way into each other, into the hearts that would carry us far into the future, together. We would only have that one summer. The spring was already going. We held onto it as we held onto each other, hoping it would last, even though we somehow knew it couldn’t. The magic of a spring night is fleeting at best, never to be captured for very long.

Oh yes I love you, but today I could hate you, I could hurt you

Cause were joined at the heart

Beats faster, hits harder than a boxer whenever we are apart

Body language is an S.O.S. I don’t understand how our fight starts,

Not enough to believe in love, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know where we’ve gone wrong

How long will it take to get used to me?

How long will it take to get used to me?

Don’t wait that long, won’t wait that long

No we won’t wait that long, don’t wait that long…

In the very earliest hours of dawn, I’d drop her off at her house. There was already light in the sky. A foggy haze, damp clover, the startled eyes of a deer, and me pulled off on the side of the back road, sitting behind the steering wheel listening to this song and wanting to cry for everything we did not know. The beauty of the morning made me ache. Have you ever been so happy, so bursting with joy, that it veers wildly off into sadness, skidding recklessly into a messy patch of tears, your body convulsing with passion and pain it hadn’t known needed emptying?

But the sun was coming up, the fog was burning off, the birds were starting to sing. The world was awakening like it always did, and one young man running off helplessly into a field wouldn’t ruffle feathers that simply flew higher. I pull the car back onto the road. The corn is just beginning its fountain-like ascent. Rows and rows of it, neatly parallel on mounds of dirt, run beside the car, waving their green strands in my wake. I am driving directly into the sun ~ into the summer ~ and not bothering to slow down.

Operator, the lines are down,

And I’m a traitor to a beautiful cause.

God made me to her own design

Bad planning, too many flaws

I’ve got too many flaws

Too many flaws…

Don’t wait that long, won’t wait that long,

No we won’t wait that long, don’t wait that long…