101AD
STREAM 101AD
When I think about music, which is fairly often, I group songs by what they do. These songs make people need a drink. These songs help us recognize ourselves while we're becoming someone else. These songs keep people on a dance floor. These songs make you want to drive at night with the windows down with your best friends until the cold numbs your cheeks. These songs elicit confessions. These songs make me feel like myself.
For the last twelve years, I have kept a playlist called 101AD. These are the songs that make me feel like Arya. It began as an attempt by a friend and me to answer a deceptively simple question: "How do we fill a road trip?" and it’s lived in my music library ever since. For over a decade, 101AD has been updated, reordered, argued with, and endlessly obsessed over. But it has never been publicly shared. It's a strange thing to share a playlist that has, in many ways, given my life its language. It’s egotistical, deeply personal, and private. But to know me is to know the music.
Today is my birthday. I am turning 35. Everything is changing all the time and it's impossible to know how fast I too may be changing. The Arya who started this playlist at 23 couldn't have imagined who I'd be at 35, and I have no idea who will be listening to these songs at 47. With that uncertainty held in my heart, I am spending the day with these songs. If you’d like to spend the day with me, you can hang out with them too.
35. THE EXECUTION OF ALL THINGS – RILO KILEY
What is freedom? No fear.
My hands are at 10 and 2 and the car is in an empty parking lot overlooking the 405 and Sepulveda Pass and my mother is giving me too many instructions. My brain is a mess, suddenly unable to decipher how to softly press my foot against a pedal.
That’s how so much of life was then. The things that were supposed to be easy, practical and inherent, were able to become completely inaccessible. But I just had to do it. Push awkwardly down on the pedal and jerk the car forward and feel the wind get kicked out of my mother’s chest and apologize and feel stupid. That’s what being 15 years old was like.
A year later, the beat had dropped in. I had learned how to push my foot down and let the car cruise. The wind was raging through the windows while the blue of the ocean blurred to my left and Rilo Kiley was playing loudly. I loved that drive up the coast because it was like escaping everything. School, the neighborhood, the parents who had assumed too much about me, the boys who I didn’t know how to feel about, the execution of all things.
I was still scared. My God, I had so much to be scared of. But driving with the music turned up too loud made it all seem normal.
34. Baby It’s You – Smith
So, there’s this girl. I don’t know exactly how to describe her, but I’ll do my best. You’re going to have questions. That’s just the nature of my relationship with this girl.
We met between classes. Well, we didn’t really meet but we saw each other for the first time. She was walking down the hallway and she had a friend with her. We locked eyes for a second, the way you do when you’re walking. Instead of looking away like a normal person would, she held my eyes. She never let me go. I nearly fell over. No one had ever looked at me like that.
The next day, she came up to me while I was eating lunch in the corner of the quad and asked me my name. I told her, intimidated by her ability to just know me suddenly. She told me her name without me asking. Then, she did the craziest thing. She sat down. She asked me questions. She smiled at me. She touched my arm. She gave me her number. She walked away. She looked back. She smiled. She said, “call me!” She drew attention to us. She loved doing that.
When I first called, her mom answered the phone. She asked me a few questions and I answered them honestly. I don’t think I was supposed to do that. But I did because that’s the kind of guy I am. Then I heard her screaming in the background at her mom to give her the phone. I laughed then. Her mom wished me the best of luck with her daughter. I said thank you. Then she handed over the phone. And we talked. We talked for hours. About The OC, the painting she was working on, the music I was listening to, our parents, our younger siblings, that sort of thing. And then we’d just sit there in silence. It was never weird.
When she kissed me a month later, I nearly passed out. I didn’t ask her to and she didn’t tell me she was going to. She just did. And then she ran off to her mom’s car. She loved doing crazy things like that. And in that moment, I fell in love with her.
She had chosen me.
I was the one.
It was me.
33. The Con – Tegan & Sara
There is a war happening inside our bodies all of the time. The war inside mine sounds like “The Con.” The fluttering guitars, noisy drums, and screaming confessions tense the knot in my stomach that's been there since I was a teenager, unsure of what it meant to inhabit a body. It hurts, but it’s proof that I'm still here.
When I saw the band play the song live in 2008 at The Fonda, I was surrounded by people who felt the words the exact same way. I remember looking at my sister, a last-minute invite after a friend bailed, and watching her slowly learn the words for the first time. I saw the war in her body then. That night, I saw the war in all of our bodies. Our insecurities. Our uncertainty. Our inability to make sense of why we feel the way we do. At seventeen, I thought that feeling would eventually disappear. It didn't. The war never ended. I just stopped expecting it to. This body is mine. All I've ever wanted is to understand it a little better.
32. Blush – wOLF alICE
When I woke up in the morning, my pillowcase was crusty from my tears. Next to me in bed was the indent from where he had been sleeping too often for over two years. The light spilled through the window the same way it always had. In the corner of the ceiling, the spider was sitting in its minimalist web. In the living room, my roommate was practicing yoga. Everything was the same except the way I was feeling. Where were his clothes? They had been strung across my bedroom floor. Where was his charger? It had been plugged next to mine. Where was his smile? I had seen it every morning. Where did we go and why did we go there?
I moved through the morning routine as though the air was thick. I pushed it out of my way to the bathroom and then to the kitchen and then to my closet. I stood at my door and looked back at the bed. The indent was still there. My first real boyfriend. My dried tears. My first real adult heartbreak. I closed the door hard and walked through the thick air to my car. I sat there for a while. And then I put on “Blush.”
I listened to the song for the entire ride from Echo Park to Playa Vista. For 48 minutes, I screamed the lyrics. I banged on the steering wheel. I begged to know the question, “are you happy now?” I caught eyes with a woman on the freeway off-ramp, tears cascading down my face and onto my neck. She saw me and for a moment I thought she was crying too. Then, she smiled at me. She knew what was happening. I wanted to ask her how things could ever be okay again. Instead, I did my best to believe it and smile back.
31. Can’t Do Without You – Caribou
This is why we dance. Look me in the eyes and smile wide. Don’t stop moving. Keep me in rhythm with you. Jump up and down. Scream the words into my open mouth. Breathe directly into me. Let the sound create a heat between our bodies. Come closer but know we never need to touch. Feel that thing between us that reminds us. This is why we dance.
I always sweat from my forehead and between my legs first. This is where I dance from. My mind is with you, my partner in groove, while my legs belong to the beat. We can take up an entire dancefloor when we’re synchronized. Not in motion but in intention. You’re up high and I am down low. We switch positions. You repeat one motion and I strut it out. We applaud each other. You are getting nasty on the bassline and I am spinning like a dervish. We make our home inside the beat.
Everything is purple. Lights orbit all around us. There is no metaphor, it just really is us and this fucking song. Stay with me here forever. I don’t need anything else. I just need this beat and you and our ability to make magic out of nothing but a melody. Because we have each other, there's room for everyone else.
Dancing is the closest we've invented to proof that we belong to one another. Look at us. This is why we dance.
30. State of Grace – Taylor swift
I swore I would never do this again. I made a pact, wrote it down, put it into the fire under a full moon, and watched it become ash in the midnight sky. I feel foolish now, thinking that would work. As if that were ever going to work. Yet, the lesson repeats as needed. I’m falling in love again.
He stands there in front of me while airplanes take off overhead. His stupid smile like a blue jay flying quickly into view, his t-shirt ripped in all the right places, and his hair tussled from anxiously running his hands through it on the drive over to pick me up. And me? I’m just standing there, perplexed how any of this is happening at all.
He kisses me too hard. But I know what he means. I want to kiss him hard too. I want everything to crash into immovable objects just to see how the shards fly under this horrendous airport lighting. I haven’t seen him in eight years. The world is stopped because of a pandemic. I am holding a mask in my hand. Of course the kiss is hard. It better be.
A Taylor Swift song is playing in my head. But that isn't the one I put on when we get into his car. I play a different one. I play the one that belongs to this moment. I play the one that reminds me the lesson repeats as needed. I play the one that makes me believe love can happen again and again and again. Because it can. And in that car, as I sing the lyrics to him while he drives with tears in his eyes, I know it will happen again.
29. The Rip – Portishead
What exactly is that smell? It’s in every hospital. I would think it would be antiseptic but instead it reeks of disease. It is the smell of not being well. And right now, standing outside the hospital room, it’s clinging to the inside of my nose. Through the window in the door I see my grandmother tied up to too many machines.
She is a woman who spent her life arguing, pushing forward, and refusing limitations. Earlier today, I followed in those footsteps, driving across state lines, booking a hotel, buying clothing from Target because I left too quickly to pack, and showing up at the hospital after visiting hours because that’s my grandmother in there.
My mother had called me from her couch in Los Angeles and made it sound like maybe nothing was happening. Or maybe something was happening. Or maybe something had already happened and no one knew how to say it yet. She was vague in the way people get vague when they are trying not to scare you, which is the fastest way to scare me. I hung up, threw three things into a bag, grabbed whatever shirts were closest, and left.
Joshua Tree to Scottsdale. I don’t remember much about the drive except the feeling of moving toward something I could not name. Portishead, James Blake, that one ambient Moby album. I was playing my idea of the scene. By the time I arrived, it was nearly 7pm and still brutally hot because it was July in Arizona and Arizona does not believe in mercy. There was a valet outside the hospital, which felt insane. People were asleep in chairs. Other people were hiding from the heat. The whole place felt less like a hospital than a building where everyone had been forced to admit their bodies were real.
The receptionist told me visiting hours were over. I kept walking. Not rudely. Not exactly. I moved with the confidence of a person who had already decided the rule did not apply to him. I told her I was the first family member to arrive. I told her my grandmother was in there. I said it like that was the end of the conversation because, to me, it was.
In the room, her hair was bad. That was the first thing I noticed and I hated myself for noticing it, but of course I noticed it. She would have noticed it too. She was knocked out on a fentanyl drip, her body doing almost nothing visible. She looked dead. I sat beside her and did not touch her because touching her felt too strange. I was alone in a room with an unconscious body. There are few things more eerie than that. My whole life, I have hated rooms full of sleeping people. The silence of bodies that cannot answer you. The awful waiting. The feeling that everyone has gone somewhere you cannot follow.
I sat there anyway.
I thought of the stories I had memorized about her in Tehran, walking through the streets in short skirts and not caring what anyone thought. I thought of the woman who argued and pushed and refused and refused and refused. I thought of her seeing me sitting there, afraid to touch her hand, afraid to leave the room, afraid that if I looked away too long she might slip somewhere else.
And I stayed there. I stayed in Arizona as long as she was in the hospital. Twenty-eight days. I wore the wrong shirts. I learned the hallways. I learned the smell. I learned which nurses would tell me the truth. I had to. That was my grandmother in there.
28. Bittersweet Symphony – The Verve
I lied too much in my 20s. It was so easy. I could create a fiction about my life that made me more appealing to my audience. Falsities would spill out my mouth before I could consider the implications. And everyone believed me. They nodded and gasped and invited others over to hear the stories. They loved my fiction, which made me think they loved me.
Once, I lied about meeting Richard Ashcroft. I told a college friend I had met him at a crosswalk on 5th Avenue and that he had stopped me from walking into traffic. I think that’s a scene from the “Bittersweet Symphony” music video. That was the insanity of my fictions, sometimes I didn’t even know where I was stealing from. I was just writing the book as I was publishing it. And my friend loved it. He loved how easily I could have proximity to a rockstar. Richard Ashcroft is just as obscure as he is cool and untouchable. When I said his name like that, it said something about me. I suddenly proved I was the kind of person this could happen to. How many lies had I constructed for this one to land? Who did my friend think I was?
On the train home, my insecurities crawled through my veins. Lying was easy, but being me was increasingly difficult. Carrying all the falsehoods and fun-house mirror versions of the truths was a full-time job back then. But it was working, wasn’t it? I was a hit at parties, could charm my way into anyone’s attention, and people enjoyed hearing me speak. It was the closest I have ever felt to being unforgettable. It was just easier than finding myself. But by the time 30 began to creep closer, I did not know who I was. My performance had become my personality. The only problem was that I had never met Richard Ashcroft but I really wish I had.
27. Crescendolls – Daft Punk
It’s just a button. I press it and music comes out of the speakers. I press it and the party starts. I press it and I ask the room a question. When I press it, “Crescendolls” will play. And I will be there, scared out of my mind that no one will dance. My finger hovers over the button. The room keeps talking. I press it before I can change my mind.
26. Cool - Gwen Stefani
When it finally ends, there will be an earthquake. I’ll be standing in my living room, about to put on a song to cry to while I dance around in my underwear, and the room will shake. My phone will make that high-pitched sound and light up. Everything will rattle in its place, including me. The dogs will look up at me hoping I can explain what has just happened. But I can’t. It just ended.
Afterward, I’ll stand there waiting to see if the shaking returns. The dogs will settle before I do. One will circle twice and lie back down. The other will keep staring at me like I’m withholding important information. My phone will tell me the magnitude. It will not tell me what to do with all the love still loose in the room. It will not tell me where to put the parts of him I still recognize. It will not tell me how something can be over and still be here. It will just give me numbers and I will still have to put on the song and dance.
25. I’m Not Done – Fever ray
When I come to, there’s still vomit dangling out the side of my mouth. No idea where I am. How long have I been here? Is this all my vomit or was there someone else here? What was I doing that someone else simultaneously vomiting alongside me is even an option?
Under the door of the stall, I see feet moving. Men are talking as they walk away. They open the door and music floods in. What show is this? I just need another drink and I’ll remember. And, look, I have mastered the art of vomiting without getting any on my clothes. Master of my craft.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and check myself in the scratched metal reflection of the toilet paper dispenser. Not bad, all things considered. The eyes are bad, yes. The skin is bad. The soul is absolutely somewhere else. But the outfit survived.
I open the bathroom door too hard and spill into the lobby of The Fonda. Through blurred vision I can see a woman on stage. Good for her. Let’s see what she’s got. The soles of my feet barely leave the floor. People move out of my way, never once making eye contact. No one wants to invite a conversation. No one looks surprised to see me like this. Everyone finds somewhere else to look.
At the edge of the crowd, I wonder who I am here with. Where are my people? Why am I alone? How will I get home? Does it matter? The night’s not over yet, right?
A hand lands on my shoulder and I know I’m in trouble. I close my eyes as I turn around. When I open them, I see you. You look disappointed. You exhale. You ask if I’m okay. You tell me we should go.
I look back at the stage. I don’t want to leave. I look back at you. I don’t have a choice. No, that’s wrong. I already made my choice. You’re just enforcing it.
24. Mountains – Prince
I had to YouTube how to repaint cabinets. I had never done a home improvement project before. Usually, I paid other people to do things like that and brought them water and lunch and made them laugh while they worked. That was the role I knew how to play. Host. Helper. Person with taste. Person with a credit card.
For three days, I stripped, sanded, painted, waited, and painted again. I bought brushes and incorrectly sized drop cloths and paint trays and stood in the kitchen trying to understand why anyone would willingly own so many tools. The cabinet doors came off their hinges. Dust clung to my arms. Paint got into my cuticles. The house looked worse before it looked better, which is how I knew something was actually happening.
I needed the cabinets to be a very specific shade of green. I needed to do it myself. The green was the color the mountains turn after surprise rain. It was light, almost like the bundle of young sage my friend gave me when I moved in. I could see the mountains from the kitchen window. This was not Los Angeles. This was not New York. This was the desert. I needed the inside of the house to answer the outside.
For three days, Prince rang through the house while I worked. While the cabinets dried, I painted the walls. When the walls dried, I went back to the cabinets. I would get tired and look out the picture window in the living room and stare at the mountains. I would exhale. I would peel paint off my fingernails. Then I would pick the brush back up and keep going.
It wasn’t perfect. Of course it wasn’t perfect. The paint slid unevenly across the walls. It dripped onto the floor. A few cabinet edges dried with evidence of my impatience. But every mistake made the house feel more mine. Every brushstroke was proof that I had touched this place and changed it. I was not decorating. I was introducing myself.
By the end of the third day, I was exhausted and filthy and proud in a way I did not know a house could make me feel. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the green cabinets, dry now, finally settled into themselves. Through the window, the mountains were still there. For the first time, the house and the view seemed to be speaking the same language. Prince was still playing. There was paint on the floor, paint under my nails, paint on my arms, probably paint in my hair. I did not care. I had made a place for myself.
Nothing was perfect but everything was mine.
23. Talk Show HosT – Radiohead
I want to write this for you, and one day it will make its way into your hands.
Knowing you, you’ll spend the beginning of this pretending it’s not about you. You always did that, you diminished what you meant to me. I always called you my brother. A strange bond formed after sitting next to each other in class for three years in a row. You heard every rude thing I mumbled under my breath, and I asked you for help whenever I didn’t understand a question in science class. I always told you how I’d do anything to keep you good. Because we both knew there were things about us that weren’t good. But we were okay with it. We made those things okay because together we were good. Remember that? You used to hug me like it was nothing and say things that made me feel like I would never be alone.
You showed me Radiohead when we were 15. We were sitting at lunch in our weird corner where no one would come up to us and you had your iPod loaded up. You handed me one of the earpods and put the other in your ear before you realized I needed both for the right experience. You told me to shut up and just listen. I put the other earpod in and did what I was told. I listened as the strange voice and sounds collapsed into my eardrums. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but I saw how much it made sense to you. I kept listening because you were my best friend. It felt like you were showing me something about yourself. I looked at you while it played. You were eating a sad sandwich I think your dad packed for you. Your acne from when we were younger had started to clear. I could see you becoming more handsome. Thom Yorke was singing in my ear and while I looked at you, I felt like suddenly I was in your head. Something made sense to me then. Not the music, but you. We were two weird kids, but your weirdness had a sound, and somehow that made both of us feel cool. I never told you this but I think that was the first moment I understood the weight of how much you meant to me.
You’ll know it’s you eventually. You always did, even when you pretended not to.
22. Piece of Me – Britney Spears
And then there’s the exhale.
Over this past semester, my final of high school, the only thing I’ve really learned is how to smoke cigarettes. How to hold one loosely between my index and middle fingers. How to let it hang from the corner of my mouth while I mumble sweet nothings. How to snuff it out under my shoe with the intensity of crushing a spider. How to know if the cashier at our local gas station will ask to see my ID. How to cover the smell in my car with Febreze. How to enjoy the exhale.
And then there’s the glide.
I always keep the music loud in the car because it encourages people to shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride. Every morning, I park in the same spot overlooking the football field, smoke a cigarette, and hope I’ll get caught. People don’t wave as they walk by. They stare and make assumptions. The windows are permanently rolled down, so I can hear them whisper about my choices. Cut to three hours later and I’m burning rubber out of the lot for lunch, a cigarette dangling from my mouth as Britney’s Blackout blasts. This is what gay youth rebellion looks like in 2009.
And then there’s the indecision.
Without warning, I twist the steering wheel and bring us to a screeching halt on the side of Sunset Blvd. Before anyone can object, I pull the cigarette from my mouth and hold it up to the girls in the backseat like evidence. “Is one of you going to make a decision or am I going to have to put this cigarette out in my fucking eye?” Silence. No one wants to recommend a party that turns out to be a dud. Britney hums in the background. I raise my eyebrows to inject the environment with urgency. Finally, the girl in the middle offers an idea.
“Let’s just go to the abandoned house again.”
And then there’s the abandoned house.
A few weeks earlier, some friends had stumbled on a house in the Palisades set to be demolished. Fresh out of fucks, they walked in and found it completely empty. No furniture. No clothes. No dishes. Nothing. A group of seniors with two months left until graduation had found an abandoned 2,500-square-foot house in a dark corner of the Palisades. It was begging us to host a rager. And rage we did. I smoked a blunt for the first time in the master bathtub and made friends with a daddy longlegs. People fucked in the closet near the garage. Artists drew portraits in the hallway. We smoked cigarettes inside and put them out on the marble countertops. Someone brought a boombox and a strobe light, transforming the bedroom furthest from the street into a dance floor.
The next night, we did it again with fifty more people. The house became freedom because we were seventeen and stupid enough to believe freedom looked like this.
And then there’s the burn.
The music stops as the engine goes quiet. We don’t bother rolling up the windows. Doors open as quickly as they slam shut. Cigarettes are instantly lit. We make our way through the side door to the backyard. Everything about us reeks of privilege. As we enter, everyone hears their name called from a different direction. Each person follows the sound of themselves until I am left alone, a cigarette burning between my fingers. Another puff. Another exhale. The taste in my mouth is edging toward rancid. I decide it’s time to wash it down with something.
Inside, I am bumped into more times than I can count. For such a big guy, I am shockingly invisible. In the kitchen, the only option is cheap vodka. I lock eyes with a baseball player as I take a swig from the bottle. Our eye contact lasts too long. Maybe he’s trying to figure out who I am. Maybe he’s wondering who invited me. Maybe he’s thinking about me going down on him in the back of his truck.
I take another swig and nearly gag. As I try to catch my breath, a flash goes off. I hear a Polaroid slide out from a camera. Before my vision comes back, she is already walking toward the hallway, chuckling as she shakes out the developing photo. I look back to the baseball player, but he’s gone.
I don’t follow her. I search for the source of the music instead. Someone has surrendered the soundscape to an iPod. I bend down to the boombox, scroll through the artists, and judge the owner’s taste like my life depends on it. Of Montreal. N.A.S.A. Massive Attack. Lily Allen. Justice. Fine. Acceptable. From the hallway, I hear the stoners coming. I go to all songs and hit shuffle. For one second, silence. That dreaded moment of silence. Then the opening of “Piece of Me” erupts from the speakers. Suddenly, everyone acts like they are being watched.
Thank you, Shuffle Gods.
Outside, I find one of the friends who rode here with me. As my body adjusts to walking on dirt, I realize how much vodka I drank and exactly how cheap it was. From a few feet away, I slur something neither of us understands. He is impressed by my intoxication level. He walks over, we link arms, and we move back toward the house.
As we enter the hallway, he divulges the drama. Someone’s upset they didn’t get the invite. Someone’s upset about the window our friend broke last weekend. Someone’s upset we didn’t bring beer. Everyone is upset about the baseball team taking over the party. I ask if we should be upset too. He tells me being upset would mean we cared. Then the front door starts to open. We stop in our tracks. Everyone knows the rule. Everyone comes in through the side door.
And then there are the consequences.
21. Cry For You – September
It was probably 9:38am on a Saturday morning in 2006 when I first heard “Cry For You.” I was in a spin class with my dad and the very hot gay instructor had just told us to turn up the resistance and come out of the saddle for a climb. I don’t remember how hard the climb was or anything else about the class. I remember going up to the instructor after and asking what that song was. He looked at me and smiled. With that question, I had just come out to him. He told me it was my new favorite song.
That night, with a fresh mixtape CD in the dashboard, my friends and I drove around the Pacific Palisades with “Cry For You” on full blast. By the end of the night, we knew all the words. None of us had ever been in a club. It would be another year before we’d be at a music festival. But that night, the car became a club for the first time. Later, back at my computer, I scoured the internet for songs like “Cry For You” and was introduced to Above & Beyond, Tiësto, and The Chemical Brothers.
Almost two decades later, she sends me a video from her parents' kitchen. She's dancing to "Cry For You," singing every word. Her mouth opens impossibly wide for "you'll never see me again," and she points dramatically at the camera like she's performing for an arena instead of an iPhone. Now, when the song comes on, I don't know whether I'm hearing September or watching the video. Sometimes I forget which one I'm remembering.
20. U.R.A. Fever – The Kills
It’s not our fault we make you feel small. It’s not our fault we’re the most talented people here. It’s not our fault we look hot. It’s not our fault you noticed.
I still haven’t found a leather jacket that fits me well, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll stick to denim. Someone will still look me up and down while I stomp up 14th Street toward the Meatpacking District. As I stomp, my people join me. We take over the sidewalk, actually, so everyone else can cross the street on their way to whatever stupid party they’re going to. Our parties were in rooms with lofted ceilings and porn on the TV. Girls fought and then made out. Drugs slipped through hands and into noses. Boys made out for the first time. Music coated us like armor. Come stay a while. Try not to embarrass yourself.
The next morning, we’re up at dawn, ready to put on a show. A literal show. We’re five stories underground Off-Broadway, rehearsing a play about gender politics, domestic violence, and the chaotic nature of love. We’re throwing ourselves on the floor, ripping petals off trees, singing at the top of our lungs, crying tiny, sincere tears while everything crashes around us. What people never understand is that who we are in the evening is who we are in the morning.
We believe art matters more than sleep. More than money. More than comfort. More than being liked. We believe a rehearsal room is as sacred as a party. We believe the performance doesn’t stop when the party ends, it just changes rooms. We believe art can make a life. We are unbearable, yes, but we are not unserious.
19. Computer Love – Kraftwerk
The internet used to be loud. I would sit at the family computer and wait for the machine to scream at me. That was what it sounded like when we connected to the internet: machines screaming into other machines. Then, after all that noise, a strangely calm voice would arrive: “Welcome.”
My AIM screen name was OCFan84. I loved Randy Moss and Seth Cohen equally. As OCFan84, I sent messages into the void and, when my friends were at their family computers too, they wrote back. Our messages were short, riddled with typos, and filled with teenage feelings we didn’t care were embarrassing. We talked like that for hours. I laughed at jokes while the screen’s blue light reflected off my still-hairless face. I turned song lyrics into cryptic away messages for everyone to decipher. I found myself in chat rooms with strangers talking about things I did not understand. I downloaded songs from LimeWire with the wrong titles, broken endings, and strange voices interrupting my favorite parts. I loved all of it because it was just me and the computer, alone in the dark office with everyone I knew.
I waited for the digital sound of a door opening.
Who was online now?
My buddy list was a city of fake names. Everyone I knew had turned themselves into a code. A joke. A lyric. A sports number. A feeling they were trying to hide badly enough for all of us to notice. Everyone was always coming and going, appearing and disappearing, available and away. It felt private even though the whole house could walk in at any moment. My parents could pass behind me. My sister could ask to use the computer. Someone could pick up the phone and destroy the connection. Still, somehow, this felt like the most intimate place in the world.
Whenever she came online, I waited for her to write first. Everyone else was quick to message, hungry for the new feeling of digital connection. But she could wait longer than I could. So I kept talking to my best friend about the newest songs we had downloaded. Did I find the new Madonna clip? Did we have the same file? Was his version better? Did mine cut off too early? We would have to burn CDs and play them for each other the next day. This was how friendship worked then. We found things in the dark and carried them to each other.
But she had to message me first. That was the rule, though I’m not sure who made it. Probably me. Probably because I needed to know she had chosen me again. I could see her name sitting there on the buddy list, lit up and available, and I would pretend not to watch it. I would open another chat. I would type something stupid. I would change my away message to a lyric only she would understand. Then I would sit there in the blue light of the computer, waiting for her to realize the away message was for her.
18. Help, I’m Alive – Metric
I tremble. Getting dressed for a court appearance is unlike any other experience with clothes. Maybe this suit is too much. Maybe these shoes are too shiny. Maybe this whole thing is just absurd enough that I’ll break into laughter at any moment. But I won’t. Instead, I’ll sit there and the whole world will be still and I will tremble. My lawyer will roll his eyes at my choice of tie. The judge will feel bad for me as I sit on the stand. Sweat will lodge its way in between my toes until my socks are soaked through. What the hell is wrong with me that this is what I am thinking about?
The second button won't cooperate. My fingers miss the slit twice before it finally slides through. Then the third one. Then the cuffs. Every tiny task suddenly requires negotiation. My heart is beating like a hammer. It's the second day of the calendar year, my throat is dry, and I cannot convince my hands that buttoning a shirt is not a life-or-death situation.
This is the second time we are doing this. Gathering in a room to discuss the worst thing that has ever happened to me while strangers quietly decide what kind of person I am. I have a copy of my filings in my hands, knowing my lawyer will arrive carrying stacks of paper thick enough to reduce months of my life to a few hundred pages. We will sit. Someone will pass photographs of my naked body across the room. I will remain silent until someone tells me it is my turn to speak. My life has never belonged to so many people at once.
Help, I’m alive.
When the judge finally asks, I’ll open my mouth. Words will fall out. Someone else will decide what happens next.
I tremble.
17. Crazy For You – Slowdive
The things that stayed ours after we didn’t:
1. That first night in your bedroom
2. Forelsket
3. Getting lost on hikes and it not bothering us
4. Post-show recovery kits
5. Tummy kisses
6. Purely Elizabeth’s ancient grain granola
7. Negotiating who will close the blinds and the door
8. That weird period of time where Slowdive was soundtracking everything
9. Resting our heads on each other’s chests in the shower
10. The necklace you gave me
11. Blood oranges
12. The pile of your clothes that always accumulated on top of my favorite records and spilled out onto the floor
13. Green curry from Summer Buffalo
14. Swimming naked in my mom’s pool and not caring how cold the water was
15. Our shopping route inside the Whole Foods 365 in Silver Lake
16. Running laps around Echo Park Lake and racing back home to fuck
17. That drive back from Malibu, my hand out the window while you wore those tequila branded sunglasses and everything was perfect for six minutes and one second
16. Enjoy The Silence – Depeche Mode
One night we listened to “Enjoy The Silence” five times in a row. We were down in a valley at the base of Arcosanti in Arizona and Skrillex was DJing from a truck bed while 100 of us smoked cigarettes and made out and shared beers until it felt like everything was communal property. Underneath it all was Dave Gahan’s voice. I remember looking at the stars and singing to no one in particular and feeling like something celestial was happening to us all. As the song ended, we shouted for it to be played again. And so Skrillex obliged. That happened three more times.
Growing up, I wanted to be like Dave Gahan. He wasn't goth, he wasn't technicolor, he was just effortlessly cool. That was all I wanted: to be cool. Dave Gahan never looked like he needed anything from anyone. Standing in that valley, surrounded by strangers singing the same chorus into the dusty air, I realized I'd misunderstood him. Cool isn’t distance. It’s presence. Stop using words. Stop trying to make sense of everything. Just enjoy it. That night, I felt cool for the first time because it may have been the first time I just enjoyed it without wondering who was watching. I felt like Dave. I felt like me. So, naturally, we asked for the song to be played again.
15. Let It Happen – Tame Impala
Being 25 with no money to my name isn’t embarrassing. It’s just keeping me up at night while everyone else in the house blissfully sleeps. I won’t apologize for spending the last three years working part time while making theater and pretending being an artist was glamorous. I had been waxing poetic about this struggle while sipping a glass of orange wine at a friend’s house when someone looked at me with unsettling confidence and told me I should come work with her at an ad agency.
An ad agency? In what world, girl?
In this world.
Within three weeks, I am carrying coffee cups, moving meetings on calendars, and reminding people who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars that their time is up. It’s easy to perform this job. Not do the tasks, but to perform the job. Imagine me walking down a busy hallway with one phone pressed to my ear, another in my hand, a coffee nestled in the crook of my elbow, and an attitude you can spot from hundreds of yards away. When people see me coming, they know their time is up.
I learn the choreography quickly. When to stand. When to sit. When to knock and when to walk in like the room has been waiting for me. When to make myself small enough to be ignored and when to make myself impossible to miss. I learn which executives want warmth, which ones want speed, which ones want to be feared, and which ones are only frightening because no one has ever told them they are running twelve minutes over.
Then I do it again.
I walk to the room. I knock. I open the door. I smile. I say five minutes. I close the door. I walk back to my desk. I wait while I look across the office. I walk back. I knock. I open the door. I smile. I say two minutes. I close the door. I walk back to my desk. I wait. I walk back. I knock. I open the door. I smile. I say we need the room. I close the door. Over and over and over.
At first, I think this is fake power. Assistant power. Power with a calendar notification. Power that comes from knowing who is in which conference room and which coffee belongs to which hand. But there is real information inside the loop. If you pay close enough attention, an office will tell you everything. Who is panicking. Who is pretending not to panic. Who makes decisions. Who only repeats them louder. Who gets protected. Who gets blamed. Who everyone is waiting for before they admit what they already know.
In my head, the beat of “Let It Happen” plays while I knock on doors. The song folds into itself, stutters, catches, glitches, returns, and then suddenly the whole thing opens. That is how work feels to me then. The same hallway. The same rooms. The same people. The same urgent walk with a coffee burning the soft skin of my arm. The same knock. The same smile. The same sentence leaving my mouth.
Your time is up.
Your time is up.
Your time is up.
And then the beat drops.
14. Bamboo Banga – M.I.A.
The sound arrives first. It always does. Long before you ever see us, M.I.A. is already bouncing off the mansions of the Westside. The bass rolls around the corner like a tidal wave announcing itself. Then the headlights appear, sweeping across the intersection. Just as the light turns yellow, my sedan explodes into view, all of us screaming, "Road runna, road runna." By the time the beat drops and the light turns red, we're gone again, disappearing into a quiet residential street as if we'd never been there at all. The music hangs in the air for another few seconds, begging for someone to come chase us.
Nobody can catch us in Brentwood. At any point, we’re swerving into a neighborhood, rattling the fences and waking up the sleeping dogs. A cigarette dangles through my underage fingers as smoke fills the inside of the car. The song drops again and I push hard on the gas pedal, burning a bit of rubber. Laughing at the absurdity of it all, I make another sharp turn and we’re back on San Vicente. Turning the music up, I dance with my arms. Passing the cigarette to her, we both sing in unison as we cruise down one of the prettiest streets in the city. She eggs me on, always telling me to sing louder.
We do this every night. Sometimes just me and her. Sometimes more. Sometimes there are six people in my sedan, limbs falling out every open window. We aren’t trying to get anywhere. We know we’ll disappear into the fog. We are just happy.
13. Rome – Phoenix
Close my eyes. Pick someone I've known. I'll probably find them. Give me one second. It’s like walking into a room of everyone I have ever known. You’re all in there. None of you have moved. You've only become easier to find.
This is how my memory works sometimes. I shuffle through faces until someone arrives and the music starts. Or I’ll be in the car and a song will come on and someone will suddenly be there. It’s not about assigning songs to people as much as knowing how a person sounds when they’re alone with me. This is how it sounds when we’re sitting in the living room and the incense is burning and the dogs are sleeping and we’re just breathing together.
Tonight sounds like “Rome.” The faces keep shuffling, but no one stays long enough. I keep searching for the person this song belongs to. I can’t figure it out.
Maybe “Rome” does not sound like someone I knew. Maybe that’s why the faces won’t settle. Maybe it sounds like a future that never found its face. A room I was supposed to enter but didn’t. A person I was supposed to become and somehow missed. The song keeps opening a door and I keep expecting someone to walk through it, smiling, familiar, easy to name. But no one comes. Just the room. Just the light. Just the feeling that somewhere, in another version of my life, I am standing there, fully arrived.
12. Deeper & Deeper – Madonna
Walking through a crowd on ketamine is tricky. It’s even trickier when every gay boy, queer girl and anything in between wants to say hello. Someone kisses my cheek and leaves a residue of cheap lip gloss. As I move past them, I shout over my shoulder for them to do better. I've spent most of my life wondering why people look at me. Tonight, I'd rather look at them.
A stranger's hand rests on the back lip of my skirt as we move through sweaty bodies. When the music is so minimalistic, it feels like everyone is moving in slow motion. All you have to do to find your way through a crowd is move at a different speed. I find my favorite spot in the party, ten feet in front of the DJ, lasers shooting out over our heads. This is the spot where anything can happen, and no one will see.
Turning back to face the stranger, everything tingles as his hands move up my chest. He's rough. He tells me he likes how hairy I am. Very original. His callouses agitate my skin in a way that feels erotic. I barely notice how it's making my eyes roll back in my head. Or, more likely, the ketamine is. One hand is in my hair, while the other is down the back of my skirt. I go limp against his body. He holds me up by my ass. He tells me what he wants and I smile into his chest. I look up and we lock eyes. We dance like this for a while before he turns me around and presses himself against my back. I lock eyes with the DJ, a young new guy whose body is perfect and whose taste in music is good enough for the 3am to 5am slot. He nods at me in approval of who I've landed with.
Under the bassline, I hear the synths from the beginning of "Deeper and Deeper." I do a quick check to see if I recognize anyone near me but the glow in the dark glitter is only on the floor, making it impossible to see who is who. I used to feel outside of the anonymity in rooms like this. When I walk down the street, people tend to look at me. I've never been sure why. But here, in the glittery darkness, the glances are far less frequent. If I want someone to look at me, I have to find their eyes first. Somehow, that's where the anonymity lives.
Through the darkness, I see a tall, handsome white guy watching us from a few feet away. He's shirtless, his body the kind of body every gay man aspires to. As my lover grinds into me, I want to lean forward and tell the stranger I am proud of him for having an Equinox membership. He bites his lip and nods. As the Equinox member comes up to us, the man behind me pulls my face apart by wrapping his hands inside my mouth. I moan into his hands as I lock eyes with the Equinox member. Up close I see a sadness in his eyes. I recognize that look. It's something I used to carry every day. But not anymore.
Everything, including the song, is throbbing. Sometimes belonging only lasts the length of a song.
11. I’ll Try Anything Once – The Strokes
Walking down the street, I feel the new ring on my left hand move in strange ways around my finger. There had never been a conversation about what the ring would look like. I never considered what it would feel like. Pearl necklaces I know. Friendship bracelets I know too. The gaudy gold jewelry my father brought back from Iran has always made perfect sense to me. But this silver is different.
People are laughing, cheering, and enjoying their lives. My phone won't stop ringing. Every few seconds another friend calls, another text arrives, another smiling face appears on my screen. Every part of me is vibrating. I keep turning the ring with my thumb, feeling it catch against my knuckle. I try not to look at him. If I do, I might laugh. I might cry. I can’t find out which.
I have always told people I'll try anything once. I believed it enough to tattoo the words in Morse code on my left ankle. At twenty-eight, it sounded like freedom. Go to the party. Fall in love. Buy the ticket. Try the drug. Kiss him. Say yes before you can change your mind. Jump. Try anything once. I never stopped to consider that some things are only tried once because they ask to stay forever. I slide the ring farther down my finger. It stops just before the knuckle. I twist it back into place. I tell myself I'll get used to it, that eventually it will become another part of my body, another thing I stop noticing. I am just uncertain it will ever fit the way I want it to.
10. Anthems For A Seventeen Year‐Old Girl – Broken Social Scene
I know something’s wrong because this friend from high school isn’t supposed to be calling me. I am at work, the combination to my high school locker forgotten years ago, staring at a name flashing on my phone. It’s been years since we’ve spoken on the phone. Why call me now? Something must be wrong.
I pick it up and whisper a greeting, trying not to disturb my coworkers sitting feet away from me in the annoyingly underdeveloped open concept of the office. A few strange niceties and then...
I really hate to do this but I need to tell you.
Silence. No. Crying. Eventually, my friend breathes. Then I do. My friend speaks first.
She’s gone. She left yesterday. Suddenly. It was a mistake.
But no, that’s impossible. I just spoke to her yesterday. Yes, I spoke to her yesterday. We talked for an hour. We made plans. Yes. She was going to come to Joshua Tree. At like 2:30pm. Yes. For an hour. Wait, you’re lying. No.
My friend stays silent.
I drop the phone. It hits the ground hard. My coworkers look over. Someone asks if I'm okay. I think they do, anyway. Their mouths are moving but the room has become strangely quiet. I have nothing to say to them. I stand up slowly. My chair rolls backward into the aisle. Nobody stops me.
I leave my phone where it fell.
I find an empty stall in the bathroom and lock the door. My hands press against the cold metal partition. I gasp for air. I push harder. Maybe the building can keep me standing if I ask it to.
Yesterday.
We talked for an hour yesterday.
We made plans yesterday.
She was going to come to Joshua Tree.
I heard her voice.
At like 2:30.
Yesterday.
I close my eyes. I see her in the passenger seat. I see her dancing. I see her singing to me. I see her holding my gaze. I see her see me. I see her.
9. 33 “GOD” – Bon Iver
Do you remember?
It must have been late summer. We had been walking through my neighborhood at night. To get ice cream. To get air. To make the day last longer than it had any right to.
One morning I was getting dressed and you were tossing in bed. Usually, you were so still. Even asleep, you looked like you were trying too hard. I was putting on the necklace you gave me when I looked over and found you watching me. I wondered how long you had been there.
I said good morning and you made that face. You know the one. Come on. Do it.
Then you slammed your arms against the bed a few times. Like this. You were so cute I could barely stand it. Neither of us wanted to leave that room. If love lives somewhere long enough, it takes over everything.
It was hard to live there after we broke up. I moved furniture. I hung new art. I made room for myself where there used to be us. But I remember that morning. You waved me back to bed. When I crawled in, you slapped the mattress again and I burst out laughing. I climbed up to your face and kissed your nose. You hated that. I did it anyway. I told you I loved you. I don’t remember whether you said it back or kissed me or just looked at me like I was asking too much.
You told me not to go. But you knew I had to go. It felt like a trap.
I got up and you slapped the bed some more. I called you a silly nickname. You pointed at me and said nothing. I always wish you said more.
I remember the bathroom too. Maybe a month later. I was sitting on the rim of the tub and you were leaning against the wall. We were so angry. I don’t even remember what about. I hated myself for being that upset with you. It made no sense to live there, in all that heat, when all I wanted was to kiss your nose. Our glass was so full. How can either of us be mad that sometimes it tipped over?
It has never been the same. My room. Our room, really. There’s the half I have made my own and the half I have yet to convert. You are still there. I see you in the corner, pointing your finger at me.
I am not waiting for you to come back to bed. That belongs to me now. But seeing you yesterday made me think of that morning. It filled me up so quickly I couldn’t breathe. I was back there with you. It was every emotion I ever felt with you at once. It felt like everything.
I love that I haven’t been to your new room.
It feels right.
It hurts to think about. But it always ends with me imagining how happy you must be. How many plants you must have. How the natural light must wash over your bed in the morning while you sleep, still as a rock.
I’m happy for you.
I’m jealous of you.
Because every once in a while, it feels like all I have left is you pointing at me from the corner of the room.
8. Soft Shock – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
It is the third week of quarantine and I am walking through Angelino Heights with nowhere to go.
That is the strangest part. I have taken so many walks with destinations in mind. Coffee. Dinner. A friend’s house. A party. A bar. A date. But tonight, every reason is closed. The restaurants are dark. The bars are locked. The houses glow from the inside with people trying to pretend their lives still have shape. Downtown Los Angeles sits in the distance, lit up and useless.
“Soft Shock” is playing in my headphones.
There is no one on the street. No cars passing. No neighbors on their porches. No friends waiting around the corner. The whole world is behind closed doors, learning how much of a life can disappear without witnesses.
I start dancing before I decide to.
At first, it is small. A shoulder. A wrist. A step that lands slightly too hard on the pavement. Then the song opens up and so do I. The streetlights throw my shadow in every direction as I move toward home, arms cutting through the air, knees bending strangely, my body making shapes for no one. For once, I am not performing. There is no crowd to charm, no stranger to impress, no friend to make laugh, no room to win over. There is only the song and the street and the ridiculous fact of my body still wanting to move.
This is what I had confused for loneliness: the absence of witnesses.
But being alone is different. Alone is a room you can enter without apologizing. Alone is hearing your own breath and not needing to turn it into a joke. Alone is dancing up an empty street because the music asked nicely and nobody is there to misunderstand you.
By the time I reach my front door, the last sixteen counts of the song are playing. I let myself finish them outside. I move badly. I move beautifully. I move like nobody is coming to save me and nobody needs to.
Then the song ends. I go inside and lock the door behind me.
7. Swoon – The Chemical Brothers
Circles are my favorite shape. I gravitate toward music that sounds like it’s moving in circles. Synth lines that reconnect to themselves, drum fills that whirl and whirl, melodies that repeat until the lesson is learned. Dance music often lives in circles, expanding and contracting to fill rooms of bodies moving in strange unison. “Swoon” is the best argument for why it works.
“Just remember to fall in love / There’s nothing else.” Yes. Keep it simple, guys. Spin that round and round over an infectious synth line and let me dance and dance and dance until suddenly it all clicks. The world is hypercolor when “Swoon” is playing. I am driving in a car 20 above the speed limit, skipping through an open field of Joshua Trees, dancing in a crowd with my best friends, kissing someone and feeling their hand reach under my shirt, and running a marathon all at once. It’s acidic and technological yet somehow sounds exactly how I feel when the wind is rushing against my cheeks. Everything is alive.
6. Marry The Night – Lady Gaga
At mile 18, Lady Gaga tells me what to do. I am halfway up Sepulveda from Santa Monica to Wilshire and every inch of my body is on fucking fire. But, whatever, this is happening. I have chosen this stupid thing and been waking up at 5am to run and count miles for months. This isn’t the moment to give up. This is a moment to burn a hole in the road.
To the people on the side of the road, keep shouting. I need someone to yell at me. Like a spin instructor from when I was a teenager who didn’t want to climb anymore after a 40 minute class. Like my mom telling me to push harder on the accelerator. Like my friends in the backseat who want the music louder. Yell at me. Lady Gaga, sing out for your life. We’re going for it.
Of course I decided to do this. Difficult things? Give me more. You don’t think I can handle it? Girl, please. You think I will give up on my life? You don’t know me. I'm a soldier to my own emptiness, I am a winner. That’s what she’s telling me. And I don’t just listen. I sing. I sing out loud and lift my burning hands above my head and I lift my tired feet and I run up that street I drove down nearly every day growing up. Not because I have something to prove to anyone. But because this body has spent its whole life crossing lines it was told to fear. So, really, get out of the way. Lady Gaga and I have somewhere to be.
5. Keep The Car Running – Arcade Fire
For two years, I wore a ring embossed with the coordinates of the Empire Polo Club in Indio. People occasionally asked what the numbers meant. I always smiled before answering. There are some places that permanently rearrange your life. Mine happened to be a polo field.
Until April 28, 2007, Coachella meant absolutely nothing to me. Then, I stepped onto the grass, heard music somewhere in the distance, and before I had seen a single stage, I knew I belonged there. Of course she was there, already dancing before we'd even figured out where we were going. My mother was also there, frying under the sweltering heat. My best friend looked at me with the same expression I imagine I was wearing. My body was ready.
All day we stood at one stage. The only direction we moved was closer. By the time the sun was setting and Arcade Fire was coming on, we were 20 feet from the rail. She held my hand tightly, my best friend on my other side smiling from ear to ear goofishly. Behind me, my mother was becoming less the person I knew and more the person she knew herself as. As the lights dimmed, there was a rush of energy over our heads. And then, the swell of “Keep The Car Running” came through the speakers with such a triumphant feeling I lost my footing. I don't remember much from that show. I don't remember what Arcade Fire played after "Keep the Car Running." I remember losing my footing. I remember her hand. I remember thinking, so this is what people have been talking about.
4. Keen On Boys – The Radio Dept.
His hand is grazing mine and my stomach is doing flip turns.
Versailles is oddly quiet for a place so many people have come to see. Somewhere beyond us, tourists are moving through rooms built to make power look beautiful. Somewhere, someone is explaining Marie Antoinette. Somewhere, our RAs are counting heads. But we are in the grass, looking up at the sky, barely touching.
Still, we are touching.
I don’t know when I started to feel this way. Whatever ‘this way’ is. Every morning, when we leave the dorms and walk to the studio to rehearse, he looks at me and smiles, and something inside me lights up too fast to name. Fireworks. That’s the closest I can get. He feels like fireworks.
We came to Versailles for a field trip. I walked through the palace listening to The Radio Dept. on my headphones, Sofia Coppola’s movie soundtrack deciding my emotions before my brain had a chance. When the tour was over, they told us we could go to the gardens, so we ran. He and I took off like we were already in the middle of a game. We ran past hedges and fountains and tourists with digital cameras, our bodies blurring through someone else’s history.
By the time we reached the grass, we were breathless. We collapsed beside each other and stayed there.
Now his hand is next to mine. I move first because I have no other language for what is happening. I grab it. Not confidently. Just enough to tell him something I can’t say out loud.
He leans over, his blond hair falling in front of his eyes. He smiles at me.
“You’re a really sentimental person,” he says.
I ask if that’s a bad thing.
He tells me it’s the best part about me.
Fireworks.
3. Unravel – Björk
Don’t touch me, actually. The corners of the ceiling are sharp. My vision is blurring out. Let go of my hands, please. I cannot feel my fingers. I need space. Turn the lights off. Give me a second. I just need a second. My body and I are trying to reach an agreement.
Darkness, thank you. It’s better this way. In the dark, I can’t know how much space is between me and the ceiling. I can just sit here and count my breaths until my fingers start to feel normal again. Please be patient with me.
One: in through the nose.
Two: out through the mouth.
Three: think of a song that makes you feel safe.
Four: hum the melody.
Five: in through the nose.
Six: out through the mouth.
Seven.
While you are away, my heart comes undone.
Slowly unravels in a ball of yarn.
I lied, hold my hand. I don't want to feel alone anymore. Now, grab it. I cannot trust my body. Everything feels miles away. I want small safe rooms and familiar sounds and nothing that surprises my body. When I tighten my grip around your palm, that’s me trying to find my way back.
2. Green light – Lorde
When I die, play “Green Light” at my funeral. Play it loud. Sing along. Jump up and down. Cry a little. Laugh a little. Cry a little more. Chase the infinite concept of being free of someone and, much more importantly, free to chase your own life. When she sings, “But I hear sounds in my mind / Brand new sounds in my mind,” let all of it in. Enter the catharsis. This is the song where everything gets let out of you. It's feral because that's what freedom sounds like.
People will want you not to feel this much. I learned that the hard way. But we're emotional creatures and our feelings are proof that we're here. This isn't a song for people with small feelings. I have always lived with enormous ones. Big, messy, inconvenient, absolutely insane feelings. No other song has ever made me feel so grateful for them.
“Green Light” is the song most people think of when they think of me. Not because I love Lorde more than anyone else you’ve ever met, but because whenever someone asks me to play whatever I want, this is the song that comes out of the speakers. Every version of me has needed this song. No, 'Green Light' has never been a song about letting go of a man. It's about hearing brand new sounds in my mind. It's about wanting the light to change so I can press hard on the gas and go.
1. Ceremony – New Order
Press play.
A ritual is not an argument. It does not need to explain itself. You do the thing because doing it makes the world briefly legible. You light the candle. You open the door. You put the needle down. You sing.
This is my favorite song. I want to sing it to everyone.
There was life before “Ceremony,” and then there was life after I understood what it could hold. Every time it comes on, something arrives. I am driving somewhere with the windows down. I am in New York pretending not to need anything. I am falling in love. I am losing love. I am mourning someone I will always expect to see again. I am staring at a Joshua Tree under a burning sun. I am running uphill. I am grabbing a hand because I have no other language for what is happening. I am grabbing a hand because I need proof I am still here. I am dancing. I am with my friends and everything is loud enough to feel safe.
Maybe I took too much for granted. I probably did. But looking back is never going to give me the whole picture because the sun is always in my eyes. The road keeps bending. The music keeps changing rooms. Still, I can see enough. Shadows on pavement. Smoke in the air. A car full of voices. A girl looking back. A boy in the grass. Dogs sleeping in a room I made mine. My own body, difficult and devoted, carrying me through.
It looks good, doesn’t it?
Imperfect, radical, moving perfectly to the beat. I like it. I didn’t for a long time, but I do now. I like this life. I like the mess. I like the enormous feelings. I like that I am sentimental. I like that I kept dancing. I like that I stayed. I like that after everything, the music still knows where to find me.
I am not sure who I was when I first heard this song. Someone younger, probably. Someone convinced he had already become himself. Someone with more certainty than sense. I love him for that. He got me here.
I am not sure who I will be when I hear it tomorrow, next month, or in ten years. Less certain, I hope. More open. Still changing. Still listening. Still willing to be surprised.
Right now, while the song plays, I am standing here.
My life is still happening.
I am glad to be in it.
