Playlist of desire

Every time I write the intro to an essay lately I feel I am at my most John Wick, all tired and hunched over. Saying yeah, I’m thinking I’m back in my most charming monotone. I submitted the revisions on my book, and this is what has made it hard for me to think about writing essays for a newsletter. I was asked to make the book a little longer, I took that as a challenge instead of a note and wrote two new essays for it, plus a secret third one. So three, I guess, for those who passed math.

I didn’t, it’s fine.

For the sake of numbers, I also took one essay out because I’m saving it for the outline of my next collection of essays that is already taking shape on the side of my desk amidst the clutter of half-completed projects and empty coffee mugs begging to be refilled.

Writing a book is hard people tell you, especially if it is personal and especially when it digs into memories I left half buried in the past, the beating of a heart that slowly drives me to the brink of sanity. Now I wait for final edits and all the bric-a-brac that builds a book, so in the meantime I have time again. I have so much time and time is bad because time becomes guilt and guilt becomes nightmares and I’ve been having a lot of those lately too. Dreams where I’m working construction again, dreams where I’m smoking again. I had one drinking dream, which I don’t often have anymore, but drinking dreams haunt me because I do remember how it felt to drink and I remember how it felt to wake up after and when I wake from a dream with urgency inevitably my body tries to recreate the experiment of the dream in order to land me in reality.

It is jarring and a little triggering to wake up from not drinking wondering if you had. Sober for over 5 years. An ongoing project.

I also turned forty two recently, and I think I’m old enough now to be past the age I thought I would never see — forty — and there’s a certain numbness in that too. Not a bad kind of numb, honestly a mostly pleasant kind. Like being frozen to not feel anything. Just the pinch and then nothing at all really. I don't need to know so many things now. I'll go to my grave having never known what Hawk Tuah Girl was, and please don't ruin that for me. I don't need to know, I gain nothing from all this knowing.

I made a playlist for my birthday, because it’s one of the last remaining traditions I hold onto. My birthday was once all about drinking and self destruction, and when I quit the former it became harder to understand what the fuss was about. It's just age slowly stripping away the layers of a life. The self destruction remains, but I think there’s a little self destruction worth holding onto. Self destruction in search of a life.

An age playlist is hard to make, because the theme is kind of nebulous. Playlists need a theme, even if I don’t see it or fully grasp it, the best playlists need a thread running through each song that ties it all together. Otherwise, and this is just how I feel, it’s not real. It’s just a collection of songs that I like, which is fine, but a playlist is something more intentional.

Maybe this is because I made mixtapes long before I made playlists and I’m tethered to that feeling. The intention and the time spent. Mixtapes were tactile, my fingers remember the press of plastic, holding the record and the play button on a shitty boombox in my old bedroom waiting for just the right moment. The need to get a song that played in regular rotation on the radio, waiting for the moment it appeared again so I could grab it and add it to my collection. Like catching Pokemon.

The playlist I made for my forty second birthday starts with a song I can’t include here, because it’s only real to the people who have it. Julie Doiron covering the Tragically Hip’s “Ahead By a Century”. Lysh had sent this to me one morning a few months ago, asking me hey did you know Julie covered “Ahead by a Century?” which led to it being the first song I listened to every morning for a month.

Lysh has so many incredible secrets in her music collection. She has binders with complete handwritten lists, every track of every mixtape she made when she was young, and hard drives of music from bands she worked with in one way or another. Shows she put together in Saskatchewan when she was young and building her own DIY outfit promoting shows and building a scene. Every now and then the urgency will strike her and she’ll dig through her lost archives and uncover the greatest songs few people heard or even remember.

I miss when music was like this. Not always a secret, but something personal. Everyone’s collection was something different than everyone else’s. There was something to talk about, something to share, secrets hidden in liner notes or on a tape someone got from a friend they don’t remember the name of anymore.

I don’t want to spend my forty second year complaining about kids these days or technology or whatever. Streaming is fine, except for the royalties or lack therof! I use it all the time, don’t worry. My nieces are all discovering music and their own taste through streaming services and honestly, I’m glad it’s there for them. It’s good for them to be able to experience or understand anything whenever they want. When they’re forty two they will remember something different and no less real than my own recollections of the past. The way I’m nostalgic isn’t the right way, it's not perfect and I don't come from an idyllic decade. It’s just one memory of the way the past was, that stands in contrast to the present.

These mental illnesses are my own, and they’re doing just fine by me for the most part.

From a Julie Doiron cover few will hear my playlist moves to Otis Redding’s “Change Gonna Come”, a cover of the Sam Cooke single, which he played once on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in February of 1964, and then never again. Apparently he told his protege, Bobby Womack, that he thought the song sounded "like death". In December, right when the single was preparing to be released, Cooke was killed in a motel in Los Angeles.

I have always loved Redding’s interpretation of the song, released in 1965 a year after Cooke’s death, which takes the elaborate orchestration of Cooke’s song and boils it down to a new and beautiful interpretation. Not to say it’s better, just that it’s a different way in.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Otis Redding this year too, as I was reading through stories of famous artists who died in plane crashes. My mental illnesses are my own and sometimes they look like googling famous airplane crashes. Redding and four members of the Bar-Kays were killed in a plane crash in Wisconsin in 1967. I’ve been thinking a lot about the scariest and saddest part of this; where the only survivor of the crash, Ben Cauley, woke up just in time to see fellow Bar-Kay Phalon Jones look out the window and say oh no before they hit the water.

Cauley couldn’t swim, all he could do was hold onto a seat cushion to stay afloat long enough to be rescued. He could not save the others.

I don’t know how to swim, I’m also extremely afraid of the water, and as I have been getting older I’m increasingly afraid of flying, especially over large bodies of water. It’s the oh no that gets me. Seeing the end rushing up to claim you.

Three days before the plane crash that claimed his life, Redding had re-recorded “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”, a single which would become his most famous work despite already being a well loved and successful artist by the time of its release. It’s a different song than the rest of his catalogue, Redding had wanted to change his style a little, try something new. There are stray conversations that note some people thought the sound leaned too much into newer, poppier territory. There’s also a rumour that the Staples Singers were supposed to do backing vocals on it, and it all never came to pass. Redding had done two recording sessions on the song, but never got to finish it before his passing.

Just to add to the malaise of all this, the third song on my playlist is “Together”, from Nine Inch Nails because Lysh and I watched the first episode of Season three of The Bear and I thought the song was a beautiful and somber choice to lay behind the frantic movements through Carmy’s memories of his own self perceived failures, interwoven with the stress of trying to be someone different and somehow better that your own lacklustre reflection.

I’ve been thinking about the use of labour and addiction and mental health as a backdrop in this show, and thinking about my own relationship to these three ideas which are a constant presence in my upcoming book. I watched that first episode of season three and wondered if I could do something like this but in the worlds that I know. I tweeted something about it, got pissed off when someone said that they don’t think trades people have interesting enough lives to develop a narrative structure around. Like only some of us deserve to have stories, and the rest of us are just here to fix things that are broken and die when no one is watching. I would love to write a show like this, and I'm worried I'll never be good enough to do it.

I can’t go through every song on my playlist, because who would read all that, but the playlist flows through ideas, and stray lines that thread the needle “Almost was Good Enough” by Magnolia Electric Co. (Almost no one makes it out) and “Stratford-On-Guy” by Liz Phair. (It took an hour, maybe a day, but once I really listened the noise just went away).

“Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)”, by the Deftones, to add grit and texture and also because whenever I need to think or talk through an idea I like to go for a drive by myself and there’s been a lot of that lately.

“Streets of Bakersfield” by Dwight Yoakam, partially because it makes me think of my mom but also because of the line hey you don’t know me, but you don’t like me. I'm old enough and adjusted enough now to let go of some of the more toxic parts of my youth, like the idea that I'm too punk for country.

A left field choice maybe, but I put “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” by Sly and the Family Stone on here, because A it’s a fucking great song don’t @ me and B, it makes me think of working in the glass shop with my dad when for a while we instigated a rule that on Fridays we only listened to internet radio stations that played funk and soul music and whenever this one came in it always made the days a little easier. Our hands covered in blood and dirt from the work, desperate for a coffee break, singing dance to the music as we kicked broken windshields out of used out GMC Suburbans.

“Nothing” by Gladie, because it’s one of the great masterpieces of songwriting by a band I think is consistently making some of the greatest music to hit the streets. Augusta Koch has one of those voices I will never tire of, it’s layered and textured but in control. It feels real, self assured even when it’s expressing doubt and don’t we all want to feel like that? I like the line, what would it feel like to want nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Let’s run through some hits. “Stella Heart Ocean” By Divine Right, the long running Canadian indie rock band that Lysh has been a member of many, many years. They’ve added some older jams to their setlist lately, and I’ve been loving digging through the back catalogue with her as she tells me stories about making mixtapes with BDR on them and how amazing it is that she now just gets to play those songs. How lucky a life sometimes.

“Driving Wheel” by Al Green, “Speeding 72” by Momma. Songs about movement, or inspired by. Songs about shaking it off maybe, about fear and worry. About death and loss sometimes but also about beautiful moments in being alive.

“Fire Alarm”, by Snailhouse (the beautiful songwriter Michael Feuerstack who now records under his own name) reminds me of working late at night on work sites alone, installing doors and hardware on condos I could never afford despite working 12 hours a day to build them. Coming home tired and fried and dreaming of some better life that existed only in the lost recesses of my mind. A life I never thought possible that has become almost easy to take for granted. I have nightmares about this work not because it was bad or demeaning, but it was hard and arduous and I was never able to be myself in it. It’s hard to spent all day disassociating while also trying to run your own construction company. I always loved this song, but especially the chorus,

don’t be afraid, you’ve got your youth, though that will fade does it keep us safe from harm, if the kettle whistles along with the fire alarm

A theme emerges as the thread appears on the fabric. I went into forty two worried and a little stressed, nightmares and anxious thoughts and a lot of it is imposter syndrome and some of it is holding onto the things I wanted and worried about what happens when people can see me grasping them too tight. I’m just worried about what happens when I let go.

I’m worried about what happens if all the things I wanted, this career and this life and the relative calm and beauty of getting older, are fleeting. What if I fail, what if the work isn’t good or the opportunities don’t work out. What happens when I don’t wake up anymore?

It’s nice to remember the work I’ve done, the lives I’ve had and the times I worried they might be all I ever achieve. I’m proud of the work that I’ve done in the past — fuck that guy who said that people who work with their hands for a living don’t contain a life worthy of compelling and dramatic narrative — and I’m proud of the work I’m lucky to do now. I guess when you come in as an outsider or when you don’t have anything else to rely on it can be scary sometimes to move to the next place, because what if the plane crashes?

Oh no.

I made the playlist for my birthday because it helps me work through the anxious emotions giving me nightmares. They’re not going to go away, there’s nothing so powerful that will push them out of mind. I just need to remember to wake up and shake them off. This is what makes a playlist real, I guess. The intention behind each choice, not a collection of unconnected things but a desire to have these songs make peace with all the anxious thoughts that build a life.