Second Thoughts

Austin started a fantastic trend of writing a list and description of the ten songs that got one into music, followedby Nick and Ty. The idea is talking about the songs that got you started into loving music.

We've all taken different approaches to it. In making this list, I have realized that what I first loved about music was the chance it provided to live somebody else's life and to have my own emotions make sense in somebody else's terms. I found the joy of recognition. When I hear these songs I remember lots of firsts, lots of times when I felt something completely new. These ten songs are the songs which, though not necessarily the best, are the ones that meant the most to me at the time. They didn't all lead to other music genres; I didn't really love them for their musical qualities necessarily. I loved them insanely and obsesively because of how they made me feel.

10) Michael Jackson - Dangerous

For what must have been my tenth birthday, a friend of mine gave me Michael Jackson’s Dangerous because his cousin had told him to. It was the first CD that I owned. The title track, Dangerous, was the first song I had heard with the word “damn” in it, as in “Take Away My Money / Throw Away My Time / You Can Call Me Honey / But You're No Damn Good For Me!” At first I listened to the song from “Free Willy” constantly, and I reveled in the scene at the beginning of “Black and White” where the kid is playing music and his dad is pounding on the wall to tell him to turn it off, but this song just opened up new worlds to me. I didn’t understand why she was so dangerous, but jeez did I believe it. And I kept coming back for more.

9) Bush - Little Things

Bush’s Sixteen Stone meant a lot to me, this song the most. It painted this bleak picture of a relationship in which they were poor and hungry and crude and hated each other, and the whole thing seemed so vivid. It was way over my head but I felt the emotion of it. I was attracted to this glimpse of highly sexualized anger and violence, and I couldn’t place it, but I couldn’t stop listening to it. Machinehead was a great song, and Comedown was heartfelt, and Glycerine was airy and emotional. But Little Things was just really pissed off and scared, and these were emotions I wasn't used to hearing or feeling.

8) Goldfinger - Here in Your Bedroom

Goldfinger wasn’t a band that I listened to much, and this song I had just recorded off of the radio. But there was this girl named Celia that I had watched for so long at youth group, and she had started to really show interest and she led me on and then dumped me. Everything was going grand until this winter retreat when she completely blew me off and I was left in the snow of Wisconsin with cheeky youth pastors as comfort. Every time we would meet for the large-group coed gatherings, my heart would beat faster and I would wait for her and her two friends to show up. I volunteered for the comedy skit just so I could get up on stage and hope that she might be impressed.

I came home defeated, and then heard this song. It only took the one line: “You have changed ‘cos I still feel the same.” And I really did feel the same, but she had moved on. This was somehow the most cathartic line, and cathartic song, of my entire pre-highschool life. Every time I listened to it, I fantasized myself singing at youth group in a band, and each time that line would approach, I would stop moving and stare at her while I delivered it. And she would feel ashamed. And then she would love me back.

7) Nirvana - Smells like Teen Spirit

Smells Like Teen Spirit was the song that we would beg the DJ at school dances to play all night, and the teachers would try to stop him. Invariably, the song would start playing and we would begin to “mosh” like mad, and it would stop. But once I remember that the DJ played it the whole way through, and we made a tight circle and pushed each other around for the entire five minutes and three seconds. I lost a shoe and we knocked over a light stand, and the teachers turned on the overhead lights in the gym and the DJ was yelled at, but we had our mosh pit, and it was beautiful.

This song was so explosive and incredible, we all wanted to live inside of it. It was the most collectively exciting song of that entire era. I remember searching the paragraph of lyrics on the liner notes, which has bits and pieces of lines from this song, trying to figure out what it all meant. Meanwhile the picture of Cobain flicking off the camera watched me from the other page. After I bought this album, my father convinced me that it was evil and he burned it on a piece of tin foil on the porch while I watched.

6) Tripping Daisy - I Got a Girl

I heard this song on a Q101 cagematch, which was a thing they did every night, pitting two songs against each other and you could vote. This song reigned for a long time, and I used to tune in every time until I figured out you could record off of the radio. The portrait he painted of this girl was so exciting and sexy and weird: "I got a girl who wears cool shoes" (this part I could relate to) "I got a girl who wears them in the nude." (This part I could pretend to).

5) Smashing Pumpkins - 1979

I am placing this well away from number one so as not to incur the wrath of Nick, but also because it meant more to me later than it did then. It's clearly the best song out of all of these, and Austin is right, it should play everywhere in the world on every set of speakers for all of time. Seriously.

The first Smashing Pumpkins song that I loved was Bullet With Butterfly Wings, because the angst was irresistable and the battle was epic. Billy Corgan knew that Jesus was his only son, but he was pissed about it instead of being happy. And the finale of the song is Corgan yelling that he still believes he cannot be saved.

4) Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger

Wonderwall is the obvious choice, and man did I love that song, but I liked the one that came after it on the album better. This song was the essence of my continual fascination with seeing relationships as past things. I was all about the nostalgia of telling a girl it was over, and feeling sad about it but remaining strong. I had this mental image of a girl sauntering by in slow motion, an image which was updated as time when on with the various objects of my crush-affection. I would shrug at her, turn to my good friend and smile wistfully, and she would be unable to look back in anger because of my mood. Then I would stop and watch her walk away, and feel sad myself. I have no idea if that has anything to do with what this song is actually about, but that’s how it was for me. But it's the epitome of how I saw my relationships to girls then: from a distance, past-looking, laced with sadness.

3) Offspring - Self Esteem

I heard this song in the back of my best friend’s car the morning after 9 of us stayed up all night in an Embassy Suites for a hotel birthday party. On the floor below us was a group of girls who were having a sleep-over, too, and we spent the night playing elevator tag, stealing do-not-disturb signs from doors, and creating rubber band balls to drop 8 stories in the open courtyard which filled the interior of the hotel. In the morning we had breakfast, and I sat next to the cute girl, feeling elated, who was wearing a fitted baseball cap backwards. She poured my orange juice. On the way home, I was falling asleep as his father drove us home at 9 in the morning, and the song came on the radio. We rolled down the windows and yelled about girls and dessert and self-esteem. That night was also the first time I saw the playboy channel. The next morning, I walked to the music shop and bought my first album.

2) Green Day - Longview

I bought this album, my second real album, after hearing Basket Case. I loved every single song on the album and every instance of youthful disenchantment. On a car trip to Colorado the same year, my mom took the liner notes out of the sleeve and started reading the lyrics. “I declare I don’t care no more” is the first line, and my stomach dropped as I watched her glance through the black and white photographs of Billy Joe and Tre Cool blowing cigarette smoke into each other’s faces, images that I had studied with a mixture of attraction and hesitation, and dreamed of living in.

I loved Longview the most because I could yell “fucking” at the start of three out of four choruses (inside of my head, of course). I wanted to care as little about morals and personal hygiene as Billy Joe did, to be unaffected, to have masturbated enough to have actually gotten bored of it.

Serendipitously, Billy Joe had a strikingly similar name to the singer of River of Dreams, a song which was a centerpiece of my parents musical bequeathing to me. So I threw that crap out immediately.

1) Weezer - Only In Dreams

Perhaps a controversial first pick, but I'm quite confident of it. Weezer’s “Blue Album” was my favorite album in Jr. High. My best friend and I had crushes on two girls who were also best friends, Tori and Kristen, respectively. We spent a great deal of our time singing Rivers Cuomo’s songs and making up our own lyrics to suit our own forlorn, unrequited love situations.

Only in Dreams, however, was my favorite song on the album. It’s epic--just under 8 minutes long--and it starts with simply a bass, to which is added a symbol, to which is added a strumming guitar, to which is added an electric lead guitar, to which is added vocals. It builds to a climax slowly, and then they take apart each element of the song, one at a time, until only the bass is left again with a lingering, exploring lead electric guitar. Then then the symbols get gradually faster, and the snare returns, and guitars get epic again, and the song opens up the sky. It existed between reality and dreams for me. I imagined myself slowly leaving the ground. “You say, 'It's a good thing / That you float in the air (in the air) / That way there's no way / I will crush your pretty / Toenails into a thousand pieces.' “ This song was the essence of my dream girl, the one who I would come to answer all questions and lead me to salvation in the world of dreams. "She's in the air (in the air) / in between molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide." I would put my discman on “repeat 1” and fall asleep to this song. Every night for a two and a half years.

"But when we wake / it's all been erased. And so it seems / Only in Dreams."