0.51.0 - Tell me, am I right to think that there could be nothing better?
In the early 2000s somewhere in Mexico, while studying for her PhD, Catherine met a fellow languages and culture student named Quent, a young gay man from Texas with a fierce love of social causes and civil rights. Quent hailed from West Texas near the town of St David, just near the McDonald Observatory - a place where in the early 2000s being an out, vocal, and socially liberal activist wasn't an easy road to travel. He became Catherine's treasured friend, and when she returned to the UK they exchanged letters and packages regularly, including CD's full of music each thought the other would like. Until Quent tragically took his own life in 2007, this cultural exchange informed a significant portion of Catherine's music listening. Somewhere, on one of those early silver compact discs with the handwritten inlays was The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, a song which stuck with Catherine, and informed a deep love of the song, and the album which spawned it, following Quent's passing.
In 2004 I was working at the University of Sheffield in a job where I was both comfortable, annoyed, underpaid, and with a growing dissatisfaction for the whole affair. I'd sit in my office and work and browse the SomethingAwful.com forums, a kind of proto-Reddit, and as part of that I found a community of others from across the world doing the same thing, and bonded with them over our shared dumb hobbies. Before I fell into playing online games of Mafia/Werewolf* repeatedly, I met several people online though the medium of playing then-obscure Games Workshop fantasy board game Blood Bowl using the Fumbbl online client. One of those people, unaware of the profound effect he would have on my life, was a software engineer from Seattle called Zach who went by the username AbeVigoda, and with whom - amongst several other people including now-Youtube Blood Bowl influencer cKnoor and my friend Tom who I have known for more than 20 years at this point through this extremely unlikely connection - I would spend the day chatting on IRC, a primitive messaging client, about stuff. I, of course, talked about music a lot.
One day I was talking with Zach about our respective music tastes and he asked me "Do you like shoegaze?". I didn't know what shoegaze was in the context of the question, but insecure and not wanting to appear uncool I faked some kind of vaguely affirmative answer. The channels FTP server notification lit up, and a .zip file of mp3s was sent in my direction. "You should listen to this," Zach told me, speaking what would be in hindsight a massive understatement into being, "I think you'll like it."
On the 18th of December 2007, 18 years ago tomorrow as I write this, I had my first date with Catherine, in the front lobby bar of the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield, having corresponded online briefly** after I'd been through a pair of fairly disastrous online dates in the prior month. I don't remember much about what we talked about, I was distracted through much of the date by the fact that the zip on my jeans had broken after I'd been to the bathroom and I spent the entire second half of the date trying desperately to disguise the fact that my fly was open throughout, but I do know we talked about music, a little, just the basics. I don't remember if The Postal Service came up on that date, or one of our dates the following January after I hounded her for a second date after the Christmas holidays (which I spent alone in my crappy flat, giving me plenty of time to harass her via friendly text message), but our mutual appreciation of this album, the fact that she had heard of it and could talk with passion about the music and what it meant to her and where it had come from gave me confidence that this might be a person who's particularly brand of crazy might be a good match for my own.
There probably isn't an album I've listened to more often, in its entirety, with one other person than this one. Some couple have a song, we have this, the one and only album from a music producer and the frontman for Death Cab For Cutie, an album created by a small group of people mailing physical cassettes of music across the US until something incredible emerged from it.
This film messed me up. Do not watch it.
It wasn't just the way the album intersected with and exploded out my particular neurosis though; that was just the turn of the key, the foot in the mental door. I'd sit motionless and listen to the album from start to finish as I'd feel the distance, the echo, the feeling of hopeless doomed romanticism on Brand New Colony and the creation of an illusion of a relationship long dead in Clark Gable, and the obliviousness to that failure in Nothing Better. This is an album of fear, one of doubt, of being trapped in excess and trapped in isolation, and echo down a distant hallway of someone, somewhere, having a better time than you.
Either side of that exploration of the cold, the empty, the desperate and the cynical comes Such Great Heights and Natural Anthem; the first professing a profound unwillingness to let anything, any of the fear or doubt or isolation tether you away from a moment of joy, a relationship you truly believe in. The second, a propulsive electronic track that builds and builds before it reaches its apex, eight lines of lyrics filled with a sense of righteous anger. Natural Anthem itself is my favourite song from this, my favourite album; it reminds me of another sensational electronica album closer, The Private Psychadelic Reel from The Chemical Brother's Dig Your Own Hole; but Natural Anthem is no journey into your own mind. It's an escape, frantic and powerful and liberating, something profound and seemingly impossible with such frenzied electronic sounds. It's a masterpiece, just writing about it made me put it on and sit, eyes closed for five minutes while I let it wash over me again.
The day spent at the All Points East festival that summer was incredible, perfect. We ate delicious food at an Indian restaurant in Shoreditch, wandered the streets far from the crowded city centre and found cool shops and cooler bars; and we spent the afternoon watching Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney and The Decemberists put on excellent performances. When Death Cab came out to perform the entirety of Transatlanticism, I would already have been happy; but when the final strains of A Lack of Colour faded away, and Death Cab left the stage, I felt every part of me start to vibrate with anticipation.
There were tens of thousands of people around us, in front of that stage, in that park in London. When the first chords of The District Sleeps Alone Tonight rang out, it could have just been us two, alone on that field of grass, transfixed by the stage. I've talked several times and at length about the power of live music, but this was beyond that, a chance to see an album that has been my constant companion for twenty years, which I'd written off any chance of ever seeing performed live, on a summer evening with a woman who had become my whole life, and for whom the album has equally potent significance was beyond anything I could have hoped for. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my arms rippled with goosebumps, tears filled my eyes***. We stood and danced and sang and wrapped ourselves in the music for the forty-five minutes the album runs for, and then it was over, a single perfect moment locked forever in my memory.
There wasn't any other album I could have picked for my 1,000th album of the year.
I don't want to eulogise this project here, just yet. There are two weeks left, and I'm already at 1005/1000 as I type this. I've got about 200 albums to write something about on this blog now the pressure has eased and the race has been run. Doing this has been a delight, a journey, an exploration and I don't intend to write the final chapter of this book, and my feelings about it, until all the work has been done.
For the people reading this, thank you for being there for any part of it. As midlife crises go, its probably been the least harmful one I could have had, and its honestly done a great deal to reinforce and reawaken my love of new music which had been dulled by the insidious power of The Algorithm. I don't know if and when I will have more time to write for the rest of this year - in two days time, I get to take two weeks of work which I have social activities and much-needed mental hibernation breaks taking up much of my calendar - but I wanted to thank you all for being along for this ride, even if its not going to reach a full and complete stop for a couple of months or so yet.
Keep listening to new music. Ask someone, anyone to give you a list of albums, take them, and actually make a point of hearing and digesting them. Have a good holiday, a safe New Year, and I'll see you in 2026, if we make it that far.
I love you.
* aka The Traitors I guess, its a social deduction game with a hundred names.
** I operated on the principle in internet dating that once you had exchanged a couple of messages you should meet in person - no point in being afraid to commit to that step once you've established that you're not a creep enough for them to meet you in the first place.
*** Not that significant really, I am a notoriously easy person to make tear up.
**** I also knew that as a result, Album number 2 would be Taylor Swifts Reputation because New Years Day is on there, which meant I could aim to listen to Evermore in December as my 999th album as well.
