The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
Before someone spilled Hi-C on it during a hot Iowa summer and my car window fixed sunlight into its silky black innards, warping Steve Earle’s voice into that of a sexually beleaguered chipmunk, that tape drove me through a lot.
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The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.
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We all had braces. When we smiled or laughed, we flashed steel and colored rubber bands. We shared a language.
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The news of Jason Molina’s death came to me in a storm. I was about to teach a class when I saw the first posts announcing that he was gone.
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It was a cassette copy with no case, and my dad gave it to me a couple of years after he’d moved out. I was about nine. I knew enough about the album to yelp “This is priceless!” as I ran to my bedroom.
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It begins with an act of divine intervention. “God reached his hand down from the sky,” sings Hutch Harris.
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She drew cartoon sketches of herself. I sent more mix-tapes. Within a few months, in the middle of a five- or six-page letter, she wrote that she loved me.
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The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.
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The only thing that could put me back right was a long walk in the cold along the Danube, with Peter Gabriel singing in my ear.
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Elizabeth and I took our first road trip a few months into our relationship. As the miles went by on the interstate, I changed CDs
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We listened to the album straight through. When it finished I looked at my hands. I’d kept them balled tightly for all forty-five minutes.
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When I first heard Hickey’s Various States of Disrepair I knew I’d found what I’d been looking for. The only problem was, I’d found it too late.
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I must have heard about Liz Phair from Sassy Magazine, my go-to and, really, only source for anything remotely counter-culture in the early ‘90s.
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Both hands, please use both hands. Oh no, don’t close your eyes. I am writing graffiti on your body. I am drawing the story of how hard we tried.
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I was fourteen when Strange Little Girls was released and I was fifteen when my parents decided to separate.
I didn’t know Whitney Houston, and yet there I was, weeping. I’d read the Tweets, watched the videos, and re-posted a video of her singing “I’m Changing” live from when she was very young and so pretty that it remains almost painful to look at her, even now after all these years.
Boys For Pele came out around the time I lost my virginity. This was a very sensitive time in my life, because I knowingly had bad sex with a more experienced partner, and my failure to give her any pleasure resulted in her leaving me for her older, handsomer, and cooler ex-boyfriend who threatened to kick my ass after I obsessively called her dozens of times.
I was 19 years old when I first witnessed the achingly beautiful sounds of Fred and Toody Cole and Andrew Loomis. They were called Dead Moon.
make me young again / make me well
When I listen to the Mountain Goats I always hear traveling—a ceaseless forward momentum.
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It’s Christmas morning, 2001 and I’m fifteen. I unwrap a record player, but am more immediately captivated by the record collection that comes with it.
Joni Mitchell’s Blue may have been released one summer seven years before I was born, but it’s a winter album that conjures memories of me, my mom and my little sister.
1. Love Letter
I experienced my first categorically bisexual three-way—a completely unexpected yet unforgettable coming-of-age story—when I was 15.
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Of the many adjectives one would use to describe me—some might even be positive—sexy would not be one of them.
His loneliness lay around me like a fence. The promise was that once I solved the loneliness the fence would dissipate. But I couldn’t solve it.
He sounds so young on the recordings now. After all, he was young when he wrote most the songs.
My first revelation was in a car, a rusted but strong 1985 Toyota Camry I bought from a friend’s older brother for 500 bucks.
Sometimes the boy you love introduces you to the man you fall in love with. The boy and the man are not the same person. This is not intentional.
I refused to listen to the B-side. This was, I guess, an extension or reflection of the poverty of those years after leaving my marriage and buying the 10 Willie Nelson records at a small town Goodwill store for 10 cents each– a kind of hoarding of every meager resource, like the unopened cans of beans, moved from kitchen to kitchen, state to state.
