Songs of Our Lives: Stereolab’s “Pause”
“Pause,” like the nostalgia it references, possesses the qualities of ceremony. My ceremony: I played and replayed this song that year, transforming past into present into past over and over.
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Joshua Harmon
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Joshua Harmon is the author of five books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including most recently The Annotated Mixtape and History of Cold Seasons. He will publish two chapbooks in the next year: Usonian Vistas and Outtakes, B-Sides, & Demos, in which this essay appears.
Songs of Our Lives: A Certain Ratio’s “All Night Party”
Even the girl busted for drunk driving before she was even old enough to get her license seemed impressed: “You and your parties! You guys are just crazy.”
Songs of Our Lives: Look Blue Go Purple’s “Circumspect Penelope”
Distance always seduced me—distance from whatever was most familiar, especially myself—but the difficulties in achieving such remove vexed me.
Albums of Our Lives: Three Songs from the Pixies’s Surfer Rosa
Halloween afternoon, my senior year of high school. At the end of the school day, shadows already stretch from the huge white pines near Newton Square.
SONGS OF OUR LIVES: THE CAPTAIN AND TENNILLE’S “LOVE WILL KEEP US TOGETHER”
These songs became the soundtrack to my primordial memories not because I liked them, not because my parents necessarily liked them, but simply because one of my parents had turned on the radio
Songs of Our Lives: The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” and Unrest’s “Teenage Suicide”
I could never imagine that a single spring night in my teenage years would be the best my life would offer me
SONGS OF OUR LIVES: JOY DIVISION’S “LOVE WILL TEAR US APART”
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.
