Blind Hunger, Black Bodies, and Radiohead’s In Rainbows
I’ve seen it coming. This is where it passes through.
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Posts Tagged: Albums of Our Lives
Songs of Our Lives: “Off to War”
This is fault-line music, dangerous in an unassuming way.
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Albums of Our Lives: As Cities Burn’s Come Now Sleep
Most often, I do not speak when I am alone. That morning I sat on the couch and said Oh my God. I said it aloud, again and again, Oh my God.
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Albums of Our Lives: Mister Loveless’s Grow Up
These golden years, precious and ephemeral, are falling in pieces at your feet everywhere you turn, and part of you thinks, let them. You almost wish, despite yourself, for this all to just go faster.
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Albums of Our Lives: Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight
Something about the twangy banjo and the melancholy vocals just made me feel less alone. And I hated being alone.
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Albums of Our Lives: Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity
Regardless of where or how I listen to the CD, I can still imagine myself in the car’s passenger seat, smell Tim’s cologne, or see the sun setting in a mix of fiery colors beyond us.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
When I first heard Brian Sella’s sweet, pathetic voice sing these words, they seared a sense of guilt into me.
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Albums of Our Lives: Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac
In her voice, I am held, cradled even. I am equal parts longing and hope. I am home.
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Albums of Our Lives: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade
The summer before my final year at college, my fear started to manifest as an anxiety disorder specializing in sickness and disease.
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Albums of Our Lives: Scissor Sisters’s Night Work
Night Work is a queer sonic fantasia soaked heavy in the 1980s.
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Albums of Our Lives: Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports
I drifted off and dreamed that Emily and I donned riding hoods and ran through the forest to escape from wolves.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree
I knew if I could make it out of town, make it to college, I would survive. But I wasn’t sure I would.
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Albums of Our Lives: Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City
Could the idea of a god be reconciled with the things I saw around me? This question obsessed me in my last month in Cambodia.
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Albums of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs
“Annie Waits” summed me up in ways that I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time and not only because Annie was my childhood nickname.
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Albums of Our Lives: Beck’s Odelay
A friend once showed me his dad’s copy of the Beatles’s White Album and said you could find secret messages hidden in the lyrics. I tried to look for the same things in Odelay, but it resisted.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Cure’s Disintegration
The end is always tragic. I’d known that from the start. What kind of sucker would expect to hold on to a girl named Misty Hayes?
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Albums of Our Lives: Guided by Voices’s Alien Lanes
For me, Bob Pollard became a messiah of the creative life, urging me forward for many years to come, in my new, somewhat shabby but inspired career.
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Albums of Our Lives: The National’s High Violet
I wanted to feel sheltered under the cathedral of his voice, to feel, always, the way his songs made me feel.
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Albums of Our Lives: Les Savy Fav’s Go Forth
It’s one of those records I’ve glued to a pedestal, like people do with torrid weekend affairs or their favorite dish at Denny’s.
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Albums of Our Lives: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm
We could hear the muffled roar of the show booming through the walls of the historic building. We were drunk, pretending to be music writers. We were giddy with our trespass.
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Albums of Our Lives: Björk’s Debut
Music is the ultimate consolation for reality’s letdowns (like being thirteen and still firmly living in the realm of childhood). I would listen to “Venus as a Boy” on repeat in my bedroom, curtains drawn, and imagine Allan’s face, his arms, his chest, his body.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Diana Whitney reviews Cynthia Cruz’s poetry collection, Wunderkammer, meaning “cabinet of curiosities.” This is a book of “delicious… detail.” Cruz’s poems, Whitney declares, “have a wry sense of humor that tempers the traumas they reveal.” The poet, who was born in Germany, transports readers from Berlin to upstate New York, from death to madness […]
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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.
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Albums of Our Lives: Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads’ Rock Immortal
The driving force of the album is the character Dory Tourette, part invented alter ego, part self-mythologized caricature of frontman Dory Ben-Shalom…
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Albums of Our Lives: Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism
When I heard Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism it was the first time I remember seeing sounds, understanding stories told to me set to music.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Counting Crows’ August and Everything After
A few days before we left a life in New York, my then-husband drove home drunk from a bar in the Bronx
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Albums of Our Lives: Hole’s Celebrity Skin
1. The car I drove when I was 20 smelled like rain. When it stormed, the passenger side floor filled with a puddle so deep I’d have to bail it out with a folded floor mat. When I drove faster than 60, it shuddered. None of this bothered me. What drove me crazy was the […]
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Songs of Our Lives: Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “The Inflated Tear”
I decided that I had to write a book about him. I would track down everyone who knew him while they were still alive, I would collect their stories of him in the hopes of preserving Rashaan’s legacy.
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Albums of Our Lives: Moxy Früvous’s Bargainville
What did I turn to when I needed to channel my frustration with this corporatized Republican state against which I could only kick my small angry feet? The music of Gen-Xers from another country.
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Albums of Our Lives: Dan Zanes’ Rocket Ship Beach
Our music collection was unassailable until I became pregnant with my first daughter.
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