Remember that time

I have seen dozens of concerts in my life. In fact, I have seen nearly all of my favourite bands in concert. There was the Something Corporate concert, when Jes’ dad drove us to Montreal and I got to touch Andrew and I shouted for Konstantine and the crowd got quiet for nine and a half minutes. There was the Bright Eyes concert, hundreds of emo kids staring at the stage with a hunger in their eyes as if hoping somehow they’d find meaning. There was Death Cab for Cutie, where we stood in the mosh pit and watched people cry. Green Day, the day I almost died when I got moshed away. Good Charlotte on a rainy day, when we loved Good Charlotte because we were young and angry and we had signs that said I love you, Benji. There was Sarah Slean and a piano, a free show and only a few dozen other people there and I sat in the front row by myself and smiled like an idiot. Amy Millan at the Roisin Dubh in Galway, where she asked me to sign Calendar Girl with her but I was too drunk and I’ll regret it forever. All American Rejects, Jimmy Eat World, Our Lady Peace, Barenaked Ladies, Emily Haines, Tegan and Sara, Brand New. Somehow, it has worked out that I got to see my most important bands at the times I loved them most.

You went into the kitchen cupboard
Got yourself another hour
And you gave half of it to me

With those words, the Regina Spektor concert that I’d taken the train to Manchester to see started. A girl, a piano, a cello, a violin and a drummer. And about 3000 people of all types, all clearly in love with Regina, maybe even more than myself.

It was amazing to hear her live. She was perfect, exactly like the recordings. She played some of my favourite songs, and my absolute favourite song. But she didn’t talk. Not except to say “Thank you. Thanks very much.” I think at one point she said “Hello, Manchester.”

I’m not used to this. I wasn’t expecting this. Regina, shy? The girl who sings Mary Ann and Remember That Time? Her songs are so personal, so raw and so weird sometimes, I thought she would be the same playful, outgoing person on stage.

After the concert we went outside to be fan girls and wait by her tour bus. The girls standing there said she’d already come out and gone into her bus. She didn’t stop to talk to them because she was cold, she said. It was cold. I know, I had to wait an hour and a half to get in before the show. And then I waited another hour outside that bus to get an autograph.

The British girl said she’d seen the last two shows and was going to tomorrow’s as well. Chandra and I huddled closer, we could no longer feel our toes. The crowds slowly died out, caught the bus or a taxi and went home. Only about twenty of us stuck it out. I thought for sure she’d come out and say hi when there were only a few of us.

After over an hour, we watched the tour bus drive away, and I never got my autograph.

I was cold and disappointed. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to see a Regina concert again. Her music means so much to me, it would have been amazing if she’d bothered even just to come out and wave. Tell us that she was too cold, but thanks for coming. Thanks for paying for her warm tour bus while we freeze our asses off outside.

Don’t get me wrong, the concert was amazing. Her music is beautiful. But there’s more to a performance than singing well or playing a piano. There’s an aspect of connecting with your fans. It’s the reason they spend so much money to see you. It’s the reason you have a job at all.

I hope she was just having a bad day, because I definitely lost a little bit of my love for Regina in Manchester last week.

I remember the sound…

I can see my breath in the air as my gloved hands fumble for the play button. I’m indoors, if you can call the space between two rusted and dented white sheets of metal indoors, but it will take over half an hour for the slow and chugging heat to fill the car. By that time, I’ll almost be home. For now, I have a hat, gloves and a new mix CD to keep me warm.

The first few bars fill the car as I pull out of the parking lot. Already, I can feel myself relaxing, easing into the sense of rightness that this song instantly creates in me. I have never listened to it before but it feels like I have been hearing it my whole life. Of course it exists. So perfect, it fills my heart and head and leaves me unable to imagine the time, short minutes ago, before I’d heard it.

How pale is the sky that brings forth the rain
As the changing of seasons prepares me again
For the long bitter nights and the wild winter’s day
My heart has grown cold, my love stored away…

Over the next four years, I would listen to the CD hundreds of times. I would cycle through relationships with each song, love and boredom interchangeably. Always changing with my mood, with my age, with my life. But two songs would remain, too perfect to fade.

And every time I hear those chords I’m taken back to that cold December day, shivering in the old Sunfire we lovingly called Blanche, my soul melting into the piano, violin and Allison Krauss’ beautiful voice. My heart hooked on each word that told it’s own story.

I remember. I remember the sound of November and December, the melancholy created by that time of year, a juxtaposition of holiday joy and sadness. I remember a 5am bus to Toronto, watching the rain against the window. I remember the first lines of a song.

I should know who I am by now
I walk the record stand somehow
Thinking of winter
The name is the splinter inside me, while I wait…

I should know who I am by now. The words haunt me still. Each year I’m brought back to this song and the fact that I do not know. I remember thinking that I was following that path, on the road to figuring it out. Who I am. What I want. Where I belong.

This November I feel even further from this. The song has changed again, and it is now a dull ache reminding me that I have not gotten far on this journey, that I’ve been derailed or detoured or taken too many breaks and now I’m too late. Or that maybe I was going the wrong way all along and I’m not even close anymore.

The first song is Get Me Through December by Allison Krauss, the second is Winter by Joshua Radin. The mix CD, which I call the December CD, was a gift from my Dad and remains one of my favourite presents ever.

Far away

She’s packed up her bags, she’s heading out
She says, “I know that I’m ready,”
With such beautiful doubt.

Here’s where I wax poetic about distances and the spaces between. With a few steps, a car ride, a transatlantic flight, I leave behind the place I have lived for 22 years. I leave behind what I thought I knew for something I want to know. I exchange dollars for pounds, boxes for suitcases. I exchange endings for beginnings, the minute the plane leaves the ground.

My suitcases are too heavy to lift comfortably. No doubt I’ll struggle to pull them off the baggage claim, and someone will have to help me before I either fall over or knock someone out. My head is a storm of conflicting worry and excitement. No doubt I’ll hesitate at the gate, doubt myself and my plans.

The feeling of anticipation has been keeping me awake. I haven’t slept more than the bare minimum in two weeks. There’s too much to do, too much to think about.

And when I take my seat on the airplane, I’ll lean back and daydream as the plane lifts off. I’ll feel all of the doubt and worry fade away and leave behind only the excitement. With my headphones on, I’ll give my journey a soundtrack to be proud of. Leaving songs. Love songs. Life.

And by tomorrow I’ll be in England. And cold.

Far away far away, I want to go far away.
To a new life on a new shore line.
Where the water is blue and the people are new.
To another island, in another life.

Far

You know when you love an artist, but you haven’t liked them long enough that you’ve been around for a new CD release? You download/buy/steal everything that they did up until that point and anxiously await the new.

And then somehow their new stuff just isn’t good enough to live up to your expectations?

It’s happened to me so many times and so I was worried about the new Regina Spektor CD, Far. What if I hated it? Regina Spektor, to me, is God.

Luckily, I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. It came out yesterday and it’s just as wonderful as I wanted it to be.

Man of a Thousand Faces

Listening to Regina Spektor is an intense experience for me. Like reading a good book, it takes me time to think about it and process it. I once listened to Braille on repeat for an entire day. I’ve been known to put Samson on repeat too.

So far, my favourite of her new songs are Calculations and One More Time with Feeling. But I rediscover Regina songs, new and old, all the time.

Hold on, one more time with feeling.
Try it again, breathing’s just a rhythm.
Say it in your mind until you know that the words are right,
This is why we fight.

I’m too sexy for this song

After my posts about Old Soul Songs and Travelling Songs, I’ve decided another category needs to be added: Sexy Songs.

By Sexy Songs I don’t mean those trashy scantily clad, barely veiled come-on songs that people like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson specialize in. No, I mean songs whose lyrics are truly sexy. Let me start with, of course, a Regina Spektor song.

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
He told me I was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light
And he told me that I’d done alright
and kissed me till the morning light, the morning light
and he kissed me till the morning light

-Samson, Regina Spektor

Samson is quite possibly one of the sexiest songs I’ve ever heard, though at first it seems to be mostly sad. At first you think it’s just about love, but it’s about more than that. Like the story it references, it’s about disarming someone with sex (or love, or both). Mostly, it’s about that weakness that is such a part of being in love, the vulnerability. It’s about why someone like Samson loves someone like Delilah, and why she betrays him. And why he loves her still. It’s about even the greatest hero being weakened by love. And sex. I thought this song was innocent at first, but it quickly became obvious that it’s not at all.

I remember when the days were long
and the nights when the living room was on the lawn.
Constant quarreling the childish fits
and our clothes in a pile on the ottoman.
All the slander and double speak were only foolish attempts
to show you did not mean,
anything but the blatant proof was your lips touching mine in the photobooth.

-Photobooth, Death Cab for Cutie

I’ve mentioned at least once before that I think Death Cab for Cutie makes the sexiest music. There’s something about the soft nostalgic tone to their songs that makes me want to make out with people under trees in suburban parks, that makes me want to kiss someone in a photobooth, go skinny dipping and have sex in the back seat of a car. Death Cab for Cutie is first loves and fumbling hands and sweet kisses and it makes my heart warm. Also, kissing someone in a photobooth remains one of my life’s goals, no matter how 16 it sounds.

Kiss me too fiercely, hold me too tight
I need help believing you’re with me tonight
My wildest dreamings could not foresee
Lying beside you with you wanting me

And just for this moment, as long as you’re mine
I’ve lost all resistance and crossed some borderline
And if it turns out it’s over too fast
I’ll make every last moment last
As long as you’re mine

- As Long As You’re Mine, Wicked

There’s a lot that’s sexy about Wicked. And not just visions of Taye Diggs as Fiyero. This song is the ultimate meaningful one night stand song, I guess. It captures not the love but the intense physical attraction of Fiyero and Elphaba. Because the whole show Elphaba is supposed to be ugly, wicked. And here, Fiyero not only loves her but wants her, despite her not having a “blithe smile, lithe limb” and “gold hair with a gentle curl” like Glinda.

Where I go, when I go there,
No more whispering anymore-
Only hymns upon your lips;
A mystic wisdom, rising with them, to shore…
Touch me - just like that.
And that - oh, yeah -now, that’s heaven.
Now, that I like.
God that’s so nice.
Now lower down, where the figs lie…

[...]

Touch me - all silent.
Tell me - please - all is forgiven.
Consume my wine.
Consume my mind.
I’ll tell you how, how the winds sigh…
Touch me - just try it.
Now there - that’s it - God that’s heaven.
Touch me.
I’ll love your light.
I’ll love you right…
We’ll wander down, where the sins lie…

-Touch Me, Spring Awakening

Okay, so there isn’t much about Spring Awakening that isn’t sexy. I mean, it’s about sex. And they have sex on stage. Honestly, this show is very sexy (is it wrong that I think that considering they’re supposed to be teenagers…?). All the same, this song is beautiful. With the underlying chorus that the girls sing, while the boys fantasize. It’s enchanting and definitely captures that confusingly intense physical urge of teenagehood that the show is all about.

I’ll finish with one verse from one of my favourite Something Corporate songs that inspired this entire post:

But the driveway’s clear
You pray for silence
Step into my quiet violence
She smiles, taking off her shirt
Standing still, this world moves faster
On her back my next disaster
You’re gonna get what you deserve

-Letters to Noelle, Something Corporate

“She smiles, taking off her shirt” is definitely one of the sexiest lines yet. I don’t know, why exactly, but it seems as if it’s capturing an intimate memory in the writers (Andrew’s…?) relationship with ‘Noelle.’ You know that one perfect moment you think about for years after the relationships over? I think that smile is it for him.