The Musical Anthology

[Puncture Repair]

I think music has a unique ability to very deeply weave into our lives, as songs are perhaps the most powerful tool at bringing back vivid memories, or emotions you associate with past times. Sometimes it feels good to share how a song makes you feel, so what if we could create a living and on-going documentation, story book or anthology of those vivid moments in your life, that a song will always remind you of.

Note: It is extremely important that you only post your stories, and not comments on other people's writing. While you are more than welcome to reference other people's posts in your writing, you post must be a recollection of what a song reminds you of. I want this thread to not necessarily be something discussed, but something that be opened, read, and then put down, like a real book.

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Perils From The Sea by Mark Kozelek &am...my Lavalle

Song: What Happened To My Brother

Late November, last year. Rehearsals for my school production would go on until late, sometimes 7pm. I enjoyed it - I love acting - but there was a lot of my mind at that time. Studying for my A-Levels, especially the second year, was a lot of hard work. Coming back home into the late evening to spend the few hours I had left to study was exhausting, and I was lucky if I could find an hour of spare time. My spare time was often the walk home - half an hour to plug myself in and listen to music as I walked through the middle of town. At this time of year, it was cold, cold and dark. That walk was something of a ritual for me, I especially loved tying up my Doc Martens tight so they felt secure and comfortable and putting my grey pea-coat on over my suit jacket, then stepping into the evening. I'd heard Perils of The Sea maybe a couple of times before, and I was excited to give it another listen. Walking through the park I couldn't see anything unless a car drove past and have their headlights run past the trees. But as I stepped into town there was something special about hearing the twinkling electronic sounds, and the humility of Kozelek's voice while walking through the street lights, shop signs and passing cars. The song also plays at a perfect walking pace. I'd also said goodbye to my brother a couple of months earlier, as he left home. Perhaps my longest and closest friend, it was strange not being able to return home and talk with him over dinner. I found the song very relatable in that regard, as though the song was a recollection of my own future - as Kozelek describes how special and close his brother was to him, it reminded me a lot of how I see my brother now. But as my older brother left me I also felt a lot more independent, it might also be because he left not long before my eighteenth birthday. I felt, maybe, more alone when I walked home, but I also felt more sure of who I was. Returning home after the walk, where your face stings from the warmth as you enter the front door, and you can smell the paint on the radiator warming the air, were the signs that it wouldn't be long until my head would meet the pillow. My brother wouldn't be in the room next to me, but I finished listening to Perils of the Sea that evening, and poured myself a glass of the whiskey I'd bought on my birthday - as far as I'm concerned, that's the next best thing.

[Kiki]

Song: Time to Waste

Reminds me of Christmas morning 2005. Got this album and Resident Evil 4 for the Gamecube. Played it my room most of the morning but soon had to go to my nans for Christmas dinner. Didn't bring Gamecube and had to watch The Snowman and that super long film about conferdate civil war something. It's on every year and I haven't watched more than half an hour in one sitting. Anyway, this song reminds me of a time when music was so simple. It was new. New things are good.

[Kiki]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Album: From Under The Cork Tree

Song: Nobody Puts Baby In The Corner

In my tiny bedroom which I used to have. Should be revising for my GCSEs, instead I have Burnout 3 on. Soundtrack is brilliant and found many great artists there (Rise Against, Sugarcult and Go Betty Go) and feel very optomistic. Sometimes I put on the Fall Out Boy album instead and this was my favorite song off it at the time. It's sunny outside but curtains are drawn. Made of a thin red material and in turn gives the whole room a red glow. I got my first mobile phone for my birthday as well the Dangerdoom album. Never have albums which blow my mind like that these days. Music is still very fun although I am not enjoying it as much as I should. Shun a lot of stuff. Remeber pretending I was Pete Wentz on a forum later in the day. Msn was also one of the best things ever back then and I would get lots of contacts I didn't even though. In fact any Fall Out Boy song off the Cork Tree has memories.

[Kiki]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Album: Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005

Song: Spitfire

First time I had independence. Getting up in the morning by myself Washing and going out. Something about hearing music from a distance has always appealed to me. It's like light shining through the gaps of the curtains. Only certain parts can be heard. Like being in an apartment in some late 80s movie with a wind up radio playing good morning type songs. This song brings me back to a morning when I had a little more imagination and optimism.

[zdwyatt]

"Fade Into You" from So Tonight That I Might See by Mazzy Star

It was 1994, freshman year of high school. As was often the case, I had fallen asleep to MTV. In that dreamlike state between wakefulness and sleeping, I heard it for the first time. I missed the title card, and only vaguely remembered the video the next morning. I tried to describe it to my friends to no avail. "There's a girl. And they're in the desert. On a train maybe?" It didn't help that the both the video and the song have a dreamlike quality.

I was sure it would come on again, but a week went by and I was no closer to solving the mystery. I was beginning to think I had actually dreamed it. I tried to piece together fragments of this beautiful song on my guitar, but I couldn't remember any of the words. The best I could manage was a rough approximation of the melody from the chorus. I played it for everyone who would listen, and not a single person recognized it.

It was devastating. I had heard a perfect song and it was gone.

Then, one day, my brother called from his room. "Hey, this kinda sounds like your guitar song." I ran down the hall and heard it coming from his radio. The song came flooding back into my brain, all the gaps in my memory filling in all at once. I was on the verge of tears, as much from relief as from the song itself. Even now, I get an overwhelming sense of calm when I hear it.

[benpaco]

Song: RE:Stacks

It was Monday July 11, 2011, some time between 7 and 9 PM. I was eating cookies and watching HOUSE MD on the USA Network, for the very first time seeing the House's Head/Wilson's Heart episodes. The episodes as a whole are intellectual and incredible, but Wilson's Heart uses some of the best music on any single episode of any television show ever. One especially striking example is the use of RE:Stacks in a moment I won't spoil because everyone should watch those 2 episodes, you don't really need to have seen the rest of the show, if you basically know who the characters are enough to know that House is heartless and Wilson is Watson, then you're good to go.

Anyways, this song played and I instantly ran upstairs to find the song as the show hit commercials. I pulled it up, hit pause, and ran back downstairs to catch the end of the episode, which uses Iron and Wine's "Passing Afternoon" (another song I found from this episode, as well as Jose Gonzales' cover of "Teardrop") The episode ended and I went upstairs, plugged in ear buds, and listened to the whole of RE:Stacks for the first time. And then hit repeat. And repeat. And repeat. I listened to that song for at least an hour, in an almost meditative trance.

At 9:54 I got back on my email and told the girl I was then pursuing about the song. Emma responded to me that she enjoyed the song, but liked that he had a song called "For Emma" even more. She added "You know it feels good to just have an open conversation with someone. Not caring about what anyone thinks. You know?"

That song brings me back to the simplest time in my life. Back to the days of being on Aviary, emailing the girl I liked, watching TV with my family, eating cookies. I do hope that the final sound to hit my ears some day is Justin's ending G chord into just silence.
_________________

. . . 2016 . . . 2015 . . .

Things I Make

[Kiki]

Album: Very

Song: Go West

Right when I younger I would spend a lot of nights after school at my nans house. Nan is the correct word for mother's mother as Gran is the correct for father's mother. Doing it any other way is wrong. Right I think mum was at the hospital again so I was playing with legos and plamobil on the living room floor. Well I would like to crush my plamobil men with bricks Like build houses on the floor. I had toy cars as well. They were in boxes big red ones. Well I have an uncle who wasn't very talkative with me at that age because children annoy him I think. Anyway he was still living there at the time (he lives down south in Brighten now). Well he had a bunch of cds in a cupboard thing which was no thrown away. The only album I remember from it was this album in a orange plastic sleeve. I also remembered the band name and imagined them hanging outside a pet shop with parots and rabbits in cages. Many years later I found myself liking the album a lot for a great deal of time. Because of Go West.

[Borve]

Karma by Pharoah Sanders

Song: The Creator Has a Master Plan

These days I have no interest in getting high, but once, due to inexperience, I thought it was sort of fascinating. So anyways, I once visited a friend, and we wanted to get high. We did not have anything to get high by, so we thought that maybe the stuff that's inside tea bags would work. So we spent two hours trying to create a bong in order for us to smoke tea. After two hours, we gave up on trying to create a bong. So instead we took a spoon and lit a candle, then filled the spoon with tea stuff, then held the spoon above the lit candle, so that the tea stuff would thrush out fumes or whatever, which we would then try to sniff with our noses. We thought we should be accompanied with some trippy music, so we decided that The Creator Has a Master Plan was the trippiest song in his iTunes, so we went with that. So the music went on while we snorted tea fumes. The end result was: I got seriously tired, and I ended up just lying on floor for I don't know how long. I don't know what the hell my friend ended up doing, but probably nothing too serious. I wonder if this experience might have damaged my brain, to tbh I think I'm pretty well

[SuedeSwede]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Hurtbreak Wonderland by World's End Girlfriend

Birthday Resistance

I could really pick any song from this album, but I chose this one. It happened today. I woke up at 1:30pm after staying up a bit too late the night before, and had that "you've just woken up late" mundane feeling. I didn't know what to do, so I put I'm Alan Partridge on Netflix and started watching a couple episodes of that. Mundane. I remembered listening to this album from the night before, and enjoyed it and thought I'd give it another spin. I put my headphones in and this second track comes on and suddenly a huge wave washes over me, I feel pure and overwhelmed by life. Everything good in my life flashes before me: happy memories of times in my life where I've felt significant and as if life is treating me well - staying in and watching films with a girl just because I'd rather do nothing but that, experiencing love for the first time and feeling my heart sink, getting the first conscious glimpse of another country for the first time - Paris - and being overwhelmed by the beauty it holds at the mere age of 7, and realising I have my whole life ahead of me to do exactly as much as I please. All these memories roll back at me and suddenly I feel more energised. This is my life, this is how I've chosen to live it. I couldn't be happier right now.
_________________

[Skinny]

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

Tango in the Night by Fleetwood Mac

Song: Everywhere

I've only ever been to Dorset once, and even then I didn't see much of it. Me and some friends had agreed to help an old friend of ours sell some tacos at a music festival - the guys who run the taco restaurant were both at a wedding that weekend, but had got their dates mixed up and paid (well, overpaid) for a pitch at Camp Bestival. They hadn't sold their tacos at a festival before, so this would be their first time. And neither of them could make it.

So it fell to my friend to run the stall for the weekend, and he'd sent out a plea on Facebook to try and get a few people to help out. It paid pretty well (£8 an hour), and I had nothing else to do that weekend, so me and a couple of other friends got in touch and said we'd help out. One of my friends even said he'd drive us there. What he hadn't mentioned was the reason he was so keen to drive - a girl he'd met at a festival earlier in the summer would also be there, working at the welfare tent. The other two of us basically got roped into covering pretty much all of his hours so that he could have sex the whole weekend. I didn't mind too much as I needed the money, but it did also mean that over the course of three days I worked 36 hours (I'd been expecting to do 24), basically cooking and selling tacos from 9am until 10pm all weekend, with an hour's break each day. It wouldn't have been too bad either, but for the fact that my friend was stressed because the stall was struggling to make its money back on the pitch (try selling two small, fiddly tacos for £6 to hungover punters at a festival when they can get a carbolicious naan bread stuffed full of chicken tikka at the stall next door for a fiver), and we basically had no time to enjoy ourselves. Being on your feet for 13 or 14 hours a day takes it out of you, and every night we were asleep by 2 or 3am in order to be up again at 7 or 8. Add in the fact that Camp Bestival's biggest selling point is that it's a family festival (by all accounts the most popular act of the weekend was Horrible Histories Live), and that all of us were basically broke until Monday (when we'd get paid), and it made for a pretty miserable time. I managed to see David Rodigan DJ his usual set of reggae-tinged crowdpleasers on the first night, and snuck off to watch the guy from Awesome Tapes From Africa play a chill-out set one afternoon, but besides that I saw nobody play any music. At a music festival.

And so by the last day we were all fucking exhausted and getting on each others' nerves (except for my one friend who had basically spent the weekend having sex and was thus the envy of everybody else). I worked the whole day, basically dead on my feet, and then helped clean-up after we finished selling. We tried to get back to our tents, but everywhere had been blocked off until the 'Fireworks Finale' had finished, meaning we were trapped in the arena, sweaty and knackered and stinking of tacos, surrounded by screaming kids who had stayed up far too late, not even able to go relax and have a can of beer or change our shirts. And then, of course, the 'Fireworks Finale' went on for twenty minutes, and finished with 'Bohemian Rhapsody', which many of you probably know is one of my least favourite songs ever. Seriously, fuck 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. If anything can put me in a bad mood, 'Bo Rap' is it, and I couldn't think of a worse situation in which to hear that song. When we were finally able to move, I stormed back to the tent, pissed off and tired, and told everybody I was going to bed. They tried to convince me to come and dance, that we'd actually done it, got through the festival in one piece. But I had no cash, no drugs, and about three cans of beer. It was cold and I just wanted to get the fuck out of Dorset.

Then, of course, the boss arrived. He'd been to the wedding, and had come to see how we'd got on. He thanked us all for helping out, offered to buy us drinks, and told us if we wanted any cocaine all we had to do was ask. And so I immediately perked up. We set off into the night, fighting past families trying to get their kids back to the tent, in search of music and booze. But, being a family festival, every stage had shut off at 11pm, apart from one tiny little shack that was blasting out the absolute worst in poppy electro and dubstep. The music was shit, but we had drugs, we had money, and we had alcohol, and so we made the most of it. We were all a little disheartened by the truly terrible selection of tunes, but we made a go of dancing to it anyway, occasionally laughing with each other about quite how bad the music was, and trying to get as hammered as possible as quickly as possible. My legs were aching but I just kept dancing. And then, as if by magic, that twinkling keyboard rose out of the noise like a mirage in the desert, and the DJ dropped 'Everywhere' by Fleetwood Mac. We, of course, went crazy, dancing like idiots and shouting along, and it all seemed strangely poignant. Even though we'd had a shit weekend, managed to see no music, eaten nothing but tacos (seriously, if I never see another taco again it'll be too soon), watched our friend bask in the glow of doing nowt but have sex for three days, had pretty much zero drink or drugs the whole time, I was still with some of my closest friends, and I did feel like we'd accomplished something together. I'd made about £300 in three days, we'd fed some middle class families, and now we were absolutely battered, shouting "I wanna be with you everywhere" at each other in a random field in fucking Dorset. I couldn't think of a better situation in which to hear that song. As long as you've got your mates there, anything's bearable. Even Fleetwood fucking Mac.
_________________
2021 in full effect. Come drop me some recs. Y'all know what I like.