Hello friends. For my last big act of Year of Commitment, I am spending the last 100 days writing 100 stories. They’re, so far, all little snippets of memories of a life. Here’s story number three, about music which has been on my mind.
Summer 2023 was a weird time. The first, and last summer I spent back home after high school. I got a job as a dishwasher, which served me well enough. It paid for the gas, and copious CDs I bought. There’s not much to do back home, you see…
The summer started off royally evil when, driving home from a summer solstice party, on a grass-smelling night, I crashed into and killed a deer. When I walked back up the road, flashlight in hand, it was gone. Scary, but what was scarier was how I kept seeing that deer all summer long. Around every blind corner my headlights could not reach. In the precious, hometown relationship I enjoyed before we really knew how far we were going to make it. And, crucially, every single time I drove at night. Those sweltering night when the animals come out.
Life fell into a tired rhythm, driving to and from work nightly. I did it probably 115 times. On the way back, I had no comfort except my many CDs. As per usual Jude habits, I listened exclusively to a genre and stuck only to those CDs. My only companions through the dark night, when sacrificial calves would gather by the guardrails to get me. I never hit another deer that summer, but came pretty close, and owe my luck to those CDs. Spiritually, or whatever, I can’t help but feel like they protected me. Today I call them my night music.
The ultimate night music staple is Magnolia Electric Co., chiefly “The Big Game is Every Night.” That one is special and scary. Just behind Molina’s wailing comes Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. Their album Painful is also heralded among the night music hall of fame.
Finally is Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin, a gift from my mom. She got it when she was a teenager in the midst of 1980s Satanic Panic. Back when rock and rollers were worse than the devil. Her story always made the album feel especially ghostly to me, not to mention the fact that she found it in an abandoned house.
Yeah, that was a weird time.