End-of-year roundups were all the rage last month, as they are every December. All across the internet, as far as the eye could see, were piles and piles of lists - lists of the year's best books, best book jackets, best fake rumors, best companies to work for, best high schools, best Japanese phrases, least misogynistic rap lyrics, best movies, best tech products, best sports cars under $50,000, best adoption-friendly workplaces, and on and on and on. Many of these lists, of course, were about music - best albums, best songs, best releases within any number of genres and sub-genres - and this reminded me that sometimes I like to make up my own little list (in my head) of the best new albums I acquired over the past year. This year that's kind of difficult, though, partly because everything that happened before July happened in a previous life, and partly because everything that's happened since July has been filtered through what happened in July.
I did listen to lots of music in the second half of the year, however, probably for the same reason that I read lots of books: it enabled me to shut out the world and to burrow into someone else's feelings or ideas or moods for a while, and, through them, to burrow into my own. As I've mentioned, lots of the music I listen to is associated with Joey in some way - we had similar tastes and frequently discussed and shared music with one another - and so closely intertwined is my music with my brother that my iPod can barely shuffle through two or three of its (at the time of writing) 9,434 songs without prompting one Joey memory or another. Even music that has been released since July, music that he never had a chance to hear, can do this - either because it's something he would have liked, or it's from a band that he did like, or because the lyrics evoke him somehow, or something.
For the next few posts, I'd like to share a little of what I've been listening to over the past year, mostly the new stuff that I never had a chance to share with him but that nevertheless makes me think of him, and invite others to do the same in the comments section. This is not the music I play to escape - there's plenty of that, too - but the stuff I listen to when I want to reflect, cry, or sing very loudly, on my own, in my car.
The album that I've probably come back to more than any other is "High Violet" by The National. The album came out in May, but I didn't get it until July, and I never discussed it with Joey. In fact, I don't remember ever discussing The National with him, although I've been a big fan for a long time. They do broody, moody songs about failed dreams, urban alienation, and the reckless or paranoid behavior of people crippled with one variety of angst or another. Not exactly glee club material, then, but it's really not as dark as it sounds, either - there's just enough irony and self-mockery, in both their lyrics and their pose, to keep you from taking it all too seriously. The singer, Matt Berninger, sings in a languid, almost reluctant baritone that is so sophisticated and detached that it's like the rest of the band (made up of two sets of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf) is having to drag the words out of him - except when he drops the baritone and begins, briefly, to scream. When that happens it's both shocking and amusing, and it reminds me of the first time I watched Joey play football, when I saw my normally languid, sophisticated brother - from whom you usually had to drag absolutely everything - explode with such force and speed that I wondered if it was really him out there.
There aren't any screamy moments on the new National album, but there are many Joey moments, moments that evoke both his life and his death. There's the song "Anyone's Ghost," the refrain of which is simply
Didn't want to be your ghost
Didn't want to be anyone's ghost
and which contains the lines
Go out at night with your headphones on, again
And walk through the Manhattan valleys of, the dead.
Joey was always walking through cities, including Manhattan, with his headphones on. Always. When I listen to this song I can picture him walking through, say, the East Village (through which an ex-girlfriend and I once spent the better part of an afternoon chasing him and his friend Ben, as they hopped from dive bar to dive bar [with the help of a NYC dive-bar guide I'd lent them] and repeatedly failed either to linger long enough for us to catch up or to keep us apprised of their next move), weaving his way through the crowds of NYU students, getting annoyed with the tourists, searching for some hot dog cart or a bakery he'd read about, and listening to this song on his iPod.
Here's a video:
Watching this, I notice that Berninger (the singer) not only acts and sounds like Joey, but he looks a little like him, too.
Mostly I've been listening to The National so much not because it has anything directly to do with Joey, but because their tone suits my own mood much of the time. Kate and I saw them when they came to Nashville in October. They were nattily dressed, they made snarky jokes to one another, Berninger was sloshing wine everywhere, and they made me cry with this song:
I'll leave you with this one, the standout track on the new album and one that most of you probably know. It makes me think of a) road trips and b) returning home to a place somewhere in the middle of the country that you left many years ago.
Bloodbuzz, Ohio:
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