This is a June playlist
And some modest life updates.
Good morning,
I’m back in Austin after ten days in New York City. We lucked into visiting during an absolutely beautiful stretch of weather. A brief list of some things I did while there:
Took my five-year-old niece to the Transit Museum.
Visited a (sadly now former) co-worker and her 10 month old daughter in Park Slope and talked about what the hell to do with our careers amongst other things.
Had dinner and drinks with my old roommate and his girlfriend in Ridgewood.
Spent some time in the office at 1 World Trade and had lunches and coffees with some new reports and a couple of meetings with some great co-workers of mine that helped inspire me to do better work and be a better manager. Also made me feel a little shitty about being full-time remote and away from my team and the collaborators I really value at work.
Ate at Dhamaka because you can’t really get a meal like that anywhere else. It’s better than Semma, don’t lie to yourself.
Took long walks through my old neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.
Had slices from F&F in Carroll Gardens which is much better than Lucali. If you wait in line for pizza you are delusional.
Ate at Libertine for a second time and was unfortunately very disappointed after a flawless first visit in January.
Went to Jacob Riis and swam in the ocean.
Had a five-hour picnic in Prospect Park.
Had dumplings and wine on a roof with a very old friend I hadn’t seen in three years and talked about how to continue living an artistic life while getting older, not feeling like artists, how we didn’t look too bad for almost 40, being young in New York, and lots of other things. I loved every minute of it.
Had Father’s Day dinner with my father and mother at Walter’s.
Ate at Place de Fetes in Clinton Hill and didn’t love it.
Got Levain Cookies. The new caramel coconut ones are perfect.
We were staying in Williamsburg in my fiancee’s sister’s apartment. She lives in a great spot in that part of town and I walked around the streets of Williamsburg feeling a little like a ghost moving through my own life.
I lived in Williamsburg from 2008 to 2012 on Grand Street between Leonard and Manhattan. When I saw a friend last weekend she said to me, “You were like the King of Williamsburg once.” I don’t think that was ever true. What she actually meant, she later explained, was that she associated me so strongly with that part of her life.
One night during our stay, my fiancee and I were walking along Manhattan Avenue back from Greenpoint to her sister’s apartment. I passed by what used to be Enid’s (Enid’s is gone now like so many other things) and was overwhelmed with the sense memory of walking back that way so many times late at night and early in the morning during my twenties.
Another evening, my fiancee and I went for a jog on the McCarren Park track. My roommate and I used to do evening jogs there several nights a week. I’ll always associate that place and its chaotic flurry of athletics (sprinters, circled exercise classes, organized soccer games, handball players, uncoordinated kids kicking balls) with the very beginning of my time living in New York.
At times, it felt as if my heart would explode. It was like watching my own life play again in front of me, except I wasn’t in it. Or, rather, it was actually seeing just how much New York City, like life, continues on and evolves and changes without you and that life is always just beginning for somebody.
My fiancee and I asked each other many times if the other regretted moving. Or if we should move back. She put it best when she said, “I can’t tell if I miss living in New York, or if I miss being in my early twenties.”
I’m not sure if I miss either of those things, but sometimes it can be hard to tell. And maybe all that you can ask for is the chance to be able to feel things or miss times from your life that are no longer present. You can’t watch a movie for the first time twice.
Here’s a playlist if you want it.
See you next time.
“Southern Girls” by Cheap Trick
I’m not really a Cheap Trick guy. Love the idea of them, but never spent a lot of time with their music. This song always makes me smile. Perfect summer song. Waxahatchee used it as their entrance music to start their show in Austin in May. Thought that was a nice touch.
“I Lost It” by Lucinda Williams
Speaking of Waxahatchee, they covered this song during the encore at their show in Austin. When I listen to this song I can picture it being written, practiced, and recorded. That doesn’t mean it sounds written or over produced. On the contrary, when I hear a song like this I hear how hard it is to make a song sound as easy and as always there as this one does.
“Ice Cold” by Waxahatchee
An actual song by Waxahatchee. Like I said, I saw them in Austin back in May. I’m not the biggest Waxhatchee fan, but I really like their music. This show was one of those strange ones you sometimes go to where the audience is immediately in sync with the performer and they’re feeding off each other in a heightened way. Emily Crutchfield couldn’t hide her happiness at performing and the crowd felt that and their enthusiasm for her and her music seemed to increase after each song. The show-goers had been able to listen to Tiger’s Blood, Waxhatchee’s latest record, for a few weeks and were ready to sing the songs back into the air. It was while hearing the chorus of “Ice Cold” played live that I noticed how much it soars, and it was in that moment that I was fully tuned into what kind of show I was attending.
“Hanginaround” by Counting Crows
Counting Crows were one of those bands that kind of passed me by in the ’90s. I watched the video for “Long December” a million times like every other kid that had a crush on Courtney Cox in her Ace Ventura/early Friends era and “Mr. Jones” was always playing somewhere, but I never really thought Counting Crows were all that great. People had patches on their backpacks or quotes in their AIM profiles but you couldn’t have paid me to care about them in the early 2000s. I heard this one on the radio recently and it is an undeniably fun song. So much so that I’ve found myself craving it on certain days.
“Living in the Material World” by George Harrison
Possibly my favorite solo George Harrison song. It has some of the best self-referential lyrics by any of the four Beatles, the bass (Klaus Voorman) and drums (Ringo, natch) sound incredible, and it’s one of the few solo George songs to purely rock. This song is perhaps the best articulation of George’s basic philosophy on life as well: he wants enlightenment but can’t stand how much of a drag life and people can be, which in turn makes him feel like shit and do shitty things which in turn makes him want to work toward enlightenment all the more. One of my favorite songs to listen to when I feel put upon.
“Dirty Work” by Steely Dan
In May 2010, I started my first stint working at Conde Nast. It was my first job at a real company. Before that I’d served as a paralegal/assistant for two years for a real estate attorney who ran her own practice. I worked at W Magazine which was in the 350 Madison office—not the old legendary 4 Times Square office. My boss was a great guy and I learned a ton from him. But I remember the first time he asked me to press on some editors to move their passes through the issue closing. It was for the September issue and he told me to make sure some editors were doing what they were supposed to. I was still learning how to separate my natural introversion from the extroversion I needed in order to be the person I wanted to be at work. And I remember feeling shitty about being told to do someone else’s dirty work. I was 24 years old. What did I do when I left work? Put on “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan as I walked to the 6 train.
“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” by R.E.M.
One of my major blind spots is R.E.M. I understand their importance and I love a lot of their songs, but I don’t know their discography inside and out. I heard this one while I was waiting for the Waxahatchee show to start. There is a magic moment in this song when Michael Stipe breaks after singing the following line of lyrics, “A candy bar, a falling star, or a reading from Doctor Seuss.”
“Levii’s Jeans” by Beyonce
I don’t really like Beyonce. “Drunk in Love” is the kind of modern day experimental pop that I get behind, but a lot of her other work doesn’t really grab me. I find this song irresistible. It makes me think of the wide, extended pink twilights I’m starting to appreciate about the evenings in Central Texas.
“Slow Dancing in the Kitchen” by Yaya Bey
Read about this album on AllMusic. Gave it a listen. Really liked this song.
“Gypsy - Early Version” by Fleetwood Mac
A friend of mine showed me this version a couple of Octobers ago when we were apple picking in Kingston, New York. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about it this month. In this early version of the song you can hear Lindsey and Stevie going for something closer to Springsteen than Fleetwood Mac. I like hearing that.
“On Melancholy Hill” by Gorillaz
One recent unseasonably humid afternoon, my fiancee and I were sitting outside at a counter service restaurant. This song came on. She asked me if I knew it. I said I didn’t. A lot of the Gorillaz catalog is kind of hazy to me. She said she listened to it all the time when she was younger. We’re seven years apart in age.
“Moss Garden” by David Bowie
Of all the ambient pieces on Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums, this one might be my favorite. For some reason it’s always reminded me of lying down at the beach on a cloudless day and looking up at the blue sky and noticing a vapor trail.
“Carmen” by Lush
Heard this one in a vintage store looking for chairs. Apparently Lush were show gaze trailblazers. Huh. Never knew that.
“Dawn Hush Lullaby” by Lightheaded
This is another one I read about on AllMusic. Nice little genre hopping album by a band I’ve never heard about. Will jangle pop songs ever get tiring? Not to me.
“You and only You” by Erlend Oye and La Comitiva
All hail AllMusic! This is another one of their recent Editor Picks. Great website they’ve got there. I think this record is a little gem. This track in particular is a composition that the Beatles were absolutely nailing in 1964. The production is obviously different but it is similarly light and sophisticated pop.
“Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club
I heard this song while walking in New York earlier this month. Then a few days later I had time to kill before meeting up with my fiancee for dinner. It was early evening—about 7:30—and I was strolling around Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens where my fiancee and I had lived together for the almost four years before we left New York. I turned this song on and walked up and down streets I’d walked so many times, turned corners I’d turned hundreds of times, gazed at parlor and garden floor windows I’d enviously turned toward on so many warm nights. I’d never listened to this song deeply before and have no idea what it’s really about and don’t care. I love the lines “loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams/red, gold and green” because they can mean whatever you want. In that moment of walking and listening to this song, I felt such a great sense of joy welling within me at all the things I presently have in my life while also a sense of loss at what I’d left behind moving from New York. Yet, seeing people eating on long front patios in Carroll Gardens and watching the sky turn pink and purple and feeling the cooling evening coming on I couldn’t help feel so thankful for all of the unknowable life rising and moving around me as I walked along, murmuring, “red, gold and green; red, gold and green.” And I realized that unknowable life was also spreading out in front of me—just as it always had.
“A Guitar and a Bottle of Wine” by The Mavericks
One of those old-timey Everly Brothers style songs that never gets old.
“Strawberry Flats” by Little Feat
I love Little Feat. Lowell George was from Los Angeles but I always thought he was from Texas. Maybe it's because of songs like this, which abstractly talk about living a certain kind of life in Texas in the late-middle 20th century. This is one of my favorite Little Feat songs and it's a great song for driving in the summer.
“Sweet Virginia” by The Rolling Stones
I heard this song come on in a vintage store while looking for furniture. I realized it’d been maybe ten years since I last listened to Exile on Main Street in its entirety. I stared out the window remembering how alive I used to feel listening to it when I was 16, especially when I was driving down Nicolls Road in my 1992 Chevy Blazer, smoking cigarettes with the window open, after finishing taking the PSAT at Centereach High School on some lost Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2002. Exile on Main Street was 30 years old then. Now it’s been over 50 years since it came out. It can still make you feel something if you want it to.
“A Rose And A Baby Ruth” by Al Kooper
Al Kooper is kind of lost to time but he was a part of some of the most important recording sessions of the 1960s. His solo albums are little treasures to me and I recommend listening to any of them. This one is a cover of a George Hamilton IV song from 1964 that he released on his Easy Does It album from 1970.
“Plainclothes Man” by Heatmiser
My fiancee and I heard this eating outdoors on a hot night at the very end of May. The night had just cooled enough to enjoy our food at an outdoor table. You can always tell an Elliot Smith song as soon as it starts.
“Big Swimmer” by King Hannah and Sharon Van Etten
This was an AllMusic recommendation. Back when I worked as a paralegal from April of 2008 to April of 2010, sometimes I’d come back to my apartment in Williamsburg and my roommate was practicing songs at our kitchen table with Sharon Van Etten. They did a few two person shows at Zebulon. I don’t know anything about King Hannah but when this song gains momentum it really carries you along.
“Tie Up The Tides” by Quilt
This is a great bit of modern psychedelia that I’ve loved since 2014. I don’t remember how I found this song but it struck me the first time I heard it. I used to live to find songs like this. Ten years later, I’m even more impressed by the production. A nice song for a summer afternoon.
“The Wire” by HAIM
Speaking of the early-mid 2010s, remember when this one first came out? Thought HAIM were going to be the biggest things ever. But they were really coming in at the end of something—kinda like Tony Soprano. This song is still great and sits perfectly beside all those summer anthems it felt like you were handed, like photocopies in class, if you came of age in the 1980s or 1990s.
heart exploding. the best time of our lives :)