Every now and then I check the CD cabinetand notice that some of them are missing. If they happen to be the more romantic or ballad songs and albums, I always fin that I’m in a bit of a panic, because like so many people we have made tapes for someone just as we were getting to know them, dong what Al Pacino would call “The wonder of me thing” (Sea of Love). These are the songs like Bonnie Raitt s song, “Something to Talk About,” “They keep saying we stand just a little too close, stare just a little too long, laugh just a little too hard,” or something along those lines.
Anyway, it’s the sort of thing you think about when you think about gossip concerning an office love affair. I’ve noticed that the CDs are in different order as well, and I can tell you that I haven’t heard him play any of them at home. I also notice that CDS like old Rolling Stones (Beast of Burden era stuff), old Led Zeppelin with All of my Love and Kashmir, classic Bowie and Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde, and naturally, Bonnie Raitt and Nick Drake and John Cale – they have all been sucked into a devil vortex where I am quite sure they will reemerge on some cute young things walkman or whatever.
They are the same soulful singers that so many of a certain generation will put on tapes for every individual one has wooed or is wooing or has fucked or is fucking or wants to fucked or wanted to but left unrequited. They are the songs you put on a tape for someone you like, in that way. You think Wow! Those songs, like Nick Drakes Northern Sky and Hazy Jane and Fruit Tree and John Cale, Hanky Panky No-How and Andalucia are all for me. You listen to the tape over and over again, certain that there is some hidden meaning in the lyrics and that he is or was trying to tell me something by through the chosen songs and their lyrics. Something like, You’re wonderful. You’re unique. I made this for you because you inspire me like no one else has, or at least, not in the same way. Oh, bollucks.
For years, I listened to Northern Sky by Nick Drake and for years, I believed it was ‘our song’, a silly notion, I know, and probably one that is best left at Junior Prom, but it is sweet and innocent and why can’t we have our own songs? What’s wrong with that? as Paul McCartney would say. So it was our song, and I knew all the words, I sang it in the bath, in the shower, in the car, I turned it up, I listened to the whole album every night one winter while I was knitting him a scarf and I was happy. Stupid and happy.
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