This songs matters to me, because: (your explanation here)

Love to hear why, Buck. But I realize you're a man of few words.

 

o_t --
You got it, my brother.

 

Thanks for that story, Fen. The fact that it was Gladys, not Patsy, totally rings a bell now.

 

Looking through my playlists, I have a lot of songs that give me memories, mostly of times with my friends. There's quite a few songs about girls - one that my buddy played for me the day I flew four hours to a Southern college town to help him move, only to have that song remind us the whole weekend about the all-American soccer player chick he chased the whole time. Another - oddly enough, "P.I.M.P." by 50 Cent - was the first song I heard on the radio when I found out my dad had a heart attack about six years ago, and everytime I hear it, that song (rightfully) gives me chills despite having absolutely no connection to my father. Then there are others that hold some kind of small meaning and remind me of some small moment in time that I crack a smile at.

Perhaps there's no bigger song, though, that reminds me of my time in college than the song "Hey Jealousy" by the Gin Blossoms. One of the first days of freshman year, I met this chick who was just stunning. I tried to get to know her a little bit and found out she had a boyfriend who went to college elsewhere, which was a bummer. But she had this roommate who wasn't necessarily the most attractive girl, but she had a great smile and was fun to be around (and was crazy about football, which was awesome because we had a two-hour long chat that night about the NFL). That night, she ended up playing that song, and I had heard it so many times and found it catchy but never knew what it was. I would go on chasing that girl for weeks, even though she was so incredibly difficult to read. I tried to play the role of the model citizen - no parties, no crazyness, just a straight-and-narrow kid looking for an education. That was the character she projected and the character I thought she'd like to find.

After getting to know the girl the whole semester, I ask her out on a date, and she declines, saying she's not looking for a boyfriend. I spent the resulting night down in my dormroom at a complete loss (my roommate was already gone for the break) and playing the song over and over again. I had a bad habit of falling hard for girls I had no chance at getting throughout my high school and college years, and these lyrics just had me beaten down:

I had nowhere to go. I tried to talk more and more about the rejection with her that night, but tried hard not to impose knowing she had an early-morning final exam. I never said goodbye; I went home for break and returned to school a month later, only to find out that she had been dating some guy for three weeks. Three weeks - about a week after I asked her and she said it wasn't ready. Even worse, not only did I see the kid (who looks like a dead-wringer for Brian Scalabrine today), but he came with a host of personal baggage that always had her sitting downstairs in the dorm's lobby talking to him at all hours of the night. Way to rub it in.

We'd eventually start talking and get along again years later, but that song still reminds me of that day. It was crushing, moreso because the girl's roommate told me at the time that it was a great idea and that she wanted to say yes - but I found out later it was all a front.

Anyway, that's too much. But that's probably the one song that has a real tangible emotional attachment for me.

 

"Leave" by R.E.M. It was one of the last CDs I'd ever purchase at a Wal-Mart - R.E.M.'s criminally underappreciated "New Adventures in Hi-Fi." I fucking hate censorship on CDs, and Wal-Mart had already burned me with The Offspring's "Smash."

Still, I was stuck in Waverly, Iowa, helping Dad scout Wartburg (who would kick his poor team's ass two weeks later). I was a sophomore in high school who really didn't know a damned thing about good music. I'd written 'Nirvana' and 'AC/DC' on my old notebook at school, but only had two Nirvana albums and had once heard a kick-ass AC/DC song on the radio.

I didn't want to buy the damned thing at a Wal-Mart, but there wasn't much else in Waverly, Dad wanted to get to the game early and all of my new friends told me I should get this CD. They found I liked R.E.M., but only had "Monster," which I'd inherited from my uncle when he died that summer. So, I threw down my last $12 from my summer de-tasseling job and threw the CD in my Discman as fast as possible.

Track six hit somewhere in the second quarter, while I was walking around the field. The haunting start caught me off guard, but something about the sound-check echo of the drums with the constant alarm noise in the background set me on my ass. In retrospect, it sounds a lot like some of the 'Monster' tracks, but I couldn't tell those things at the time. I just remember listening to that track over and over and over on the way back from Wartburg.

Nothing against Nirvana and AC/DC, but that old notebook found the trash can about a week later. By the end of the year, I was into a lot more R.E.M., Ben Folds, the Pixies, Hum and Radiohead. A music snob was born.

 

Better Man -- Pearl Jam: I was never a Pearl Jam fan in the '90s. Nirvana was who I obsessed over, followed, and bought everything that featured them.

Better Man came out right about the time I graduated from college, while I was dating and then engaged to a guy who had been among my closest friends first. It was never a great consuming love affair, more of one of those, "Hey, we do everything together. Why aren't we dating?" sort of relationships. We were together because we couldn't find anybody better.

I never told him, but I always called Better Man our song to my girlfriends (who were all appalled, for the record). Even now, close to 9 years after we finally broke up, that song still reminds of him and one of the better relationships of my life.

 

Your friends were probably mystified cos it's a song about a woman who can't bring herself to leave a troubled relationship.

 

Well duh. That's why I never told him the song reminded me of our relationship.

 

In the last 25 years, I can hardly remember anything of even relative significance that isn't connected to some kind of music. I can't listen to my CDs or the radio for more than 10-15 minutes without triggering multiple memories tied to specific times, places, people and events.

The one song, though, that's really stuck with me is "Whiskey Lullaby." It came out not too long after my marriage broke up, and given that my ex was a huge Brad Paisley fan, I initially didn't want to have anything to do with it. However, shortly after the breakup, I moved and my ex-in-laws graciously agreed to watch my dogs until I got back on my feet. So, every week on my days off, for 10 months, I would make the 90-minute drive to basically spend time with my dogs at the ex-in-laws' country place. I spent most of that time sitting on their porch sulking, and I started to listen to "Whiskey Lullaby" -- a lot. At the time it provided, in a strange way, a sense of comfort. It didn't hurt that it's the kind of "depressing" country song I really like, but, at the time, and in my position, it was a very, very hard song to get away from after the first few listens.

Fast forward a year and I, for reasons still unclear to me, decided to start drinking after 8 years sober. It's a decision I struggle with to this day, more than four years later. Now, I am obsessed with song lyrics, and while "Whiskey Lullaby" already "spoke to me" on a heartache level, the line "He put that bottle to his head and pulled the trigger" suddenly became a line whose implications I could not get away from. Still can't.

That song is haunting to me (and haunting me) on multiple levels, and, for better or worse, I'm connected to it unlike any of the thousands of song that have helped defined the hours, days, weeks, months and years that have passed since I bought my first cassette in 1983.

 

I'm very much the same way, in that most songs trigger thoughts. Maybe not even full-fledged memories, but thoughts.

What I love, though, are the songs that totally transport me. I hear something and suddenly I'm in another time, another place, another atmosphere entirely. One of those songs is "Life is a Highway" by Tom Cochrane.

I consider myself pretty crafty, more MacGyver than Martha Stewart, though. When I was a young teenager I would buy those dollhouse kits from the Ben Franklin store at super-cheap prices and spend a few weeks each summer putting them together and then giving them away. I wasn't into furnishing them with all the tiny crap, just building and painting the houses.

I would spend hours each summer out on the back porch, sanding and gluing and painting on a rickety kitchen table that had been relegated outside. Being a teenage girl, I rigged the setup so I could pull the telephone cord through the screen door so I could talk outside in "privacy" while still working.

I didn't really have the money to purchase tapes, so I used to buy blank cassettes and try to "catch" songs on the radio. The beginning was always cut off, and the ending always had some stupid DJ talking over it, but to play back a song of your choice on a crappy 1987 cassette player was the greatest thing.

"Life is a Highway" was a song that made the repeat list the summer before high school. Whenever I hear that song I am 14 again, working outside in the hot summer, Mountain Dew cans piling up on the table, with my long, long hair blowing into the glue and an old buttoned-down shirt of my father's serving as a wearable wipe rag for cheap acrylic paint.

I was on the edge of a certain kind of freedom that year, I could see it and taste it without knowing exactly what it was. The world really did open up like an endless highway shortly thereafter, but when I hear that song I think of all the ways I am still myself, still on that hot and dusty porch, filled with creativity and anticipation.

 

The story of my song, or the song to my story, seems unusual to me. The memory generally only travels in one direction: I can listen to the song any time and the story won't trigger in my mind.

But I can never pick up my stained, dog-eared copy of Eliot Asinof's "Eight Men Out" without the song playing over and over again in my head -- and the memory of reading that book for the first time. Needless to say, it changed my life.

It was the fall of 1997. My family was headed down to Florida to visit relatives and I was in my customary back seat of our van for the 8-hour drive. And with my portable CD player, I -- like all moody, complicated 15-year-old boys -- was effectively cut off from the world. My music world, for that fleeting trip, anyway, circled around Fleetwood Mac.

I had seen "The Dance" on VH1 that summer and it had turned me on to even more of my dad's generation of music that I had never really listened to before. So for that trip, one of the CDs in my case was his copy of "Rumours" and, coincidentally, that was the first CD I put in my portable player. I put it on repeat and then opened up my copy of "Eight Men Out."

Over the span of those eight hours, I never put the book down. It was that fascinating to me -- and still is, of course. And because it was so fascinating, I never once thought to change my soundtrack. Since "Rumours" registers 40:03 in length, I suppose I listened to it about nine or 10 times, straight through, over and over again.

But there is one moment during that car ride down to Florida that still sticks out to me, where it all just happened to sync up, song to story, in that same eerie way that "Dark Side of the Moon" syncs up to "The Wizard of Oz" and freaks you the fuck out when you're watching it in a darkened room at 3 a.m. after a couple of hits on the bong.

This passage from the book is from the beginning of Chapter 5 in Section 5 (The Trial). It reads like this:

They [the ballplayers] had sat through five weeks in almost complete silence, unable to expose the real fabric of their lives as Comiskey's ballplayers. For that was the deal. Nobody was to testify. Not a word was to be spoken against the great American pastime. The name of Charles A. Comiskey was to be kept holy. The ballplayers would keep silent in exchange for protection. They would sit out the trial and Baseball would do what it could to shield them from the bite of the law.
And so it had gone. Nobody had spoken. Not even Gleason, not even Schalk.

As I read that passage, and realized the implications of what Asinof had written, and how complicated the entire Black Sox scandal had been, and still was ... and instantly acquired the urge to continue Asinof's research, continue seeking out the truth, in the quest -- the obsession -- to break the chain of silence ... the sound that came through my headphones was that intoxicating bass line from "The Chain" and these lyrics:

And I can still hear you saying
You will never break the chain, never break the chain ...

I've never been the same since.

I had never written anything before, never been interested in writing. I had never been interested in serious research before. I had always been interested in baseball, and baseball history, but never thought it was something that I could -- and would -- make a serious career out of.

That song and that passage coinciding for that brief period of time -- it totally changed the direction of my life. It turned me on to writing, for which I found an outlet that fall in my sophomore English class, where my teacher (a part-time freelancer) encouraged my writing and pushed me to apply for the local newspaper's bi-weekly "teen page." I later became co-editor of that section, and had so much fun with it that I decided to stick with journalism after I graduated, which -- a few twists and turns aside -- carried me to where I am today.

Never imagined what that moment would lead to, sitting in the back seat of my parents' van on a long drive down to Florida with a good book in my hands and good tunes in my ears.

 

Now THAT'S what DD had in mind.
Great tale, buckdub, you moody, complicated guy, you.