My Favorite Century: Part VI, a Birthday Story
There was a simplicity to the Facebook Wall that, occasionally, I long for.
It was Instagram, Twitter (or X, if you must), and iMessage rolled into one.
Functionally, though, it served one true purpose: To say happy birthday to people you didn’t actually talk to.
I went to college with a woman with whom I only communicated on our birthdays, which happened to be a few days apart. I don’t think I ever actually talked to her, but she wished me a happy birthday on my wall every year for about eight years, and I did the same for her.
What a great memory.
Hope you had a banging birthday, Megan!
I am not taking shots at anyone who still uses Facebook to wish anyone a Happy Birthday. In fact, some of you may have wished me a Facebook happy birthday already today.
Thank you. I’ll see the notification in like three months when I log into the app to try and buy a coffee table on Facebook Marketplace, but I am preemptively thanking you now for your well-wishes.
Honestly, knowing when it’s someone’s birthday and wishing them a Happy Birthday is a valuable tool and a nice gesture. I simply don’t use Facebook like that anymore.
Despite being 50ºF a few days this week, today was colder. Not “February-9th-typically cold”, but cold enough to look at photos of me celebrating past birthdays in Qatar or Egypt longingly. Warm birthdays are better than cold ones.
I’ve hinted to my family that I’d like to move my birthday to August and cede the month of February to my nephew so he doesn’t have to share the limelight with me on the family calendar.
Spread the celebrations out the way I do with my loyalty programs.
Mcdonald’s thinks my birthday is in May. Dunkin believes it’s in December. Why enjoy all your freebies at once when Dominoes wants to give you three free lava cakes in September?
Same for actual birthdays. Why celebrate Burt and me one weekend in February when we could celebrate each other independently. I’m talking twice as much cake here, people.
Who says no?
What does any of this have to do with music?
Last week, someone told me they were astonished by this entire activity. “You’re not ranking these songs 100-1. Why give yourself the added stress of figuring out how to present them a few songs at a time?”
I said this when I started, but ranking them 100-1 seemed more complicated than collectively appreciating them.
All these are perfect and grating in their own ways at any given moment.
Grouping them creatively is a gift and a curse.
This week’s theme is: Celebrating Sam.
When I met Leen, I made her a playlist titled “Getting to Know Sam” and shared it with her on YouTube. I followed the John Cusack rules of mix-taping, and well, we’re married now, so you have to assume it worked.
For this week’s selection of songs, I want to make a little playlist, just five songs, that you can listen to as you get ready for your weekend activities. Personally, I am going to celebrate me tonight, so I will listen to this in the car on the way to the venue.
The trick with these five songs is the fact that they are placed in the slot they appear in on their album. I mean that I have a song that opens an album, a song that is the second on the album, one that comes third, one that’s fourth, and up with one that’s fifth.
What can I say? I like a higher degree of difficulty.
It starts with a slow build, builds, pops, comes back down momentarily, and then regains momentum as it barrels towards a finish.
I think you’ll like the way it flows.
Eighteen minutes of Sam.
Song
Sleeping Lessons
Artist
The Shins
Year
2007
Lyric/Moment
And if the old guard still offend
They got nothing left on which you depend
So enlist every ounce
Of your bright blood
And off with their heads
Jump from the hook
You're not obliged to swallow anything you despise
One Word
Ethereal
More than One Word
To open this mixtape, I want to take you on a journey. An opener sets the tone for where the album is going. It's hard to get back on track if the vibes are off. The first track is the most critical because if it's bad, most people just turn it off. Sleeping Lessons is a perfect start to the album it appears on and to this mini-playlist.
On February 9, 2007, I turned 20. My friends and I took my Saturn Station Wagon with dent-resistant panels to Milwaukee to see the Shins. The Shins blasted into "mainstream" fame (as much as The Shins ever went mainstream) with their appearance on the oft-discussed Garden State soundtrack. I've never seen the film Garden State, but I have heard the soundtrack, specifically, the Shins' "Caring is Creepy" and "New Slang." Zach Braff is known mainly for his role in Scrubs (and less so for dating Florence Pugh). Still, if you spend enough time looking around the internet, you might encounter something called "the Zach Braff effect."
Honestly, that could be another name for my blog and this activity of finding and writing about 100 songs I like. Braff curated the soundtrack for Garden State as if it were his own mixtape and wrote the movie so that the female lead (Natalie Portman, dreamgirl) put headphones on the male lead (Zach Braff, beta boy) and hit play and said. This song will change your life.
I don't know if any song changed my life, but I am probably not in Milwaukee to see the Shins without Braff's impact.
Anyway, there we were at the Eagles Ballroom, listening to Shins lead singer James Mercer sing with his eerily high falsetto, and my friend leaned over to me and said: I am going to punch this guy.
There are a lot of things you expect a friend to say to you during a Shins concert. "I love their work on the Garden State soundtrack," for example. I did not have: I am going to punch this guy on my BINGO Card. So there I was, listening to the Shins, wondering when said friend would throw the haymaker. He told me it would happen the next time the fellow bumped into him. And sure enough, dear reader, the guy bumped him, and my friend dropped him.
The Shins? More like the Butts because that's where this dude was.
We made a run for it because I don't think anyone really wanted to get into an actual fight at the Shins concert, or at least, I didn't want to get into a fight at the Shins concert.
We hid in the bathroom (dumb, in retrospect. That's where I'd expect someone to hide) for a few songs and then went back and listened to the rest of the show from the other side of the room. All that said, this song is a great album opener and apparently an excellent song to punch someone over if you need to.
Side note, but related. On the way home from the concert, I got pulled over by a state trooper. He looked at my license, ran my plates, etc., etc., and said: Here's a $200 birthday present. For the rest of the drive, I assumed I had a speeding ticket in my possession. You can imagine my surprise when, in the light of day, it turned out he had given me a warning. I think him calling it a birthday present was an attempt at a joke, or as I call it, the Zach Braff effect.
Song
Oxford Comma
Artist
Vampire Weekend
Year
2008
Lyric
Who gives a fuck bout an Oxford Comma?
One Word
Literary
More than One Word
For the record, I am a copywriter. That means I write some of the subject lines, headlines, and body copy for the emails you mostly leave unread or immediately delete. I get it. One of my passions is unsubscribing from email lists. I pause to read the subject line to see if there's anything clever in there I can crib for my next attempt before I unsubscribe, but nevertheless, unsubscription happens. In the nature of my work, I have two primary clients who take up most of my time (in the biz, we call these BILLABLE HOURS).
One of the clients I write for cares about the Oxford Comma, and the other does not. And this, for someone who primarily uses commas like paper towels (out of convenience, not necessarily practicality, and despite better options routinely being nearby), leaves me thinking about which I prefer nearly daily.
The Oxford Comma is when you use a comma before and in a list before the final word. A commonly used example of this is: "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." I can diagram this sentence for you if you need me to, but I am hopeful you've gathered what the Oxford Comma is now. You may know it as the serial comma, which is the same but less fun.
The second track on the debut album by Vampire Weekend kicked off with this inquiry. It signaled that this band would make some heady allusions, clever wordplays, and fun tunes. It's playing a similar role in my little playlist here. We will be having a little fun, and if you're heading out with me, expect heady allusions and clever wordplays.
I've not been let down by most of what Ezra Koenig and Vampire Weekend have done in the 15 years since I heard that song. Additionally, I recently discovered that he's been dating Rashida Jones for over a decade.
I don't know her opinion on Oxford Commas, but honestly, the more I think about it, I think I give a fuck about them. Without them, sentences, like the Ayn Rand example above, can be confusing. It's like the eats, shoots, and leaves example as well. I am a big proponent of clarity of language, more in theory than practice.
This song is joyful for many reasons, primarily the Oxford Comma thing, but also the fact that he sings, "First the window, then it's to the wall/Lil Jon, he always tells the truth."
This was five years after "Get Low" came out, and Vampire Weekend decided to pay homage on their debut album. Listening to the song many years later, it's hard to argue with it. I'd like to thank my readers, Lil John and Ezra Koenig.
Song
Take Me Out
Artist
Franz Ferdinand
Year
2004
Lyric/Moment
When the drums change at the 0:52 mark building to the riff coming in at the 1:05 mark. Incredible.
One Word
Riff
More than One Word
In John Cusack's version of the perfect love playlist, you take the third track to cool it off, "You don't want to blow your wad." He and I deviate on this point, and mainly just because of intent. If you're doing a more extended playlist, then yeah, I guess you want a series of peaks and valleys. Killers and fillers, if you will. But in this five-song playlist, I mainly want to keep it moving, but with various styles.
I remember being in a Hollister at West Towne Mall in the summer of 2004, trying to decide if I could pull off a pink polo (no). It's a sensory memory for me because that store was so fucking dark and so aromatic, with different colognes and body sprays assaulting your olfactory nerves. But the sense that was the most attuned at that moment was my hearing. In quick succession, the store speakers played Float On by Modest Mouse and Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand, and I thought: Is this the coolest store on the planet? (It was not.)
There's a lot to like, historically speaking about Franz Ferdinand, namely how they got their name. In their words, "His life, or at least the ending of it, was the catalyst for the complete transformation of the world – he was a pivot for history. But I don't want to over-intellectualise the name thing. Basically, a name should just sound good – like music."
And make good music they did. The debut album had the intended purpose of just making people dance. Mission accomplished. I mean, sort of. Dancing to this is doable, but not in a bump-and-grind way, but more in a herky-jerky manner.
As the story goes, the lads wrote this absolute banger after an evening watching Enemy at the Gates. It makes sense as far as narratives go. And frankly, what the lyrics are talking about is inconsequential compared to the guitar riff that hits about a minute into the song. My God, what a ride. With a pulsing rhythmic drum beat that is easy to track, the guitar is catchy, fun, and memorable. The song's first minute does a classic misdirection, taking you down one path before veering into an entirely different stratosphere that is one of the more recognizable guitar pieces of the 21st century.
At the time of their debut album, someone in the band said, "I like the idea that, if we become popular, maybe the words Franz Ferdinand will make people think of the band instead of the historical figure." I'll leave it to you to wonder if they accomplished this fact.
Bonus points for this album's release date: February 9, 2004.
Twenty years ago today.
Song
Byegone
Artist
Volcano Choir
Year
2013
Lyric/Moment
Tossin' off your compliments, wow/
Sexin' all your Parliaments
One Word
Grandiose
More than One Word
My feelings on Bon Iver are well-trodden. Most of the time, though, I can’t understand what Justin Vernon is saying, and I am okay with that. His work here, with Volcano Choir, removes some of his falsetto and allows the listener to hear his capacious baritone at work. This song has some real tongue-twister lyrics, and, paired with its epic instrumentation building to a maximal conclusion, it sounds epic.
On that note, it’s a perfect fourth song in that it sort of acts as that chill factor Cusack mentions before soaring to anthemic highs and crescendos.
But if I am being honest, this song makes the top 100 for what I think is Bon Iver/Justin Vernon’s coolest lyric of all time. The entire narrative of the song leads me to conclude it’s about the passage of time and reflecting on moments that came before. Fitting theme for a birthday playlist, I’d say. The title alludes to a bygone, be that a moment or a person, something has left, and this song is Vernon’s way of paying tribute to it. This song is about holding onto memories, and so when, towards the end of the song, Vernon croons: “Tossing off your compliments/sexin all your Parliments,” it’s a powerful image of someone just burning a heater in what I suspect is the coolest or sexiest looking way you ever could do it.
I’m not a smoker, so if someone handed me a Parliament and asked me to see it, I would not be ready for my close-up. Justin Vernon will not be singing any songs about me and my smoking skills.
I’ll leave it to the experts and artists like Vernon to immortalize it.
Song
Someday
Artist
The Strokes
Year
2002
Lyric/Moment
I see, alone we stand, together we fall apart
Yeah, I think I'll be alright
I'm working so I won't have to try so hard
Tables they turn sometimes
One Word
Relatable
More than One Word
Eliot is really into transportation. More in theory than in practice. This is typical of many kids, but I only have two, so I am generalizing here. When I say "into transportation," I mean he likes cars, trucks, food trucks, excavators, and buses. When we see a city or school bus, he points it out, and Roman agrees that he sees it, too.
Look, a bus!
Yeah, a school bus!
It's great. Looking at buses is very cool. Recently, we've started discussing how Eliot will get to school, and I explained to him that one of the options on the table is taking the bus. He asked me if I took the bus to school, and I had to explain that Reedsburg, Wisconsin, allowed me to walk to most of the schools I attended.
And when they were too far, or it was too cold, someone took me. My brother took me to school from 2001 to 2003. And I reckon we listened to the Strokes album "Is This It?" approximately 9,000 times during those two years.
One of the things we lost because of the rise of streaming is the familiarity, the routine, the repetition of listening to the same thing over and over and over again, and never really getting tired of it. Joe had one of those CD cases in the car that everyone had, and it was full of CDs. Maybe he listened to other ones when he wasn't driving me, but it seemed like no matter what, before school or after school, it didn't matter; we were listening to Is This It?
When Julian Casablancas sings, "I'm workin so I won't have to try so hard" I felt that deeply, even as a 9th grader. Mind you that in 2001, I was probably still more familiar with most of the words and some of the dance moves in the Backstreet Boys' song "Everybody" than just about anything else, so to say that listening to the Strokes was a seismic deviation in my musical paths is an understatement.
It relates to so many things in life. Professionally? Absolutely. Relationships? Indeed. Academics? No doubt.
So, I will take Eliot in my car as long as possible so he can eventually take Roman in his car. Through this, we will continue the tradition of listening to good music with someone sitting shotgun, expanding horizons, and hopefully, in 20 years, one of them will say that a song they heard in the car is one of their favorite 100 of all time.
As for using this song to close out a playlist, as I celebrate myself tonight and my nephew tomorrow, please understand that everything I do today is so that I do not have to try so hard tomorrow.
That sentence's today and tomorrow are metaphors for the present and future.
I hope we all ascend to a point where none of us need to try so hard.
Cheers to you and yours.
More next week.
