exhilaration | Comfort Music (Reply)

Some people eat comfort food. Well, I don't really eat for comfort... but I listen to music for comfort. I mean, I listen to music all the time. I think I recently explained how central music is to my life and my thoughts... and I know I've said countless times how amazing Leonard Cohen is. I said I went to the Radiohead concert and I said how I've got all of OK Computer pretty much memorized. My LJ name is from a Foo Fighters song, and someday I'll expound on just how much Nirvana means to me. I can probably recite the entire Downward Spiral, effects and all, and I can chat on and on about my current crushes, like The Killers and Mika and Hello Saferide and Regina Spektor.

My comfort music is folk and bluegrass.

When I first moved here I really fixated on my speakers and my mp3s and playlists - I'd pretty much never lived by myself before and I was scared to death this house was going to drive me to insanity. I'd dedicate entire days to entire albums, and so on. But the music that makes me calmly happy and warm and fuzzy inside is my parents' music, music from when I was a little kid. I think I've got Ok Computer ingrained in my consciousness? Then I go back to this stuff, and it's in there even deeper. I know every word of every version and every nuance every artist who performed these tunes brought to them.

My mom was a professional musician, I think I've said, but besides her, my dad is also very musical. I remember being very, very young - I almost think my sister wasn't born yet - and watching my parents recording themselves performing their favorite folk tunes with my mom on the guitar and my dad playing harmonica "Stewball the Racehorse" and "Lemon Tree" and "500 miles."

My dad used to let me play with his harmonica, and tried to teach me to play it, but I thought it was like a piano and each little hole in the thing was a consecutive note - my mom would always freak out and take the harmonica and "disinfect" it before and after I'd play it. She didn't like spit sharing, even among family members.

My mom didn't try to teach me guitar until I was older, I guess because you have to be adult-sized to play an adult sized guitar, right? But I can probably play all this stuff on a guitar, or at least, I know how.

You have to understand this about my early childhood: my family may be supremely fucked up, in fact, the older I get, the more I realize the truth of that statement, but even so, I don't have horrible memories of being a kid. I loved being a kid. And my parents were the center of my universe - for a little longer, too, than I think is normal, because... they're weird and paranoid. But I didn't know that at the time. My mom never worked, and I didn't have friends, so when I was a kid I played with my mom. Every day. When my sister was born, my mom would play with both of us. Parties and get-togethers were with their friends, who some of them had kids of their own. So those kids were "all us kids."

Our next door neighbors were musicians too - well, actually, our next door neighbors were artists professionally (I've said I grew up around artists, right?) and were musicians kind of as a hobby... a serious hobby. They were in a bluegrass/rock band, and they put out at least two records when I was very little, so in the mid eighties I guess. So hanging out at their house was usually a bluegrass session - my dad would play harmonica. My mom, if she was around, would harmonize - by the time I was four or five I'd sing along, and for a while my parents were really into showing off how I could sing all the old folk songs.

When I was seven or eight I was at school and upset about something - I forget what, it couldn't have been that big of a deal I'm sure - and I remember walking around the playground after lunch, singing "500 miles" to myself, because the plaintive, melancholy sound of it was... I guess I thought appropriate to how I was feeling.

My dad really liked female solo vocalists, so trips in the car with my dad (even out here to NJ to see his family...) were always full of Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell - see, Judy Collins sang a lot of Leonard Cohen's compositions, and so I discovered him through her, because as I got older I listened a little more to the words she was singing and became slowly entranced.

I remember sitting in the old Escort on the way to the movie theatre refusing to get out of the car because I wanted to finish listening to Judy singing about the Sisters of Mercy. I remember secretly going through the glove compartment in my dad's car and taking the mix tapes labeled "travel" (I think my propensity for playlists might be genetic or something...) back into the house and listening to them with headphones, alone in my room, pressing pause after every line so I could write it down. "Both Sides Now," "Sisters of Mercy," and "Michael From Mountains" all crammed on to one sheet of lined paper, four lines of lyrics to every line on the paper (because I had a minor obsession with writing tiny at the time)

I remember getting out the Bob Dylan tapes and slowly beginning to make the connections between all the different artists who performed each other's music - some of these tapes were labeled in our neighbor's funky writing, and they must have been very rare because my dad kept them in a special shoe box. I have a feeling they were live studio recordings - our neighbor was kinda connected.

My mom had a thing with not like Bob Dylan. She always said he sang like he was in pain, and my dad would roll his eyes. My mom and dad and I would sometimes sing "Blowin' In The Wind" in threepart - I would beg them to sing it with me, actually. I always wanted to make a recording of it, just like I remembered them doing with other songs, but either we never did or we did but I never listened to it. I dunno how I learned to harmonize. I dunno if it's something they taught me, or my mom made up a part for me and taught it to me, or if it's something I just learned from hearing it so much. Now, though, I'm a compulsive harmonizer - I do it to everything I hear.

When I was in middle school I had a teacher who was about my parents' age, and in music class he played a lot of stuff for us that I recognized, like "I'm in Love With a Big Blue Frog" and Janis Ian's "Society's Child," and he also had a very rare tape of Judy Collins singing "Come Away Melinda," that I recognized immediately as her voice even though he didn't say it was her, just that it was a very talented singer and the song was about nuclear war destroying everything. He was also the choir teacher, and we did a whole concert of, oh, socially conscious music, I guess you could say. So yes, in middle school, I sang "Blowin' In The Wind" in a choir. That was also right around when I realized that in Judy Collins' version of "Sisters of Mercy" she says "we weren't lovers like that but besides it will still be all right" about the Sisters, and I remember being all 0.o really? WOW. Just, wow. Judy Collins thinks it's all right to be lovers with the Sisters. WOW. I didn't know at the time she didn't write the song.

Well, today, oh, today I was just kind of bummed. It's my day off, Thursday, and my sleeping's been all messed up because of my overnight job, and I was just kind of wandering around aimlessly for a while. I spent today listening to all the comfort music I own. It makes me feel safe and happy and calm and okay.

Also, from my anon meme, I learned that somebody on my flist thinks I'm a hottie :P THANKS ANON! I BET YER A HOTTIE TOO!