![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rezendiGetting it out of my system before I think better of it:
Bush, "Machine Head"
To this day I can't tell you why exactly I flew off to find work in San Francisco right after graduating university. But I did. I flew into SFO, checked into the grandly named Nob Hill Pensione (actually a threadbare flophouse) on Hyde Street, and went straight to the Tiburon ferry for the first of six interviews I'd arranged via email before flying over. When I came back, thinking (incorrectly) the interview had gone really well, I went for a long wander through SF - my first - until I returned footstore to the Pensione and turned on the radio, and this song came on. And seemed to follow me wherever I went for the rest of the week.
I spent my first proper month in SF back in the Pensione before I found a proper room. One morning I opened the window and found the hallway thickly full of smoke; it took me a panicked second to realize it was steam. A shared-bathroom room with no TV cost like $300 a week. I had no money and was living off my sole, modestly limited credit card until my first paycheck arrived - and for a couple months after, in fact - and there was at least one occasion when I went down to pay and held my breath nervously while the machine considered my application, not at all sure that I wasn't about to be kicked out.
Smashing Pumpkins, Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The world is littered with double albums that would have been masterpiece single albums if only all the crappy filler had been cut out - Use Your Illusion and The Fragile leap to mind - and Melon Collie is no exception. (In fact the only three really great double albums I can think of are The White Album, Physical Graffiti, and The Wall, and that last is only like ten minutes longer than a single CD anyway.) But there are still a dozen fantastic songs here. My weeklong SF job hunt successful - I was hired by a downtown software-consulting company - I flew back to Canada for a couple weeks, to graduate and put my few things in order, and for me this album is that Time Between. I distinctly remember sitting with a guitar in a bedroom that had once been a sister's (dunno why) painstakingly figuring out how to play "Stumbleine."
Consolidated, "Butyric Acid"; Tom Waits, "Step Right Up"
Exactly ten years ago today I moved into Stark Raving Brad's house on Rivoli Street in Cole Valley, SF USA 94117. These two songs call back every detail of that room. SRB, the black-sheep punk-rock son of a major California politician, was a character, as was Gerhard, our skateboarder-journalist other housemate. Oh, the stories: not-coral snakes, runaway rabbits, long morose late-night conversations. He had a full recording studio in his basement (thanks to one of the Gettys) which I had enormous fun with. Looking back, it was there that I came closest to taking music really creatively seriously. I didn't, and I don't regret it, but there's an alternate-history me who became a musician there.
Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville; Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
San Francisco 1996-97. Both of these albums are absolutely brilliant. To this day, listening to EiG makes me feel lonely all over again. It's not a particularly easy thing, moving to a strange city where you literally know nobody. Both these albums bring back kaleidoscopic flickers of memory: wandering through Golden Gate Park on a Sunday; taking the late-night BART back from the rep movie theatre in Berkeley that Philip K. Dick used to attend and talking to a homeless guy heartsick that he had lost his powers of astral projection; climbing up Tank Hill just behind my house; all but paying rent at the Castro when it ran its monthlong film-noir retrospective, and climbing the long 17th Street hill back home; tearing off my tie every day, seconds after walking out of the Bank Of America building where I worked; hunting for a decent beer with Horst-the-Austrian; playing chess against the homeless and near-homeless in the Horseshoe Cafe. (Where I met![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cr0wgrrl, digitalsidhe, feyandstrange, kn1ghtshade, and orendure, as you all may recall. Ten years, guys. Ten years.)
U2, Pop
Winter 1997. In retrospect, choosing pre-Internet rural China as my first solo travelling destination was either brave or insanely stupid. It was amazing, but it was hard scary work too. To this day the most alien place I have ever travelled. Somehow I made it through without disaster. I picked up Pop on my last day in Tokyo (my sister was living there) and for all I knew was the first to bring it into China when I took the boat from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. It's not a great album - in fact it's mostly filler - but I have a distinct recollection of sitting in a sort-of-bunk on a Chinese bus rattling from Guangzhou to Yangshuo, listening to "Do You Feel Loved" and "Mofo", my two favourite U2 songs outside of Achtung Baby, and experiencing a sudden, piercing, shivering understanding of just how far away I was from home, and from any human being I knew.
Various Artists, Britpop
London 1997-98. This is a mix tape that doesn't exist; the Cool Britannia music that was playing everywhere around me when, not yet having had my share of being intensely lonely (and initially penniless) in strange cities, I moved to London in the summer of 1997. The very first song I heard, moments after getting off the Tube in Warren Street, while I walked with my suitcases blistering my hands to my week's accomodation in Ramsey Hall, was the brand-new Oasis single "D'You Know What I Mean." I guess the mix would also have to include Pulp, "Common People" and "Disco 2000"; Chumbawumba, "Tubthumping"; The Verve, "Bittersweet Symphony" and "Lucky Man"; Paula Yates, "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone"; Manic Street Preachers, "If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next"; The Prodigy, "Breathe" and "Firestarter"; and finally culminate with the BBC everyone-and-their-dog version of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day."
Radiohead, OK Computer
In 1998 I took a truck trip across West Africa. I sort of wrote a whole book in part about this trip so I won't belabour that point, but some days, OK Computer (which I listen to an awful lot) takes me back to that time; suddenly I'm sitting on a bench in the truck, surrounded by that desert ocean called the Sahara, overwhelmed by the morose majesty of the music and scenery both.
Portishead, "Sour Times"
I made a bunch of mix tapes for the truck trip - Relentlessly Upbeat was the crowd-pleaser - but what I most remember is a child in Morocco who signed that he wanted to listen to my Walkman, so I put the headphones on him, and he listened to this song with a very serious expression for some time, then nodded wisely, gave back the headphones, and walked away.
Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
While in West Africa I spent quite a lot of time away from the truck (which was easy to grow sick of, and easy to find again once you wanted back on - there aren't a lot of roads in West Africa, and big yellow trucks full of Westerners tend to attract a fair amount of attention). In particulary, Tim and Nick and I abandoned the truck in Kayes, northwest Mali, to take the train to Bamako. Kayes is the hottest place in the world outside of the Horn of Africa, and was going through a massive heat wave; average daily highs were well into the 50s (circa 130 F) while we were there. The train travelled overnight to avoid the heat, in theory - but of course, being African, it fell behind schedule. Way behind. And its iron carapace began to cook its inhabitants like an oven. You could feel your brain begin to fuzz and brown out, feel your system shutting down. Only Rumours, which I had bought from a street vendor just outside the Kayes train station, kept me sane.
Joan Osborne, Relish
Southern Africa 1998. I bought this in Bulawayo, listened to it nonstop for two months as I travelled through Southern Africa, and never touched it again after I left Africa. Weird. Except for that awful "what if God was one of us" song, this is a kickass blues album, especially notable for its great cover of Dylan's "Man in the Long Black Coat."
Midnight Oil, selections from Diesel and Dust / Blue Sky Mining / Earth and Sun and Moon
Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands 1998. I remember listening to this tape all through a long, long walk through the Vumba, an incredible loop from Ndundu Lodge to the Mozambican border and back again. The next week I listened to it when I climbed into and overnighted in the Chimanimani hills, my only supplies a can of stew, a jar of honey, and a bunch of Puritabs. Ndundu Lodge, amazingly, was still there when I returned last year.
Tom Waits, Frank's Wild Years
Toronto, 1998-99. This is kind of a weird case, as I've loved this often-dissonant album since I first heard it back in university, but for some reason I associate it with my 1998-99 stint back in Toronto. Maybe because it's a sad album about long wanderings and failed ambitions followed by an attempt to return to a home that no longer existed. Not that that's exactly what happened to me; but I grokked the album a lot better, having been There And Back Again myself.
Moby, Play
New York City 1999-2000.sarahlangan and my tiny 200-square-foot studio apartment on the ground floor of West 16th Street. This album comes on and I could draw you a map of every article in that apartment. Hell, I could paint you a picture, if I could paint. I remember Play was widely dissed because Moby had licensed all its songs for advertisements before the album even came out. I didn't care.
Pet Shop Boys, "New York City Boy"; Groove Armada, "If Everybody Looked The Same"
Bally Total Fitness at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street. I swear they played these songs every freakin' time I worked out there (which was like thrice a week.) I suppose it's not that surprising. The gym was a weird assortment of area employees, Chelsea boys, and this weird crew of massive black guys with omega sigils branded into their arms who all but owned the free-weights area - I never quite figured out what their deal was.
Robert Miles, Dreamland
India 2000. The congested filth of Delhi. The majestic glory of the Taj Mahal, surrounded by the even more congested filth of Agra like a diamond drowning in shit. The congested but somehow charming filth of Varanasi and Calcutta.
The Prodigy, "Narayana"
Nepal 2000. Hiking alone down the dry desert above the Kali Gandaki Valley riverbed, through winds that threatened to blow me over, with Annapurna and Dhaulagiri (two of the world's ten largest mountains) to my left and right respectively, a gorgeous mountain-desertscape all around me (I do believe I have a picture taken from the riverbed itself), and this perfect-for-the-moment song booming in my years. An absolutely glorious moment.
Radiohead, Kid A
SE Asia 2000. I bought this in Malaysia for a long ten-hour ride into Thailand. For the first ten minutes I wasn't quite sure if the tape was broken or playing slowly or something or what. When I did my first dive course, in Krabi, I'd go home after every session and listen to this.
Weirdly, I can't think of any music at all that defined 2001.
Moby, 18
2002. July: My ill-conceived relationship with N. ended with this ill-fated drive across the Southwest with N. which ended with our ill-mannered breakup in Las Vegas. (Well, the relationship ended there; we didn't actually part ways until the next day after I drove her to LA.) We'd spent a fair fraction of the drive listening to this album. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with this album having overtones of her, so, October: I made myself use it as the soundtrack to my three-day bus journey across Australia from Cairns to Alice Springs. Now I just associate it with deserts, and am OK with that.
Radiohead, Amnesiac; Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
Winter 2003, sharing a flat in London with my cousin, who I'd met like once before I moved to London in '97, but who had since become (and still is) one of my all-time favourite people. I still don't like Amnesiac - as a friend of mine said of it, "I liked their albums better when there was music on them" - but she listened to it often enough that I eventually grew accustomed to it. Then I developed a crush on Nebraska, and in particular "State Trooper."
Peter Gabriel, "Big Time"
I have admitted this in the past to only a very few people. And now I tell the world! In late January 2003, when I finally got a literary agent - and a big-time big-name agent at that - what I did was, on the way home, I stopped at the Virgin store across from Brixton tube, bought a copy of Peter Gabriel's So, took it home, and listened to "Big Time" over and over and over again. (hangs head in shame.)
System Of A Down, Steal This Disc
The album I took to Paris for a long weekend in 2003, where, just like in Altman's Pret-A-Porter, I checked into my hotel and found that I and a cute girl had accidentally booked into the same room, and there were no other rooms, and we wound up having a weekend fling. Life imitating bad art or something. But for some reason Steal This Disc mostly makes me think of Waterloo Station, waiting for the Eurostar.
Crowded House, Greatest Hits; Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory
The Balkans, spring 2003. Specifically, Crowded House is a long bus ride across Albania and Kosovo, and Hybrid Theory is the epically uncomfortable train journey from Belgrade through all of Macedonia to Thessaloniki.
Radiohead, Hail to the Thief
Autumn 2003. Driving at night withredshrike, south from Bodega Bay to San Francisco, on the high winding clifftop roads that abut Mount Tamalpais, with the full moon's reflection shimmering silver in the Pacific below.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps"
March 2004. I spent the month in Los Angeles, driving all over the place, listening to Indie 103.1, which played this song a lot. I wasn't complaining.
Audioslave, Audioslave
April 2004. South America. I listened to this as I got off the plane in Cuzco, and for most of the next week, and along most of the Inca Trail. It was stolen from me along with the rest of my day-pack contents from the bus station in La Paz, Bolivia, as I waited dazed for an early-morning coach back to Peru.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
Paris, autumn 2004. This was the album I used as an alarm clock to wake myself up every day the month I studied French at the Paris Ecole des Roches near Pere-Lachaise.
Snoop Doggy Dogg, "Drop It Like It's Hot"
Jan-Feb 2005. My second stint in LA. Another of those songs that just wouldn't leave me alone.
I'm pretty sure I took a Discman to Iraq, but I guess none of the music I brought registered.
System of a Down, Toxicity
August 2005, aka last year. Driving from Las Vegas (DefCon) to Los Angeles. I do so love the Southwest.
The Arcade Fire, "Neighbourhood #3 / Power Out"
The last day at Burning Man 2005. The camp had mostly been struck, and around us Black Rock City was returning to dust, great patches of desert already visible where dense tent communities had stood just the day before. Everyone else was away from what was left of our camp for some reason. I turned on the car, selected this song, and blared it as loud as I could stand.
System of a Down, Mezmerize; Green Day, American Idiot.
December 2005, South Africa. Cape Town to Knysna and back. I rented a car for five days, bought both of these albums on the first day - both of them are masterpieces - and listened to them alternately as I explored the Western Cape.
Man, I'm glad that's over. (And I bet you are too.)
Bush, "Machine Head"
To this day I can't tell you why exactly I flew off to find work in San Francisco right after graduating university. But I did. I flew into SFO, checked into the grandly named Nob Hill Pensione (actually a threadbare flophouse) on Hyde Street, and went straight to the Tiburon ferry for the first of six interviews I'd arranged via email before flying over. When I came back, thinking (incorrectly) the interview had gone really well, I went for a long wander through SF - my first - until I returned footstore to the Pensione and turned on the radio, and this song came on. And seemed to follow me wherever I went for the rest of the week.
I spent my first proper month in SF back in the Pensione before I found a proper room. One morning I opened the window and found the hallway thickly full of smoke; it took me a panicked second to realize it was steam. A shared-bathroom room with no TV cost like $300 a week. I had no money and was living off my sole, modestly limited credit card until my first paycheck arrived - and for a couple months after, in fact - and there was at least one occasion when I went down to pay and held my breath nervously while the machine considered my application, not at all sure that I wasn't about to be kicked out.
Smashing Pumpkins, Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The world is littered with double albums that would have been masterpiece single albums if only all the crappy filler had been cut out - Use Your Illusion and The Fragile leap to mind - and Melon Collie is no exception. (In fact the only three really great double albums I can think of are The White Album, Physical Graffiti, and The Wall, and that last is only like ten minutes longer than a single CD anyway.) But there are still a dozen fantastic songs here. My weeklong SF job hunt successful - I was hired by a downtown software-consulting company - I flew back to Canada for a couple weeks, to graduate and put my few things in order, and for me this album is that Time Between. I distinctly remember sitting with a guitar in a bedroom that had once been a sister's (dunno why) painstakingly figuring out how to play "Stumbleine."
Consolidated, "Butyric Acid"; Tom Waits, "Step Right Up"
Exactly ten years ago today I moved into Stark Raving Brad's house on Rivoli Street in Cole Valley, SF USA 94117. These two songs call back every detail of that room. SRB, the black-sheep punk-rock son of a major California politician, was a character, as was Gerhard, our skateboarder-journalist other housemate. Oh, the stories: not-coral snakes, runaway rabbits, long morose late-night conversations. He had a full recording studio in his basement (thanks to one of the Gettys) which I had enormous fun with. Looking back, it was there that I came closest to taking music really creatively seriously. I didn't, and I don't regret it, but there's an alternate-history me who became a musician there.
Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville; Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
San Francisco 1996-97. Both of these albums are absolutely brilliant. To this day, listening to EiG makes me feel lonely all over again. It's not a particularly easy thing, moving to a strange city where you literally know nobody. Both these albums bring back kaleidoscopic flickers of memory: wandering through Golden Gate Park on a Sunday; taking the late-night BART back from the rep movie theatre in Berkeley that Philip K. Dick used to attend and talking to a homeless guy heartsick that he had lost his powers of astral projection; climbing up Tank Hill just behind my house; all but paying rent at the Castro when it ran its monthlong film-noir retrospective, and climbing the long 17th Street hill back home; tearing off my tie every day, seconds after walking out of the Bank Of America building where I worked; hunting for a decent beer with Horst-the-Austrian; playing chess against the homeless and near-homeless in the Horseshoe Cafe. (Where I met
cr0wgrrl, digitalsidhe, feyandstrange, kn1ghtshade, and orendure, as you all may recall. Ten years, guys. Ten years.)U2, Pop
Winter 1997. In retrospect, choosing pre-Internet rural China as my first solo travelling destination was either brave or insanely stupid. It was amazing, but it was hard scary work too. To this day the most alien place I have ever travelled. Somehow I made it through without disaster. I picked up Pop on my last day in Tokyo (my sister was living there) and for all I knew was the first to bring it into China when I took the boat from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. It's not a great album - in fact it's mostly filler - but I have a distinct recollection of sitting in a sort-of-bunk on a Chinese bus rattling from Guangzhou to Yangshuo, listening to "Do You Feel Loved" and "Mofo", my two favourite U2 songs outside of Achtung Baby, and experiencing a sudden, piercing, shivering understanding of just how far away I was from home, and from any human being I knew.
Various Artists, Britpop
London 1997-98. This is a mix tape that doesn't exist; the Cool Britannia music that was playing everywhere around me when, not yet having had my share of being intensely lonely (and initially penniless) in strange cities, I moved to London in the summer of 1997. The very first song I heard, moments after getting off the Tube in Warren Street, while I walked with my suitcases blistering my hands to my week's accomodation in Ramsey Hall, was the brand-new Oasis single "D'You Know What I Mean." I guess the mix would also have to include Pulp, "Common People" and "Disco 2000"; Chumbawumba, "Tubthumping"; The Verve, "Bittersweet Symphony" and "Lucky Man"; Paula Yates, "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone"; Manic Street Preachers, "If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next"; The Prodigy, "Breathe" and "Firestarter"; and finally culminate with the BBC everyone-and-their-dog version of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day."
Radiohead, OK Computer
In 1998 I took a truck trip across West Africa. I sort of wrote a whole book in part about this trip so I won't belabour that point, but some days, OK Computer (which I listen to an awful lot) takes me back to that time; suddenly I'm sitting on a bench in the truck, surrounded by that desert ocean called the Sahara, overwhelmed by the morose majesty of the music and scenery both.
Portishead, "Sour Times"
I made a bunch of mix tapes for the truck trip - Relentlessly Upbeat was the crowd-pleaser - but what I most remember is a child in Morocco who signed that he wanted to listen to my Walkman, so I put the headphones on him, and he listened to this song with a very serious expression for some time, then nodded wisely, gave back the headphones, and walked away.
Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
While in West Africa I spent quite a lot of time away from the truck (which was easy to grow sick of, and easy to find again once you wanted back on - there aren't a lot of roads in West Africa, and big yellow trucks full of Westerners tend to attract a fair amount of attention). In particulary, Tim and Nick and I abandoned the truck in Kayes, northwest Mali, to take the train to Bamako. Kayes is the hottest place in the world outside of the Horn of Africa, and was going through a massive heat wave; average daily highs were well into the 50s (circa 130 F) while we were there. The train travelled overnight to avoid the heat, in theory - but of course, being African, it fell behind schedule. Way behind. And its iron carapace began to cook its inhabitants like an oven. You could feel your brain begin to fuzz and brown out, feel your system shutting down. Only Rumours, which I had bought from a street vendor just outside the Kayes train station, kept me sane.
Joan Osborne, Relish
Southern Africa 1998. I bought this in Bulawayo, listened to it nonstop for two months as I travelled through Southern Africa, and never touched it again after I left Africa. Weird. Except for that awful "what if God was one of us" song, this is a kickass blues album, especially notable for its great cover of Dylan's "Man in the Long Black Coat."
Midnight Oil, selections from Diesel and Dust / Blue Sky Mining / Earth and Sun and Moon
Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands 1998. I remember listening to this tape all through a long, long walk through the Vumba, an incredible loop from Ndundu Lodge to the Mozambican border and back again. The next week I listened to it when I climbed into and overnighted in the Chimanimani hills, my only supplies a can of stew, a jar of honey, and a bunch of Puritabs. Ndundu Lodge, amazingly, was still there when I returned last year.
Tom Waits, Frank's Wild Years
Toronto, 1998-99. This is kind of a weird case, as I've loved this often-dissonant album since I first heard it back in university, but for some reason I associate it with my 1998-99 stint back in Toronto. Maybe because it's a sad album about long wanderings and failed ambitions followed by an attempt to return to a home that no longer existed. Not that that's exactly what happened to me; but I grokked the album a lot better, having been There And Back Again myself.
Moby, Play
New York City 1999-2000.
sarahlangan and my tiny 200-square-foot studio apartment on the ground floor of West 16th Street. This album comes on and I could draw you a map of every article in that apartment. Hell, I could paint you a picture, if I could paint. I remember Play was widely dissed because Moby had licensed all its songs for advertisements before the album even came out. I didn't care.Pet Shop Boys, "New York City Boy"; Groove Armada, "If Everybody Looked The Same"
Bally Total Fitness at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street. I swear they played these songs every freakin' time I worked out there (which was like thrice a week.) I suppose it's not that surprising. The gym was a weird assortment of area employees, Chelsea boys, and this weird crew of massive black guys with omega sigils branded into their arms who all but owned the free-weights area - I never quite figured out what their deal was.
Robert Miles, Dreamland
India 2000. The congested filth of Delhi. The majestic glory of the Taj Mahal, surrounded by the even more congested filth of Agra like a diamond drowning in shit. The congested but somehow charming filth of Varanasi and Calcutta.
The Prodigy, "Narayana"
Nepal 2000. Hiking alone down the dry desert above the Kali Gandaki Valley riverbed, through winds that threatened to blow me over, with Annapurna and Dhaulagiri (two of the world's ten largest mountains) to my left and right respectively, a gorgeous mountain-desertscape all around me (I do believe I have a picture taken from the riverbed itself), and this perfect-for-the-moment song booming in my years. An absolutely glorious moment.
Radiohead, Kid A
SE Asia 2000. I bought this in Malaysia for a long ten-hour ride into Thailand. For the first ten minutes I wasn't quite sure if the tape was broken or playing slowly or something or what. When I did my first dive course, in Krabi, I'd go home after every session and listen to this.
Weirdly, I can't think of any music at all that defined 2001.
Moby, 18
2002. July: My ill-conceived relationship with N. ended with this ill-fated drive across the Southwest with N. which ended with our ill-mannered breakup in Las Vegas. (Well, the relationship ended there; we didn't actually part ways until the next day after I drove her to LA.) We'd spent a fair fraction of the drive listening to this album. I didn't want to spend the rest of my life with this album having overtones of her, so, October: I made myself use it as the soundtrack to my three-day bus journey across Australia from Cairns to Alice Springs. Now I just associate it with deserts, and am OK with that.
Radiohead, Amnesiac; Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
Winter 2003, sharing a flat in London with my cousin, who I'd met like once before I moved to London in '97, but who had since become (and still is) one of my all-time favourite people. I still don't like Amnesiac - as a friend of mine said of it, "I liked their albums better when there was music on them" - but she listened to it often enough that I eventually grew accustomed to it. Then I developed a crush on Nebraska, and in particular "State Trooper."
Peter Gabriel, "Big Time"
I have admitted this in the past to only a very few people. And now I tell the world! In late January 2003, when I finally got a literary agent - and a big-time big-name agent at that - what I did was, on the way home, I stopped at the Virgin store across from Brixton tube, bought a copy of Peter Gabriel's So, took it home, and listened to "Big Time" over and over and over again. (hangs head in shame.)
System Of A Down, Steal This Disc
The album I took to Paris for a long weekend in 2003, where, just like in Altman's Pret-A-Porter, I checked into my hotel and found that I and a cute girl had accidentally booked into the same room, and there were no other rooms, and we wound up having a weekend fling. Life imitating bad art or something. But for some reason Steal This Disc mostly makes me think of Waterloo Station, waiting for the Eurostar.
Crowded House, Greatest Hits; Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory
The Balkans, spring 2003. Specifically, Crowded House is a long bus ride across Albania and Kosovo, and Hybrid Theory is the epically uncomfortable train journey from Belgrade through all of Macedonia to Thessaloniki.
Radiohead, Hail to the Thief
Autumn 2003. Driving at night with
redshrike, south from Bodega Bay to San Francisco, on the high winding clifftop roads that abut Mount Tamalpais, with the full moon's reflection shimmering silver in the Pacific below.Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps"
March 2004. I spent the month in Los Angeles, driving all over the place, listening to Indie 103.1, which played this song a lot. I wasn't complaining.
Audioslave, Audioslave
April 2004. South America. I listened to this as I got off the plane in Cuzco, and for most of the next week, and along most of the Inca Trail. It was stolen from me along with the rest of my day-pack contents from the bus station in La Paz, Bolivia, as I waited dazed for an early-morning coach back to Peru.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication
Paris, autumn 2004. This was the album I used as an alarm clock to wake myself up every day the month I studied French at the Paris Ecole des Roches near Pere-Lachaise.
Snoop Doggy Dogg, "Drop It Like It's Hot"
Jan-Feb 2005. My second stint in LA. Another of those songs that just wouldn't leave me alone.
I'm pretty sure I took a Discman to Iraq, but I guess none of the music I brought registered.
System of a Down, Toxicity
August 2005, aka last year. Driving from Las Vegas (DefCon) to Los Angeles. I do so love the Southwest.
The Arcade Fire, "Neighbourhood #3 / Power Out"
The last day at Burning Man 2005. The camp had mostly been struck, and around us Black Rock City was returning to dust, great patches of desert already visible where dense tent communities had stood just the day before. Everyone else was away from what was left of our camp for some reason. I turned on the car, selected this song, and blared it as loud as I could stand.
System of a Down, Mezmerize; Green Day, American Idiot.
December 2005, South Africa. Cape Town to Knysna and back. I rented a car for five days, bought both of these albums on the first day - both of them are masterpieces - and listened to them alternately as I explored the Western Cape.
Man, I'm glad that's over. (And I bet you are too.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 08:30 pm (UTC)Good list, though - I have a lot of the same music. =)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 08:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 09:13 pm (UTC)Exile in Guyville is an absolute gem which always reminds me of both Chicago (the place, where I first heard her) and ii3 (where I appropriated Shy's copy for a few months, until I found one of my own.) Unfortunately Liz Phair's never matched it since.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 02:15 am (UTC)Yeah, all the rest of LP's oeuvre is, alas, mediocre-at-best, with the one striking exception of "Polyester Bride."
no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 02:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-06 05:43 pm (UTC)i know you've told me several of these before, but it's nice to see them all, and the previous set, grouped together.
i have the same associations (and actually, some from earlier in the day, depending on the song) for hail to the thief...and i remember that evening at camp, too. there hardly was any camp left, just a few piles of stuff, and you with the car, and that song. that album kept jumping out at me all week, on the playa in '05.
one to add, peripheral to you but you weren't there, quite: my frank's wild years association is riding the bus from the airport, in the early morning hours, into manhattan, july 4th weekend, '04. the feeling that this city was a relative i'd always heard stories about but was only coming to visit for the first time. the heat and stink and noise of the city even before 8am, and no fear, just readiness.