By: Glasses
A fellow DJ here on WKDU called me cold and emotionless recently, so I decided to jump on the “10 songs” bandwagon to prove to myself in a meaningless way that I was still doing okay. Written at 4AM against harsh fluorescent light.
1. Spiritualized—Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space
This one goes way back for me. The gentle swinging in the background, the layering of the vocals, the juxtaposition between hope and despair. Whether or not this track was written about heroin is irrelevant. Spaceman taps in to a universal feeling of confusion between hope and biased preconception, and the result is something special. I ended up listening to this album a lot when experimenting with my first relationship. I was in no way ready emotionally, and by the time I realized that there was nothing real beneath my expectations and illusions, I found that this album was the only thing that was really left after the full ordeal. Great record, great live show, too.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB7E1D_3Na4]
2. Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Sleep
“They don’t sleep on the beach anymore.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcE4_7-X78]
3. Fuck Buttons—Olympians
Fuck Buttons takes me back to careless summers in high school playing now-dead video games with close friends and feeling a general acceptance of the world. These days are gone. Things change, and experience is flitting. There is no use in harboring desires informed entirely by past experience as they hinder any chance for real progress to be made going forward, but every time I hear this track, if only for a moment, I feel that a nostalgic lifestyle might not be too awful.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQZo2rsReEM]
4. Daniel Johnston—True Love Will Find You in the End
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma7lyfYzIw8]
5. Jeffrey Lewis—The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song
My friend Max sent me this song one of those early mornings in which you go to bed to the sounds of birds chirping outside. I took it as a personal attack. Never before had I felt more spiritually connected with a song. If anything sums up my most successful social experiences with others, this songs does it. Re-listening to the track for this article made me cry again. The universe is absurd, and no regrets are logical because the sheer amount of factors pulling us in all directions are limitless. At least that is what I tell myself to when I find myself in these places. There is a line in the song about writing love songs without every really having love to write about, but what is more important is the final vignette about the universality of all of these feelings.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlRanftUqO4]
6. The Antlers—Wake
“The hardest thing is never to repent for someone else, it’s letting people in.” In a particularly difficult summer, I found myself on the roof of a building in Las Vegas in 114 degree heat crying to this album.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fpI2PPRAM4]
7. Strand of Oaks—Pope Killdragon
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uWA_kCRaNM]
8. Mount Eerie—Moon Sequel
“What gives? I yell and there’s no answering sound. And there is nobody around, and there my answer was found.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsUfvPx7gbY]
9. Leonard Cohen—Suzanne
Please, just leave me alone, Leonard Cohen warned me about this and I’m not about to fall for it again.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otJY2HvW3Bw]
10. The Microphones—Instrumental
Goodbye my friends, I am gone.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlP57Ny-y9Q]
About the author: Glasses is doing much better now, thank you for asking. He is one Top 10 list away from making the Buzzfeed shortlist of list writers for 2014.
[spotify id=”spotify:user:1229622277:playlist:5XKLEtnBpTAAf5ZbYOXoRT” width=”300″ height=”380″ /]