by Tom Bosworth // April 25, 2020

The final stop on our musical heartbreak journey (that I have planned, at least) is with a band called Odesza. If you follow me on Spotify, you probably have seen me listening to a playlist called “Electronic, but something is sad,” a loose descriptor for a genre I’ve always been drawn to. Bands like CHVRCHES, M83, and Phantogram all have different kinds of sadnesses in their synths— if we were to spread them on an easel, they’d all be shades of blue. 

A Moment Apart has a few songs that I’ve fixated on, but the titular song is the that I come back to over and over again. It has a haunting hook, a melancholy, not quite human, but not quite not human voice that melodically sings “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” At least that’s what I heard on the first two-dozen plays. The internet disagrees, some posts suggesting “I loved your mess / I love you more”, another “I love you most / I love you more now.”  Those are the only words, over and over again to a sanguine, danceable beat. It’s like that gorgeous, painful moment when you finally hear in “Hey Ya” by OutKast “But ya’ll don’t want to hear me / you just want to dance” and the whole song changes. 

I had a great professor who has a whole collection of buzz words, but one of her favorites is “undecidability.” When a thing is either one or the other, but also both. Two possibilities at once, but also neither. 

There’s a final couplet to a poem I read recently that I can’t find again but has been stuck in my head that was something like “my love was like a fish / in the wrong kind of water.” I might as well hear that in the song too: “I love you baby / I loved you all wrong.” Tragedy is in the tenses. Love is in the present, but the object Is stuck in the past. OutKast: “Nothing lasts forever but what makes / what makes / what makes love the exception.” If someone can hear “all wrong” from the lyrics, surely “all gone” is just as possible— barely a slant and he’s gone. 

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s something impossibly difficult about a relationship where everything was right but it fails anyways. My mind is constantly running scenarios like “what if this part was a little different or if I had sad this or if I hadn’t have done that or if he was a little more whatever.” But that is such unkind thinking. Bell Hooks writes in All About Love, “this process alone did not ensure self-recovery. It was not enough. I share this because it is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”

It’s not a perfect book by any means and rarely did it acknowledge queer relationships in a deeply meaningful way, but when it does click, it’s a real gift. My biggest fear is that I loved all wrong, that I loved with the wrong kind of water, that I loved inconsistently or inadequately, that some sort of flaw of mine put an end to one of the most positive experiences of my life. All of my thinking up to this point has narrowed the answer down to “Maybe?”

But there’s fundamentally a fear at the root, for which Hooks offers, ““Love as a process that has been refined, alchemically altered as it moves from state to state, is that “perfect love” that can cast out fear. As we love, fear necessarily leaves. Contrary to the notion that one must work to attain perfection, this outcome does not have to be struggled for—it just happens. It is the gift perfect love offers. To receive the gift, we must first understand that “there is no fear in love.” But we do fear and fear keeps us from trusting in love.”

“I love you more now” can’t possibly be it, can it? I don’t know how to feel gratitude for something with a painful absence. It’s even harder to feel that gratitude for someone gone. But wow, did I love our mess. I probably loved us all wrong, but damn I’m trying to love us more now. 

by Tom Bosworth // April 17, 2020

“Motel 6” by River Whyless is in a totally different genre and struck me much more recently. I had most of their discography on repeat last fall, when I was slowly realizing that things with my partner were quickly slipping away. The slow friction of long distance was beginning to screech. The pace of the quarter system meant I couldn’t get away as often. 

On the morning of my last visit to Bennington, we were listening to the album in his twin bed. The sun was coming through the east window. I hadn’t really listened to the words and none of the ugliness was apparent to me yet, but the first verse, “Long-time lover, have you gone? / I left you walking through / the parking lot of a Motel 6 / As I turned our van back east / Somewhere on the road we lost our way.” I thought the melody was nice, and it is, but I was slowly waking up to the whole song. 

Sianne Ngai has a book called Ugly Feelings that gets at what kind of state I often listened to this song. The book is cool and important, but the introduction is what stuck out to me, the explanation of just what an uglyfeeling is: “unlike rage, which cannot be sustained indefinitely, less dramatic feelings like envy and paranoia have a remarkable capacity for duration. If Ugly Feelings is a bestiary of affects, in other words, it is one filled with rats and possums rather than lions, its categories of feeling generally being, well, weaker and nastier.”

I had Mitski, Bon Iver, and yes, “Heartbeat in the Brain” for the heartbreak: songs to listen to before, during, and after crying in the shower. But there’s another class of feeling— the ugly kind. It’s slower, more palatable to listen to while the 10º wind chill besieges the thinnest parts of you. 

“Motel 6” is an ugly song then, an amalgamation of regret, inevitability, and slow loss. The chorus is desperate and uncertain: “In my mind / in my mind / I can save us all / I can breathe this all back to life.” But he can’t. The only things we know about the speaker is that he drives a van and he is leaving someone at a Motel 6. That doesn’t scream restorative power. Holding on and letting go are opposite actions, but I’m often trying to do both at once. 

Coming “back east” is a retreat toward the old, the known, maybe even the comfortable. Something is always left behind in that movement. Writing about the album, Ryan O’Keefe remembers being broke after a tour, dropping one of the members off before she flew home: “Watching her check into the motel as we pulled away felt like an ending. It was as if I removed a pair of tunnel vision goggles and could see the world and my life for the first time since we started this band. I felt incredibly small, fragile, irresponsible, foolish, at a loss for what to do next and very alone.”

The chorus ends, “From a dream I’m waking up / And for the first time / I’m terrified of waking up alone. “I tried to use winterim to “get over it” but it simply wasn’t enough time. Still feeling the tequila heartburn from New Years, I slouched back East for Winter term and arrived to a dorm room practically haunted by better times. River Whyless became unlistenable. 

I don’t understand it. I have a manuscript of poems about it, a weird creative non-fiction piece about it, and now a blog, at least partially, about it. Letting go and holding on are opposite things, but things always done together. I can listen again, though, and it’s as gorgeous as ever.

by Tom Bosworth // April 10, 2020

I woke up this morning with several songs stuck in my head, as I often do. I don’t know how they get there. I don’t listen to music when I’m going to bed, and I remember enough of my dreams to know that they aren’t soundtracked. But as I was rinsing my retainers of all the nasty things the human mouth does while its host is asleep, the two songs were wrestling each other in and out of my brain-folds. I couldn’t think about anything else until I wrote a multi-part, confessional post for my new music blog. I hate that sentence. Quarantine rots the brain.

I listened to the first song, “Heartbeat in the Brain”, a lot in high school when I was going through an ugly, prolonged heartbreak, where the boy in question was straight and therefore painfully inaccessible. The song is pretty “edgy” and does feature some screaming, but part of it really resonated with me. And I’d often play a 20 second or so clip over and over again while staring at the ceiling, high on angst and hormones.  

The second verse builds up to this really difficult moment where the speaker is trying to hold onto someone that’s already gone: “I know a few chords that could make you miss me. / They ring and decay in this garage every few days. / Just trying to figure out this beat. / So if you want to come back east, then maybe you can help me find it.”

There’s an essay by poet Jenny Zhang about Tracy Emin’s work that’s part confessional essay, part aesthetic statement, and part criticism. She uses a couple instances in her life and her encounters with Emin’s art to defend art that’s considered “too sentimental.” There are a couple paragraphs that I think about all the time, but this is one that’s really stuck with me. It comes after she observes that we’re eager for poetry during extreme times: death, loss, grief, suicide and yes, heartbreak.

“But I want elegies while I’m still alive, I want rhapsodies though I’ve never seen Mount Olympus. I want ballads, I want ugly, grating sounds, I want repetition, I want white space, I want juxtaposition and metaphor and meditation and all caps and erasure and blank verse and sonnets and even center-aligned italicized poems that rhyme, and most of all — feelings.”

Yeah, the song is emotional, emo even. It makes me want to grow bangs that cover my eyes It makes me want to smoke cigarettes behind GameStop. It makes me want to crack open an ice cold mountain dew and dew a couple kickflips. But it has a lot to say about letting go. I came back to it after breaking up with my partner and found that verse just as potent. It reminded me of a poem that a friend had shared, a short ekphrastic piece with its lines cut so short it reads wound up and breathless: “I hope / you won’t / need pills / like I / do.” The ending is also a sort of “come back east” invitation: “Please forget / your scarf / in my / life and / come back / later for / it.”

Rilke writes to the young poet Franz Kappus, 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I am often so critical of high school Tom, who didn’t have all the tools he needed, didn’t have the fancy English classes to be able to explain his angst. His poems weren’t good. He didn’t have a confessional music blog. He didn’t have such beautiful friends. But god, I love him for trying anyways. I love him for asking questions with no / bad / ugly answers, but also the questions with so much joy, so much possibility in their blooming “?”.

Here’s a link to Jenny Zhang’s gorgeous essay. I think everyone should read it, but I also wanted to give content warnings for descriptions of self harm and suicide.

by Tom Bosworth // April 4, 2020

It’s a weird time right now. I don’t mean “wow, things sure are whacky,” I mean things are changing so quickly in such strange and often bad ways that my already troubled brain cannot read the news without thinking “Huh!” As in “Huh!” I can’t seem to finish the NYT daily mini. “Huh!” the neighbors want to trade a bottle of wine for hand sanitizer. “Huh!’ it’s from Tuscany. “Huh!” the bottle is empty. “Huh!” the bath bubbles are gone and it’s just me, Joan Didion and yes, the pencil I bring to annotate with in the bath.

I’ve been talking to friends about what music they’re listening to. The answers are all over the place and looking at spotify’s “friend activity” is like looking at a dozen SOS fires burning on a beach. One friend is only listening to “sad Radiohead.” One is listening to a playlist called “aries…. Oh?” Another is listening to “90S RUNNING MUSIC.” I think when times are fucked up, we’re extra sensitive to art. I can’t listen to several artists that my ex introduced to me— Sylvan Esso, Sir Babygirl, Doja Cat. Three notes from “Funeral Singers” and I have to climb in bed and call it a day. If a song mentions kissing, I skip it. Calvin Harris, for some reason beyond the understanding of me or my therapist, is unavailable to me at this time.

Taking the airpods out (I know, I know) is just as bad. Most of my neighbors seem to be retired men holding leaf blowing contests. Sean Hannity is constantly screaming from the living room, I swear even when the TV is off. My ceiling fan is not balanced and clunks every few rotations. Small complaints, yes, but the mind needs a beautiful place to live and we get there with art.

My most listened to album of 2018 surprised me. (Yes 2018 was two years ago but as I was explaining, time is weird right now.) I was just getting into Bon Iver and 22, A Million was on anytime I was in the car. But Music for a French Elevator and Other Oddities still managed to take the top spot. Like many of the songs in it, the album is pretty much what it says on tin. It’s for going up or down in a whimsical, made-up fancy-land where things are weird in another direction. I don’t mean weird like when a straight guy takes two hits from the bong, says he’s going to put something “pretty weird” on the aux and then plays Modest Mouse.

The Books is (was?) a band consisting of just Nick Zammuto and Paul Je Dong who met in New York, recorded in an old Victorian house in Massachusetts, and then ended the project some time in 2009. The music is built around “found sound,” that is, existing audio, haunted and all about mood, tone, and atmosphere. “Meditation Outtakes” is a clip of someone saying “meditation” about 200 times. “Ghost Train Digest” sounds like out of order dialogue from an audio drama. But there are more traditional, listenable tracks too. “Mars, OK” is just two guitars in a familiar, comforting duet. 

The album is full of puzzles. Some tracks seem like jokes, others feel earnest and true. Some tracks feel rural and homely, others feel like unwatched chemistry experiments. I’ve listened to it for so many hours because it’s strange but not unlistenable. It is not sad. It does not remind me of someone I love. It’s fine in the background, the foreground, anywhere in between. It’s not often on repeat, but it’s something I can comfortably, consistently reach for when I need something there.

I’m interested to hear what you’re listening to or unable to listen to. What albums got you through difficult times? What albums instantly conjure up memories?