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WHAT'S ON MY LATEST MIX CD (titled "Oto�o"): My first huge relationship was with Melissa. It began the autumn of my sophomore year in high school. One of the first things we discussed, the first things we bonded over, was an appreciation�if not an outright love�of Peter Gabriel. I was out walking with my friends on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and we ran into her and a friend of hers. I don�t really remember which friend of hers, which friends of mine; you know how it goes. I had a stack of CDs in my hands, probably so my friends and I could listen to them at one of our houses. This was before any of us had jobs, before anything could arrive to sully a sunny Saturday afternoon. She saw that one of the CDs I had was Us, the new Peter Gabriel album. I vividly remember buying at the end of September�Homecoming week, in fact, in between school and picking up my date�s corsage at the florist. The only record store in town was a Radio Shack franchise which also sold musical equipment, and the CDs were wildly overpriced, but we didn�t care; high school students are not bargain shoppers. I�d heard �Digging In The Dirt� on the radio and been transfixed; it was�and the clich� truly does apply here�unlike anything I�d ever heard before. The dirty drum loops, the serpentine guitars, the mysteriously sexual groove of Tony Levin�s bass�it all foretold the trip-hop and ambient music revolutions that would come in the ensuing years, but Peter Gabriel and his cabinet of production geniuses�Brian Eno, David Botrill, William Orbit�were doing it now, in 1992. Eventually, Melissa and I would have our first kiss on October 16, at a school dance, during �The End Of The Road� by Boyz II Men. Not an auspicious first-kiss song, granted, but we quickly amended that by choosing better songs to be �ours.� Chief among them was �Blackwater� by the Doobie Brothers, which came on the radio one rainy Thursday afternoon while I was driving her home from school. And then, of course, our good friend PG. The whole album was ours, of course�we claimed it as our own in the ensuing months as we, two basically decent-hearted sixteen-year-olds, decided we were madly in love with each other. Mainly the song �Only Us,� which was perfect both for its message of insular, nearly solipsistic commitment to another person (�Only us breathing/only us sleeping/only us dreaming/only us�) and the howling ambient soundscapes which swirled over the staggered funk of its six-minute tenure. That, and it was a kickass makeout song. And then, the ensuing Octobers. I would like to think it was nothing more than chance when I began dating my next girlfriend, Sarah, on the sixteenth day of October the following year, 1993. For us, the album was Siamese Dream. I bought it on the first day of school and cranked up �Cherub Rock,� which as far as I could tell was an elegantly extended middle finger to authority. Again, we loved the whole album; again, one song stood out: �Hummer.� Another great makeout song, especially the tender instrumental coda. That song and the rest of Siamese Dream captured the strange marriage of creeping mortality and sanguine infatuation that October always seems to evoke. We�re all going to die soon, October whispers in its rainy afternoons and fiery foliage, But for right now, take your baby by the hand and enjoy the scenery. 1994: At least this year I moved things up a week, to October 8. Her name was Rachel and she was a college sophomore. I was a senior in high school now, and as such, I needed to prove my maturity. So I dated a college student. With a hearing impairment. She had hearing aids and could read lips, and even had a phone with an extra-loud receiver. We�d watch movies with the closed captioning turned on. And she listened to music, a lot, though she said she often couldn�t make out the lyrics. For her; most songs were instrumentals. My musical taste was getting more refined, or so I liked to think�if it�s true that simply seeking out more obscure artists makes one�s taste more refined. For Rachel and me, the album was Body Exit Mind by the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, perhaps the most tragically overlooked band of the 90s, in my opinion. They were a Manchester band that somehow broke out of the punk and mope-rock molds that city seems to employ. They wrote powerful rock songs with hypnotic pounding drum and bass cadences and auxiliary percussion flourishes. They wrote surreal ballads with guitar loops and ambient noise. The lyrics were stream-of-consciousness nonsense that made beautiful instant poetry. Our song was �Bruises,� with its uncharacteristically sentimental elegy for the walking wounded (�So many bruises that don�t show/found yours sometime ago/they never stopped you from being�). I was old enough to understand how human beings could hurt the people they love, and how it can take a very, very long time to get over it. I was still young enough, though, that such horrors existed only in theory for me. It was in this delicate condition that I embraced Body Exit Mind and, with it, the changing leaves of October, the increasingly darker afternoons. Whatever scant trace of goth genes I have loves the scarcity of daylight that October heralds in its final weekend when we set the clocks back. And then I went to college, and there surely was a relationship�or something close to it�waiting for me. She was a sexy girl�a musician�whose perpetual unattainability only made me more infatuated with her. We didn�t really have an album, per se. We had songs�some from Bj�rk�s first album, some Frent� (hurtling towards me from the general direction of left field), some Sarah McLachlan (from back when she was still cool). We also revisited Siamese Dream, and Us, and some Led Zeppelin, and scavenged other music that had already been used as the soundtracks to previous relationships. We weren�t fooling ourselves: the relationship was doomed before it even began, and we clung to each other in our beautiful dysfunction so we could listen to the music and make sure we had some good makeout songs stored away. But that ended the cycle, perhaps mercifully so. Ever since, my relationship clock has been more irregular. I guess there was 1998, when I began dating someone in November, but that�s November, folks. The album was xo by Elliot Smith; the song was either �Waltz #2� or the less-obvious �Baby Britain.� And don�t even get me started on �Autumn Sweater� by Yo La Tengo. Some years, I�m already in the relationship when October arrives, and the songs have already been slated. Some years, there�s a great album and no girl, like Jawbox�s self-titled masterpiece in 1996, or last year, when the Dismemberment Plan�s Change knocked us all on our asses, and I listened to nothing else as the leaves fell and the days got shorter. Which brings me to this year: At the end of last month, Peter Gabriel released Up, the follow-up to Us that his fans have been salivating over for a decade. It sounds like a cruel inside joke to call it a follow-up album when there�s a ten-year gap between these two albums, tersely titled Us and Up, as if the titles could glibly belie the depth and breadth of the music contained therein. And perhaps I�m being premature as I write this, because I haven�t yet given Up the proper listen it deserves. Sure, I�ve heard wondrous things each time it pops up on my iTunes playlist, but I need to lie down some rainy Saturday this autumn and really wallow in it, the way I did with Us a decade ago. As far as I can remember, Us was released at the end of September, 1992. Us was released on the twenty-fourth of last month. I get some kind of smug comfort from the thought that Gabriel intentionally sat on the thing just so he could bask in the grandeur of a decade-long hiatus. He can do that, you see. He�s Peter fucking Gabriel. But I�m not sixteen anymore�not even nineteen, or twenty-one�and these days, just as I�m about to write another poem about the changing of the seasons, or go on a walk under the changing leaves with a good album on my DiscMan, something comes up, like work, or just sheer fatigue. Maybe I no longer have the luxury of wallowing in October�s music. Ah, who am I kidding; I always will. |