by Dan Kennedy
For instance let’s say it’s fall, maybe 1998, New York. It’s Friday night and you and your girlfriend have just broken up a couple of days ago. And as Autumn kills innocent leaves and gives the sunshine the bum’s rush, pushing it out of the sky three hours earlier than it’s been used to leaving all summer long, you’ve decided to head out of town alone for the weekend. Ah, good for you. Getting over it. Heading into the Catskill Mountains, let’s say.
Hypothetically, there’s a small CD player in the motel room you end up checking into. There’s a CD player in the rental car, too, for that matter. But you’ve forgotten to bring CDs, haven’t you? Let’s say you forgot toothpaste, too. You forgot a few things really, maybe still reeling from where this breakup. And the worst part of that feeling of breaking up when it hits is that it has happened yet again, wouldn’t you agree? Anyway, here you are getting out of the city and away from feelings…I applaud your effort to not have sad feelings alone in a small apartment tonight.
Okay, so, where were we? Right, so, you’re checking into a small motel in the mountains. Alone. With weird breath. And no music. Oh, wait, look! There’s a CD in the side compartment of your backpack. It must’ve been left in there from that trip to California that you and your now ex girlfriend took together over the summer. Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. Okay, so…good…moving on with your life. You've also purchased some twenty-ounce cans of beer, let’s say. You put that CD in and turn it up.
Ah, there’s that one song, what’s it called? Oh, right: “God Only Knows What I’d Be Without You.” Okay…good…song for…getting over a breakup. I guess. You focus on Brian Wilson’s painful, beautiful, heartbreaking melodies. You focus on this collection of what may the most lush, melancholy, poignant, songs ever filed in the pop/rock aisle in the course of the last thirty years. Go ahead and focus on the CD, because it’s the only one you brought. Focus on the beauty and the pain and the honest to God naked vulnerability and unbelievably beautiful, almost boyish, innocent words he sings. For instance, the line about how he loves her so much that if she should ever leave him, life would go on, but it would mean nothing to him, so what good would living do him. I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Hey, these lyrics and these beautiful songs are making me cry.” You’re thinking this: Hey, when I listened to these songs this summer, when I still had a girlfriend, they seemed somehow hopeful, but now as I listen to the same songs, they seem like songs about a man realizing the pain and also the beauty in how we all must face the fact that we’re forever alone. Songs about some girl named Caroline and how her long sweet hair has been sensibly bobbed, songs about realizing life goes by whether we want it to or not, and that life’s innocence, it’s “summer” if you will, will wane like every summer always has: the June you thought would last forever turns somehow into August, then into shorter days and fallen leaves, then finally darkness.
Hmmm, maybe not the best CD to be listening to while sitting alone in a roadside motel in the Catskills after a breakup. It’s filled with songs. Songs like “God Only Knows”, “Wouldn’t it Be Nice”, “You Still Believe in Me.” And that’s really why I don’t recommend this particular listening experience for you. There’s just something about you sitting there alone, drinking tall cans of beer from a gas station on State Throughway 87, listening to songs like the sadly optimistic and chilling, lilting and haunting “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on my Shoulder)” that may not be the best situation. Inevitably, there will be three beers left of the six, and it will be only, say, 8:40 PM. And no matter how hard you try, it will be impossible to sit there trying to convince yourself of something like this: “I’m fine, and it was really for the best, and I’m glad to be out of the city for the weekend.”
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