Future Favourites
I am an amalgamation of all the music I love. I am the beat-drop at 05:59 in the utterly sublime cover of On the Wall by Chromatics. I am the cello at 1:14 in Man of the Year by Lorde. I am the strings at 3:12 in the transcendental Amsterdam Tapes version of White Room by Adrian Borland.
I am the lyrics to Moment by Moment by Breathless. I am the way Dominic Appleton trembles the line “it’s late, very late in the day.” I am the utter bounce of the synths in Ahead (II) by Wire, somehow far superior to the album and single version. I am the way my feet tap as I cook to This Must Be the Place by Talking Heads. All of these moments I collect with me, like my emotions are a gold pan, sifting through all the experiences that I go through, quite literally just scouring for gold. The sweet nectar of tethering moments to sounds, placing a flag in the sand and saying, “this song will always be here in this moment, and whenever you want to revisit this moment, here it is.”
Music, to me, is time travel in its purest form. No matter how many times I hear a song - or a certain melody, or a certain chord from a certain melody in a certain song - it will always bring me back to a moment. When I tried to commit suicide in 2017 and played Liability (Reprise) by Lorde on repeat. When I spent the following weeks wandering coldly and aimlessly through the crisp autumnal air of Cornwall whilst listening to Under Your Spell by Desire. When I’d hype myself to drink the first shot of vodka with my best friend Martin before a night out whilst listening to Guardian Angel by Human Sexual Response. When I creeped into December 2012, on the cusp of a relationship with a woman who would abuse me and give me nightmares that still persist to this day whilst listening to the entirety of Outlandos d’Amour by The Police on repeat. When I first discovered hip-hop, after being so rigidly against anything that wasn’t 80s synthpop for so long, after listening to See You Again by Tyler the Creator in 2017. When I’d pine for my first love as a wee teenager whilst listening to Love You Til the End by The Pogues in 2010. When I had a situationship that became so much more than that whilst B.O.A.T. by Camila Cabello predeterminably wrote our ending before we’d had our start. When my old friend from uni became my long-term girlfriend and we first admitted we loved each-other as Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman played.
But they don’t just have to be memories I hope to cherish forever, either. I have been scrobbling my music since I was 15 years old in 2008. For those that don’t know what that means - I have had an account on music archival website last.fm since 2008, and connected all my digital listening to it. I’d scrobble everything on my PC to that site, and it would track every track, album, artist. It tells me when I listened, and what I listened to. Sure, some iPod scrobbles will have been missed, but it’s a nearly-two-decades-long archive of almost all of my music listening and, with it, it is the most in-depth diary of Ryan you could ever possibly hope to muster. I can see what I was forcing my friends to listen to during one of my many house parties as a 16 year old. I can see that night, in 2017, when I listened to Liability (Reprise) on repeat. I can see what I listened to during the very moment when I kissed my last love for the first time. All these moments are not lost in time, they are right here, forever.
I know everyone loves music. I know we all have our own special relationship with the songs that shape us. My relationship to music is intense, and obsessive. I cry over the stories of the artists that I love. I connect deeply to the artistry of their souls and the ways they choose to express them from sounds. I am in awe when Lorde describes music as “the love of [her] life” and I am enamoured that we, as a species, can be so tickled and tantalised by playing with our senses. I don’t know the science behind music, and why we are moved by it. Sometimes I have semantic satiation around music itself, as a concept, and the song I’d be contemporaneously listening to suddenly sounds like a Swell Maps song. I’d imagine if I was listening to Swell Maps during one of these times, it’d suddenly be as melodic as Paul McCartney. It’s as if the rhythm collapses and I’m left with disparate things.
It’s weird to experience one of those moments. Like facial blindness for the soul. The drums suddenly sound like bashes. The singing suddenly feels like a, “why are they talking like that?” confusion. For just a moment, I lose all sense of cohesion between the elements of the music and it all just sounds like a jumble of sounds. I ask myself why we want music, and listen to it, and why this particular artform? Is it because it is the least engaged - it is background to any other activity? It’s strange because it’s so intangible - yes, the instruments are tangible, the words in the lyrics are tangible, the notations in the songbook are tangible - and yet the music itself, the soundwaves that bounce from an instrument or a speaker into our ears… it’s just vibrations. Just sweet, sweet vibrations. Our tiny little eardrums are enough to receive the data, and our brains transform them into meaning. And that meaning becomes everything. It reminds me of that I’m So Hollow lyric, “emotions turning to sound, turning to motion.”
Sometimes I wish a blogpost could just be an endless series of lyrics that mean something to me. Maybe I need to start logging the particular lines more. The moments that get me. The feelings. Maybe the data isn’t enough. Maybe the emotions are the flag in the sand, not the songs themselves. Listening to Breathless by Adorable in a vacuum might not evoke any emotion in a person, but drop it into their life when they’re going through a breakup and searching for meaning that concludes their heartbreak and propels them forward into their new future? Then it becomes a favourite song. I’m always searching for that new moment that provides me with a favourite song, but it’s frivolous to try to search. It’s an equation that lives outside of time itself, as if in the fourth dimension. The need for the emotion to give meaning to the song, the need for the artist to experience emotion to put into the song, they both happen at the same time, concurrently and forever, and then that transforms into that special moment when you first hear a song that you know is going to be a future favourite. So just keep your ears open and wait for the future favourites to reveal themselves.