“That’s not the sound,” F says, but he’s going to keep listening.
I’m giving F The War on Drugs, which I discovered because for a while in the 2000s I subscribed to the RSS feed from Minnesota Public Radio, and they had this thing called “Song of the Day” — or maybe it was “Song of the Week” — where you could download a featured song for free, and one time it was a song called “Arms like Boulders” by The War on Drugs, from their album Wagonwheel Blues. It was a weird sound, like Springsteen and Dylan brought into the 21st century on a psilocybin cloud. There’s no way these guys are gonna get big, I thought, so I kept following them. I wanted to be proven wrong. I still, always, want to be proven wrong. I reviewed their 2011 album Slave Ambient for the music blog I wrote for at the time. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember I liked it, and I remember pulling out a line that was like “I thought I had him by the hand / I only had him by the glove,” which was sort of how I felt about my life generally at that time.
I’m introducing F to The War on Drugs, more than ten years after all that discovery, because they’ve become one of my favorites, and because I’m learning to play “Lost in the Dream” from their 2014 album of the same name. Eventually, long after that first introduction, I’ll send him a recording of me playing that song on the guitar. It’s the fifth or sixth take because I keep getting distracted by things happening in my house and flubbing even though it’s only three chords. He’ll tell me it reminds him of Carla Bruni; I’ll think he’s lying. I can play that song without even thinking now, can’t imagine it taking five or six takes to not flub. It’s amazing how long things actually take to fully ripen.
One time my friend J was giving me a ride home from across town where we’d been hanging out with some more friends, and someone had thrown up in his passenger’s seat the night before, so I had to sit in the back, which is very bad for me because I get carsick, but he gave me full control of the aux cord as a sort of consolation prize, so I put on The War on Drugs’s 2017 album A Deeper Understanding. I don’t think we spoke at all, the car hurtling down the highway and me trying not to hurl. We experienced the music as we experienced each other, as we experienced his stinky car: temporary company, imperfect and impermanent, just what happened to be happening at the time.
I don’t think J liked the music, and it didn’t matter. I wasn’t sharing it because I wanted him to like it; it was just who I was and where I was at the time; putting it on felt the same as engaging in conversation would have.
My friend M is an antiques buyer, and he often shows me the things he buys and sees when he goes “picking,” which is a word, I learned, for when you go shop for antiques at big malls and thrift stores, not knowing what you might find. M and I have different tastes. He likes art deco and metal and glass and 80s things. I don’t like art deco or metal or glass, unless it’s super-kitschy Italian glass. I do like 80s things, but I don’t like any of the 80s things M likes. There is a deeply entrenched dynamic in our relationship now, wherein M sends me a photo of something he’s just purchased — a metal coffee table, for example — and almost every time I tell him how ugly I think it is. We both delight in this dynamic because how often do you become friends with someone who hates most of the things you like? We also delight in it because, occasionally, I will actually love the chair he’s just gotten reupholstered in an inverted cow print (white splotches on black), or the lamp that looks like a bouquet of drippy condoms, or the square wall art made of felt pieces, much to our shared consternation and confusion. M tells me he’ll never pin down my taste. And how could he? It’s not like I have.
I’m sharing The War on Drugs with F not because I am hoping he’ll like them, or even because I think he will, but because I like them, and I want him to see how much. That’s why M sends me photos of the things he’s purchased, even though I am almost for sure going to hate whatever it is. He’s excited, and he wants to share that with someone, and sometimes that someone is me. I don’t have to like the ugly painting or lopsided sculpture to be excited that my friend found something that makes him happy. I can just be happy that he’s happy.
For the last few months, I’ve been working on learning The War on Drugs’s “In Reverse,” the last song on Lost in the Dream. It’s a long song about staying steady through uncertainty (“I don’t mind you disappearing / ‘cause I know you can be found,” frontman Adam Granduciel sings to some unknown person, maybe a lover, maybe himself). It takes a while to make it to its final verse, a short, hopeful ode to the self’s persistence:
I'll be here or I'll fade away
I never cared about moving, never cared about now
Not the notes I'm playing
Is there room in the dark, in between the changes?
Like a light that's drifting, in reverse I'm moving
It’s also pretty sonically complex, and I only have an acoustic guitar. But I’m making do, mostly watching a video of Granduciel playing it alone on an acoustic and aping his hammer-ons and pull-offs. Maybe one day I’ll play it for F; maybe he’ll tell me it’s “not the sound.” I sort of hope he does.
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