I’ve always thought that a good album — a truly good album, one you can’t even listen to without shutting your eyes really tight and wanting to absorb every tenuous chord — is like a blank diary. There’s a framework, a structure with different pages to flip through, but you fill it in. The meaning is ultimately yours.
Just as Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity stole my heart in high school, I’ve added my name as collegiate co-author to Jack’s Mannequin’s Everything in Transit. I grabbed the album off the shelf of the Arlington Best Buy the day it came out — coincidentally, the day I moved into my sophomore dorm.
I fell for “I’m Ready” (track four) and kept it on repeat as friends and I who were “made for each other” (“MFEO,” track 10) spent our first week back soaking up our long-awaited homecoming. Winter heartbreak left me singing the chorus, “I’ve got friends who/Will help me pull through” (“La La Lie,” track five). I fell ill a couple weeks later but was “Rescued” (track nine) to my home in Jersey before departing on my “Holiday from Real” (track one), a spring break trip to Fort Lauderdale.
Some songs are forever etched in my mind alongside time and place, and I’ll always recall the smell of salt in the air with the lyrics. It’s true of the “Georgetown State” mix that accompanied us on the 26-hour roundabout route to Minneapolis, as we partied like a state school through March Madness. When I studied abroad last spring, Springsteen hits resonated across the border of Italy and Switzerland from our rental van. “Welcome to Atlanta” by Jermaine Dupri cycled at a rate of once per hour as we drove to the 2007 Final Four. The epic ’90s pop-sing-along showcase we played on the way home from this year’s Big East tournament as we bounced around the eastern seaboard.
It’s mildly ironic that I’ve been all over the world and yet have found the greatest moments of happiness in the backseat of a minivan.
It is the same way I used to feel at really good concerts. As if every element in the room were conspiring to melt into one, be better than it is, and live forever. Which is probably the same reason why I always feel the need to roll the windows down and blast the music as loudly as possible and drive as fast as possible on my way home from a funeral.
The movie of my life would be peppered with these scenes. As the picture would show events, the soundtrack would voice my narration.
Together, in these past four years, we have crafted the perfect album.
People ask me if I write about music. I say I write about people. Embedded in each of my music columns are stories of best friends, boyfriends, roommates, heartbreaks, crushes and car crashes. Thank God I always speak in code.
In the 1995 book High Fidelity, Nick Hornby writes, “It seems to me that if you place music ( … and anything else that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to think of [your life] as the finished product … Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: We have to be unhappy or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy.”
This part of my album, the part I and about 1,500 other Georgetown seniors are each crafting right now, is bittersweet. It begins with the Counting Crows’ confession from “High Life:” “I get my ends and my beginnings mixed up, too/Just the way you do.” And I plan to “line my skies with all the silver I can use” straight through May 17th.
And as we count down our weekends, Jack Johnson is reminding, “This moment keeps on moving/We were never meant to hold on,” in his song “Adrift.”
Next, there will be a reprise of “Left & Leaving” by The Weakerthans. A flashback of doors shutting for the last time on New South One will frame the vocals, “We meet here for our dress-rehearsal to say,/“I wanted it this way”/Wait for the year to drown/Spring forward, fall back down/I’m trying not to wonder where you are/All this time lingers, undefined/Someone choose who’s left and who’s leaving.”
The truth is, I don’t know what comes after that. The next parts of my album will be subject to the revisions of a whole new group of bandmates, guest artists, backup singers and producers. Some tracks will be live, others will be remastered to perfection. With any luck, I won’t end up being the star. I will still be surrounded by people worth sharing the spotlight with.
Sometime in the future, in a time and place I can’t even imagine, the proud chords of Billy Joel’s “These Days” will sound through a montage of scenes I can never forget. “So before we end and then begin/We’ll drink a toast to how it’s been/A few more hours to be complete/A few more nights on satin sheets/A few more times that I can say/I’ve loved these days.”
My album isn’t bubblegum pop, and it isn’t emo. You can’t dance the whole way through, but you could try. I wouldn’t love it if it didn’t have a few minor chords, a scratched surface and an inch-long crack across the front cover. So it isn’t bright and shiny; it’s not perfect in any conventional sense. But it’s mine. And I stood by it as bandmates added harmonies and producers remixed the tracks. And I will credit to all of this, and to us.
Erin Delmore is a senior in the College. She can be reached at delmore@thehoya.com. This is the final installment of The Rules of 8-track-tion.