I realized today that this project has gone on for ninety days and I’ve only written about one record by The National. And in the beginning I assumed it would stay that way. I’d try my best to write about things unknown, things far away from me, things that would require my full attention. But that changed quickly. There were days when I knew I could only right about the familiar, about what I already love deeply, about albums that have meant a lot to me for a lot of years. Today is one of those days. Trouble Will Find Me is the only thing I want to listen to right now. And that means it’s being written about.
I always feel nostalgic around this time of year. For the past twelve months, certainly. Hundreds of moments to sift through, hundreds of memories, bright, shining things that matter and that have filled my heart and continue to do so. Standing in the pit watching The Strokes, lining up in the pouring rain to get into the Catfish and the Bottlemen show in Chicago, dozens of coffee dates, New York City on the day of the Met Gala, the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Guggenheim, a million dinners with friends, the shock of selling a good chunk of art, talking to people about said art, seeing faces that feel like magic for the first time and hoping they’ll stay, hoping they’ll mean something wide and deep. Nostalgia for the years that keep feeling further away, for Yorkshire accents, for the sun shining like I’ve never seen it before, for Spanish beaches and Italian train rides, for dance parties, for long talks that go into the night, for spontaneous road trips. The National – any of their records, really – do a good job at intensifying all of that. Maybe that’s why I feel drawn to them at the end of the day. At the end of a chapter.
It’s the words. It’s how powerful they are and how sharply they hit. How I’ve tied them into incredibly specific moments and feelings, how they seem to have faces, how they seem to live in certain places. It’s the quiet muttering of I need my girl. How quickly “Graceless” rolls into itself, how difficult it feels to confront, how beautiful the lines are for such a difficult topic. I am not my rosy self, left my roses on the shelf. “Demons” and its darkness and its poetic self-deprecation. Do my crying underwater, I can’t get down any farther. “Slipped,” its confessions. I don’t need any help to be breakable, believe me. “Pink Rabbit,” the hope of someone coming back to you, the magic in the line I was a television version of a person with a broken heart. I want to type out the songs in their entirety. I want everyone to read them and swallow them and let them live inside their hearts.
There is emotion all over this record no matter how many times I listen to it. It transforms, I think, in the dead of the night, into whatever I need it to be. It knows me. I remember buying the vinyl from Rotate This on a high school field trip when I was meant to be getting lunch but escaped to a record shop instead, and I remember carrying it home so proudly, and opening it when I got home and staring at the beauty of the album design, and putting it on my turntable and lying on my floor and closing my eyes and taking in every single lyric. I still do that. I still want it to sink into every hole in my body.
It’s not an album to ignore. Once I had it with me it stayed. Once it spied an opening in my life it filled it. This is the band I listen to when I want someone else to hand me the words I need for a certain situation. This is the record I put on when I’m upset, when I want to be held up by something, when I feel love for no reason, when I want a specific person near me and they’re not, when I’m falling apart, when I’m sewing myself back together, when the world is quiet, when life is too loud, when I need to hear and feel and know my heart again. It’s a record for everything. A record for life.
Babbleogue. 