Two things happened this weekend that affected me. The first was Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie turning 20 years old, and the other was the release of Earl Sweatshirt’s VOIR DIRE. Both made me think about my life in a retrospective way that feels kind of cringe but is still something we should all turn and face at some point or another.
Twenty years ago, I was eight. A little too young to listen to Transatlanticism, I wouldn’t discover it until I was twelve or thirteen, probably. I remember the moment exactly: riding in the middle seat in my mom’s minivan, on the way to pick up something she’d left at her office by accident some Saturday morning (purse, cell phone, something), in-ear SkullCandy headphones playing the album off of a Sony CD walkman I’d had since time immemorial. I think my aunt gave me the CD sometime that year; I remember her getting a PC that could burn mp3s to disk and asking me all the time what sort of music I was into. Tiny Vessels came on and I had such a visceral emotional reaction I started to cry in the back seat. I think a lot of young boys, especially those raised in upper-middle white homes that go to church every week with both parents and have next to no problems, don’t frequently reckon with sad emotions such as the ones Ben Gibbard’s hopelessly sigh-ing out all over that record. Suffice to say, I had never before felt emotions the likes of which Gibbard describes in Tiny Vessels or Passenger Seat - understandably, because I was barely out of middle school. It still shocked something into me, and it felt like I grew up ten years during that 45-minute runtime. I’d call it a fond memory, or something adjacent to a fond memory.
Twelve years ago, I was 16, and so was Earl Sweatshirt. I had recently crested the upper-middle white kid music taste hill and was coming around to rap, and like many suburban white boys, I got really into Odd Future after the release of Yonkers. I spent a lot of time listening to that first hyper-violent EARL mixtape, and then even more time with Doris when it was out a few years later. It’s a uniquely 2011 16-year-old experience to have. I was really into those albums for their violent imagery; sort of the direct opposite why I loved Transatlanticism so much. It felt like a similar outlet to the metal and hardcore I was just getting into, as well. An undiagnosed mental illness will do that to you. I, too, was disenchanted with the monoculture and radio pop-rap. I imagine it's how a lot of kids feel when they find their local punk scenes, something I wouldn’t really start leaning into until I was in college and had a band of my own.
Nine years ago, I was starting college. Pacific Lutheran University was the in-state private college I ended up at in scenic Parkland, Washington. Parkland had one venue for live music, and it was a really, honestly poorly-run coffee shop on the constructed main street just outside the campus boundaries that was carefully fabricated to give the illusion that you weren’t attending college in unincorporated Pierce county. The cafe did open mics every wednesday and I made a genuine attempt to attend and perform whenever I could. The place was packed every week, mostly because there was nothing else to do in Parkland and this was the only off-campus hangout that didn’t card. I had just started writing originals with my first band, but we never ended up finishing anything that’d resemble a setlist. Instead, we picked a handful of songs we could cover on two acoustic guitars and I made my guitarist drive out to Parkland every week to sing Title and Registration with me. Title isn’t a great karaoke-style song, so it must’ve been fairly punishing watching us squawk our way through Death Cab’s masterpiece of a down-tempo acoustic ballad. I didn’t care. I was so enamored by the simple fact that I could write my name down on the list and go up there and sing Title and Registration to fifty-odd people and no one would stop us until we were done. This was a new Title and Registration, a rediscovery of the joy for the song that I hadn’t yet felt. Playing it live was like hearing it for the first time again.
Two days ago, I read this interview with Earl from the Guardian. Earl reflects on being 29 and being so separated from the slur-slinging sixteen year old of his youth. It's not often we get to watch an artist progress so publicly from such a young age, and even less common when they happen to be the same age as you. I won’t pretend to say I can draw any direct parallels between my life and Earl’s besides the general feeling of maturity that happens across his career. EARL and Doris are albums made by a young guy, mad at the world and mad at his depression and mad at his dad. It won’t be until Some Rap Songs that we start to see a “joyful” Earl album. That transition from angry young man to a calmer, wiser tone isn’t unique to Earl’s experience, either. You can see it in lots of artists’ discographies; compare the first Mountain Goats albums to the dad-rock Darnielle puts out now. That’s not who Earl is anymore. “I had to make myself inhabitable,” he says in the interview.
It’s not who I am anymore, either, but not to the extent of necessity that Earl talks about. I don’t listen to the EARL mixtape anymore, but I do still love Doris. But it’s different now; I’m only reconnecting to that 16-19 year old Jeff rather than creating a completely new bond with the music. If I hadn’t listened to some of this so much when I was young, I don’t know that I’d like it now, honestly. That scares me a bit; that you can change so much over time. Parts of me that I thought were intrinsic to my sense of self are barely perceptible anymore. Let me be clear: I’m not lamenting the loss of my Odd Future fan aesthetic, but rather the passion I could feel for a group like Odd Future.
On the other hand, I’ll never stop listening to Transatlanticism. Don’t ask me why its easy to fall in love with that song over and over again.
I’ve lost the plot here, though. I guess what I’m saying is the double whammy of two musical moments coalescing so clearly in my hindsight at the same time did something to me. In a move both retro- and introspective, I’ve spent some time recalling the music I listened to at 12, and at 16, and at 19, and at 23, and at 28. A lot of it is the same as it was back then, just matured a little. This musical maturing is something I’ve felt very closely these past few months.
I’ve recently come into a time of funemployment in my life, which has given me an unprecedented opportunity to sit around and overthink things to drive myself mad with worry. First and foremost of these worries (even before the “damn, I should find another job” one) is how I can get more music finished. With one band playing shows with a soon-to-be stale setlist, and two more on the cusp of getting off the ground, I've been playing and writing more music in the past two months since any time before in my life, including when I was a full-time music student. I look back on the band I started when I was a freshman, and I look back at the Save Bandit album from five years ago with a mix of embarrassment, pride, and contempt. There’s always gonna be nitpicking you’ll do about how we recorded this part, or the riff on that part, and I’m over that initial wave of self-criticism. Where I’m at now is a complicated mix between desires for dissociation and preservation. Dissociative because I would prefer if people heard new music when they search up Save Bandit after a show, and preservation because I have an anthropological and ethical necessity to preserve relics of culture forever for future generations. Like a blogspot from 2008 with niche screamo releases in media zips.
I don’t think this feeling ever goes away. Earl struggles throughout his seven album career, and probably won’t ever escape. Despite Title and Registration’s two-decade presence in my head, I’ll never be able to stop singing it. The best I can do with it is dissect the parts of me that resonated with it originally.
Anyways, Save Bandit’s playing the Bayside Cafe in Everett on October 13th and we’ll be doing a Title and Registration cover.
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