I finished the 30 days of music, but I felt myself getting sad that I didn’t have to post a song this morning and write about it. So: Bruce!
Because I didn’t use Bruce for any of 30 songs, and I don’t really know how that worked except none of them quite fit. Although this is a song that reminds me of a certain event (in the car on the way home from DC and the inauguration of Obama, rocking out to some songs that make me feel better—optimistic—something different after the weight of Bush was lifted off my shoulders. A different weight settled, of course, but still) and also a song that makes me happy and that occasionally I listen to when I feel sad, to make me happy.
It’s a simple song—certainly not one of Bruce’s deepest, not the kind of epic story that you can visualize the whole way through—it’s perfectly illustrated by a video of live performance, because the beauty of it is that it’s this musician, this voice that you know reminding you that things get better. Sometimes that’s all I need.
A lot of people my age grew up with their parents loving Bruce, and my parents do like him. He’s one of the few musicians my mother and I can agree on while roadtripping together (the others, maybe more surprisingly, are Blondie, Siouxsie/The Creatures, Depeche Mode and Concrete Blonde—and yes, Neil Diamond).
But I don’t really have childhood memories with Bruce in the background the way I do with Neil Diamond or Michael Jackson. I don’t remember my dad introducing me to Bruce the way he did to Elvis.
I think it was an Emma Forrest book that made me realize that Bruce was, in fact, awesome. That reading Namedropper made me turn back to those old Springsteen songs and bliss out to “Thunder Road,” which despite all circumstances reminds me of The One That Got Away.
I think actually that I bought a Best of Bruce while driving with my mother to visit my grandmother, so that we’d have something to agree on, and then I hit on the idea that listening to Bruce was the only way not to get completely stuck on the Jersey Turnpike in hours of traffic, like some God of the Jersey Highways Bruce will see you through the right gates and off the right exits and winks down at you when you come back from the rest stop with something rich and disgusting sipping soda to keep you wired enough to keep driving.
I look to Bruce along with Johnny Cash for the measure of a man, and joke that anyone who doesn’t love them is un-American. Bruce hasn’t disappointed me, and I hope, like Johnny, that he never will.
30. Your favorite song at this time last year. Tori Amos, “Teenage Hustling”
Sometime last spring I got a call from the fabulous editors at BUST asking me if I’d like to interview Tori Amos for their next issue. Um, yes? And also, yes? Granted, I’ve had mixed experiences meeting people that meant a lot to me when I was 15, but really, interview Tori? Stoked.
Then I realized that I hadn’t heard her most recent album—they were going to send me to the publicist’s to hear the new one, but not having heard the one before that? Sort of wrong. Yet like many other bands and musicians that I left behind after college, I’d sort of let Tori slide while I ran around with Neko and the boys from Lucero, more cowboy boots than stiletto heels.
So. American Doll Posse. Love at first listen. Tori, forgive me for letting this one slide past me so long. And this song? Well, truthfully my feelings for it started a bit earlier, when I used iTunes to fill in the gaps after buying the amazingly beautiful Tori Amos Comic Book Tattoo, which if you haven’t heard is a giant coffee-table graphic anthology of work by some of my favorite writers and artists, each inspired by a different Tori song.
It’s a song to strut to, to swing your hips while walking down the street in impractical-but-oh-so-sexy heels, I don’t mind a dirty girl, because really, who does? And if they do, do they matter?
It vaguely reminds me of this guy who was vaguely in my life (one of those stories, dear Tumblr, that you do not get to hear) at the time I first heard it, but I picked it back up again as an anthem when I got the call to talk to the lady herself.
No, she did not talk about faeries.
We talked about sex and high heels, handcuffs, women policing each others’ behavior, the economic crisis, and of course, comics. (She loves Ryan Kelly’s work and so do I.) She gave me a hug when I left and I strolled back out with this song back on my iPod and happy that at least one of my teenage idols was just as awesome later.
This is technically the end of 30 Days of Music, and I can’t help but notice how much I’ve talked about my teenage years, listed coming-of-age songs. There’s not a lot of new music on this list. Partly that’s because it takes time for me to really know and love a song, but partly because since I stopped doing regular music writing, I’ve been out of the loop. I like to believe there are bands I could discover that would mean as much to me as the ones I’ve listed here (and I’m trying to think up some bonus prompts for other songs I love that didn’t make the cut, several of which are by bands I’ve learned to love in the last year or two).
But it’s harder to find great music when you don’t seek it out. I was out last night with a troupe of music writers, seeing The Hold Steady (who deserve a spot on this list, for sure) and they certainly know more bands than I do, but when I turned the conversation to The Best Rock’n’Roll Song Of All Time we were naming classics and songs we all knew.
Maybe five years from now I’d make a different list. But five years ago I could’ve made a list very close to this one.
Today while out with a friend we were talking about the way things lose their sweeping importance as you get older. Kisses don’t thrill and bands don’t run away with your heart. But a great rock show can still get under your skin and a perfect pop song still makes you dance til you’re sore, and every now and then a kiss can still take your breath away. It just comes rarer these days, and in between other pleasures.
29. A song from your childhood: New Kids on the Block, “The Right Stuff”
Oh, I went there.
See, I contemplated using Bruce for this one, for a minute. He was certainly around during my childhood—that was really his peak influence, I suppose, the 80s. But I didn’t have a childhood relationship with Bruce, which is probably why I love him so much now. Really, I could’ve used Elvis or Neil Diamond or Michael Jackson. But let’s face it, all of those have some sort of cool cred.
But really, the first concert I ever went to was the New Kids. With TIFFANY. (fuck yeah Tiffany, btw. No, really, click, you won’t regret it.) I was maybe 10? I think at first I liked Joey and then someone told me that the reason he had bags under his eyes were that he SMOKED POT, ZOMG. So on to Jon, the quiet one.
By the way, can we talk for a minute about how vaguely creepy this video was? I don’t remember it at all—I just remember NKOTB sheets, giant oversized buttons that had stands on the back to display them, and arguing with my friends who lived on my street (oh, suburban youth) about which ones we were going to marry.
My next-door neighbor, with whom I had one of those secretly competitive friendships that you have with other girls when you’re 10 and haven’t listened to enough Bikini Kill yet (who’m I kidding, I had ‘em in college too), had bragging rights because her mother had taught two of the New Kids in middle school or something. I think it was Donnie and Danny? Who knows.
Of course, we all felt bad for Mark Wahlberg at the time, having left the group before they made it big, which of course we all now know was the best career move he ever made cause now he’s all Oscar-nominated and stuff and still sexxay.
Deep thoughts? NKOTB and other groups were safe for little girls who still thought sex was icky and something we’d never do but yet were starting to understand what attraction really was. You always need that teen idol who’s safely sexless before you move on to the ones who are clearly sexual (and someday I’ll write about the way that Kurt Cobain managed to straddle that line and how that, along with many other things, was the reason for his ridiculous success).
So. The last band of my “childhood”? Probably. It wasn’t long after this, after all, that Smells Like Teen Spirit exploded onto the radio and then the rest of the Seattle grunge groups, and then 1994 and Nine Inch Nails and I was forever corrupted (and while we’re talking about my teenage corruption, here’s a brief toast to Peter Steele of Type O Negative, a group that got me mocked on my second day at a new school but whose spookiness I loved until I found the Bauhaus and Skinny Puppy and went off in a totally different direction. Still a piece of my adolescence.)
Wow, how many bands can I namedrop here? And how many parentheses?
(Link for actual video for the song, which will not embed. assholes.)
and if I seem to be confused
I didn’t mean to be with you
and if you said I scared you
well I guess you scared me too
So. “Song that makes me feel guilty” is an entirely different proposition than “guilty pleasure,” which I actually have zero guilt over. No, this is a “Song that reminds me of someone” and a “Song that makes me sad,” even a “Song that reminds me of a certain event,” too.
But mostly it reminds me of the ways I fucked up once upon a time, the ways I was stupid and simply accepted that Boys Would Fuck Me Over because that was how the world was, and never even thought that someone could care about me enough that I could hurt them back.
I have long since gotten over, for the most part, what I dubbed recently “the nagging self-doubt that I associate with high school and college.” A coworker asked me yesterday how I felt about my life, as 30 approaches (9 days). The answer is “pretty good.” But a long time ago I internalized two ideas: that people loving me and that having some sort of financial reward for work I love were things that were too much for me to ask for. (Apologies for that awkward sentence, really.)
The boy who comes back in full color each time I hear this song should’ve taught me differently (and to some extent he did—he also taught me that people loving me does not mean they won’t tear my heart out again and again). I should’ve accepted far sooner that he meant what he said. Instead, I lost him and then I tried to pretend it didn’t hurt and tried to move on and over and over again I proved him right—since neither of us really felt love-able.
It was easy for me to blame him. It fit a narrative—a story I’d been told so often that I told it to myself every day when I woke up and only later realized that maybe, just maybe, I deserved some blame myself.
He wasn’t an alcoholic, which this song is so clearly about, but he had capital-P Problems that made it easy for people to write him off, and I was always good on paper, college scholarships, good grades, together family. It can be easy to let your relative privilege make you feel like you have no problems at all and make you feel guilty for feeling bad. For having reactions and fears that you don’t understand. And for drowning them in destructive behavior your damn self, too.
(Oh, but my destruction was socially-sanctioned. I wrote shitty poetry, drank too much, slept with the wrong boys to try to feel something. That’s what girls DO when they feel bad, right?)
This song suits my savior complex from those days, too. I can fix you, pretty boy, but only if it doesn’t require me to do or say something first. You have to ask me for it. No, ask me louder. Again. Otherwise I’ll run away angry that you couldn’t read my mind.
I couldn’t fix him but he seems to have done an all-right job of fixing himself and so have I. 30 approaches (he hit it last year) and I feel pretty good about it. But I think what I feel most guilty about in this whole mess is that I still haven’t learned to open up first. I’m still always waiting for someone to ask me. So what good was all that crying, anyway?
27. A Song you wish you could play. Guns’N’Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle”
Not what you were expecting? Have we not yet, in our extensive friendship via Tumblr, discussed my deep, unironic love for late 80s/early 90s hair metal? Though to be fair, GNR were better than just a hair band. HOWEVER. I also love Poison, Cinderella, Motley Crue and others. I have driven multiple hours to see bad reunion concerts. LOVE.
As with so many of the songs on this list, I have a long history with GNR. It started in the sixth grade, when the Use Your Illusion records hit and were all over rock radio. The November Rain video? When I hid out in the basement spare room and watched MTV, it was everywhere. Then the first boy that ever “asked me out” like people do in sixth grade used to call me up and play GNR at me and I would feign being offended and hang up, then snatch the phone back up to hear him giggling on the other end.
Nice girls didn’t like rock’n’roll. Not that kind of rock’n’roll, not such dirty, loud, wild, sexual rock’n’roll. That was for boys who had long hair and rode skateboards to school (already, in middle school, for the bad boys). Except that bad boy turned out to be one of the most solid people I’ve ever known and claiming that music for myself more than anything led me to who I am now.
I wrote about U2, buying my first U2 record, but the older girls I knew liked that band and my mother was never horrified by anything they did or said. GNR, by contrast, was a band that only boys I knew liked. Just like I “broke up” with that boy who used to call me all the time because my friends disapproved, I didn’t know what people would think if they knew I hid out and watched GNR videos over and over again, if I admitted that I liked the shock-value lyrics of “Shotgun Blues”. It was a secret habit, like masturbation, which I certainly hadn’t discovered yet.
Until I claimed it. All of it. The music, that is. If I hadn’t let in Axl and his skintight pants and his otherworldly wail, I wouldn’t have let in Trent Reznor or Jello Biafra or Exene or the Bauhaus. I wouldn’t have a scar on top of my head from getting kicked in the pit at a punk rock show and I wouldn’t, probably, have moved across the country by myself, multiple times. I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have these tattoos.
Of course, the ultimate claiming of this stuff for myself would be to learn to play it. Which I will never do. I’m never going to learn even basic guitar, let alone Slash riffs. I used to joke about having an all-girl GNR cover band, which I then expanded to an all-girl 80s metal cover band, but I wouldn’t actually want to play these songs badly. No, I’d want to do it right, in skintight pants with a guitar slung low, sweat dripping across whatever tiny shirt I had to wear to be legally compliant.
So there it is—the truth. Yesterday I was talking with a friend about the legacy of 90s girl rock, which certainly had a huge impact on me before I ever discovered Riot Grrl, but I have to admit that a big chunk of my rebel-punk-girl pose that I perfected in college came from finally figuring out that metal wasn’t just for boys.
26. A song you can play on an instrument. X “We’re Desperate”
I can’t play anything on an instrument. I never took piano lessons or anything as a kid. One year at school we were supposed to learn the recorder, and I think I successfully managed to not learn a damn thing on it.
I always wanted to be able to sing, though. I did theater (and never got parts in the inevitable fucking musical because I couldn’t sing) and somehow wound up in the Select Chorus in middle school, and when I couldn’t hit notes instead of trying to teach me our teacher just told me not to sing those notes. So basically I sat in back mouthing shit. That guy can suck it.
So instead of picking a song with someone hitting a triangle or a tambourine in the background as an “instrument” I could “play,” I’m going with X. Partly because they’re up there with my absolute favorites, a band I never get tired of, in some ways more important to me than the Clash though less explicitly political.
Really, the reasons I chose them bleed together, because though you have to love them for actually being a punk rock band that could play the shit out of their instruments, for John Doe’s croon and Billy Zoom’s sneer, it was always Exene that made them personal for me. Exene couldn’t sing and it was magnified that she couldn’t sing over the top of actual skilled musicians and even John’s voice, but she didn’t give a crap and she sang anyway.
Little bookish poet girl who got swept up into a punk rock band? Yeah, I can relate. I can’t sing but I can write. And I can scream along and not feel like I’m decimating something like I do when I sing along with Neko or Fiona because I’ll never sound like them. I can DO this. And this. And this.
Which was always half the magic of punk rock—its essential democracy. You can do it too, because “this” wasn’t concealed with tricks and mirrors, it didn’t require years and years of study (OK, it did if you wanted to play like Billy Zoom). You just got up there and did it.
And I got to 26 days of music without posting anything X, which is just all sorts of wrong.
Why this song? It’s sort of the epitome of X to me. “We’re desperate/Get used to it/It’s kiss or kill.” Two minutes of straight-up assault, Exene leering over the mic at the crowd, nearly falling into it, John chiming in later but the song’s all about her, her, her.
25. A song that makes you laugh. All, “She Broke My Dick”
There are no words or deep thoughts for this song other than LOLz. No, really. Also, the completely unofficial, slightly NSFW, sorta strange video above made me giggle way more. Mostly for the preponderance of girls giving the camera the finger in it.
All and the Descendents do make me happy, though. Every time that, in my rock-writer days, I used to have to review another shitty pop-punk band, I would pop in one of their records afterward to wash the pale imitation right outta my brain, and bliss out on one part dick and fart jokes, one part sweet love songs, and one part pure high-energy punk rock. Love.
24. A song that you want to play at your funeral. Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple, “Bridge over Troubled Water”
Funerals are for the living, so as loveandzombies said, I’m sort of uncomfortable with the idea that I would pick a song. I won’t be there to see it. Plus it’s vaguely creepy to me. But oh well.
One of my favorite things about the American Recordings Johnny Cash albums is that in addition to covering songs that I already had a long relationship with (“Hurt,” “One,” “The Mercy Seat,” “Personal Jesus,” etc.) and redefining them, Cash worked with artists I adore. I mean, the fact that on ONE record he duets with Fiona Apple and Nick Cave? It’s like the man read my mind.
Cash was from a generation and a world far removed from mine, but I like to think that if we’d ever gotten to sit down and chat we would’ve loved the same things about those artists and songs. Fiona is just a little bit older than me, after all, and they connected beautifully on this song.
I’m not a big Simon & Garfunkel fan (or a fan at all, really), but this version is lovely and mournful, and as it (like “Hurt”—I swear I love Johnny Cash’s entire career, not just American IV) is on the last record released while he was still alive, there’s something otherworldly about his version. He’s not promising to be there for you in body, but in spirit. Like other tracks that Cash was able to turn into songs about God (“Personal Jesus” OK I’m shutting up about this record now JUST BUY IT if you don’t own it it will change your life), this sounds like a promise from another world.
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m not religious and certainly of my Johnny Cash collection, the “God” record of “Love God Murder” is the least-spun. But Cash’s Christianity is the kind that I like to believe in, me, the nonpracticing bacon-eating tattooed Jew. And I like the idea that at my funeral, I’d send some sort of message of comfort to the people there.
(For more on Johnny Cash and spirituality, you really should read this brilliant, moving Vanity Fair piece from 2005 on Cash’s relationship with Rick Rubin. Seriously, it’s one of the best magazine pieces I’ve ever read. No, really, read it. )
This is where I get sorta sappy. I know I’ve posted this scene before, but Tumblr search hates me so I’m doing it again. (Link is to the full Elvis song if you need that. But really, who doesn’t know this song?)
I’ve always had a running joke that I wanted to get married by Elvis. I’m not religious, and I’m not even particularly attached to the idea of a wedding. I was never one of those girls that pictured her wedding dress, and even when my ex bought me a ring I was more annoyed by it than anything else.
This movie probably ruined me for any sort of “normal” wedding; I blame it for my idea that getting married should be something you do just for yourselves, not for the whole extended family. I have a very small extended family, anyway, and though I have wonderful friends, at some point some of them wind up excluded and ugh, money. Also (of course) as a feminist I have some issues with the whole idea of marriage.
So Elvis. I am a confirmed Elvis Person, if you go by (as I do) the Tarantino line from the deleted scenes from Pulp Fiction (yes, I’m quoting Tarantino in a post about marriage, shut up) that somewhere everyone draws the line. I like the flash and glitter of the King but mostly I like his voice. Elvis was the first musician that I ever remember deciding to like, playing my dad’s old 45s at home and so of course identifying Elvis with my dad, but also finding something in that voice that meant something to me. For me.
So I am a sucker for this song and have been for a long time, and so even though my idea of a dream wedding is basically deciding one day to get married and running off and doing it, it wasn’t all that hard to decide that this would be the song for today.
22. A song you listen to when you’re sad. Neko Case, “This Tornado Loves You”
I discovered Neko by reading about her somewhere; I bought my first Neko record blind. It was just a few years ago but still before I had really internalized the idea that you can probably listen to any song you want to on the Internet, first.
I don’t regret it.
Before Neko, I wanted Fiona Apple’s voice. Now I want Neko’s. It’s full and deep and has a lovely range; it’s slightly country and it carries a woman’s lifetime of hurt and sometimes it says Fuck You so gloriously.
This song has a slightly mournful edge (what will make you believe me) and the love songs that hit me in the gut always do. It sweeps across you like the tornado of the title, wild and beautiful and encompassing. It makes me a little happier, and it makes the hurt a little sharper, but mostly it reminds me that whatever sadness I feel at the moment is shared with many, many other people.
I can also turn it on myself, as a reminder from Neko that someone loves ME, and since her voice is the one I pretend I have then it’s almost like a note from myself…
The first Neko I bought was The Tigers Have Spoken, a live record, and I quickly filled in the gaps. Middle Cyclone is her most recent, it’s where this song comes from, and it might be my favorite. It’s rare that I say that about an artist I’ve loved for a while, when a new album hits—it’s so often the old ones, the first one I heard, that shapes what I think they should be.
But almost every song on this one hits me in that soft place around my heart where I’m vulnerable, something in the slight twang or soft chorus that makes me go “ohhhh” and know that she feels me. And that it was written just for me. Contradictory sentiments that nevertheless are the twin reasons why we appreciate love songs and songs about hurt.
I’m not sad this morning, not really, and so this song doesn’t really suit my mood and yet just listening to it, finding the right video-version to post for you, has made me a little more contemplative, brought some feelings closer to the surface.
Time to go out now. Will I poke and prod those feelings a little more and listen all the way through, or will I switch gears back into work-mode in my brain?
"There is nothing I like better than doomed romance. Trying something impossible is intrinsically noble. You try and do something possible and you end with possible things. Bless the people who try the impossible, because sometimes the prove that it wasn’t they who were wrong - but the definition of impossible."
I am reblogging this because you should read Kieron’s first of 30 Days of Music. Because I made him do it, and therefore I can sort of take credit for these three sentences, which are giving my day a good start.
21. A song you listen to when you’re happy. The Clash, “Train in Vain”
Yesterday was the anniversary of The Clash, but I’m going with a song off London Calling. I look up to St. Joe Strummer and you may have noticed my lust for Paul Simonon, but the best pure pop song the Clash ever did was a Mick Jones number and it’s three minutes of bliss on par with “Just Like Heaven.”
Of course the Clash were about a million more things than pure pop songs, but this one, tacked on the end of London Calling as if to say, oh yeah, fuck you, we can also toss off a perfect love song better than anything those other folks are doing, and we barely even break a sweat. It’s beautiful.
I’ve written probably thousands of words about The Clash and I’m sure I’ll write many, many more, but one of the best things about them is they have songs for all moods. I could fill 30 Days of Music with Clash songs (or Bowie songs, or X songs, or Lucero songs…). I don’t only listen to this track when I’m happy—I also could’ve used it for a “song that makes me happy,” because it does, but I am always tempted to reach for it when I feel good.
The first Clash song I heard was probably “Rock the Casbah” way back when—somewhere in my head it blends with Madness’ “Our House,” not for content but just for something that crossed my consciousness and tweaked my idea of music just a little. It’s the other “pop” song that people know, but I wrote about a loaded memory that involves that song earlier in this series, and it’s never quite had the same lightness ever since. And it was never a light song anyway, it was always one of those songs that people danced and sang along with and ignored completely what it was actually saying.
But “Train in Vain” (or “Stand By Me” as many people probably frustratedly Google-search) is that light airy thing—or also not really, since it’s about loss of love—but its buoyancy says that despite its despair you’ll make it anyway. It belies its own “Without your love/I won’t make it through” and even though it’s sort of a Nice Guy song I don’t cast myself as the Girl being addressed, I step into Mick’s shoes and sing it at any number of boys who fell for me as some sort of hellcat dream girl and then bailed.
It’s there for me when those boys weren’t, anyway.
(Also, I mean really, watch the video. Paul is so pretty. Oh, come on, you knew I’d throw that in here somewhere, right?)
But somewhere earlier this winter I went on a binge on Saul Williams’ The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which is such a ferocious, intoxicating, great rock record by a brilliant poet. It takes no prisoners. It demands you turn the volume up loud, louder, loudest. It crashes and bangs in a deeper, harsher way than most of that clanging whiteboy industrial music with its Eastern European and German fetishes, and Williams purrs into your ear, seducing and condemning by turns.
So now, specifically, this song. Which is unfair to say, really, that I listen to it when I’m angry because I listen to it all the time. But it is great for working out aggression, really. That pounding, throbbing beat like a sped-up heartbeat about to thump right out of your chest, Saul’s voice smooth and sexy (conductor, conductor/I feel electricity) crooning, gorgeous, just works out any tension you have.
It’s the drums, really. The drums of a much heavier, angrier song, that trick you into thinking the song is just going to rev up your emotions and instead it settles you down.
Of course, then it flows into “Raised to be Lowered,” which is also a great angry song. A more authentic angry song, revving you back up for the fight. It focuses your rage.
19. A song from your favorite album: David Bowie, “Rebel Rebel” from Diamond Dogs
I had to think about a lot of these for a while. But this one? No thought required. Zero. This is without a doubt my favorite album of all time. I often insist that it is the best album ever, and threaten to fight people who disagree. And this is my favorite song on it.
If I wanted to post this for my favorite song, in fact, I probably would not have been lying. Hell, if David Bowie were a band, he’d be my favorite band, but he is not, and there IS a difference. My love for Bowie pretty much knows no bounds. Somewhere on my hard drive there are 50-odd pages of a fiction story based on Diamond Dogs that someday will see the light of day. Maybe. Ideally, as a graphic novel.
The album itself is inspired by the wonderful-if-obsessively-overcited 1984 (Yes, Orwell) and it takes all the thrilling highs and creeping dread of that book (give it another read, I promise you, Orwell doesn’t disappoint) and rolls them into a sci-fi mashup of paranoia, bliss, love and fever dreams that hits all the notes you want in a great record—the creepy spoken intro, the splashy first song, the drawn-out running-into-one-another middle, the echoing last tune, the iconic “This ain’t rock’n’roll, this is genocide!”—and the perfect rock song.
“Rebel Rebel” of course is that perfect rock song, verse-chorus-verse and danceable as hell while also forwarding the narrative of the record, introducing a character as indelible in her own way though she’s never named. No Manic Pixie Dream Girls for Bowie; Rebel Rebel will kick you in the face if you look at her that way, and all she wants is rock’n’roll tonight or any night. She’s perfect.
I almost went with this for “Song that describes you” but you know, I don’t go out and dance til my makeup streams down my face (your face is a mess) very often anymore and though I came home from Lucero with mysterious bruises I haven’t ripped a dress at a show in a while. I’ll never be too old for this song, though.
Here’s a tiny bit from that 50-odd pages of writing…
He breathes in as he passes the girl, the blonde in blue, with the pastel tattoos up and down her arms, breathes her in and smells clean sweat and gin, nothing chemical or fake but plain girlsmell. He moves past, into the bathroom, reaching into his pocket for the bag of fairy dust…
He emerges, eyes wider, motion slower, and leans against the wall. He can see that Eva’s on his barstool, and Colin seems to have taken him up on his offer, the tattooed left hand—the one that reads “pain”—sliding up underneath her black miniskirt.
A pale blur next to him moves, and as his eyes slowly focus, she asks, “When you’re done staring, would you mind getting me another drink?”
He looks down at her, speechless for the moment.
“Unless,” she says, leaning in, “I can have some of what you’re having.”
“Sure,” he stumbles, digging in his brain for his cool—he’d had it when he walked in the door, Eva on his arm; maybe he’d left it in the bathroom.
She grabs his hand, winks. “Come into the ladies’ room,” she laughs, her eyes dancing. “It’s got a door that locks.”
