anticipation
Something I'm beginning to think that I have problems with; I've played the new Interpol & Pulp & Spoon twice each, then buried them away. It was just enough to get a taste of what they sounded like, but now I'm hesitant to listen to them again. At the moment they're unformed flurries of chords in my head; nothing's settled into full songs, there are no connotations to any of the song titles yet. When I first moved out here... getting off the bus and standing on the sidewalk, I saw the city in a way that I can't ever re-capture. In the first weeks here, I used to walk for two or three hours every evening, memorizing the layout of the city, where the good coffee stands were, which delis could make a real sandwich, and eating them alone with a new local paper, trying to decide what I thought of being somewhere that wasn't in the looming shadow of NYC. Today when I walk down Second Ave, I'm not really seeing the street- I'm seeing the last conversation with a friend on the steps of the Symphony Hall, or a rainy morning discussion about work outside an office door.
Albums that I've played over and over get the same imagery tucked inside them; have their sounds curled through seconds of my life that I'm loathe to lose. Some CDs never reach that level, even ones that I think that I love. Kid A, for one, has no memories stored with it; I can think about times that I've listened to it, but the same faces never show up each time a certain note is played. The anticipation of playing a new CD for the first few times is heightened by trying to project my current state onto each song; the sense of being nowhere- new home, no new daily routine, facing the 1 year anniversary of a few things I'm still not prepared to deal with- is sometimes a liberating one. This week, though, it's more of a sense of unnamed dread. One which feeds right into a few songs that I've heard on these CDs and makes me unable to play them again. I don't want to feel this shakey everytime I hear these songs, to have memories unwind between lines that in a different month would be colored brighter. Then again, perhaps each of these albums will remain like Kid A, unmarked by my listening; it's not something I think I have much control over.