angels, ghosts

I do this thing where I associate seasons of my life with certain cds. Maybe you do it too. For example, I can’t hear Dave Matthews Band’s Live at Luther College without thinking of my sophomore year of high school, when all my t-shirts came from Abercrombie and I liked this ridiculous boy so much my brain damn near leaked out my ears. Paul Simon’s Graceland always reminds me of the summer after my freshman year of college, drinking iced coffee in Rachel’s Ford and doing the “You Can Call Me Al” dance at red lights.  And Telling Stories, by Tracy Chapman, stayed in heavy rotation for months as I began to do just that, sitting at my desk in my parents’ house and plugging away at one tiny fiction after another.

A truly disproportionate number of these life-soundtrack albums are by one John Mayer, who seems to have a talent for making records particularly suited for repeat-play: Inside Wants Out on my trip to Australia in high school; Heavier Things at night on the Greyhound on my way to visit friends in undergrad; Try! in the darkroom junior year, seconds ticking by as I waited to pull my photos from the fixer. I love John: his quiet voice, his moody guitar, his heartbreaking covers of old favorites and the odd lyric that makes me sit up and say, “YES, THAT.” If it wasn’t for his habit of serially dating and discarding women with documented low self-esteem, I’d probably have a giant crush on him.

Instead I only have a medium-sized crush on him.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that Tom is awesome and bought me Battle Studies yesterday. The notification from iTunes showed up in my inbox, I literally gasped with unbridled joy, and twenty-four hours later the play count is already creeping close to a dozen.  Oh, I’m in love with these songs. Personal favorites include “Who Says” and “Perfectly Lonely,” though “War of my Life” is a rather excellent hymn to being a divorced-kid-at-the-holidays and “I’m on Fire” made me all teary, because fundamentally I’m a giant ninny. Anyway, it’s vintage JM, swoony and sad and maybe just a little bit more grown-up. Like the rest of us, I guess.

Over the next few days I’ll be logging many, many hours in kitchens here and miles away, and I already know this cd is going to be the perfect companion. And I already know that when these songs turn up on shuffle in years to come, I’ll remember where I’m at right now.