Pondering in my bed the other night, I was thinking about some of my favorite records. In An Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Good Morning by Alkaline Trio, Control by Pedro The Lion, Deja Entendu by Brand New, The Soul Album by Otis Redding, ( ) by Sigur Ros, and Blue Skies, Broken Hearts... Next 12 Exits by The Ataris. So I made a playlist of all my favorite albums and their last tracks. If anyone knows me, they know that I am pungent dick-weed when it comes to making mix CDs, tapes, or playlists for people. I even have a braggadocios aura to my posture whenever I talk about it as well. Either way when I put the playlist on shuffle it didn't take me long to realize that the majority of the final tracks were less-than happy tracks. Take for instance the track Rocket City off of Northstars album Pollyanna, I mean as much as the record takes the notion of melancholy to a very trendy and catchy arena of life, the last track seems to not try and bury the misery.
"And when I fall don’t forget me….
Cause if I stay here I’ll be dying forever…"
Cause if I stay here I’ll be dying forever…"
The whole track has a rather scathing Icarus vibe to it. And maybe that's what it's like completing a monumental record. You find yourself flying to close to the sun. The closing track to the infamous playlist, Is That You, Scully was a toss up between Big Star's Thirteen or Otis Redding's Cigarettes and Coffee. Both of those songs have a deep meaning for me. I always imagined having my first dance with my wife to Thirteen because it's an adorable acoustic ballad about young love and telling the girls Dad to fuck off. Romantic, right? But then there was Cigarettes and Coffee, and hot damn, that song perfectly described my favorite moments with the people that I love. Just being together, smoking cigarettes just talking... or just simply being present. I'm fairly positive I chose Otis in the end, but what does it matter now, right? Otis was my Icarus song. The moment when I flew to closeto the sun. Perhaps that is what its like when you're at the end. You can fully see the sun when you fall back to Earth.
This is the best story I have about the sun.
[Also I apologize in advance for how emotionally graphic this gets. But I wrote this in October of 2015 after leafing through an old journal and seeing the physical entry about this day.]
