Playlist for an Anniversary That Wasn't

I am not the kind of person who necessarily links music to specific moments in my life. I don’t have a “soundtrack for seventh grade” or anything like that. I like music, of course, but it was never the most important thing to me, even when I was a teenager. And the older I get, the more I find that I prefer silence, especially when I’m working or reading. The one exception for me is in the car. No matter how short the drive, I turn on the radio. I love finding a good, fast, funky song, cranking the volume and singing along as loud as I dare in close traffic.

I took a random bunch of CDs when I left the house, mostly because my internet would not be hooked up until a week after I moved into my apartment. Old-fashioned media on a late-90s-era boom-box entertained me for that long January week. I saw the nine-disc set of “Traveling Music” my husband had compiled for road trips years ago among the loose CDs in a travel case, but I pointedly avoided listening to them. I am not sure what I was afraid of. Maybe I thought the music would underscore all the good times we had together and make me regret my decision to leave. Maybe I thought there would be some kind of secret message in the songs that might completely change how I look at myself.

Today, I decided that listening to those CDs might be a cathartic way to revisit the soundtrack of a marriage on what would have been the twenty-second anniversary of that union. They are recounted here in all their non-linear, non-chronological, nonsensical glory: a playlist that brought me to tears, made me laugh, and helped me get through a weekend fraught with memory and emotion.

Disc One

Aerosmith: Sweet Emotion

            (Good start, but not all these emotions will be sweet.)

Al Green: Let’s Stay Together

(This one feels like a knife or a bad joke. Honest: It’s the second track on this first disc. It’s gonna be a long day.)

Amy Winehouse: Rehab

(seems appropriate to my hangover this morning)

Not Jimi Hendricks, but African artist Angelique Kidjo, from the album “Cover the World”: VooDoo Child

            (This is hands-down my favorite version of this excellent song. Haunting.)

Eurythmics: Walking on Broken Glass

            (This one conjures very old pain, from before I met my husband—that deep, scarring pain of youth and unrequited love…)

B52s: Rock Lobster

            (This song always makes me laugh.)

The Band: The Weight (Take a Load off Annie)

Bare Naked Ladies: If I Had a Million Dollars

A Beatles Featurette: Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Back in the USSR, Life Goes On, Norwegian Wood

A Billy Joel Two-Fer: Keeping the Faith and This Night

            (I have loved Billy Joel from very early in my adolescence. For one of my high school birthdays, my best friend, Linda, made me a scrap book filled with newspaper and magazine clippings of Billy Joel. It was the 80s, so “An Innocent man” was huge and I listened to “Songs in the Attic” like it was my job. I hope to see him perform at Madison Square Garden before he dies.)

This disc wraps up with a couple of early-nineties-sounding songs that I cannot place. I don’t particularly like them; that’s probably why I don’t know their artists or names. There is often one person in a couple who keeps the memories. I was not that one.

Disc Two

Bob Dylan: Meet Me in the Morning and How Does It Feel

            (“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” I always feel like Dylan is talking directly to me when I hear his songs, but never more than today with this song.)

Jimi Hendricks: Hey Joe

            (Prescient?)

Cat Stevens: Peace Train

            (This song always, always lifts my mood and restores my faith in humanity.)

The Cure: Pictures of You

            (The Cure is another vestige of my youth that inevitably conjures bittersweet memories of heated love and unbelievable pain. This weekend, this song simply emphasizes the fact that I still cannot open the photo albums from our wedding or travels together. More time will have to pass for that.)

Don Williams: I Believe in You

            (Anyone who knows me very well at all knows that I do not like country music. Don Williams is not a favorite artist of mine—except for the fact that my dad loved him. When my dad died in the summer of 2009, I was put in charge of compiling music for the funeral home calling hours. My mom said the Williams album “Especially for You” was in the CD player of Dad’s car the week before he went into the hospital for the lung infection that would very quickly become systemic and take his life. She said he liked to drive around town with the volume up full and the windows down, singing along with Williams at the top of his lungs. Just like me. Even now, eight years after he died, I still have difficulty picturing my dad doing that, but the effort makes me laugh through the tears that inevitably stream down my cheeks whenever I hear this song. Dad truly believed all the sappy sentiments of this song. He used to sing it to my mom. Their love inspires me still.)

Disc Three:

Wall of Voodoo: Mexican Radio

            (An upbeat, silly rockabilly ditty is the perfect antidote to the heaviness of the previous disc. Maybe this exercise won’t be so hard from here on out…)

El Vez: Blue Suede Shoes

            (The opening musical sequence of this song totally tricked me into thinking it was Hendricks’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” I know that’s deliberate. El Vez is a shameless thief who does a better Elvis impression than, perhaps, the King himself.)

An ELO Featurette: One Summer Dream, Hold on Tight, Mr. Blue Sky

Elvis Costello: Allison

            (This soulful tune of infidelity, loss, regret and abiding love is almost more than I can take today. The genius guitar licks, anthemic chorus, and sweet musicality of it pulls me back from the edge. I wish my aim were true…)

More Costello: You Better Watch Your Step and Watching the Detectives

            (I never realized how much Costello’s songs reference infidelity.)

War: Spill the Wine

Etta James two-fer: Tell Mama, Almost Persuaded

The Faces: Ooh La La

            (This is so much better than the Rod Stewart remake, which was the only one I knew of until the film “Rushmore.” My husband learned to play this on the guitar and would often strum it on our front porch. It is the ultimate nostalgia inducer.)

Disc Four

Green Day: When I Come Around and Here We Go

            This disc has a much different tone than the previous ones. I think he just went through our digital music alphabetically when he made these discs, but the content of this disc is a lot more high-energy overall than the previous three. Green Day sets an angsty-but-indifferent bar, then Holly Golightly and the Headcoatees brings in girl-group toughness. Tom Jones covers “Lust for Life” with geriatric zest, Ike and Tina do “Proud Mary” nice and rough, Jane’s Addiction segues into Janis lamenting a “Cry Baby” and missing her “Bobby McGee,” and then we veer into the 21^st century with Jason Mraz and “I’m Yours,” only to be tossed back to the ‘70s with Jethro Tull and “Skating Away.” The musical schizophrenia continues with several lyric-less guitar pieces, Johnny Cash covering “Personal Jesus,” k.d. lang’s sultry version of  “My Smoke Screen” and the Kinks “Celluloid Hero.” The disc wraps with my favorite version of Ain’t No Sunshine: Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Des’ree from “Cover the World.” It leaves me emotionally drained, and I have to go for a run to restore my sanity.

Disc Five

This disc is clearly all him. Long guitar riffs and ‘90s angst. In fact I’m not sure I ever heard this disc before, unless I hit ‘skip’ almost every other song. Bright spots for me include Louis Prima, Lyle Lovett and Macy Gray’s “Why didn’t You Call Me,” which resonates particularly in my current love life—you know who you are; didn’t we have a good time? call me! Also Chrissie Hynde because she is a goddess. Her version of the Jimi Hendricks classic, “Bold as Love” is transcendent. The rest of it is really an ode to the guitar in all its forms: bluegrass, metal, garage rock—heavy on this one—and rockabilly. The one guitar-focused track I really don’t mind is Offspring’s “Self Esteem.” The more you suffer, the more it shows you really care; right?

Disc Six

This one I take out into the car. It seems fitting, as these discs were intended to be a distraction on long road trips. With the sunroof open and the road under my wheels, the playlist immediately gels. Ray Charles, early Rolling Stones and Santana are fantastic driving music. Sly and the Family Stone are very timely with “Hot fun in the Summertime,” seeing as we’re “into the fall and there she goes. Bye-bye-bye!” Social Distortion brings in some hard-driving rebellion. Then Stevie Wonder takes me to “Higher Ground” with his signature funk. I’ll have to leave all of these discs in the car. That is clearly their natural environment.

Disc Seven:

Temptations: Ball of Confusion and Papa Was a Rolling Stone

            (Nice.)

Three Dog Night: Mama Told Me (Not to Come), Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues)

            (I am in heaven right now. Three Dog Night is one of those groups that has something like thirty songs I can listen to over and over again without ever getting tired of. The Temptations, too. Finally, some music that doesn’t feel mired in unsavory emotions of my past.)

Todd Snider: Train Song, The Kingsmen, and Iron Mike’s Main Man’s Last Request, Conservative Christian Right-Wing Republican Straight White American Male

            (This first number is an inherently sad song, about the death of a friend who lived like a “runaway locomotive, out of his one-track mind.” But I have very happy memories of us going to see him live at the Beachland Ballroom, so it doesn’t bring me down.)

{More songs I cannot name and that I’m pretty sure I have never heard. How can that be?}

A nice tribute to U2: Vertigo, Angel of Harlem, and When Love Comes to Town with B.B. King

{More incomprehensible, unnamable noise.}

Violent Femmes: Blister in the Sun, American Music

War: Low Rider

White Stripes: You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)

The Who: American Wasteland, Won’t Get Fooled Again

Disc Eight:

Eurythmics: Keep Young and Beautiful

Bare Naked Ladies: Be My Yoko Ono

The Beatles: Revolution 1

(I always liked this slow bluesy version better.)

The Black Keys: Your Touch

            (I think he went all the way through the alphabet, then looped back around to pick up some strays. That’s good, because with The Who at the end of disc seven and two discs to go, I was wondering how this was going to go.)

Black-Eyed Peas: Pump It

Brian Setzer: Rock This Town

Bruce Springsteen: Jacob’s Ladder

Buckwheat Zydeco: Be Good or Be Gone

            Ah. Here’s that secret message I thought might be in these discs somewhere. For all its light-hearted zydeco character, the message of this song is a prescription against infidelity. We saw Buckwheat live once in downtown Akron on a stage set up in the middle of Main Street. It was a great show, but only about a hundred people attended. My husband introduced me to a lot of new music over these past 23 years. Buckwheat, Bare Naked Ladies, The Kinks, Green Day, El Vez, Elvis Costello, Etta James, and so much more. As this disc and the ninth disc return to more familiar music from my life before getting married—CSNY, more Cure, ELO and Etta, more Stones and Janis—I think I can see a trajectory. We grew up together. I learned how to be a person while learning how to be a wife. I would not be who I am today without the 23 years I spent with him. I might have learned about Lake Street Dive and Delta Rae some other way if he hadn’t introduced their songs to me, but then again, I may not have. Regardless, I am now the culmination of all the events and people of my life. I can no more regret any one of them than I can go back in time and change how it unfolded.

            One of the final songs on disc nine is “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War. I know it’s a cliché, but I really do hope that he and I will be friends one day. As ready as I was to climb out of the container of our marriage, I can’t really imagine never seeing or talking to him again. I’m going to keep these CDs in my car and listen to them in tiny snippets on my five-minute commute to work or my 20-minute jaunt to my mom’s place or on aimless drives through the valley on beautiful autumn days when the past, present and future meld into one golden flow of timelessness.