Turn On The Bright Lights: 20 years
💦 Quickie: I wish I could eat the salt off of your lost and faded lips
I promised this wouldn’t be a spammy newsletter. Well, I wasn’t aware that I’d send my last issue TWO DAYS before this absurdly important event (at least for me). Sorry about the double-mail, this won’t be recurrent.
The 20th of August of 2002 was the release date of one of the most important albums in my life. I found out about it only 5 years later, when I was 17, and it was part of a set of things that molded who I am today.
I cried listening to those songs remembering my mother’s recent death. It was the soundtrack of my first relationship with a girl. I had my first “listening session”: gathering friends just to listen to an album for the first time, silently, then talk about it later together.
It got so much under my skin that, years later, I decided to carve it on top of it. See the album cover:
See this small thingy in the band’s logo:
Then see this not-that-small thingy tattooed on my arm:
Yeah, I’m quite serious about this.
The lyrics are somewhat cryptic, but some phrases hit me hard since I heard them the first time, like Obstacle 1’s analogy “She puts the weights into my little heart”, or this verse in Say Hello to the Angels:
When I'm feeling lazy, it's probably because
I'm saving all my energy to pick up when you move into
My airspace
Move into my airspace
And something's coming over me, I see you in the doorway
I can't control the part of me that swells up when you move into
My airspace
Move into my airspace
Right after my mom died, Obstacle 2’s “I'll stand by all this drinking if it helps me through these days” said a lot to me.
My favorite songs from this album are the ones I mentioned above, as well as Stella…, PDA, The New, and Leif Erikson. Well, almost the whole album, sorry.
Listen to it on Spotify or Youtube and tell me what you thought in the comments.