March 2024: Turn The Radio Up For That Sweet Sound
I'm gonna you a letter, I'm gonna write you a book. I want to see your reaction, I want to see how it looks.
I spent much of March time-traveling.
Music is already one of the greatest ways a human being can travel to the past, not just because a song captures the specific moment in time when it was recorded, as that’s how recording works; but because music is so often attached to a memory that by listening we can transport ourselves across space and time to where we were, and how we felt, when we first listened to a song, or when the song played at a pivotal moment in our lives, or when we saw or heard a band or artist for the first time.1
In the fall of 2002 I was starting my junior year of college. I was twenty years old, I had, over the summer, moved into a four bedroom house with friends2, and I had just broken up with my first girlfriend. A band my friends liked was playing a show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a bunch of them were hatching an idea to road trip to see the show. I joined them. The band was Guster. The opener was a fellow named John Mayer3. The six of us loaded into a friend’s mom’s van and drove 8 hours across three states to watch Guster and that plucky upstart John Mayer play in an amphitheater under the celestial glow of the stars of the American Southwest.
My memories of that trip, of that year, of that time of my life, are not great. Time, obviously, plays a factor, but there are other reasons for murky memories. The year before, 2001, was a year fraught with grief and change. From my brother dying in May 2001 to the events of September 11th, there were more than enough traumatic things in my life to affect memory. Additionally, as it was pre-social media and iPhones, there aren’t a ton of photos or digital memories to reflect on or look back at.
For all the pitfalls and problems with social media, it is nice that I can see what I was doing a year ago, two years ago, ten years ago, via Instagram memories, or even when my phone reminds me of something from the past. As long as it’s happened since I had my iPhone, anyways.4
As such, what I do remember from that trip are flashes of a van ride, of a concert, of friends. A cramped hotel room, wandering the streets of Santa Fe, shivering under the stars as a band plays, arguing about fast food sauces.
It was 22 years ago, and a lot of life has happened since.
Earlier this year, Guster announced a “We Also Have Eras” tour. Their tour dates were mostly the mid-west and east coast, but they would be hitting my hometown of Oklahoma City as well as Dallas, TX, where one of the members of the 2002 trip lived. When they announced the tour dates, I texted two friends from that 2002 trip and half-jokingly said we should go to the shows.5
They both responded enthusiastically, and a plan was formed for us to hit both shows, with me flying back for a whirlwind week in TX/OK. And that’s what happened.
But even though I was traveling to see shows and friends, I didn’t expect to actually travel back in time as much as I did, or how I did, or how much of the trip would be spent disorientedly out of time.
I flew to Dallas, except, due to severe thunderstorms, the plane couldn’t land, and thus spent the next five hours circling the state of Texas, with a stop in Austin before flying back to actually land in Dallas. By flying from the Pacific to Central time zones, I of course lost hours, and time spent avoiding storms meant additional lost time.
My first actual day in Dallas, I explored the city. As a kid who grew up in Oklahoma, Dallas was a frequent vacation spot, mostly because of Six Flags Over Texas6, but outside of going there for OU/TX football games in college, and the occasional movie or concert7, I never spent a lot of time there as an adult.
I wandered around the West End of Dallas, taking in the JFK Memorial, Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum. I’d never been or seen any of these before, at least in person; I’d read about them in detail years ago in Stephen King’s fantastic 11/22/63, a book about time travel.
It’s a wild thing to see tourists wait for traffic to stop so they can run out onto the street, stand on the spray-painted XX’s on the road indicating the exact spot a president was assassinated, and then take a quick selfie on said XX’s. More wild than that are the museum’s banners that hang around the plaza which say “JFK WAS HERE,” as if that’s something to brag about or be proud of. John F. Kennedy was here, yes, but things didn’t exactly go well for him while “here,” did they?
At dinner and drinks before the first Guster show, which happened at the Granada Theater in Greenville, I reminisced with my two friends about that 2002 trip, and more moments and memories started to return, the three of us filling in the gaps of our past like MR DNA using frog DNA to fill in the gaps in the dinosaur code. It wasn’t perfect, and it still wasn’t complete, but it was nice to remember more than I had.
And the show was fantastic, it was fun, and I was smiling the whole time.
Not only did I get to see one of my favorite bands8, I got to see it with two friends I’d seen them with 22 years before. One of my friends brought her daughter, and it was her first concert. Memories on memories.
The time traveling continued.
The morning after the show, I woke up earlier than my friends; we were all staying in Dallas at one of their houses. My friends other daughter was also up early, and the two of us watched old 90’s X-Men cartoons as we waited for the rest of the house to wake. It was the first time I’d revisited the Fox X-Men cartoon in a long time, a show I watched religiously as a kid.
That night was a night of more time lost, and not just because we went to a ragin’ cajun house party, but because of Daylight Savings.
The next day we drove from Dallas to Oklahoma, to meet back up with the third (and eventually a fourth) member of our 2002 trip, and that’s where the disorienting trip through time really began in earnest.
On the way to Oklahoma City, for the second Guster show, we stopped off in Norman, the college town I lived in for four years. It’s been 20 years since I graduated; I hadn’t been back in about 17 years, and certainly hadn’t wandered around the college campus in longer, but that day we took some time to walk around and I was lost.
Lost in time, lost in memory, lost in all manner of ways.
I like to think I had a good time in college, all things considered, but as an adult I can look back at that time and see and know that I was just surviving, as best I could, during a time in my life where I was very, very, very depressed. I started college in August of 2000, and within a week my brother was living in Santa Monica, CA, for chemotherapy and cancer treatments, where he would stay until May of 2001, when he flew back to Oklahoma for the last month of his life. He died at the end of my Freshman year. That fall brought September 11th, and in 2002 I changed majors and went through the previously mentioned breakup. All through college I gained weight, and by the end was unrecognizable, both to who I was when I started and who I am now. Three months after I graduated, I moved to California.
There were parts of Norman I remembered, parts that I remembered vaguely but looked different, and parts I didn’t remember at all. The campus itself looks unchanged, so much so that it was like stepping back in time, and that meant stepping back in time to an emotional place I didn’t like, and was unhappy in, and which contributed to my depression. Buildings, restaurants, streets that have changed over the years can be disorienting in certain ways, but buildings, restaurants and streets that haven’t changed at all in 20 years (or more) can be disorienting in completely different ways.
While walking around campus, my friend and I talked about the past, about college, about our friends, and my memories began firing as all sorts of things came back. You know in films or television when a character walks into a room or location, and there is wave of CGI that washes over the screen and they see the past happening around them? I totally understand why people think that effect works now, because that’s what seeing my old campus was like, what stepping through the doors of the student union was like, what walking into the rooms of that union was like. I stood there and watched the past flow around me, a past I didn’t remember until I stood there.
Grief affects memory, depression affects memory, time affects memory. I felt like I found things I had lost, except, I never knew I had them to lose to begin with.
I felt like I had quantum leapt into myself.9
That night at the Guster show, in my hometown10, already reeling from the days trip down the memory rabbit hole, I felt outside myself. I had already felt distanced from myself during the drive up from Texas, a drive I haven’t made or taken in over 20 years, which I used to make often enough to know billboards, tourist traps and truck stops.11 The walk around my university added to that. By the time I walked into the venue, I felt like I was a tourist visiting a new city they’d never been to. The time traveling continued, as the show was at The Jones Assembly, a venue built in what used to be a Ford assembly plant in the 1920’s. A Model T that was assembled in that very plant sat in the lobby of the connecting hotel.
The show was good. I saw a friend I’d known since 5th grade, who used to be one of my best friends, but whom I hadn’t seen in years. More of the past swirling into the present.
That night, I slept in Norman for the first time since I left in 2004. And the next morning, we drove back to Texas, stopping for BBQ outside a small town in Southern Oklahoma I frequented a kid because of a Wild Animal Park that still exists there.12
All of that, all of the above, all of that time travel and skipping through the past, was unexpected when I planned the trip. I expected good shows with good friends, and they were and it was, but I couldn’t have foreseen exactly how far my travels would take me, into time and memory, into a past I forgot and still can’t really remember.
You’d think all of that would affect this month’s playlist, and it really doesn’t. There are some Guster songs, some songs I listened to while in Texas, but mostly the music I listened to in March was unconnected to my trip through time. Mostly it was just the music I listened to the rest of the month.
Mostly, it was just music.
“Amsterdam” Guster - “I threw away your greatest hits,” is how this track, and this playlist, opens. My favorite Guster albums were always Ganging Up On The Sun and Lost And Gone Forever, the albums that bookend Keep It Together, but over the last few years Keep It Together has crept up to featured rotation more and more, especially ‘Careful.’ They didn’t play that song at either of the “We Also Have Eras Tours” that I saw, but they did play this one both nights, and night two also featured a themed drink, Lost In Amsterdam, that was… blue and tasted like blue.
“Make Me Lose Control,” Eric Carmen - Eric Carmen died in March, leaving behind a slew of great songs, and this is one of my favorites. We’ll get to the Raspberries later, but as far as his solo recordings, this is the jam. It ends and I just replay it, over and over. “When I look in your eyes, I go crazy…”
“Casual,” Chappell Roah - I first heard this on insta in a Maren Morris story, but, it’s one I listened to most of last month. She’s currently out opening for Olivia Rodrigo and I’m sure most of the kids at those shows can relate to these lyrics, ahem.
“Opera Disco,” Uhl - Absolutely obsessed with this track. I think it was Ra Ra Riot who pointed her my way, calling attention to the vocal range, but whomever it was, I listen to this track on repeat almost daily.
“Enjoy Your Life,” Romy - I think this is the third track from Romy’s 2023 album to be featured on these playlists, and it’s every bit as great as the other two.
“Take Me to the River,” Lorde - Ah, a cover of a cover. Always fun. Taken from A24’s upcoming tribute album to Talking Head’s ‘STOP MAKING SENSE,’ this is Lorde covering the Talking Heads version of Al Green’s ‘Take Me To The River.’ It may be my favorite Lorde track.
“Up All Night,” The War On Drugs - A week after I got back from Guster and Dallas, I went to see Cold War Kids at the Fonda. After the show, I walked back to my car, got in and was prepared to listen to CWK all the way home, expect when I started my car, the opening of this song was starting on KCRW. It’s one of my favorite The War On Drugs songs, and I happily listened to it as I drove home. The War On Drugs will be touring with The National this summer, including a stop here at The Hollywood Bowl.
“Sweet Freedom,” Michael McDonald - One of those songs that you always hear various places, it popped up on an 80’s Spotify mix I was listening to that someone shared, so here it is. One can never have too much Michael McDonald in their lives.
“Know Til Now (Pixelated & Poolside Version,” Jim James - A good song made greater with this remix by Pixelated and Poolside.
“Lady - Hear Me Tonight,” Modjo - Heard this on Morning Becomes Eclectic one morning and it stuck.
“Run Away With Me,” Cold War Kids - This is from their latest album, 2023’s eponymous Cold War Kids. CWK appeared a lot on the previous iteration of these playlists, so it’s more than appropriate they finally show up here. Their show at the Fonda featured most of those songs, but it was also the first time I’d seen them when I meant to see them. Previously, I’d seen them play a few songs at Delta Spirit’s “farewell” show at the Teragram in 2015, and again last year opening for Tears For Fears at the Hollywood Bowl.
“…Baby One More Time,” Tenacious D - I haven’t seen Kung Fu Panda 4, mostly because I never saw the third one and I barely remember the first two, but this cover of Brittney’s classic is a banger in its own right, and Jack Black absolutely owns it:
My loneliness is killin' me,
I must confess, I still believe
When I'm not with you, I lose my mind
Give me a sign
“I Wanna Be With You,” Raspberries - Before ‘Hungry Eyes’ and ‘All By Myself,’ Eric Carmen was the lead singer of the 70’s pop band Raspberries. Their best known song is ‘Go All The Way,’ immortalized a few times in the MCU, but this track is a great as that one.
“All Time High,” Zach Jones - taken from a new collection of James Bond covers, which absolutely makes me just want to listen to Bond songs all day, but this is my favorite of the bunch. Rita Coolidge sang the hell out of the original, which was the song for 1983’s Octopussy, but there’s something charming about Zach Jones’ version.
“Strange Way,” Firefall - While in Dallas, a friend brought out a box of their fathers old vinyl records and asked if I wanted any13. Among the dozen records I pulled out was Firefall’s 1978 album Elan, which features this song, one of their greatest hits. “That's a strange way to tell me you love me…”
“Right Down The Line,” Sam Evian - A friend on insta storied this cover of Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 hit and it instantly joined this playlist.
“(Nothing But) Flowers,” Guster - Even though Guster’s tour was about their various albums and incarnations, it wasn’t until I saw it the first time that I realized how exact it would be. Like Taylor’s Eras tour, their “We Also Have Eras” tour goes through each of the bands albums, but unlike hers, they go chronologically through time, as well as feature skits, sketches and interludes detailing and explaining their history. As such, I was surprised but happy when they included this single song from their Guster On Ice live album from 2004, which itself is a cover of the Talking Heads classic.14
“She Calls Me Back (with Kacey Musgraves,)” Noah Kahan - This is the second playlist in a row to feature a Noah Kahan duet from his latest album, the last having featured Brandi Carlille. This one is with Kacey Musgraves, and I was first listening to this in February with a few other Kacey songs. I had decided that this year was the the year I get into Kacey Musgraves, and she does appear again a few songs down, but… I’m still not there yet. I even spent an afternoon one day in a backyard, sunshine spilling through the clouds, as a friend played her entire oeuvre. It still didn’t take. But I’ll get there! “Oh, there was Heaven in your eyes…”
“Solid Ground,” Gaby Moreno - Fresh from winning a Grammy, this is off Gabby Moreno’s latest album.
“Bluegrass Radio,” Steve Martin & Alison Brown - Steve Martin remains one of the greatest lyricists working today, and this fun banjo song echoes his previous bluegrass hits like ‘Caroline’ and ‘California.’
“TEXAS HOLD ‘EM,” Beyoncé - “And I'll be damned if I can't slow dance with you…” An early favorite off Cowboy Carter, another track that you can listen to over and over. “We headin' to the dive bar we always thought was nice,” is such a fantastic lyric. We’ll be seeing more of this album on the coming playlists, don’t worry.
“Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?” Lola Kirk & Kaitlin Butts - A beautiful cover of Paula Cole’s 1996 radio staple that somehow makes the tragic story of the original even more so.
Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song
Where is my happy ending?“He Rode All The Way To Texas,” Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris - Oh, are we in the “these must all be songs Cody was listening to while in Texas,” section of the playlist? Maybe we are!
“Nothing Like You,” Luke Combs - I was sitting in Jack Ruby’s Saloon & Grill, which is a new bar that has opened about two blocks from where John F. Kennedy was assassinated15, when this song came on. I’m a sucker for any song that mentions both California and Oklahoma, and the fact this song does that while also lamenting being on the road and missing someone states away adds to its inclusion here. “I've seen California and the fields of Oklahoma…”
“Fix You,” Kacey Musgraves - A cover of the Coldplay classic and further proof I am trying to make Kacey happen for me.
“Can We Hang On? - Los Feliz Blvd,” Cold War Kids - This is an alternate version of the song than the one featured on the album, but I prefer it for a thousand reasons. It’s also one that I was listening to a lot over the past few years. I’m not sure which lyric I love more, “Could you be mine forever just in case it exists?” or “I'd be chasing some broke down dream, I'd be bored to death” or “I'm looking to you always, even though we're like ships in the night” or or or or…
March Media:
Concerts:
Guster at The Granada Theater (Dallas, TX)
Guster at The Jones Assembly (OKC, OK)
Cold War Kids at The Fonda (Los Angeles, CA)
In Theaters:
Streaming/Physical Media:
Bambi (1942)
Three Amigos (1986)
X-Men: The Animated Series - Night Of The Sentinels: Parts 1 & 2 (1992)
Anaconda (1997)
The Great Outdoors (1988)
Uncle Buck (1989)19
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
The West Wing Season 1 (22 episodes) (1999)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)
Galaxy Quest (1999)
The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
Books:
Gun, With Occasional Music, by Jonathan Lethem (1994)
Fairy Tale, by Stephen King (2022)
Lucky Alan and Other Stories, by Jonathan Lethem (2015)
Neverwhere (Authors Preferred Text) by Neil Gaiman, (1996/2006)
Comic Books: Spectacular Spider-Men #1, Weapon X-Men #1, X-Men #32, The Sensational She-Hulk #6, Gargoyles: Dark Ages #6, Avengers Twilight #4, Fall of the House of X #3, Amazing Spider-Man #45, Wolverine #45, TMNT #149, Gargoyles #12, Lilo & Stitch #2, The Resurrection of Magneto #3, X-Men Forever #1, Web of Spider-Man #1, Spider-Boy #5, Rise of the Powers of X #3, X-Force #50, Edge of Spider-Verse #2, Amazing Spider-Man #46, Superior Spider-Man #5, Ultimate Spider-Man #3
Music and memory is a weird thing, and the connection can also be fallible. As an example, while writing this, I was listening to the song ‘Sometime Around Midnight’ by The Airborne Toxic Event. In my mind, this song is intrinsically linked to a party and a night in 2003, but the song wasn’t released until 2008. So my memory is wrong. Even now, I can’t differentiate those two things, the song and the night, being separated by 5 years. And not just 5 years, but also spatially, as the night in 2003 took place in Oklahoma while I would’ve first heard the song in California.
A four bedroom house in Norman, Oklahoma rented, in 2002, for $800 a month; it was two stories, with a large front and backyard, garage, the works. The first place I rented in Los Angeles, CA, in 2005, was a 1 bedroom apartment that was $1200 a month.
John Mayer, had, prior to all this, played a house party at a fraternity house on campus, and was well known by my friends. His 2001 album “Room For Squares” remains one of my top ten albums.
Does my life exist before November, 2012? In the photos app on my iPhone, it does not. Even though I had an iPhone prior, while I was on location for work that October my phone spectacularly died, taking all backups with it. And because I’m not on FB, whatever photos I have prior to Nov 2012 come from photos I’ve added over the years, but as far as my phone in concerned, Nov 2012 is where my life starts.
I keep up with a bunch of college friends through insta, and previously Twitter, but there are only a handful I still consider actual friends. These two have a distinction I didn’t previously realize until writing this, which is that I’ve seen shows with both of them since leaving Oklahoma and moving west, and that’s a way more limited circle of friends. One of them even came to Los Angeles years ago for, wait for it, a Guster show.
Fun fact that I guess a lot of people who didn’t grow up going to Six Flags Over Texas know: Six Flags is so named because of the six flags that flew over the state of Texas, and the original Six Flags in Dallas had themed lands for each of the six nations: Spain, France, Mexico, the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy.
in 2001, I saw Paul McCartney play at the America Airlines Center in Dallas, and sometime later in college I saw Phantom Planet play a small venue named Trees. The Paul McCartney trip also included seeing Beauty & the Beast in IMAX, when it was shown with the previously deleted scene/song ‘Human Again’ restored and cut back in. My other Dallas college trips were to see movies at Dallas’ indie theaters like The Magnolia and the Angelika, which I did for both class trips with teachers as well as independently with friends. Another sign of the times: having to drive 4 hours to see Pieces Of April or Y Tu Mama Tambien because Dallas had the closest theaters showing those films.
These were the fifth and sixth Guster shows for me, having seen them in 2002, 2016, and twice in 2019.
Hoping that the next leap…. would be the leap home.
I spent all of five and a half hours in the city I was born in. It was the ideal amount of time.
Time/Travel.
Arbuckle Wilderness, for those curious. I never watched Tiger King, but Oklahoma is one of those states that allows large cats (and other exotic animals) to be raised and housed outside of an actual zoo, and Arbuckle Wilderness was/is, essentially, a drive-through safari park in the sticks, where you could hang a bucket of feed outside your station wagon window and let giraffes and zebra eat from your palms.
Another instance of music and time intersecting and music bridging the gap between decades.
It all comes back to Talking Heads, eventually.
Jack Ruby was the nightclub owner who shot JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald days after Oswald shot the president. That there’s a bar bearing his name with a patio where you can look up at the very window where Oswald made the shot is something else. Dallas is… an interesting place.
If you can see Love Lies Bleeding, you should do so immediately.
Frozen Empire could’ve used an actual soundtrack, with actual needle-drops in the film, outside the same theme song sung by the same artist as the original.
Luca was the last of the Pixar re-releases, and another that I saw at the El Capitan when it was released originally. But I of course had to see it again on the big screen. It remains every bit as charming, funny, sad, moving and beautiful as the first time I saw it. It’s a film that holds a special place for me, one I will always treasure for a lot of reasons that aren’t explainable, but it’s just so damn beautiful, in story, in animation, in design, in feel. That last shot, of Luca on the train…
Yeah, I’ve now moved to the John Hughes films where he featured John Candy, who was clearly a better and more appropriate muse for him than a 15 year old girl, ahem. I also, when rewatching Uncle Buck, realized, alarmingly, that I am Uncle Buck: a 40ish unmarried, childless, wreck of a man with a big heart who is great with kids that aren’t his own while being misunderstood by other adults. And you know what? That’s perfect. I am in my Uncle Buck Era and I am here for it.