A perfect soundtrack for a lazy afternoon of writing:

Miss Hasselbacher knows her class is cheating on the English exam.

Steve, the third best player in the Miller High School football team, has been using a clever mirror contraption to look at Bobby’s paper. Not that Steve needed the device, since Bobby has been standing on his desk for the last ten minutes looking at Stan’s paper from above, and his exam has been clearly visible for Steve to copy. Stan’s been cheating with the answers written in the palm of his left hand; certainly not the most original way to cheat, but they can’t all be clever. Hope has been copying her answers from a small scrap of paper that’s been sitting on her right knee like a feather. The Gibson twins were using some kind of communication device to speak with someone outside – probably someone in that white van sitting across the street with the large dish on top – and the class could hear them whispering the questions into their shirts. Jake, as usual, was taking his exam without his shirt on, and Miss Hasselbacher could clearly see the exam answers tattooed on his back, written from muscular shoulder to muscular shoulder, and it was Edie – Jake’s girlfriend of two weeks and who sat behind him – who benefited.

The only person not cheating, of course, is Kim, the redhead who always sits in the front, always the first to arrive and the last to leave, raising her hand at every question. In fact, she had finished her exam over thirty minutes ago, and had been spending the time checking and rechecking her answers. She would continue to do this until the exam session ended in seventeen minutes.

If this were 1993, this album would be played in the clubs like 911 or DNA in Tampa, and later you’d be able to dance to it in the Parthenon. I can remember the darkness and the smoke, the way the blacklights revealed all the lint in your clothes, and the way my muscles would ache when the evening was through. Like most people in those clubs in those days, I wasn’t full of angst or depressed, I just enjoyed the atmosphere and the sound, and the way my friends could always get me to laugh.

It’s funny how the darker music can always bring back such bright memories.

Boxer is such a great album. And now that I’ve taken the time since discovering the National to explore the rest of their work, the greatness of Boxer is not an anamoly. While some songs are better than others on Boxer,  there really isn’t a bad song on the album. In fact, the album as a whole just makes me happy. The songwriting is topnotch, but there’s something beautiful about the band’s sound that does it for me. In many ways, it feels like something I’ve never heard before but was already familiar with. And songs like “Fake Empire”, “Squalor Victoria” and “Slow Show” take me back to a lot of different times in my life, as if the music had been following me around for years now. Tori Amos used to have this effect on me with her early albums, like I had dreamt her songs long before I heard them.

Anyway, I’m happy to have Boxer back on rotation. You were never far away, but I certainly missed you.

Now let’s make some stories.

It’s easy to find good music for almost any occasion, but it’s difficult to find good music for writing. For my biographical work, sometimes the music I heard when I was experiencing the event can be helpful to recapture the mood or emotion. Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Radiohead’s OK Computer were particularly helpful for many of my stories from 1997.

When I’m writing in general, I prefer music that’s not too distracting, but maintains a certain sense of drama, something evoking a soundtrack. Ours’ Distorted Lullabies has this quality, as does Sigur Rós’ Ágætis byrjun and David Gray’s White Ladder (perhaps my favorite album of all time).

I’m not good about keeping up with new music. I remember watching MTV when I was young and promising myself that I would not lose touch with what’s cool with music, and now here I am scratching my head at some of the biggest names in music. I could blame being in Poland for this, but I can’t say I was doing great in this category when I was in the States. In fact, my interest in keeping up with music pretty much died in 2002.

Luckily, I have friends who are good at pointing me in the right direction, which brings me to The Walkmen’s You & Me. This album has been on repeat for the last three weeks now and it still isn’t in any danger of being overplayed. If I were listening to this on cassette I’d be doomed by now.

The whole album is phenomenal with each song complimenting the next. I still find myself gravitating to “Red Room” and especially “Long Time Ahead of Us”:

Take me tonight as I am
Leave me the way I was found

I’m not a good reviewer when it comes to music and I’m not going to pretend here. I can just tell you that this album works in all the right ways. Whether you write or not, give it a listen.

By the way, I’m always open to new music suggestions. Let me know what I’m missing…