Week 2: The Road Trip Repeaters
Sitting in a car jam-packed with your family, luggage, gifts and food for 3+ hours on a Thanksgiving roadtrip is an adventure in itself. It’s almost the same run-time as a bollywood movie with equal amounts of drama, tension and love shmushed into a very compact space.
These are my top 3 songs to loop from the cozy third row whenever I need an escape to my mind palace to feel something.
The Way You Felt by Alec Benjamin
This song is deceptively upbeat. It’s like dancing in the rain for the first time alone because the last time it rained, you had someone else’s hand to twirl and catch raindrops on your tongues like snowflakes with. Frolicking in the rain used to be an event to look forward to, but standing solo surrounded by shallow puddles in the Shoprite parking lot is just depressing.
There’s so much depth to this piece, which warrants a handful of replays from the groovy soundscape to the absolutely gutting lyrics to the cadence of the storytelling. I can bop, dance and sway to it with such a care-free mindset when not paying attention to the lyrics. When focusing on the lyrics, I can also feel my heart physically deflating even during inhales like a bike tire trying to make it uphill back home. A stanza I unhealthily relate to is:
“Maybe I’m the one to blame, have a tendency / For always ignoring my brain when it says to me / That someone’s been manipulating my empathy / My empathy”
As a relatively empathetic person myself, he put words to one of my biggest fears in any relationship: letting my empathy become a poison instead of antidote. Empathy is a root cause of people pleasing when interpreted in disproportionate dosages. When manipulated, it’s almost too easy for us to be taken advantage of because our brains continue to convince us that this is what compromising is “supposed” to feel like.
I used to listen to Alec’s music four or so years ago back when the only platform I had to do so was YouTube playlists. Then I sort of forgot about him until about a little over a year ago. He tends to write about the rougher-edged emotions through his sweet & somber approach. Kind of like sweet & sour soup but with tears to salt the broth-body of an anecdote. I’ve found solace in his songwriting style a lot more recently as my life has forced to me to be more introspective about my decision making. I have more to say about him and his art in general, but I’ll save that for future posts.
Kissin’ When We’re Mad by We Three
As powerful as words are (coming from a poet herself), there are times when I feel that words are being used to scapegoat actual change. At times, it’s easier to say “I’m sorry” than to do the internal work. I realize that I myself, sometimes, would rather see someone in my life show me they care through their actions instead of words like:
“Maybe I should stop and rub your back / Maybe I should hold your hand in traffic / Even when we both are being drastic, move past it / Maybe I should kiss you when we’re mad”
Maybe it’s the Tumblr girly in me fantasizing over the bare minimum, but a very single person at the moment, I will admit that the premise of this song sounds really sweet. It’s so much easier to walk away from something that you don’t see any value in anymore, but to stay and put effort into working on it makes all the difference. I’m not endorsing avoiding talking about your problems all together, it’s a balance as all things in life I’m slowly learning are. This song is for the select moments when recognizing the value of actions > talk can move baby mountains.
This interpretation may vary when I do find myself in a committed, forever kind of relationship and have to actually deal with conflict resolution. Maybe then I would find something like this, my partner kissing me when they’re mad, just not the right response. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
People Watching by Conan Gray
This was actually my most played song of last year (thanks Spotify for the very personal comment about my top vibe of 2021 being “wistful”). I once spent an entire 1.5 hour road trip staring out the window to navy coated trees and city stars just letting this song soak into the deepest layers of my being. This song is the internal dialogue I never could find the perfect words for on my own: waiting for a kind of love where we’ll finally understand when people tell us to just throw caution to the wind.
I adore the Conan’s style of storytelling, especially in this song. The POV is a mix of bitter acceptance, introspection and a hopeful longing for love. I think I heard in an interview (maybe Conan’s one with Genius?) that this song was inspired by him sitting at his college coffee shop and just noticing what people around him were experiencing.
My favorite lines are: “They met in class for metaphysical philosophy / He tells his friends, ‘I like her ‘cause she’s so much smarter than me’ / They’re having talks about their future until 4 a.m. / And I’m happy for them (and I’m happy for them)”
I was still in college when this song dropped. Even before knowing some of the inspiration behind it, it tugged on some on my own raw chordae tendineae (anatomical name for heart strings). As you can probably guess, I’m a bit of a nerd so I really appreciated there being details around academia and learning about really cool everyday things. Metaphysical philosophy sounds dope.
If this song were a drink, it would be a Sour Patch Kids lemonade concoction: tangy to the tongue that it kind of goes numb before awakening the rest of the tastebuds, preparing them for a twistingly sweet ending at the bottom of the swirling glass Solo Cup (the cup isn’t plastic because we’re not kids anymore but the shape is still the same as the red Solo Cups because we’re not that old yet) <3.
