The Postal Service: A Brief Chronology of Musical Ecstasies
I guess it was 2003.
Certainly doesn’t seem that long ago but thinking back I was definitely still in college and the shelving configuration at the Best Buy I was in on the day in question is at least that many years out of date.
Memory is an issue of triangulation of an event: thought and/or feeling against any other available sensory information. ‘When was it’ equals, ‘where,’ divided by ‘how’d it look,’ times ‘who was there’ plus ‘what’d they look like,’ to the power of ‘how it all felt and why.’
This day was Best Buy with Chad in Indianapolis. I hadn’t bathed and still had the smell of the pizza place he lived above in the clothes I was wearing which I’d also slept in the night before. He was looking to buy an album by a generic rock band called Default (I wish I had to try harder to sound satiric, but sometimes reality makes the jokes for you).
Their single had gotten heavy radio play a couple years before and on our way south toward Indianapolis it had come on the radio and Chad felt it fit his mood. The song was called Wasting My Time and it kind of reflected where we both felt we were.
Unfortunately becoming aware of your un-productive sluggishness rarely leads to its resolution. It more often leads to a kind of recursive self-defeat where laziness feeds depression which feeds laziness. The song was decent enough for fourth generation post-grunge. At least it bore no affinity with Nu Metal.
While we were there the in-store radio played a track I didn’t recognize. It had a pulsing techno quality that marked it as post-millennial, but it also bore melodic markers similar to the best of late 80’s radio pop, specifically Tears for Fears in my estimation at the time.
“That was The Postal Service with their new single Such Great Heights.” The voice overhead said as the song faded out. I made a small mental half-note and then went about the day which probably included left over pizza, putting off homework, and finally taking a shower at home after I’d walked the dogs and found some non-sequiter item of self doubt or paranoia to worry about.
That would have been in the autumn and it’s not terribly significant that I was in school at the time. School meant virtually nothing to me accept that it took up a dominant percentage of my time.
Despite my residual bad mood still hanging on from the previous five years of poorly improvised tedium I was also beginning to enjoy a slew of new ideas regarding art and science and music. I could lose any sense of myself if I let my hormones link emotion and abstract thinking.
Thus mimetic theory, linguistic analysis, personal objectivism and the music of the time all mashed up together in a dilettante’s haze of half understood ideas, ecstatically personal listening, and erotically charged loneliness. And that’s how thought can achieve its version of orgasm based on nothing but three or so books and a couple of well-made mix-tapes.
It was December by the time I gave The Postal Service any further thought. There used to be a Sam Goody music store at the north end of Mounds Mall in Anderson, Indiana. If you go back even further it was called Musicland and there was also a low-lit arcade with carpeted walls next to it, a bookstore, two drug stores, one of them with a lunch counter, and three anchoring department stores. Of which list only one shop-front remains to this day.
But in early winter 2003 there was still all three anchor stores, the bookstore, and the Sam Goody Music. That Sam Goody had been where I’d bought Elliott Smith’s XO in 1998 and the single of Pearl Jam’s Given to Fly.
I don’t know if the idea of CD singles seems absurd at all now, but sometimes you liked a song and could afford three bucks but not twelve for the full album.
I guess that logic still survives in i-tunes so maybe it doesn’t require justification. Fuel’s Shimmer, REM’s The Great Beyond and any number of others I’ve forgotten because their temporal co-ordinates have since faded, cluttered my life on single song format CD.
So when I saw a single by The Postal Service shelved under, “Various P” at Sam Goody and searched my memory for why their name sounded familiar, it wasn’t the least bit strange for me to buy it. And a similar story for the Today is the Day EP by Yo La Tengo, which I also bought that night, prompting comment from the ‘too-hip-for-this-small-town’ clerks working that night.
“Thanks for buying good music!” one of them said as I left. The woman behind me in line, buying Dido’s No Angel, fared less-well in their elite estimation, as likely did the job. I did not see either one there again and I’m fairly certain wherever they worked next, or are working now, they were/are 100% too cool for it.
The single I bought was The District Sleeps Alone Tonight and as the semester ended I was getting ready to visit my best friend in Florida. I was unstable with readiness for experience and insight. I felt capable of moving forward intellectually and emotionally. A lot of old fears were dropping away or if not completely disappearing they at least seemed suddenly irrelevant.
Looking back on it I was probably just out of my mind on naïveté and a backlog of pent-up endorphins. I don’t know the science but you know how when you’ve had a really bad headache and then suddenly you don’t, that feeling of slightly elated freedom? I think it’s like that with long-term depression; all of a sudden the weight isn’t there.
For some reason your brain is making other more helpful chemicals and every thought suddenly has the glow of magic, every hope seems certain, and every experience significant.
I boarded the plane to Orlando two days before New Years with a mix-tape prominently featuring The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service along with ecstatic tracks by Doves and The Polyphonic Spree, pensive ones by Wilco and Radiohead, and gently hopeful ones by Belle and Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy. It was a tipping point.
I wont bore you right now with where I went once tipped. That would require bringing us completely up to now, more than ten years later, and could stretch into a perilously confessional and tedious novel comparable in length and obsession (if not in beauty and insight) to Marcel Proust.
Suffice it to say, wherever I ended up one year later, five years later, ten years later, would have been utterly different had I not heard the right song in the correct context and drawn my own conclusions.
That song was The District Sleeps Alone Tonight and it’s a convenient middle mark in a narrative built on music. Tracks heard and felt and integrated into my life and thinking.
