The Army Corps of Architects - Death Cab for Cutie - Sub Pop Singles Club 7 Inch - 2000

This is one of those rare songs that I can actually remember where I was the first time I heard it. Not because this song is especially memorable (it's not) but because it is the B-side of a much better song...however since that song starts with a "U" (Underwater) I probably won't get to it till like 2012.

When I first moved to the city, one of my favorite cheap ways to hang out with my friends was to go to my friend Rance's place and listen to music. Rance had a good size record (by which I mean vinyl) collection, and his roommate had an even bigger one. My friend Josh, who I had just started hanging out with, was a member of the Subpop single of the month club and had just gotten the latest from a new Pacific Northwest band called Death Cab for Cutie....this probably would have been around January of 2001.

I sometimes miss those times, of just sitting with my friends and listening to music and drinking beer. I miss the ability to be totally captivated by new music, but now I sit back and wonder about those times "How did we just sit around and listen to music and not do anything else?"

Amputations - Death Cab for Cutie - Something About Airplanes - 1999

The ability for music to trigger nostalgia is hardly a phenomenon that requires more discussion...but this song has such a strong association to me...it takes me to a very specific time and place. But what's odd about this time and place is that it's not terribly memorable. I mean, I suppose as a little slice of a time and place in my life, it's interesting...but that I'd have such visceral memory (I can even remember how I felt at the time) is really a fascinating intersection of time and memory and music.

Anyway, it was summer of 2001...It was my second summer in the city, but since I moved to NYC in June, it was my first summer with established friends. My girlfriend at the time had decided to spend the summer doing an internship in Oxford Mississipi...I was not happy about this. But on the flip side, it left me with a certain amount of freedom to do what I wanted. I also was too broke to afford a computer or internet access or Air Conditioning in my tiny apartment (if you've never lived in New York...unless you are wealthy or got a kick ass job, you will spend your first two years here unimaginably, eating ketchup packets and duck sauce poor). I also had a friend of mine crashing in my tiny one room apartment, and he never really got the hint that he should...you know...go out and do something.

On weekend days during that ungodly hot summer I would go to my office and just sit in the free AC, get wasted, surf and write. So that's what this song takes me back to. I'm sitting alone in my old office, ungodly high, writing short stories for writing group, hating my girlfriend, but loving my new crazy life. So odd.

Anyway...