Songs For Your Day

This is a long story.

There was a time when I didn’t like Ryan Adams.  I’m not really sure why.  It was some kind of fit of self-righteousness, if even that, after my girlfriend at the time (2005) told me he was a real asshole during his live shows.  And so full of himself!  I liked “Come Pick Me Up” and “Damn, Sam” but I took my girlfriend’s word for it and quietly hid my found copy of Cold Roses behind the rest of my albums.

While I was in West Africa, I went through some musical stages that, actually, surprised me.  They were all artists that I listened to and loved, but the devotion with which I played these guys was almost unnerving.  There was my Bright Eyes stage, in the beginning (which made people in America say, “Wow, you must be depressed”).  My Radiohead/Rolling Stones stage, toward the middle (when things were rocking).  And during the last three months, following a first-time listen of “To Be Young” while drunk in a pool (in a pool!) during our Close Of Service conference, my Ryan Adams stage.  For some reason, he became my going home music.

I hadn’t brought my iPod to the conference, so when I finally got back to my village I plugged it into my shitty speakers (one didn’t work, and the cords were so sensitive I had to balance the non-working speaker on top of the cords, which sometimes had to be arranged in diverse, roller-coaster style loops to even drizzle the tinniest bit of music) and went through what I had, most of which I didn’t remember even adding.

Gold.  And then, with the Cardinals, Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights.  No “To Be Young,” which is on Heartbreaker.  So I started listening to Gold.  I set up my speakers on a bar stool I had placed in front of my bed, just outside the mosquito netting, and at night, finally, when the kids had stopped crying, the women had stopped arguing, the drunks had stopped pissing outside my window, I listened to music.

He became all I listened to.  It was just so wonderfully American; it was ‘organic’; it had dirt under its fingernails, beer on its breath.  That almost-country sound, the bravura of his singing (at all times; it’s not an arrogance, it’s a confidence in his words and music), and the wonderful sing-along-ness of songs like “Firecracker,” “Rescue Blues,” and, for me at least, “Nobody Girl.”

I can’t remember the first time I loved “Nobody Girl,” but I remember the first time I needed it.  At over nine.5 minutes, it’s not exactly a party song.  During week-long benders in the Atakpamé transit house, we’d listen to “To Be Young” five times a day, but I’d have to wait until two or three in the morning, after everybody else had passed out, to listen to “Nobody Girl.”  I’d sit in the dark, the guards’ dog asleep outside the door, the rusty blades of the fan creaking out their rhythm, listening to the song, my iPod hooked up through the television.  It’s the kind of song you have to love alone.

On the flight that took me off the continent, from Casablanca to New York, I was sitting next to a remarkably nervous Moroccan-American woman.  She wasn’t in the greatest emotional state.  She was going back to Boston after ten months in Morocco, where she’d gone to visit her mother and apply for a job at the U.S. Embassy.  She didn’t get the job.  She hated flying.  Back in Boston she had no job, no apartment, only a handful of friends.  She must have said six or seven times, “I will be going back to nothing!”  She’d chuckle nervously and add, “But I will find something, I suppose.”  Then she’d look out the window, counting the ripples on the surface of the Atlantic.

I retreated from the conversation a few times, when her jumpiness became too contagious.  I needed a song to calm down.  And “Nobody Girl” is the perfect song for that.  That opening acoustic strum, that organic hum in the background, the roll of drums thirty seconds in.  That first line: “Well, the night makes moves / and it shatters like broken glass / better play it cool… better let it pass.”  It’s a song I can sink into, like a bed after a long long day.  It was the song I needed, on that plane, next to her.  At the time I didn’t really think that this woman would influence my song choice, but looking back on it now it’s pretty obvious.  She with her empty Boston life, given up for a job she never got.  Where would she go now?  ”Say you follow your heart / well, honey, you’re just being lost / say you follow your gut / well how much would it cost?”  When we finally landed, we held verbal hands in the customs line, wishing each other luck with our respective futures.  She went through first, and as she left, she turned back to say goodbye, waving with her whole arm.  As I was called up by the customs agent, I realized we never told each other our names.  ”They don’t know you anyway / they don’t know you and they don’t watch you walk away.”