Vol. 84: The music I listen to in the fall

There’s two albums tied forever to fall for me - The Head and the Heart’s Let’s Be Still and Jack’s Mannequin’s The Glass Passenger. Every time the chill hits the air, I need to listen to the opening notes of “Homecoming Heroes.” It’s my private annual ritual.

Let’s Be Still was released on October 15, 2013 during the fall semester of my final semester of undergrad. It was a magical year; I lived with five other women and we clicked instantly. The Ann Arbor fall seemed to last forever. I biked to class in ridiculously high heeled brown leather Frye boots that I bought online at a discount and a soft gray Madewell sweater gifted to me by my mom for my 21st birthday.

I was living with the best of friends in an house full of laughter while privately struggling with my sexuality. I was invincible on campus while wholly uncertain about my future after graduation. I was on top of the world  - loved, lost, confused, searching.

I know Kaci brought the CD home but Hannah must have played it on the stereo in her room across the hall from me on the ground floor of 716 East Kingsley. Somehow the album moved from Hannah’s stereo into the car I’d borrowed from my parents, where it lived past our move out. I (hopefully?) eventually returned it to Kaci (thank you/my bad, and by the way, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!)

There’s a song called “Summertime” on the album, but it is intrinsically fall for me.

I can’t tell you what it is. Sometimes I listen to the full album, but often I listen only to my three favorite tracks - “Homecoming Heroes,” “Another Story,” and “10,000 Weight in Gold.” The inspiration behind “Another Story” is the awful December day in 2012 when we witnessed the devastation of the Sandy Hook school shooting - yet the melody calms me when I’m anxious. “It will go on like it once was.”

Jack’s Mannequin’s The Glass Passenger came out on September 30, 2008, fall of my junior year of high school. As I was on my morning walk yesterday writing this newsletter in my head, I planned to write about the deep meaning of two albums that came out during my senior years of high school and college respectively - so it was shocking when I Googled the release date. Never mind that then.

I remember buying the CD at Target with Rachel and Anna. We were shopping for costumes for a Huron Players show, the high school theater club that I proudly served as President, and there it was on the shelves. I’d been a Jack’s fan for a few years at that point, but this was the first full-length album released since I’d become a fan. This album of piano pop rock was his triumphant return to music after chemo, a bone marrow transplant, and beating leukemia. It is a perfect album; I’ve written before about my connection with the song “Spinning.” Yet I now know from his memoir how even as he wrote the iconic line in Swim, “Swim for the music that saves you when you’re not so sure you’ll survive” that he himself was drowning, rushing to put out an album that declared to the world that he’d won - while still privately battling trauma, self-destruction and demons.

My most vivid memories are of listening to the album while waiting for the bus before the sun rose. I must have eagerly downloaded it onto my computer and into my iPod, but in my memories sometimes, inexplicably, I’m holding a CD player. Nostalgia bleeds through like that. I was sixteen, without a license, and on the school bus in a neighborhood where everyone else was either driving or driven. I rose at 6 AM, got dressed, boarded the mostly empty bus, and arrived at school with 45-minutes ‘til class to wander the halls, sometimes meeting up with my then-best friend to write poetry, gossip, or fight as our friendship began to fray at the seams.

A year later during my high school senior fall, I was seventeen and still on the bus. I was dating my second boyfriend. He was nineteen, in community college, and his older sister said to me, “So, when are you going to get your license and stop making my brother drive you around all the time?” It’s worth mentioning two things - first, his license had only recently been reinstated following probation from a weed-related charge (Not endorsing criminalizing weed - just saying that I shouldn’t have been judged!); and second, in hindsight I can admit that at that time I’d had a crush on his sister for five years.

Each morning in my neighborhood in Silver Spring, I pass a bus stop for the neighborhood kids each morning while I walk my dog.

I love that we live in an area with lots of families, kids who are growing up in apartments in close proximity to other kids. Perhaps there’s a class analysis here, about how I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood feeling isolated as a kid with limited options of neighbor kids that I liked enough to play or commute to school together. Today as an adult with no children of my own just yet, I walk by and witness the bus stop goings on. The way kids reappear each fall after a summer of sleeping in and suddenly they are taller. My neighbor rushing to get her young son out the door as he eagerly greets Max. The skinny boy with his violin case in one hard and his iPhone recording videos in another. A dad speaking Amharic with his two middle schoolers. Last year, I noticed a new girl sitting alone for months before one day, I heard her giggling with two other girls.

I hated riding the bus but mostly I hated that my own inability to get my license when I was supposed to was the thing that stopped me from driving to school like the rest of my friends. But whenever I hear Andrew McMahon sing, “It started feeling like October…,” I feel myself standing in the black early morning Michigan fall, alone at my bus stop. I feel at peace.

How often do we romanticize moments that we hated when they were happening? And how do we know if we’re in those moments when they occur?

In the DMV, October won’t feel the same as it did as a Michigan kid. It can’t, not when I live in a different climate. Not when the world has grown warmer regardless of where we call home. Sometimes I fear we desperately cling onto Hallmark scenes of colder seasons that will be fiction to future generations. I’ve grown and changed, the world has grown and changed. But the music we can hold onto.

Sharing is Caring! Because I love you, I’ve linked my Fall playlist for you on Spotify here and Apple Music here. I shared this last year and we have a few updates so it’s designed for a 75-minute walk in ideally crisp fall air.

What music brings fall forth for you? Last month, I wrote about how the music I fell in love with in my youth seems so random. I don’t know that this newsletter will reach readers who share a love of these two albums, but I hope it resonates with anyone who loves a seasonal playlist.

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