I wonder who he's singing about?

There are the songs that pick me up and others that drag me back to a place I’d rather not be. In some cases, they’re the songs that remind me of someone and in rarer cases, there are the songs that I’d intentionally sacrificed as a single-use booster that I knew would forever burn them and doom them to be left behind. One of the ways I know I truly love a band is when they have a song that I can’t unstick from a particularly nasty memory but I still listen anyways.

Some songs are bigger than the moments we associate with them, though. I’m thinking of iconic songs and artists. Elvis, U2, the Rolling Stones, Pitbull… I have nothing but sincere compassion for anyone who has traumatic life disruptions that coincide with one of those artists. Those songs that can pop up literally anywhere, whether it’s a commercial, movie or elevator and there’s nothing the listener can do to neutralize them. An acquaintance in high school would recoil with revulsion when Love Roller Coaster by the Red Hot Chili Peppers would come on the radio after it was playing when she got into her first car accident. Once the single ran its course on the radio, I think it’s safe to assume she won’t be surprised by it any more, unless she watches the Beavis and Butthead movie, in which case, that’s on her.

Imagine the extreme misfortune it would take to get into a wreck while something like Hound Dog was playing. I’d only hope there’s a level of desensitization that happens with those songs if there’s any sense of justice in this world.

Intentionally left out of the hypothetically omnipotent artist playlist were the Beach Boys. I legitimately can’t think of many situations where the “music plays” cue is given and I’d be truly surprised to hear that band. Sure, there would be obviously jarring situations where a specific song wouldn’t mesh with the content, but I’m mainly thinking their early career pop sound wouldn’t fit well with lots of things. Then again the juxtaposition because of their unquestionable association with American pop culture would probably make them a better fit than most.

Without pulling up the track, I’d bet most people reading this could fill out a pretty full dossier on God Only Knows from memory. At the bare minimum, even non-music fans would tell you, “It’s a love song.” They can hum the melody in an instant, there’s not much mystery in the lyrics and it’s one of the best-known songs from an iconic album. A little digging also shows that it was the B-Side to Wouldn’t It Be Nice? so it’s certainly not a deep cut by any sense of the term.

At its heart, it’s a beautiful song. Full stop. They could change the lyrics to the electrical codes for rural Arkansas and I’d still listen to it, but it’s also a song that is made that much more memorable because of the words. This is odd to say because when you read the lyrics, it’s basically two-thirds of the sheet saying “God only knows / What I’d be without you” to round out the song.

I think that’s where the impact of the song really squares itself up. That simple and blunt repetition that you don’t know where you’d be without someone. And that holds, whether it’s been a codependent wail or a sheepish admission to myself as I realized I was in much deeper into a relationship than I’d thought. Superficial to deeply ingrained, that song applies and scales to wherever you’re at.

I knew the song could dodge and float, that it was pliable and fit any major relationship I was in and did so regardless of whether those relationships were good, bad or one-sided. In all that time, I’d never thought to look at it through the lens of a non-romantic relationship. In that fluidity came the most joyful musical surprise of my life when it slid sideways in my mind from being a song about my ex-wife to something else entirely.

The song popped up on a shuffle as I sat in traffic on an otherwise unremarkable day in the middle of a long stretch of unremarkable days except that they were all cloaked in feelings of uncertainty and being completely overwhelmed. It’s hard to mistake the instrumental intro for anything else and the emotional baggage unpacks itself before the vocals have a chance to start.

I’m not sure why I even kept listening, but I’d bet that, “I may not always love you…” was likely the kind of gallows humor I needed in the moment. As the song unfolded, the undeniable fact that I would be losing time with my sons was met directly with the repetition of the lyrics, “God only knows what I’d be without you…”

In those simple words was the idea that rewrote the song for me. Without those kids, I’d be lost. While I’d spent weeks wondering what the hell was happening, I’d failed to notice that I did have at least one through line that would carry forward - focus on the boys, no matter what else happened. While the day is lost - I couldn’t pinpoint the when or the where to any degree of detail - the idea was not. In that moment, the song rotated for me in a way that I can’t ever imagine it being a romantic sentiment ever again.

It’s an odd thought now, especially when I think about how any parent could see my interpretation pretty easily when they think about their kids. More than a hearing a gender switch when a singer covers a song about a guy or a girl, this song’s whole DNA changed for me as my perspective did. I think that’s what makes it so personal for me now - I’ve had plenty of songs that grew as I did, but those have all been gradual evolutions that were fine-tuned as I understood more about the world. The changes I see in God Only Knows are nothing short of massive.

Which is fitting, considering how world-changing the shift is emotionally when kids arrive in the picture. In the way that being a parent totally upends your views in a relative instant, it was that part of me that flipped the song in a sharp and irreversible way.

Tony Asher co-wrote the song with Brian WIlson and his thoughts on the lyrics that leave me where I am with the song today. “It's the simplicity,” he said. The inference that "I am who I am because of you. That makes it very personal and tender.”

It's Not the End of the Road, It May Just Be a Transfer

My 2007 VW Passat coasted to a quiet (but definite end) with 178,699 miles on the odometer this weekend. Cause of death: Loss of compression in three of four cylinders as a result of a handful of mechanical issues that I probably should have taken more seriously. As someone with an overactive sentimentality gland in my brain, I have a hard time letting go of lots of things. That problem is only made worse when the thing in question is a car.

The VW was my "divorce car" purchased (and briefly hated) because it was the vehicle I needed to buy to replace an aging Dodge Durango while the joint account was still up, running and uncontested. I needed something with better fuel economy and (in the quiet back area of my mind) would fit more easily into the street parking spots of Chicago's neighborhoods. I hoped that I'd visit friends, crash on couches, see concerts and date exciting women in the months to come. In reality, I saw more concerts than exciting lady apartments - I'm OK with that outcome.

There's something to be said for buying a car (or renting an apartment for that matter) in the short term to heap misery into it before you cut it loose and make a clean break. To be able to say, "This is the car that drove me to my lawyer's office, was a quiet place to mourn and then took me to court that morning... And now it's gone." I've unintentionally done this before with rental spaces that when I pass now all I can muster is a, "Jesus... that place..."

I wish I could tell you what song I first played in the VW when I wheeled it off the lot, but I honestly have no idea. It had to be on the radio, but I was more preoccupied with the sudden downsizing from the SUV while grumbling about the lack of features and being so low to the ground.

I do remember trying to hammer the gas out of a red light and the car shuddering and stalling out for a moment. It was not love at first sight.

The car did begin to grow on me, though. My sons loved that it was quicker than anything else in their small world of vehicles (all SUV's). They could climb into the back more easily. The stereo was loud and for reasons lost to family history, they named her Bubbles.

Like anything in this world, that car was present for a range of days. It was the car that took me to a host of meetings and court dates I'd rather not ever repeat in the future. It was the car where I took a selfie with a nondescript reusable bag that held my Dad's ashes in the parking lot of the crematorium and texted my sister that I was going to lunch with the old guy. Good and bad. Dark and light and dark things I made light of.

Bubbles hauled us north for trips to Minnesota and Michigan. A drive as far south as Arkansas to visit friends and explore caves. She waited patiently in parking lots for us to fly and return from Boston and LA and a handful of work trips I needed to take. There were even a few of the city dates that I'd hoped for as well as a run of about 18 months together with someone who lived in one of the tougher neighborhoods to park in.

There was moderate shouting to "behave" or "Dude!?!" when the two kids got out of line in the back. There was the long ride home from Arkansas which prompted my then 5-year-old to comment that Bubbles smelled like "farts and shouting." We found some Ozium for that when we got home.

Mostly though, the car was something that just ran without too much trouble. It played music loudly when I was happy, quietly when I wasn't and podcasts when my morning commute stretched on for 90 minutes or more. I think that setting aside the influence of America's car culture, I bond with cars because they are the first and last leg of anything notable that happens in the lives of my family - good or bad. Get in. Drive to wherever you're headed. Enjoy the time. Drive home. Park and sometimes wait for a great song to end before you head inside.

For me, Bubbles will be a car I remember for the mix of good and bad, great to terrible and moments where one extreme swung to the other. Self-selected pep talks pumped through the speakers of that sedan to help me face whatever monster was stalking me that day. Quiet breaks at midday when I'd grab someone at work and discretely tell them I just needed to go sit in my car for 30 minutes because I just couldn't keep working at the moment. The "first" first date I went on in over a decade that ended without either of us bothering to lie and say we a) Had a good time or b) Would call later. A great trip this summer where a beautiful woman sat beside me as we laughed and held hands on the way there and rode in silence on the way back, trying to figure out how we were supposed to communicate through the rough spots after two marriages that never featured that pretty basic function. The stereo may be the only reason neither of us dove from a moving vehicle.

The take away for me is that the car is obviously neither good nor bad and I'm not superstitious enough to think a collection of metal, plastic and glass can change my life with good or bad fortune. The car is simply "there" as I ride out the lows and enjoy the highs. It just helps to have a beefy subwoofer to drown out the chatter on the days I need it.

---

Without too much thought, here's a mini playlist in honor of Bubbles. While I hope you find resurrection at the hands of a careful mechanic with time on their hands and a functional engine at their disposal, if this is the end for you I'd like to say thanks. I couldn't have gotten here without you. (Well, not here here... Because you left us on the side of the highway this weekend, but in a metaphorical sense, you got me here. Good car.)

* Keeping with the theme of the grey area is this song. I have a clear memory of sitting in a parking lot, wondering just what was going to happen next (which is to undersell just how lost I was at the moment). The McDonald's just off the highway in Oak Brook is steps away from the corporate headquarters and I suspect that the constant stream of corporate executives who can no-so-secretly shop keeps this location on their toes. I swung through the drive through to get something to eat and sat quietly for a while, trying to sift through the changing landscape of what I thought the years ahead would look like.

I was intentionally cautious to not dream up too many perfect women that would be waiting with open arms post-divorce because I felt that was a short-term, simplistic fix. Trading one flawed relationship for a newer, equally flawed one didn't make sense. And then this song came on.

It's a catchy song. Elbow are a band I like in general and appreciate for their grumpy undertones and darker themes (even the name of the album references a track about a kid who is ignored until the days he starts coming to the bar where his absentee parent can be found). This track though hit me squarely in that middle ground between a groggy hangover and pleasant recognition that the person waking up next to you is extraordinary.

It picks up bonus points for the use of strings (which I theorize make any song cooler) and because it echoes my girlfriend's assertion that I wake up most mornings by keeping one eye closed, squinting with the other and growling a slightly pissed off, "What?" She thinks it's cute. I'm not going to correct her.

The best part, though is when singer Guy Garvey sounds genuinely overjoyed leading in the upswings of the verses ("Holy cow / I love your eyes!") like it was recorded as he was discovering that very specific emotion anew at that moment. I'm not ashamed to admit that on my own, at highway speeds I totally go for the accent when I sing that line. "Holy cow / I looof yer eyes..."

One Day Like This was a private anthem for months, but even its title speaks to that need to look forward to a better time.

* Jason Isbell is an artist I connect with on both musical and personal levels. There are a few songs I've thought about featuring here but are just too on the nose to work with right now. From struggles with sobriety to his similarly twisted sense of humor I really enjoy being a fan of someone who reaches me in specific but uttery unique ways. There are parts of his music that speak to me in ways that nothing else ever has.

It's interesting that Isbell and I have so much overlap when I listen. He is very much a Southern man and I am decidedly Northern, but apparently pine trees are the great equalizer for this song. When it popped up in a shuffled playlist this summer, I was in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and while I could feign shock that there were, in fact, pine trees lining the road... well, anyone who has spent time there knows that's pretty much the case for most of the area.

I've never been so rooted to the area that I've received mail in the UP, but my dad was born there and brought home to the same house my grandfather grew up in. They're now side by side in the small cemetery just outside of town. A few family members and friends who are like family have returned or never left and even now as my visits grow more infrequent, I feel I'm home when I make the drive.

That trip would prove to be the last one of any distance for Bubbles and I joked that I wouldn't have been surprised if I had to replace her mid-trip, picking something mobile from a lot in a small town with two bars, a post office and a grocery store. It was also the first trip back since we buried my dad there (though no one seemed to notice and thought I'd been back once or twice since that long weekend two years ago).

That's where the beauty of the song punched through for me as it played. While there's a lot to love about this song, it's never needy. He's admitting faults and mistakes and is startlingly honest as a recovering addict when he sings, "It’s the only open liquor store north / I can’t stand the pain of being by myself, without a little help, on a Sunday afternoon." However, the literal refrain he keeps coming back to is a longing to return home.

While the song is about a physical space for a protagonist who is living out of run down motel rooms, the idea is obviously bigger than that. As I drove from one of those roadside motels where I'd stopped for the night, it was the perfect song for the moment as I drove through the morning drizzle on a two-lane highway slashed through a National Forest.

You'd be so proud that I didn't change the lyrics to "Michigan pines." Not that it fits the rhyme scheme anyways... but still.

* Last thing's, last. I've mentioned the "Clean Enough" playlist that is slowly drifting from my control to my 8-year-old son's domain. A few weeks ago, he excitedly explained that he'd added Imagine Dragons and that I should listen as soon as the sound waves could reach my ear drums. I was standing in my boxers pouring coffee at 6:15 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I think my silent blinking and sipping from the mug conveyed my intense desire to do just that, right that second.

He played Thunder and Believer for me and in the course of that excitedly told me that these were songs... recommended... by a girl. He's in third grade, so this isn't a shock. The idea that my 8-year-old will be using music to say things he can't get a proper grip on is by no means a surprise. I'm 39 and I'm still in that phase.

With those songs in the rotation, they obviously pop up quite a bit. When riding in my old car (so old it doesn't have a radio and we make it work with an iPhone, a short audio cable and a repurposed speaker) he is generally the DJ because of the two kids, he's the one who can read track names to find the songs they want.

In Bubbles, we needed to stay tethered to AUX input, making me the DJ and official scorekeeper of whose turn it was to request a song (and complain when we didn't listen to it on repeat for the duration of the trip). The new car has Bluetooth, so once that's figured out I'm sure my phone will be migrating to the back seat more and more often.

They'll play things they like, 30 second snippets at a time until there's a near brawl or attention spans drift. They'll scream "Heyyyyy" instead of "Paiiiiin" during Believer because they're kids and I'm not going to correct that any time soon. With any luck, the new car will die like the old one - 100,000 miles richer for the experience and with a fatal blow that kills the engine, but keeps the electrical system in tact so we can listen to something while we wait for a tow.

The Coolest Guy I Barely Knew

In the summer of 1997, I decided I wasn't going to go home any more and that I'd just tough it out near campus for a few months until school started again in the fall. With a little luck, I'd managed to get a job working with a few summer camps as an extra set of hands that paid enough for me to keep basic groceries stocked and leave a little cash each week for beer and haircuts.

It was everything I'd hoped it would be and more.

There are a few oddball summer songs that tie me to that summer - 311's Homebrew being one of them, more on that in a second - but one album stands above all the others as the mile marker of that time. Poi Dog Pondering's Pomegranate is the one that always brings me back (honorable mention to Buffalo Tom's Big Red Letter Day which is a very close second).

The first few weeks of the summer was spent "looking for work" which meant sleeping until 10 a.m., lazily making my way to the St. Norbert campus center to check the board and make use of the summer meal plan at the cafeteria to get at least one decent meal a day. I'd watch students drop in for lunch after morning summer school classes and rush back out for afternoon courses or to hit the library before I wandered back into the sunlight to head home, nap, work out and occasionally call one of my parents to explain that the good jobs were taken by upperclassmen.

Musically, I got lucky when one of the students working in the mail room caught me at lunch in early June. "Hey man, there are some things for the radio station that we have, but there's no one there in the summer. You and your roommate work there, right? Can you stop by and pick that stuff up?"

I went home with a box of promo CDs and posters that kept me busy for a week. I'd continue to collect CDs all summer, dutifully listening to them and keeping them clear of my collection so I could pass them along in the fall. The posters were kept to offset my labor costs of hauling the boxes across campus all summer.

Classes ended in late May and there were three of us in a college-owned house a few blocks from campus. We each had our own space. I had the single room upstairs. Roberto had the double room to himself because no one cared and he was older than us. Matt P had the single on the ground floor. In late June Brian moved in.

We knew that there was a chance there'd be a fourth added by Residence Life, but it was up in the air for a while and we hoped we'd dodged a bullet (or that they'd forgotten). I don't remember exactly what the first day was really like but I remember the presence of Brian settling in on the house.

Brian had left school the year before needing to finish one class to graduate. He was like a lot of the guys I knew from growing up in the suburbs of Chicago - Irish, a big personality and abrasive for effect - probably because he was exactly that guy, but from a different suburb.

His attendance in summer school felt a little like the plot to Billy Madison and a little like a complicated prison-release program. He told us that with a job lined up post-graduation, he'd worked it out with the school to come back within 18 months to finish the last course and cash out his degree. This was his time and while he was "in school" he was definitely not a student.

Here was a guy who was 22 or 23, had a fiancee, a good paying job in Chicago (something business-y), an apartment in the city and a new life that was interrupted for a few weeks of slumming it in a firetrap of a house with us. It was a reality show in the days before any of that even existed.

Naturally, I thought he was the coolest guy imaginable.

Mixed in with the CDs he'd packed was Pomegranate. I listened as he put it on one evening and then he proceeded to tell me how cool this band was and that I should totally see them live when I was home in Chicago. "Totally," I said. I was 19. I had no fake ID and zero chance of smooth talking a doorman into letting me in. Brian didn't seem to notice or care.

That album isn't one that is on heavy rotation any more for me. The album is a little thick to push through at times and has a few tracks I'm not all that into now. I think a big part of the aversion is listening to it retroactively and remembering just how much I sunk into the lyrics at the time. I'm still up in the air on whether it's because it's akin to seeing your hero fall or discovering poetry you wrote in freshman English class.

Still, when a song like Catacombs manages to push to the top of a random shuffle, I listen to it with detached fondness. Like driving past your old high school, it's that feeling of "home" but still a place that isn't worth revisiting.

I listened to the live album when the anniversary of Pomegranate came out to see if I could place myself in a venue (had I been cool enough to even know where to find a fake ID at 20) and enjoyed it for what it was. For the record, I couldn't really see a way for me to have been "there" - I would have been out of place from the start. If there's one thing I've learned about this album is that it doesn't hold up for me when I strip away the physical history around it. I'm reluctant to recommend it to many people, unless I have a specific reason to do so. None of that makes it any less valuable to me, though. It's always an odd surprise to hear these songs - none of which I everseek out, but are more or less welcome when they appear out of nowhere.

My Littles and Their Playlist

Years ago, I created a playlist for my sons and offhandedly titled it "Clean Enough" which made me chuckle because my two main rules were to create something that 1) didn't suck and 2) had a maximum of one curse word used in the song. It was a small reaction to my older son's temporary fascination with some pop starlet (I think it was Come & Get It by Selena Gomez) that he insisted on listening to in the car for most trips.

To be honest, I don't necessarily care what they like musically - their tastes drifting to genres that begin driving me crazy on a three-hour road trip are another matter - but I also wanted to show them a wider range of music than what popped up on Radio Disney or the local Top 40 stations.

The first song on that list was This Could All Be Yours by Guster, not because of the implied gravity of the song, but because it was the first thing I thought to add as I seeded the playlist in 2013.

I'm pretty pleased with the initial track rollout, including Matt and Kim, The Mowgli's, The Postal Service, Trombone Shorty and The Jackson 5 among others. It was a good first step that has grown to 113 tracks and counting, which brings us to today.

Spotify sent an e-mail today to let me know that my Year in Music was ready. In addition to some basic listening stats, it also linked to my "Top 100" playlist that had been curated for me by the app. At the top was Starman by David Bowie. Clocking in at Number 55 was Mountain at My Gate by Foals.

First, Bowie. You have to start with Bowie.

I'll forever have a place in my heart for him and his music. Bowie is a complicated artist for me as he's so intertwined with his mystique and persona (duh, right?) that it overshadows his brilliance as a musician. I always respected him and then went to see the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It remains a highlight of my life for many reasons and an experience that will be a mile marker for as long as I live.

On a personal level, that trip was planned as a firewall. It was intentionally scheduled to coincide with my newfound single life after separating from my ex and moving out on my own. I thought that no matter how deep my depression plunged, I had a trip to explore Bowie's world to help stop the free fall. In actuality, I was enjoying life, connecting with friends and was seeing a wonderful woman, all of which showed me that while it wasn't the path I'd chosen, it held promise.

I wandered through the exhibit, bathed in music and grinned like an idiot. I'd planned the trip as a reprieve for what could have been a much darker time, which should say a lot about how I approach Bowie. "I'll be on my own for the first time in decades, away from my kids, likely broke and trying to care for a terminally ill parent... but Bowie will fix it."

I spent a lot of time there, wandering in and out of rooms. Doubling back sometimes, reading the little cards, listening to the interviews over and over and finally settling in the last room where concert footage was supplemented with the kinds of massive speakers that rattle your internal organs. I was lining up new playlist additions as I was handing over my museum headphones and walking out.

That's the week when my youngest found Bowie.

I obviously have multiple playlists that I cycle between frequently and most often that means swapping between "my" playlist and Clean Enough. Occasionally there's overlap and it was in one of those switches between "cool me" driving home on the highway and "dad me" picking up the boys that Bowie caught his 4-year-old ears and locked him up.

"Wait! No! Play that song!" came from the back seat. That was the first of many memories I have of a tiny redhead, myself and the Thin White Duke. A small voice in his carseat behind me, high but on key, "Staw... maaaaan..." Looking in the rear view mirror and seeing a content kid, leaving the toddler stage, singing with a slight smile as he watches traffic out the window as his brother sleeps as we drive home in the dark from some daly adventure.

The important thing to me is that he picked it as something he found interesting. It's great that it happens to be a song and artist I also love, but seeing him explore music has been a real highlight of parenthood for me. More than that was the "how" of him discovering Bowie. That bolt of lightning moment when you hear something and have to hear it again (and again and again...) that the title of this blog clumsily tries to capture.  I was overjoyed to be there when it happened for him that day.

That brings up to #55 on the hit list. Mountain at My Gates by Foals.

As a dad... and music nerd... one of my favorite things to do now is to play something I like or recently discovered and ask the peanut gallery in the back of the car for their feedback on the ride home. There are two pick ups each week for me - Thursdays and Fridays - and while I usually play Clean Enough, I'll occasionally play something foreign to them and see what they think. I know generally where their tastes lie as they develop. My youngest likes vocal harmonies, my eldest is leaning towards EDM. Both appreciate a strong bass line and/or a great guitar hook.

Mountain is squarely on the list because of my oldest son, who will be 8 in a few months. I remember listening to WXRT on the way to a soccer game (probably because my phone was being used to play Pokemon Go). When he heard Mountain play, he insisted that I add it to the list. He's much more serious than his brother and logs odd things in his mind (like I do). In one of those moments that was burned into my memory, I looked back and saw him nod his head slightly, repeat "Foals" quietly after I'd just read it from the digital readout on the car's stereo and knew it was going to be there for a while. I added Mountain when we parked and came back to it time and again on request.

During one of his morning iPad sessions, he went one step further and added other tracks from the same album (not vetted by the parent of record until later) as he continued to explore the associated tracks, which blows my mind to a somewhat limited extent.

You know when you see a sticker imploring you to "Fear no art" on a guitar case or lamppost? That wasn't my guiding principle growing up, Notably, I felt that Led Zeppelin was somehow off limits because I didn't quite get them, their fans I saw in school or the mysterious symbols that surrounded their albums (yeah... right? Not so intimidating in retrospect, was it?) In reality, it intimidated me to the point that I avoided too many bands for too many years. I'm hoping that by trying to throw open those doors for my kids that they skip the middle step of worrying about what they "should" be allowed to listen to. I'm honestly less worried about the stigma of what listening to a band or genre looks like and more along the lines of feeling "this music isn't for me."

Music is for everyone. That's the one thing I hope they learn from me - not that they should gravitate to one genre over the other but that the only excluding factors in their listening should grow from personal taste. In the present I'm fascinated to watch their selection process develop as they each take small steps to explore just a little further from the songs they know to songs that are somewhat similar, but unfamiliar. To watch them process and have them finally decide they like the drums or the bass line, but don't like the vocals and either move on or listen again to get a better handle on things.

Most parents mark their child's growth as they count loose teeth, dutifully mark heights on a door frame and see penmanship improve over time. I do those things, too, but I can say that my favorite measures of growth will continue to be pulling up a shared playlist and seeing a handful of new tracks added since the previous weekend in the early morning hours.

Go. Wander. Explore. Fear no music.

The Ghosts of Beverly Drive

The third rail of this little pet project has been resisting the urge to flood the blog with posts about the two major disruptive forces in my 2015 - the death of my dad and the divorce that followed 10 days later. Both were years in the making, neither was a surprise, but they obviously made the greatest impact on the time before and after.

While this is admittedly a self-referential and borderline narcissistic project, it just feels too easy to focus solely on those events to give a false weight to the music that was the bizarre soundtrack to the summer. With more time and perspective, some will begin to pop up here when I have a handle on what was important and what wasn't.

That's the long way around to talking about The Ghosts of Beverly Drive which I stumbled upon in a typically roundabout way. The always interesting Song Exploder podcast was the spark as it dug into the story behind El Dorado. "The song El Dorado, like other songs on the record, was written in the wake of the divorce between the band's lead singer Ben Gibbard and actress Zooey Deschanel. In this episode, Ben talks about the metaphor of the city of El Dorado and how it fit the story he wanted to tell, about separation, unrealized dreams and Culver City."

Exploring the album, I found I liked Ghosts better and started listening to it as part of my workhorse playlist. Knowing the backstory of the album and where Gibbard was mentally as he wrote the songs, there were pieces I immediately latched onto. One of the odd things about music is the tendency to put a lot of stock into the lyrics as a makeshift gospel. While I treasure the lyrics that make me feel less alone or offer quiet reassurance that what I'm experiencing is normal, I lose a little more faith in any artist's omniscience with each new musical friend I make. Simply put, they aren't any closer to figuring things out than I am, but they're a lot better at tying those things to a chord structure.

The opening lines of Ghosts are:

If only you'd have known me before the accident
For with that grand collision came a grave consequence
Receptors overloaded, they burst and disconnect
'Til there was little feeling please work with what is left

In those lyrics is an oddly personal feeling for me. They outline where I assumed I'd be post-divorce and also a degree of the issues I caused for myself when I entered the dating pool. The self-projection as I started to gather my nerve centered around all the potential negatives I felt I'd be bringing to a new relationship. Like a critical used car buyer driving the price down, I could list them pretty easily a year ago: Divorced, custody schedules, dying father, uncertain financial future, countless issues with the frame and substructure that we can't even see yet.

The lyrical apologizing pretty closely matches every rocky interaction I had at that point. Some unlucky woman quite innocently asked about my kids and I went into a full, desperate and confusing defense of fatherhood. In retrospect, she was probably only asking my schedule. Instead, I had this internal narrative that mirrored the song - I know I used to be something, I hope you're able to make the best of the trash fire that is my life.

Slowly breaking away from the idea that the divorce itself made me irreparably damaged was one of the hardest things to come to terms with. Finding the upside in even the most basic acts - starting with merely surviving the summer - were the first quiet steps to coming back from the edge. I needed to get comfortable the idea of finding value in things I'd believed were marks against me. Apparently, I wasn't the only one.

The album that Ghosts appears on is Kintsugi and it's named after a Japanese pottery process. In it, gold is added to a lacquer to repair broken pottery, drawing attention to the cracks, chips and breaks in the material. It brings to mind the Hemingway quote about being "strong in the broken places" that litters self-help memes now. Owning the breaks and the perceived faults and drawing attention to them.

At the moment, I powered through the death of my father running concurrent with a divorce and having to patch together both things as I struggled to give my sons the lives I feel they deserve. Having to mourn the loss of what that was supposed to be, keep as much of the original as I could and creating something new for them that will be of value.

To continue the metaphor, it's rebuilding in a way that says, "Here are where things gave out, but I kept the good parts and they're still there. You can see them, highlighted in gold and better than I thought they would be. It's not broken, it's been salvaged and it's now more than the sum of its parts."

Ghosts is a helpful reminder of what the end game is. It's to press ahead, create, salvage, repair and do things not everyone thinks to do. It's to do things that not everyone can. Those specific lyrics remind me to pivot from expectations and move ahead in a way that when the details come up in the future, someone says, "Wait... You lost your dad, got divorced and still kept your sanity? You took trips with your kids and didn't skip a beat? Damn..."

In the most abstract way, I can just smile and show them the flaws and the places where the dam broke and tell them, "It wasn't a car wreck... It was a place that made room for beauty."