My 2 Best Listening Experience in the Last 3 Months

If there’s anything we all agree on about music, I think, it’s that your subjective evaluation of it is deeply influenced by the context in which it is heard, and as it happens, my two best listening experiences of the last two months have been not because of a great album or song, but almost entirely because of context. Well, context and good songs. Let me explain.

#1 Liz Phair “Love/Hate” – I was feeling claustrophobic one Saturday morning/afternoon in June–we’d stayed in Friday because we were too tired or too broke or too lazy, if I recall, and while video games are nice they do sap your will to live after a while–and so I decided to take a little walk around Miss Clap’s neighborhood up in Washington Heights with my discman at my side. I loaded it up with my obsession of the moment, the self-titled Liz Phair album, and as it was a brief walk, I skipped through to my favorite songs.

Miss Clap’s apartment building is a block away from the famous buildings that perch impossibly above the huge expanse of I-95 leading to the George Washington Bridge (if you’ve ever driven from New Jersey to Brooklyn via the George Washington and Triborough bridges, you’ve seen them), and when you walk up the street just outside, Audubon, you can walk on what feels a lot like a freeway overpass but what is actually a major Manhattan thoroughfare, with nice views north and south. And so as I set out, I walked down to the park running beside Riverside drive, and there I heard “Extrordinary” and “Why Can’t I,” the latter of which I usually love uniquivically, but which wasn’t really doing it that day. I cut up 178th for a block and heard “Rock Me.” And as I started to walk over the interstate, I clicked onto “Love/Hate.”

And it was perfect. Those opening chords pounded in and I looked down at those 16 or whatever lanes of freeway with cars going down them in the bright sunshine on a weekend morning and it felt like exactly what I wanted to do, like I was a fool not to be driving somewhere right then. I stood on the edge of the sidewalk and I looked over–something I enjoy doing regardless–and I listened to the song and I could almost feel myself blaring it from a stereo as I tore down the freeway. I wasn’t, but it felt like it anyway.

Besides the great feeling, it also drove home to me the difference between “Why Can’t I” and “Love/Hate”: the former was a pop song, and the latter was a rock song, and in their way they were almost archetypical examples of each. “Love/Hate” felt good in sunshine with cars; “Why Can’t I” felt good walking through a park downtown on a quiet day. The difference is that Love/Hate has its rock beats on the 1 and 3, and “Why Can’t I” has its pop beats on the 2 and 4. Easy schmeazy.

#2: Wasteland “HH Babies” – I think it was Simon that wrote how the Wasteland album, Amen Fire, was an entirely interior album, one that sounded like indoors, especially like dark indoor places, tunnels and basements. But I really only grew to appreciate that album while listening to it on a Greyhound bus pulling out of Youngstown, Ohio. Maybe it’s because I don’t get a lot of chances to listen to music on speakers in isolation, but it was only once I got a chance in an admittedly enclosed place to listen on headphones to the things on that album that made it interesting. But while I was in an enclosed bus, I was looking out at buildings and traffic lights and sparse trees aligned besides railway tracks and grey skies, and this was how it made sense to me.

There’s something perfect for me about listening to music while on a Greyhound, and I don’t really know what that is. It might have something to do with that connection in my brain between rock and cars that I mentioned above, but as often as I’m hearing, say, the Starlight Mints in an exciting way, I’m also hearing Jay-Z with clear ears. I rarely feel good about putting out my own music without getting a session in with it on the ol’ Greyhound. And so when I go off on these trips, I know what I listen to will be important.

I had set off on an Independence Day weekend trip back home with a full CD case but with no real agenda. I spun through a few things and it was OK. But then, after the sun set–oh then–it started in on a thunderstorm. I was perplexed; I love thunderstorms, but what to put on, knowing how it would hit me? The new PJ Harvey? Lightning Bolt? Nah: the new Wasteland EP, Spirit Shots. And oh yes, it was the right decision.

This track is a reasonably good indication of the basic Wasteland formula: hip-hop beats under a bevy of noises, especially extremely high-pitched digital noises. And I’m at a loss to explain exactly why this worked so well, aside from the obvious parallels with the lightning-y noises here. But there was something about the combination of the sealed-off, air-conditioned bus compartment, the slumbering passengers, the lightning strikes in a dark sky illuminating a soggy pastoralia, and these tones and rhythms that made me feel entirely different. It felt like a fog had enveloped the riders and that I was somehow unaffected as they lay unconscious. It felt like everything had slowed down and that the lightning bolts were cracks in the sky. It felt like I was listening to the weather play a song. It felt perfect.

And so I am, I guess, asking you to do things with these songs: if not to stand above I-95 while playing Liz Phair, to at least blare it in a car; if not to rush onto a bus during the next thunderstorm and listen to Wasteland, to at least put it on during a good hard downpour. Give it a try and see.