SONGS I LISTENED TO THIS YEAR THAT I LIKE A LOT (SILTTYTILAL) #3-2005: AMERICAN ANALOG SET, "THE POSTMAN"

Again, I've been listening to this song for a while (it is, in fact, the only American Analog Set song I like, and I downloaded it as an MP3 some 3 years ago, I think), and again, my attention was drawn to it recently because of one particular line: "leave for work." Aha! See, the problem with this, and thus the reason I'd only regarded it as something pretty but not like super-extra-good, is that I'd only listened to it at work, but it was, in fact, a song specifically made for not being at work. In fact, it was a song made for me in my short-ceilinged but otherwise very nice room in Ohio, getting ready for the day and listening to music on my stereo (often, actually, Mass Romantic). That I can no longer do this is too bad, but it still extracts the feeling of that particular experience, and presumably one day in the future I will be able to do such a thing once again.

This room--well, first off, I was only in it for like 4 months, and admittedly they were good months for outside reasons, but it sure didn't start out promisingly, with me having to move out of my by-now-miserable former living circumstances in all of six hours, due to general irresponsibility on the part of the person I was exchanging rooms with (long story). Though it had denegrated into a sort of pit of despair, the room had a lot of promise, from my weird little fountain I had set up around the walls to the killer recording setup I'd wedged into half the space. (Got this great sub-bass noise from a mixer feedback loop.) And actually, the new place wasn't so great at first--I was kind of alone in the middle of a dark winter, we couldn't find the thermostat so the house was really cold, the room was, in addition to being short, covered with powdery stubbly plaster that would come off if you brushed against it, my bed was really uncomfortable, and I was just generally miserable. But this wasn't the room's fault, and we'd set it up in a very efficient way that allowed me to keep it clear, although the fact that it was pretty big helped this a lot. As the seasons changed, the real glory of the room came into play: its wall of windows, which let in just an obscene amount of light in the morning, which was actually very nice. By the time late February rolled around, I was very happy to be there, and even happy to get ready to leave, because it was just so lovely in there, with my music playing and the sun shining.

Unfortunately, if you actually read the lyrics, the song's a sort of trite tale of an obsessive mailman. But it sounds like it could've been something much nicer, and it's polite enough to allow you to forget that.

posted by Mike B. at 6:15 PM 0 comments