Okay, so I didn’t actually steal my best friend’s CDs eight years ago.  However, she was crashing at my apartment that summer in between her first and second years of law school.  And I did, that Memorial Day weekend (I’m guessing), rifle through her CD collection and make a MiniDisc mix that I found this weekend while unpacking.  And, I am visiting her this weekend back in Indiana.

So, in honor of my very best friend in the whole wide world, and the people we were eight years ago (!), here’s the tracks:

1. In The End – Linkin Park
2. Everything In Its Right Place – Radiohead (apropos track to play while unpacking)
3. Gulf Coast League – Aden
4. 1979 – Smashing Pumpkins
5. Think & Act – Curve
6. Perfect Life – Liz Phair
7. Little Lies – Fleetwood Mac
8. Fear – Sarah McLachlan
9. Everlong – Foo Fighters
10. Poly Sci – John Forte
11. White Men in Black Suits – Everclear
12. And So I Know – Stone Temple Pilots
13. Mexico – Cake
14. Low – Cracker
15. Immature – Bjork
16. Haunted – Poe
17. I Knew You Would Go – Aden
18. Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box – Radiohead
19. Cry – The Sundays
20. Wish You Dead – Curve
21. Cupid De Locke – Smashing Pumpkins
22. Instrumental – Beastie Boys

Factoid you’d never know from this mix: my best friend’s the person who introduced me to rap!

When I was in middle school, my older sister and I pooled our babysitting money and joined a music club.  Both Columbia House and BMG Music Club had addresses in Indiana, and as dutiful small-town Hoosiers, we were excited to be members of a club headquartered (or so we thought) in our home state.

One of the cassette tapes that I selected was by UK band The Sundays.  I’d read a gushing review in seventeen magazine and looked forward to being the cool kid at math camp the next summer, what with big-kid music blasting from my tape deck.

Unfortunately, I hated the album upon first listen.  But as a girl raised by parents who apparently personally knew lots of starving kids in China, I didn’t want to waste this music!  So, I kept it on my walkman, playing it over and over until, one day, it clicked.  I heard the beauty, the magic, my ears let go of the rules that Top 40 pop music had written onto my brain — I was forever changed.

The Sundays’ second album contained “Wild Horses” which I would later learn was a cover (I would also later learn what a “cover” was).  But to me, this song belonged to the bright, often incomprehensible voice of The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler.

You know I can’t let you slide through my hands
Wild horses, couldn’t drag me away
Wild wild horses, couldn’t drag me away

Lovely female phenom Susan Boyle, also from the UK, covers “Wild Horses” in her debut album I Dreamed A Dream.  For me, hers is a cover of The Sundays’ version.  And it — perhaps in part because of Ms. Boyle’s beautiful, delicate background story — moves me just as much as the “original”.  Perhaps she and Harriet can share.

—

Looking for music to put you in a thoughtful, quiet space for the new year?  Et voila:

• Susan Boyle’s “Wild Horses”
• The Sundays’ “Wild Horses”
• The 5 Browns’ “Carnival of the Animals – Aquarium”
• The 5 Browns’ “18th Variation from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini”
• Brad Mehldau’s “Elegy For William Burroughs And Allen Ginsberg”

Here’s hoping that these quiet tunes can drag you away — without the use of wild horses — from that which you would like to leave behind as 2009 turns into 2010.

Photograph (c) 2008 Anna.Andres

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

– From Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping A Notebook”

Quoth the MoMA catalog:

Each of the three notebooks in this set features 64 blank, lined, or graphed pages. The three covers are adapted from Tadanori Yokoo’s works: Poster for a Noh Play (1969), Post for National Bunraku Theatre (1971), and Untitled (graphic image) (1974). comes with a stylish slipcase. 6″h x 4.25″w x 1″d.

• Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem contains “On Keeping A Notebook”
• Yokoo notebook set > at MoMAStore.org, $18.95; $15.16 for MoMA members
• Yokoo notebook set > at Velocity, $18.95

Bonus: you can keep on nodding terms with Japan’s early seventies’ design aesthetic, too.  !

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

– From Pablo Neruda’s essay “Childhood and Poetry”

William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls includes Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” in full.

• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $9.99 at Amazon.com
• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $8.99 at Barnes&Noble.com
• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $9.99 at Borders.com

Photograph (c) 2007