Vampire Weekend – cozy does it

I’m listening to Vampire Weekend’s “Only God Was Above Us” studio album this morning in search of some spark that’ll illuminate a handful of half decent words to string together. I haven’t written in a few days and I think there might be a little rust underneath the snow of this particular page. Forgive me if it bleeds through.

April’s been wet and the drains are backlogged and working overtime. The car appears to be covered in one word in particular- a fuzzy, yellow, sneezy one called pollen and that means spring is actually here whether the weather’s gotten the memo or not. There’s some green machine projecting a droning hum somewhere outside. I set some “Prep School Gangsters” on it to scare it off.

Maybe today’s a good day to hunt down some magnolia blooms and cherry blossoms. Cloudy days make colors pop and the green will be speckling sparse branches, like pointillistic optimism. A little fresh air could be just what my brain’s looking for to get the juices flowing. I’ll take my music with me on a drive, inviting my Vampires into New Jersey, to aid me in sucking up a little of the inspiration that my surroundings never fail to provide.

Someone told me last week that they once heard New Jersey described as “the armpit of America”. I’m not a good person to say this sort of thing to. Besides, I like to think of it more as the sassy hip, but hey; I’ll let people think what they want and maybe it’ll keep the crowds down on the beaches this summer. I throw “Mary Boone” on, feeling love for my bullied state. You could do a lot worse, if you ask me.

I’m looking forward to the temperatures warming up, to the windsurfer’s kite sails floating like low, neon clouds above the shallow white caps of cresting waves. I’m looking forward to bursting green, to when the trees turn from windows to walls, and the little yellow warblers go flitting into tangled brambles, unscratched. I’m ready to unbundle and feel the breeze on my arms. Soon. Patience.

I’ve jumped to “Connect”. This one makes me think of people driving cars in old movies, you know, the ones where you see an open top convertible winding its way along some picturesque, coastal road on the side of a mountain and a graceful woman sits in the passenger seat wearing lipstick and a silk scarf around her hair that both come across gray in the absence of technicolor. I wonder what colors are preventing her fly-aways and staining her lips and getting her from A to B. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, but it’s fun to think about. If my brain didn’t work this way, maybe I’d get more done, but then I wouldn’t really be me.

I’ll leave you with that image while I hitch a ride on this imagined adventure. I have a feeling it’ll lead somewhere interesting. I hop into the backseat of the convertible and see the leather upholstery is cream with tan stitching and the car’s gleaming cherry red hood sparkles in the sunlight and curves so smoothly you could slide right off it. There is a blue and periwinkle body of water on our right and the mountainside is freckled with grass, poppies, and miniature wildflowers in shades of orange, purple, and goldenrod. The air smells clean and sweet, a little like the Chanel No. 5 eau de parfum that my nana used to wear.

The woman turns back to greet me with a Hollywood smile and I see her lipstick is an orange shade of red. Her eyes are a warm brown, lighter than mine. Her scarf is optic white, edged with gold and blooming with ornate, silk-screened flowers in rich magenta and royal blue. Her hair is black where it is neatly swirled at the nape of her neck, and I see it is flecked with red when she turns back to look at the view. I don’t ask where we’re headed. I’ll see for myself soon enough. I feel excitement in my bones, a lightness in my chest and a smile on my cheeks. I hold down my hair in an effort to prevent a mess. Who am I kidding though? The mess is part of the adventure.

I’m a nervous highway driver, on occasion. Weirdly, singing seems to help with that. So, sometimes, I sing when I drive. I sing when I drive when I’m nervous, that is.

When I was new to driving as a teenager, my dad would passenger seat “drive”. He had an imaginary brake pedal on the ceiling of the car and when he’d hold his breath in silence and reach for it with his hand, my confidence would waver. I remember thinking that a very real passenger-side clutch pedal would have been much more practical because no matter how many times my dad told me at first, “G’head; ease up on the clutch. You’ll feel it,” he seemed only to be all sorts of crazy at the time and me – all sorts of confused. Of course, he was right, and if you know how to drive a manual transmission, you know what I’m talking about. For the rest of you, there is no other way I have found to explain it; so you’ll just have to trust me on this one, okay?

Before moving back to New Jersey, I was out of practice with driving, having lived in New York City for seven years where cars are things that you sometimes forget exist as modes of transportation rather than simply as perpetual enemies to face at crosswalks and invisible crosswalks, alike. I decided to ease my way back into highway driving with a nice little “test drive” by following behind the U-Haul that Mike drove during our move. White knuckled and singing, with a nice big U-Haul to tail (and the U-Haul’s being restricted from going on the Parkway), we made it, somehow. Mike was proud of me, I was proud of me, and I think it’s accurate to say we were both sort of in disbelief. Turns out I could do it all along, like the whole time probably, you guys. Who’d have even thought?

Driving and music just sort of go together for me. My sister did most of the driving when we were in high school. She knew the radio stations to preset and had taste in music that I’d not yet honed for myself. I trusted her musical prowess and learned to like the emo pop and rock bands that were so popular in my school days. In middle school or high school (I can’t remember – help me out if you know, dad!), my dad showed me how to use his and my mom’s record player and my musical knowledge expanded to include Van Morrison, the Beatles, The Who, Cream, and Emmitt Rhodes, among others, heard as originally intended. The soft thud and crackle of a needle dropped in a vinyl groove has been a very comforting sound ever since. I’ve not touched a record or a record player for years now, but I can recall that sound as easily as I can hear my neighbor’s music playing next door right now. Unexplainable, yet simultaneously explainable – you know, magic.

Nowadays, I have an included music subscription through Amazon Prime, built on a Prime Music Unlimited subscription that I paid for (and got very limited use out of if I’m being honest), for over a year. It’s basically the same as the paid version, except that I can no longer pick the exact song I want to listen to at the exact moment I think to listen to it. The song’ll come on eventually, I have learned, and I’ll hear new stuff that I’d otherwise not have known about while waiting for it to do so. I use this music subscription, almost solely for car-based purposes and it has been my co-pilot (cough – karaoke machine) for many a long drive.

My taste has since evolved into something with an identity of its own that I’m proud of and that I don’t care whether or not other people share in. My go to for driving is almost always something by Vampire Weekend (or something similar now, by the unpredictable nature of the Amazon Music roulette wheel). Before I got rid of my paid music subscription, I mourned the final days of still having the ability to play the entire Father of the Bride album in its intended order, getting lost in songs like Bambina, Sunflower, and Flower Moon. I’d like to say I sing along to Vampire Weekend, but what I actually do is try to sing along to Vampire Weekend, as, at least for me, many of the songs would take a gazillion driving listens to get the words right (as you must remember; I cannot look at the lyrics because – driving). No, I sing whatever words fit the pleasant Koenigean warbles and “my audience” is not displeased.

I think of the Beatles writing Yesterday and Paul McCartney using the original placeholder lyrics of, “Scrambled Eggs. Oh my baby how I love your legs,” and I think it’s totally reasonable to change the words to something like Diane Young, Don’t Lie, or Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa for my own listening (and driving) pleasure. Someday I’ll look up the words, though I’m happy enough with my own versions for the time being.

Perhaps my nervous reaction to driving was born from that invisible ceiling brake. Maybe it was the watching for the opposing traffic’s yellow lights while I was stopped at a red at intersections (you know – to leave sufficient time to feel the clutch). Maybe it was how fifth gear liked to keep me on my toes by sticking every once in a while when downshifting to fourth. At some point in time, specific origin unknown, it came to be, and here I live to tell the tale, much improved thanks to uninhibited car singing and an affinity for Vampire Word Salad.

I’ll end it here before this last track skips, but feel free to set the needle down at the beginning again if you so choose.

Tag: Vampire Weekend

Creative Process

Vampire Word Salad