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The Stupid 365 Project, Day 19: iPod, Therefore I Am October 20th, 2010 
I write to music. I do pretty much everything to music. When I tell musicians I write to music, they look at me with disapproval. ”I’d be too interested in the structure of the piece,” several of them have told me. When I tell writers I write to music, they look at me (most of them, anyway) with disapproval. ”I need to focus on story and character,” several of them have said to me. And to musicians and writers alike, I say: Bite me. I like music. It energizes me. It seals out the rest of the world. It makes it possible, when I’m writing in public, to ignore the people who come up and say, “Writing something, huh?” I can pretend I don’t hear them. If they’re persistent, I can do the idiot’s defense, look up at them, smile, and point at my ear buds. It’s amazing that people who are insensitive enough to come up to someone who’s obviously working and say, “Writing something, huh?” will back away apologizing when I point at my ear buds. There’s some sort of mystical line there. EARBUDS. DO NOT CROSS. My iPod has maybe 8.000 songs on it, arranged into about 20-25 playlists. At the moment, I’m listening to a playlist I made about six months ago, and I’m using it for “Pulped.” Just to give you the flavor, here are ten song in sequence about a third of the way in. (I organize playlists by song title because it mixes up the artists, and I hate knowing who’s next.) “Bright Side of the Road” — Van Morrison, one of his late-career gems. I have no idea how someone this grumpy could sound this happy. This cut could cheer up The Cure. “Brownsville Girl” — Nine minutes of mid-eighties Dylan, a masterpiece from any perspective: “We gonna go all the way, till the wheels fall off and burn.” There are at least three movies in this song. “Call It Off” — Tegan and Sara, to whom I wrote most of the middle section (Rose’s story) of THE QUEEN OF PATPONG. Girls on girls. “Camelot Motel” — low-life, low-rent country heartbreak from the electrifying Mary Gauthier. “Can’t Stop Feeling” — Franz Ferdinand, from “Tonight,” just all guitars and all good. “Can You Hear Me Now” — Emmylou Harris, America’s greatest natural singer, making sadness sound like something to look forward to: ”I send up my S.O.S/a message in a bottle, sent out to sea/It just reads ‘soul in distress/and nobody ever got back to me.” “Can’t Stand Me Now” — The Libertines, with Pete Doherty at his most energetically fragile. Pray for Pete – he’s got more talent than all the Lohans and the other glitter-casualties put together. He’s got to stop shooting up. “Cape Canaveral” — Conor Oberst. Nobody since the first 3-4 years of Elvis Costello’s career, has written so many songs in such a short period and kept the standard so high. “Cape Cod” — Vampire Weekend, light but fun, Cote d’Ivoir League, which is a really strained African pun on “ivy league,” which these guys are, via Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” “Carpetbaggers” — Jenny Lewis from “Acid Tongue,” with a riveting one-verse guest turn by Elvis Costello, and I give Lewis credit for keeping it on the record, because it’s so brilliant it almost erases her from the song. “Celluloid Heroes” — Head Kink Ray Davies with a big fat church choir behind him, and boy does it work. The whole LP is worth it just for “Big Sky,” Davies’ song about how God doesn’t give a shit about us. One of my musical moments of the yeas is when the choir sings, “Big Sky’s too big to cry.” Whoa. “Choctaw Bingo” — James McMurtry live, doing an insanely propulsive, insanely funny, and very long song about the “Oklahoma-West Texas metamphetamine trade,” as he introduces it. I’ve driven across Texas to this song for hours. Put this and “Brownsville Girl” on a loop, and you’res good for a thousand miles of sagebrush. Okay, so that was twelve because it was fun. But it gives you an idea. This is a whiter selection than most 10 or 11-song stretches would be, since I’m heavy on African and African-American but that’s what came up when I picked a random starting point. Good energy, something to put up a wall against the world, and when things aren’t going well on the page, something to lift my spirits. Anyone who disapproves can bite me.
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