« In Which She Had Heard The Song Before »

Of the Season

by RACHEL SYKES

Something about music feels different in December. The sounds of Christmas are familiar, but the end of a year brings lists and the writing of lists brings regret. Thinking back on a year and wondering what was new, the music you listened to and the music to which you might have listened tend then to blur. This is the year in which I’ve grown stubbornly against recommendations, taking an instant if inadvertent dislike to that which people say I’ll love. In the same breath, I’ve grown lazier too, gaining music in fits and starts, as if my attention could only grasp the dirtiest beats.

From December 2012, a fallen post-it behind my desk lists songs by British Sea Power in the hand of someone I loved. An email from the same month, the subject line: Scott Walker, written by a friend who kissed, proficiently but tentative, whilst his new album played behind her. I have listened, now, to neither. Making room for the new isn’t easy. If favourite songs are incantations, the spell of the familiar must be broken to allow the new to take hold. I often think that to do so means emptying my mind entirely, the contents strewn upon the carpet perhaps sixty per cent lyric and forty per cent bass, each syllable bluntly punctuating what grey matter was left behind.

But each December I make a playlist, as if trying to guess what music will stick through January. Imagine then what these playlists would say about me. They tell me that last December I walked to my office to Azealia Banks, pounding steps to the rhythm in the hopes that my concentration would emerge at the end. As the drizzle turned to ice, frost settled on the lake and I would pass by, sometimes, with Jessie Ware playing softly, attempting to skate across the ice and into a calmer state of work, deeply praying that the frost wasn’t thicker than the soles of my new shoes.

As December began, I helped plan a conference that, like all conferences, felt like a failure until the mistakes had gone unnoticed and wine spilled down the shirts of our supervisors.

Waiting for the final speech to finish, we ducked behind velvet curtains that divided the audience from the food, running in and out of the grand hall with huge plates like we’d been given the keys to our kindergarten. Where the attendees could not see, we sprinted towards the wine bar and I jumped to click the heels of my shoes as Billy Joel played in the background. In the glee of partial success, hopeful in the potential of a leftover wine store, we sang Joni Mitchell around a piano and read from Moby Dick at midnight.

In the morning, we spoke of literature before the coffee brewed. Mid-December, I came home, and fell asleep in large headphones whilst listening to Marvin Gaye. Having obsessed and re-obsessed on Frank Ocean, I became nostalgic for the break-up albums my mum had played around me, hidden from new boyfriends in the glove compartment of her Nissan. “That comes from me,” she said, when Otis Redding was on my night stand, forgetting her larger love for Rod Stewart, the rotating tapes of Gabrielle and late ‘90s Simply Red.

My playlists might say all of this, but with technology I am careless, if not precariously near Luddite. Between this and last December I have plugged and unplugged my walkman into too many computers, with too rough a hand, and it has wiped and been wiped a dozen times or more. This is good for me, I guess, emptying out what I find comfortable, the chants and spells I pound into the pavement, in the favor of the new. These songs have been fortifying, but when you walk the same streets each day, stuck in the same riffs and hooks that are plugged so deeply in your ears, you risk becoming weighed by all the thoughts they’ve saved you from.

This December, for several days, my Walkman wouldn’t turn on. Fine, I thought, except that this loss coincided with the unusual need to learn seventeen disco songs. My first paid gig with a functions band, I struggled to differentiate between the lyrics of Chic, to keep in mind which line followed which, baffled by the lack of storytelling and how I could sing about being the peg on someone’s ladder. Without headphones, I couldn’t follow the eighteen bar break as the keyboards climbed, ominous, one tone at a time, blanking on which point I needed to interrupt with a yell of “Freak!” I sat in the bathroom during the interval with my eyes tightly shut, running the lyrics down the inside of my eyelids and wondering if I could gauge the right pitch by singing in my head.

Over the walls of the stall, two of the party guests chattered, asking which boss was drunkest, wondering about the deepness of my voice, and questioning the decision to extend ‘Get Lucky’ by ten minutes. But the band finished with our mistakes unnoticed.

This December, there was also Beyoncé, or a whole page of my notebook titled “Feelings about Beyoncé.”

For three days, I kept forgetting that ‘***Flawless’ had been written, rediscovering it when the videos shuffled and the thrill of conviction seemed new again in her eyes. No one I know will talk to me about it, so I have to use analogies. Imagine if the sports team you’ve followed your whole life won the championship. Imagine if a writer you’ve admired and supported suddenly pushed every envelope you didn’t know they knew. But Beyoncé, and my Feelings about Beyoncé, are bigger and more surprising than analogies can stretch to.

Perhaps, next year, I will need better friends; I have already started to make one. This December, I’ve been driven around, because I never learnt to drive. It’s become a family tradition; my biological father failed his test thirteen times and when he eventually passed decided he didn’t much like to. Having never deigned to drive, I have never much thought about playlists for driving but now, in December, I am starting to. Circling around our town quite early on a Saturday the kind of blinding sun that cracks only occasionally through December poured into the car. At the same time, Chvrches, a band I’d not really cared for, played too loudly for our heads. I’d heard the song before, of course, but the whole sound made more sense, right then, if only for that moment.

Rachel Sykes is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Nottingham. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Katy Perry and John Mayer.

"Valentine" - Jessie Ware & Sampha (mp3)