lofi

or, when fans improve the art they love; or, raise a glass for those with skills and time; or, I remember being a different person who is still me

Don’t know why people do this to songs we all know but I secretly hope they never stop. Don’t even know what impulse drives this kind of tinkering with popular music to make it sort of slur into the dreaminess I once felt with my head back driving with my eyes closed in my older brother’s convertible when I was seventeen and that horrendous motor was so insanely loud and the canvas top was so terrible at keeping sound out and the speakers seemed perpetually on the brink of exploding so the only music reaching me sounded like it came far away, rattling through a can, while a hurricane threatened to rip it all away.

There’s a feeling swelling in my chest that makes it hard to breathe when I think of certain moments of my life because the memory is a tattered fragile thing forever slipping between my fingers but it’s also a dreamy haze of sensations when I felt things so strongly that they became too large to fit inside my head and my words hadn’t grown up enough to capture them, diminish them, and so I’d sit with this swelling emotion, undefinable, but ready to burst me apart.

When I think of the things said to me at 4am on schoolnights while we smoked cigarettes on swingsets for children or the caustic glow of all night diners when we should’ve been anywhere else, doing anything else, but instead we were there, with emotions too big and bodies too fragile and hearts we believed we’d one day understand.

I remember the languid comfort of couches in basements, the far away brushes of something like love when the moon smiled only for me, the very real press of our bodies and the ineffable power we had on one another.

I return so often to being fifteen and sixteen and seventeen. I think that’s when I felt life strongest. I think it’s why we never grow out of the songs that defined those years for us.

We may grow up, get jobs, live dreams, have children, watch those children grow and have children of their own, but I think a part of me will still be the sad boy reading Dostoevsky for the first time, crying my eyes out and underlining nearly every sentence on every page; the boy listening to music so loud to keep my thoughts from thinking themselves into me; I remember staring out at the moon and wishing I was—

For years, I had the same dream every night. From probably when I was eight or nine until I was seventeen. I dreamt a person in silhouette far away but near at hand, like I could reach them if I tried but also like they were painted on the skies. In this dream that seemed permanent, I reached for this shadow and followed them down a hallway while they walked away.

And then they just walked away. And I let them.

Many times, I gave this dream many meanings, but then it stopped.

I think that’s when I grew up, became whoever I am now.

When I listen to certain songs, my chest swells again and I can feel my emotions in my teeth and behind my eyes. I find breathing suddenly different. Not harder or strained, but like I’m breathing for the first time with full lungs after years of breathing shallowly and never knowing.

I remember Tereza and Tomas like it all happened, like it all happened to me.

I don’t know why people mess around with these songs but something about these songs and the way they’ve been remixed reminds me of autumn when I was that kid feeling too much and whispering it all into my pillow while I stared at the moon that still seemed to shine just for me even though the night seemed determined to capsize my life and spill me under to drown on whatever ghosts haunted me.

What I mean to say is that I’m glad people are out there doing this. Thanklessly and anonymously, they take songs we all know and then turn them into something new, something haunting, something that reminds me of the many versions of me I once was, the me I sometimes still long for, the me I’m glad I’ll never be again, the me I would still be had everything gone just a bit differently, just a bit wrong, where instead of a full life with people who care about me, who I care about, to a life where I’d be that same seventeen year old boy who felt hopeless but so enraptured by love and sensation that I was willing to jump off buildings just to feel something even larger than what I once felt in a dream dreamt for years that I never understood.

This is all a certain way of saying: these songs are good.