Bonus Tracks // Song Diary: Drive to School
Welcome newcomers!
Hi everyone,
A lot of new subscribers came in yesterday via the Tracks link in my author bio underneath my just-posted New York Times Magazine piece about the gross new iPad ad. Welcome, newcomers!
To recap: this is the fifth week of Tracks on Tracks. So far, that’s meant publishing nine essays in which a writer — often me, often a guest — tracked their relationship to one song over time. All these pieces are available in the archives, including:
Becca Rothfeld on The Magnetic Fields and nostalgia for a past she once longed to escape.
Me on the one Broken Social Scene song I used to listen to every morning, the first song that ever helped my firstborn son sleep, and my 23-year relationship to Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying.”
Johannes Lichtman on Thrice and finding himself in the suburban Los Angeles screamo scene.
It’s been fun to make my own little patch, to work with my amazing guests, and to find my first generation of readers and see them sharing their own music memories in the comments.
It’s been especially moving to have some people upgrade to paid subscriptions, even though I haven’t yet produced any subscriber-only / paywalled writing. These goodwill subscriptions have bought me some time in my schedule to keep working on this project. Thank you, paying subscribers!
Once I’ve been publishing for three months, I will split the subscription money I’ve collected between my guest contributors. By signing up now, you help me pay them more.
Going forward, I will:
keep publishing at least one essay a week
experiment with various “Bonus Tracks” features to see what sticks (see below)
nudge people toward paid subscriptions a bit more, including by eventually making some content paywalled, in hopes of making the project more sustainable
continue to urge you to share Tracks with people you think might like it
On that note I present . . . the first ever “Tracks on Tracks DIARY,” a possibly recurring, possibly never-to-be-seen-again feature in which someone shares some of what they’ve been listening to lately while Doing a Thing. While cooking. While running. While writing. Et cetera. Focusing —just like Tracks essays — on how music and life intertwine. Just in a more bite-sized format.
Let me know in the comments or via direct message what you think — or what other recurring features you can imagine working.
ToT Diary #001: What I’m Listening To While … Driving My Kids To School
Vampire Weekend: ‘Mary Boone’
This is the song my son is most likely to request, especially if he knows that “kids music” is off the menu. Which is sometimes just the way it is — because I say so! It’s a great “heading out in the morning song”: the opening verse has a bright but restrained up-at-sunrise feel; the string part evokes the world waking up; there’s a reference to commuting (came in from Jersey, not from Brooklyn). When the percussion comes in — much of it supplied by a sample from Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life” — it really feels like getting off your train in the city, joining the hustle, looking for your spot, your way in. There’s a recurring whoo: a jubilant, shouted whooo (which also feels like a sample, though I can’t identify it). My son loves trying to guess when the whoo is coming and whooo along. So do I. Driving to daycare is a bit of a drag: when weather and scheduling allows, it’s much better to walk and push the stroller. But when driving is the only way, each whooo makes things a little better. ✹
Rascal Flatts: ‘Life is a Highway’
My son encountered this song at a family gathering a few months ago, and he’s been singing the chorus ever since. You know the part:
Life is a highway
I want to ride it
All night long
I don’t like the metaphor: to my mind, highways don’t really have qualities I look for in the rest of life. On highways, we’re all isolated in dangerous, resource-intensive steel boxes! I’m sure I’m overthinking it, but I can’t help it. And I don’t like the production on the Rascal Flatts version — the version they made for the movie Cars, the version that has given the song its 21st century afterlife. Everything’s squeezed into the same dynamic range, for reasons that I assume have to do with the arms-race for radio and public-space playability. At a certain point, making a recording more portable means making it more lifeless. It feels flattened. Laminated.
And yet, despite it all, I’m glad my son fell in love with this song, and I’m grateful to the family member who played it for him. Hearing him sing along with its ridiculous words in the morning makes me happy, even — or maybe especially — if I have no idea what he possibly thinks it means to ride life’s highway, all night long or otherwise.
Not “Mary Boone” whoo happy, but happy nonetheless. ✹
really appreciated this piece. And it got me thinking ‘What songs are the soundtrack to different parts of my day?’ 👏🏼👏🏼
That was a fantastic magazine piece—congrats!!