never seen blue like the blues he drives.

it wasn't raining today and I was able to get outside for a while and wander about with my camera, albeit only around the garden. (I haven't walked at all this week, and I'm starting to get restless and more than a little frustrated.) I snapped pictures of all kinds of nothing in particular, but it was nice to be out in the fresh air, and not stuck inside watching raindrops slide down the glass. when Lauren got home from school, she discovered this tiny abandoned birdnest amongst the drifts of fallen leaves in the backyard.



it's so small and perfectly-made: carefully woven and held together with straw and grass and little pieces of green moss. the tiny eggs are just props: I bought a handful of them a while back, and they looked right at home when I popped them into the nest before I took the picture. :)

I've also spent today listening to Tori Amos' new album, Abnormally Attracted To Sin, which is really sort of fabulous, especially Curtain Call and Fast Horse. I've had those two tracks playing pretty much on constant repeat. Curtain Call, especially-- it hit me hard the very first time I heard it, and it's continued to slip beneath my skin, fitting itself around my bones like it has always been there. I love how her music has always had the power to become an intrinsic part of the soundtrack of my life.

I actually wrote something once about that very thing-- the concept of a "life mix"-- a collection of songs that have distinct memories associated with them at different times throughout your life. and even though I wrote the following five years ago, every word still stands.

my lifemix

I'm sure there are songs I have missed out along the way, but as I wrote this, I listened to all the songs I have listed, closed my eyes and described what I saw and how they made me feel. done in roughly chronological order, and nowhere near as many as I wanted to include. but hey, there's still time yet :)

Cecilia- Simon and Garfunkel

I'm four years old, and this song is the very first one I can ever remember consciously listening to. I love it, and know all the words-even if I don't know what they mean. My daddy has made me a tyre swing in the doorframe of the garage, and I sit and swing in the sunshine and sing to this song when it comes drifting out from the radio he has in his workshop.

jubilation, she loves me again
I fall on the floor and I laughing


Me and You and a Dog Named Boo- Lobo

I'm a couple of years older, and my daddy has the biggest collection of records I've ever seen. Cabinets filled with a riot of colourful cardboard sleeves, and I often open up the doors and run my fingers along their spines, moving my lips silently as I read all the album names. Amongst them is something called Solid Gold Hits Volume One-- and this song is on it. please play it for me, Daddy, I ask-- and he does, the needle scritching gently before it slips into the grooves of the vinyl and music spills out like magic. I sit in the lounge and just listen, and it's always a sunny day outside. Always.

though it's only been a month or so, that old car's buggin' us to go
you gotta get away and get back on the road again


Queen- Bohemian Rhapsody

This could be any song from their A Night At The Opera album, really. I know each and every one by heart. The lyrics are printed on the gatefold album cover, and there's me, sitting on my little black and white kid-sized chair at the tile-top coffee table with it spread open in front of me, tracing a finger underneath the lines of lyrics, reading them and singing along. The tiles on the table top are hexagonal-shaped, pale green and speckled gray, and they're cool and smooth underneath my elbows. I sing along to all the parts, tripping over the long, unfamiliar words in places, but loving every minute of it.

I see a little silhouetto of a man
scaramouche, scaramouche will you do the fandango


Jean Michel Jarre- Oxygene

It's on cassette, and like all the music in my young life, was introduced to me by my father. No words sung anywhere on this tape, just music-but not just any music. It's something like I've never heard before, sound that conjures up a thousand different pictures in my head as I listen. Floating amongst stars in a midnight blue sky, walking on an ancient pathway in a land before time, running along a dry riverbed on a planet light years away from earth. One day I sit with pen and paper and draw what I see in my head, try and get down all the images the music is showing me, but I can never quite manage it. Lines and curves on a page don't even come close to showing what I see when I close my eyes.


Music Box Dancer- Frank Mills

I don't even know where I first hear this. It's a piano piece, played often on the radio, and I fall deeply in love with it as only a child can. For my birthday this year, my Nana gives me a music voucher, and I use it to buy the vinyl single of this record.


Bee Gees- Jive Talking

I'm in the lounge of my parents' house with my sister, and we've shifted all the furniture to the corner of the room to make space to dance in the middle of the floor. I put this on the stereo, and we dance and sing and spin around until the room is nothing but a blur and just like every weekend when we do this, it's the best Saturday afternoon ever.

there you go with your fancy lies
leaving me looking like a dumbstruck fool


Prince- I Wanna Be Your Lover

I hear this on my tiny little transistor radio, pressed to my ear through my pillow, at night when I'm supposed to be sleeping. My parents must know why I'm always needing new batteries for it, but they never let on. I lie awake and listen for this song, and on the nights when I strike it lucky and the DJ plays it, I turn it up as loud as I can get away with, and sing along. I don't even know what being someone's lover entails, but the song is new and exciting and makes me giddy, and while I listen, that is the only thing that matters.

and I get discouraged 'cause you treat me just like a child
and they say I'm so shy, yeah but with you I just go wild


Duran Duran- Girls on Film

I'm already hooked due to Planet Earth, but then there's this. This song, with the video, and the first five boys I have fallen head over heels in love with. Each and every time I see the video on television, I don't think my heart can take it. Surely one day it'll burst with how this music makes me feel inside. I want to be one of those girls on the slippery pole. I want to dance around to this song forever. I buy the album and spend hours reading the liner notes and the lyrics, over and over and over. I want to move to England and scrawl graffiti all over Simon's mum's wall. I want, I want, I want. In the end, I have to make do with buying magazines and covering my walls with posters and writing thinly-disguised Mary Sue stories in a big, black notebook.

and I sense a rhythm humming in a frenzy
all the way down her spine


Simple Minds- Seeing Out the Angels

I'm sixteen, and I'm the only one home-- my parents and sister have gone out for the day. I've been left with some paint and a brush, and asked to paint the porch ceiling. It's summer and I have the front door open as I paint. I have the stereo playing Simple Minds' Sister Feelings Call album, and this song comes on. If it's possible to have an epiphany whilst painting a porch ceiling, well then-- I'm pretty sure I'm having one. There's this long, perfect moment when I realise that anything and everything is possible, and my whole future is unwinding right in front of my eyes.

in voice leading to voices
last song that the land sings in colourful breathless emotional sea
leaving us this way


Thompson Twins- Doctor Doctor

I want this album, and in a twist of fate, this song from it is playing when I'm in the record store. The boy behind the counter is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen. I fall instantly and hopelessly in love, buy the album from him, take it home and listen to this song over and over.

you said you would come and dance with me
dance with me across the sea


The Cure- A Night Like This

A different record store, but the exact same boy. I walk in, and there he is, behind the counter, and this time, he's playing The Cure's Head On The Door album- the very album I am going in to buy. How could it not be love? Once again, I buy it from him, and it becomes the constant soundtrack to my life for the next few months.

And this boy. This beautiful boy. One late summer night, we end up sitting on the rocks by the sea together, kissing in the slowly-falling rain. It starts and ends there, and there's nothing else to tell, but this song, man. To this day, I still love the song.

for always and ever is always for you
your trust the most gorgeously stupid thing I ever cut in the world


Soundtrack from the musical Chess

My father comes home from town one Friday night, and as so often happens, there's a record tucked under his arm-something he's bought for himself. This time, it's the soundtrack to a musical called Chess, and he puts it on so we can listen to it. I examine the album cover as it plays, and I am inexplicably caught up in the midst of this fantastic music. It's a mix of classical and modern, lush ballads and huge rock tracks, and I am totally and utterly hooked. For many months afterward, I will pull out this record and play it. When my parents' marriage starts to disintegrate all around me, shaking the very foundation of my life and I can't find the words, I will find this record and for as long as it plays, I will lose myself in some other world, far, far away.


what's going on around me is barely making sense
I need some explanations fast
I see my present partner in the imperfect tense and I don't see how we can last


Arcadia- The Promise

I'm just barely seventeen, and I've moved out of my parents' home and into a house I share with W-- a male friend-- and another female roommate whose name I can never remember. My parents are now separated, soon to be divorced, and my world has forever changed into something strange I no longer recognise. I sit in my room and listen to this song and it makes me ache somewhere deep inside for things I don't even understand. I don't even know who I am anymore. I'm only seventeen, but I don't think I've ever felt less like a child than I do right there and then.

and sometimes we make promises we never mean to keep
and blackmail is the only deal a promise dealer sees


Shriekback- Nemesis

W and I have spent the morning defrosting the freezer. It's mid-summer, we're half-stupid from the heat, and we end up running through the house and out onto the front lawn, throwing handfuls of ice at each other and laughing so much we can hardly stand up. He vanishes inside for a moment, then this song comes on, the volume turned up so loud the windows are rattling. The two of us lie on the lawn in the sunshine, clothes soaked with ice-water, listening to it on endless repeat.

this is the splendor of our achievement
call in the airstrike with a poison kiss


Alice Cooper- Only Women Bleed

I am dating a tall boy with curly blond hair, blue eyes and a dangerous smile, but I can't stop thinking about his shy, dark-haired best friend. I'm walking home one evening and the shy, dark-haired boy gives me a ride in his car. He's quiet at first, but Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare album is playing on his car stereo, and he sings along to each and every song. He doesn't take me home-- instead we drive around for hours talking, then out into the countryside, where we kiss for the first time.

I break up with the tall, blonde boy just days later, because somehow, I've always known all along he was cheating on me, too.

she cries alone at night too often
he smokes and drinks and don't come home at all


Ultravox- Dancing With Tears In My Eyes

I'm in my room with the boy who has stolen my heart. He hands me this record. It has a pale yellow cover. He smiles and says, I bought it for you because I know you love the song about dancing--and I play it on the record player I brought with me when I moved out of my childhood home. We sit, with his arms wrapped around me, and when this track comes on, we sing along with it. I love that he remembered how much I like this song. I love that he made the effort to find it for me, then bought it. And I know then that I love him.

it's time and we're in each other's arms
it's time but I don't think we really care


Kate Bush- This Woman's Work

I'm wearing leopard print, and I'm standing by myself in the kitchen of my very own house. It's a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, and the sun is streaming through the huge window that overlooks the back yard. No sound but this song, and it's playing as I walk out through the back door and into the garden, where twenty people are gathered, waiting. Twenty people, friends and family, and they're all smiling at me as I walk along the path that leads to the big old apricot tree. There I stop, underneath the branches, to stand beside my father and the shy, dark-haired boy I fell in love with.

He takes me by the hand and smiles, and as this song plays, we are married.

I know you have a little life in you yet
I know you have a lot of strength left


U2- Where the Streets Have No Name

It's summertime, a month out from Christmas, and I'm sitting in the crowded backseat of a friend's car, as we're stuck in a huge snarl of traffic. It's hot and we all have our windows wound down, and all I can hear from the cars around us are their car radios. In some great cosmic planetary alignment, we all seem to be listening to the same station as we all make our way slowly to the U2 concert in the city. There is this amazing buzz simmering just below the surface of everyone's skin, and when this song comes on the radio, that buzz erupts into something palpable-- because in each and every direction I look, people have forgotten about the heat and the traffic jam, and are smiling and singing along.

I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
where the streets have no name


Tori Amos- Precious Things

I hear this song and it changes my life. Simple as that. There's nothing else to say.

those demigods
with their nine-inch nails and little fascist panties tucked inside the heart of every nice girl


Cowboy Junkies- Miles From Our Home

I'm in the backseat of a red car, thousands of miles from my home, on the other side of the world, travelling across a country I've only ever seen on television and in movies. Miles of highway in front of me, miles of sea and land behind me, and three of the best friends and travelling companions I could ever hope for are with me. This song is on a CD mix I made for a moment just like this, and as it plays and the road is swallowed beneath the car's wheels, I almost feel like, as has happened so many other times, that I'm dreaming this.

But I'm not. Not this time. This time, I'm wide awake, and this is real.

no one in sight for fifty miles,
sleeping fields sigh as I glide across their spines
if I could just reach the crest of that hill
this whole day will tumble and out the night will spill


Do Your Thing - Nsync

I'm in a darkened stadium, surrounded by more people than I think I have ever seen in my life. No one speaks the same way as I do, my accent marking me as from somewhere else instantly. Yet here and now, there's no need for words, and we're all here for the exact same reason. The lights flicker into life and a thousand voices fill the air as one massive surge of sound, and as curls of dry ice snake across the stage, I hear the opening notes of this song. This song that was always the last track on an album I have listened to countless times is now the first thing I will ever hear at my very first Nsync concert. I look closer, and I can see five figures standing still like statues amongst the light and shadows, and as they start to move and prowl down the stage, I start to cry.

I will hear this very same song, see this very same thing six more times before the month is through, and each and every time it will send shivers through me and confirm what I already know-- that these five men, together and apart, are truly amazing.

the ball is in your court
so reach up and touch the sky


Counting Crows- Colourblind

It's not so long ago, and I'm going a little crazy trying to work out just where I fit into my own life, and I get a little lost along the way. Then someone says to me, listen to this song. And so, I do.

I love this song, and I love them for telling me about it, and I know that, no matter how crazy life might get, things are going to be okay.

I am covered in skin
no one gets to come in
pull me out from inside
I am folded and unfolded and unfolding


BT- Force of Gravity

I can't even find the words for this one. All I can say is each and every time I hear this, it still hits me just as hard as it did the very first time. It's like death by drowning--dark water slipping over your head, and this is the last thing you ever hear. Exquisitely beautiful.

I remember the days I still could breathe
now I'm sinking beneath, the waves are crashing over me

so, what songs would make it onto your life mix?