Some songs, I can’t listen to. They’re so firmly fixed to a moment that when the moment sours, the song becomes tainted and to listen to it would fix you so firmly to the past, it is safer and easier not to. For years I avoided many songs, or particular instruments. Synths. The wrong kind of bass notes. Anything too 80s. Background music playing when things in the foreground were things I made myself forget. Some kind of aversion therapy maybe then when to write The Last Days I made myself a playlist of all the songs I could not, would not, listen to, and made myself sit with them on the headphones and it was these songs that took me back into rooms of the past. Rooms I never wanted to revisit but had to if I was going to write the book and it was Genet who said it, that to escape from horror, bury yourself in it and it was music that buried me so absolutely in the past that I could claw or write or something myself up and through and out of it again, both being haunted by the memory it evoked but also overwriting the original memory in the process of writing until now when I listen to songs from the playlist for The Last Days, I don’t remember the original memory but instead the memory is of sitting in my study in a town in the north of England or at my desk overlooking my garden in London or walking with it in my ears after writing in some self-flagellating mood and so I know the ways music is a pharmakon or more simply and likely honestly, pure voodoo, but knowing a thing isn’t enough to stop venturing towards what will only ever hurt you anyway and out of interest, just the slightest curiosity, as I wrap mugs, plates, bowls, I put on Micah P. Hinson’s Don’t Leave Me Now.
In memory this song is over the top, swelling to a crescendo, it is an alarming song, recalling a particular early summer when I was or am (this is what music does, it undoes you, until you are not sure where or when or what part of yourself you were or are in possession of) newly in love and listening to his music instead of mine as a manifestation of my devotion and recently I have stayed away from anything reminding me of that uncertain time when I might have been falling and what an odd term to use falling in love as if incapacitated in a way but what we talk about when we talk about love seems only ever to be flawed now, recently, and I was never going to be a cynic and yet, here I am, in my kitchen, listening to songs I was never going to listen to again and the song is not the song I remember it being, it is far softer than that, until the end, which, if I was listening to it in my headphones my ears would hurt but I am not so they do not, instead I am bored before the end but I am also nostalgia incarnate as often happens when you’re packing things into boxes, as if the act of boxing a life up necessitates a re-membering of the past, piecing it together in different ways and so I switch the music to Beck’s Sea Change to It’s All in Your Mind just to be 27 again and sick to the pit of my stomach in love and it does what it always does and is the song I remember it always being, a song so evocative it took a full twelve years from the summer of listening to it on repeat to ever being able to listen to it again and even now, as I wrap, I am not so sure it’s a good idea.