(Some times that I’ve played the WHOLE DAMN ALBUM)
It’s March 2006, I’m about to turn 9, and when my mum asks how I want to celebrate after school I say I want to make a stir fry and listen to Diana Ross and the Supremes. The kitchen in my childhood home has a huge CD player with different hi-fi units stacked solidly on top of each other – my dad is a sound system nerd. Five disks can fit in at a time. A typical rotation at this time could be, The Cranberries Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?, The Celtic Fiddle Festival (we do ‘crazy dancing’ to this album at least once a week and my sister runs round the kitchen nude), Macy Gray On How Life Is, The Verve This Is Music and, of course, Diana – and at the weekend they spin round on repeat through every track on all five disks. On Sundays, my mum turns up Richard Ashcroft or Carole King full volume while she cooks. The house pulses. I later ask her to stop listening to Richard Ashcroft whilst I’m home because his songs make me cry. Not sure why, something from a past life maybe (I listen to The Drugs Don’t Work for the first time in maybe 15 years whilst writing this now). That’s just at home too, we have a whole different collection for the car and Avril Lavigne’s Let Go goes haaard with my mum, my sister and me. My dad would rather be listening to Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman, I think. My brother is too young to care.
It’s some time in the naughties and we’re driving somewhere on holiday. The five of us are in one car, my mum’s friend Caroline and her family are in the other, and all ten of us are medically addicted to the Red Hot Chili Peppers album By The Way. I can’t remember where we are going but we make several pit stops en route and at each one Caroline jumps out of her car in a frenzy (this is normal for Caroline I should say) to ask us what track we’re on – sometimes it matches up and it’s so exciting! I headbang to Can’t Stop in the back with my brother and sister, and we think Throw Away Your Television is the cheekiest song we’ve ever heard.
It's 2012 and Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die is IT girls. My mum tells me she’s taken on a whole new name, look and persona for this album and it sounds so mad to me – What if she releases another one? Will she still be Lana? Won’t she be knackered with all that acting? Anyway, I’m 15 and I obviously find it ~Arresting~. I come back to Born To Die in a huge way in December 2023 actually and, apologies to the commuters, surreptitiously lip sync Off to the Races on the train to work in the window seat most mornings.
It’s September 2019 and I am sad sad sad (and in Paris too, the saddest city to be sad). King Princess has just released Cheap Queen and all 13 tracks make me cry and yet somehow all 13 tracks are also playing through my headphones 24/7 on the metro for three months straight. I start wearing a long chain with my keys on the end (I still do to this day) clipped to my trousers and I sort of feel part of something abstractly queer and mildly practical.
It's July 2020 and I’m stomping round Taipei listening to Women in Music Pt. III. I feel independent and alive and like I am the fourth Haim sister, except the humidity of the Taiwanese summer makes me so humblingly sweaty that I don’t think I will ever feel glam again. My Mandarin teacher gives me a nickname that means something like ‘drenched like you just got out of the pool’, and she’s got pure mischief in her eyes. I call my playlist Summer Girl x even though it's my least favourite track on the record.
It’s late summer 2023 and my friends and I take a curiosity induced ironic road trip from Coll de Nargó to Andorra in a fleet of 3 rental cars. Our car, made up of me, Pedro, Jon and Macleod behind the wheel pump out Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour from cover to cover and back round again – looping for as long as it takes us to arrive. Pedro and I (the gays on board) know every single lyric, and by the time we reach the border Macleod and Jon do too. It is, by miles, the best part of our day in Andorra.
It's January 2024, it’s mizzle town, and I’m doing some comedy gigs that I feel nervous for. I listen to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess on repeat through the winter and I do feel like a Midwest Princess, with rises and falls even, in spite of having to google maps exactly what encompasses THE MIDWEST as I bounce around on the DLR. I'm truly madly... parasocially in love with Chappell Roan and I want her campy sultry blasé words rush through my veins all day and all night. I play her through the kitchen speakers instead and the bridge of Femininomenon makes my brother laugh.
It’s now, I’m 27, and there's no way on earth I can get enough of Maggie Rogers’ new album Don’t Forget Me. It has that road trip homecoming (I'm not American I don't actually know what homecoming means) vibe and I feel like I’ve heard it before, in a gorgeous way. The kind of album that has me waiting on an empty house of an afternoon for some solo karaoke. I text my dad - he says he’ll listen to it through his new hearing aids, and then he says he likes the ballads. I don’t tell him that I sometimes skip those. I text my friend Charlie, she says she’s trying to make an April playlist but every track is Maggie. I text my mum, she… ignores the message. I go on a run and play it through from start to finish, twice. I decide to run to the beat and track 2 nearly kills me both times it rolls around, and it! feels! good! I text Charlie back I DID THE SAME. I listen to Maggie again whilst I’m drawing at home and skip a track. ‘Bit turgid?’ my mum looks up and asks, ‘It’s usually track 6’. I scan down the track list to number 6 and she’s bloody right too.
The hi-fi units and CD collection that started it all
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