This time of year always sneaks up on me. Part of me feels like classes just started back yesterday and the other part feels like this semester has gone on for ages. I think this is because you never quite exit a semester as the same person you were when it started. The one thing that always remains a constant, however, is the end of the semester ritual of waiting in line at the bookstore to return your borrowed textbooks. There are many ways to use this time, but I've always found the most enjoyable way to be listening to music.
Over the years I've meticulously curated this playlist and now I share it for your listening pleasure as well as mine.
1. Bob Dylan - "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands"
Length: 11:20
This song is a plaintive hymn written for Dylan's wife, Sara. It's kind of an outlier in his songbook because it is one of his most straightforward early songs. At the time of writing "Sad-Eyed Lady...", Dylan had been experimenting heavily by incorporating modernist poetry into pop music and he brings his flair for lyrical experimentation to this song. Instead of throwing in nearly indecipherable turns of phrase ("the jelly-faced women all sneeze"), he describes his love for Sara in beautiful, yet deeply felt, verses like "with your mercury mouth in the missionary times/and your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes/and your silver cross and your voice like chimes/oh, who among them do you think could bury you?"
2. Modest Mouse - "Truckers Atlas"
Length:10:57
Few things things in college are quite as boring as waiting in the bookstore line and few artists can write write about boredom with the same wit as Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock. "Truckers Atlas" is about driving around America, seeing the exact same things for days on end and trying to feel like you belong somewhere amidst all of the repetition. This is characterized in the central line "I don't feel and I feel great." Brock wrote that when he was 22 and the song works well as a distillation of the kind of wandering feeling you have when you're young and trying to carve out a place for yourself in the world.
3. Kendrick Lamar - "Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst"
Length:12:04
Like Isaac Brock, Kendrick Lamar is a lyricist who frequently pens dense/lengthy songs about trying to figure out how his life fits into the bigger picture. Kendrick's best attempt at finding his place in the world is in this song where he gives the listener two different ways he hopes to achieve immortality. The first half ("Sing About Me") is about using art to create a lasting portrait of who Kendrick is as a person by asking his listeners to "promise that you will sing about me." The second half ("I'm Dying Of Thirst") is where he reaches for spiritual immortality by pledging his life to God in the hope that he can rise above the world he is unwittingly a part of.
4. Wilco - "One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley's Boyfriend)"
Length:12:02
No one can write about aimlessness and miscommunication quite like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy. When this song is over you truly feel like you've been on a journey. Where that journey began and where it ended are up for debate, but you can be sure that your mood will be more contemplative for a little while. This is because "One Sunday Morning" is a pastoral acoustic ballad about wandering through your own mind that features an unwavering rhythm guitar. Since the other musicians in the band improvised their parts on the spot you truly feel like the song is finding its own way while you do the same.
5. Sufjan Stevens - "Impossible Soul"
Length: 25:05
"Impossible Soul" is the rare song that is both grand and huge, while at the same time being achingly intimate. Clocking in at 25 minutes, this track contains enough material to fill an entire album and it takes up the whole D-side of Steven's Age of Adz if you own it on vinyl. There's a little bit of everything here. You get treated to a barrage of clunky electronic sounds that somehow come across as orchestral in their cohesiveness, realizations about the nature of companionship (the interplay between Sufjan singing "girl, we can do so much more together" and guest singer Shara Nova replying "boy, we can do so much more together") and as a reward for sticking with the song for all 25 minutes, a return to the quiet acoustic guitar plucking that Sufjan is known for.
How do you pass the time in the bookstore line?
