The Soundtrack of My Wasted Youth

July 8, 2007

1. Teenage Wasteland – The Who

Really called Baba O’Riley, Pete Townshend wrote this masterpiece about waste. It’s everything that is my life, and probably will be in the next few years. “I don’t need to be forgiven,” coupled with “It’s only teenage wasteland,” makes it perfectly angsty and lost and unreal and valid, all at the same time. Plus, it fucking rocks, and I like to imagine myself entering a room with the F-C-Bb power chords streaming, feeling vindicated. This song takes me to the highs and lows and I’m FUCKING SWEPT.

2. How It Ends – Devotchka

Because I can’t say it any better, I borrow words taken from this review.

The music is what “…you put on when you want to wallow, when you want to brood, when you want to shut your windows and close your blinds and lose yourself in the wistful tragedy of love and loss and hope and nostalgia that bubbles to the surface in all of your darker, finer moments. And though it could easily be the soundtrack to One Hundred Years of Solitude (what, with all the horns and guitars and the crooning Nick Urata), it’s actually more spiritually related to the darker and finer moments of, say, Modest Mouse. (“Night on the Sun” the-world-is-ending-right-here-in-this-guitar-delay Modest Mouse, not the newly-minted disco Mouse).”

It’s a fucking tragedy, and I LOVE IT. “It makes you think. It makes you long. It makes you dream.” And it fucking makes you feel meaningful in every possible way, whether you’re jumping off a building, or in for a long drive in a taxi on an unknown street. “And if you can listen…without feeling the suffocating sensation of tearing flesh from bone that accompanies any true loss, then you haven’t loved and you haven’t lost and you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’re better for it.”

3. Mad World – Gary Jules

Originally by Tears for Fears, this is a great cover by Gary Jules. Curt Smith said, “It’s very much a voyeur’s song. It’s looking out at a mad world from the eyes of a teenager.”

It’s pretty accurate except for the tiny detail that I’m not a teenager (anymore). I prefer this version better because the piano chords fit me more as a voyeur of my own life more than the synthesizers, which would probably be also me in a higher plane of consciousness, i.e. on acid. Heh.