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Like You

Artist: Custom
Album: Fast
Year: 2001
♥: The first time I heard this song, all 17 and cegep-jaded, hating the world and everything in it (oh you know how it is)  -- my heart stopped.
The album is fairly typical late '90s/early '00s alternative fare: various guitars and drums, some cheerful bopping hooks, inept raps, lines used for comic instead of emotional effect. I had almost written it off as a "waste of a Christmas CD" (though there were, actually, a couple of gems: Beat Me and Hey Mister, namely) -----

and then this song popped up on shuffle, and I almost had to check to make sure I hadn't, by accident, put in a mix or something.

It is -- still -- one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.
In 2007, I put it on an fuck-you-Valentine's day mix and described it as "anonymous sex on a kitchen floor covered with broken glass at a sleepy, grey 3am."
By that, I didn't mean it was a sexy song, because it's not. It has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with broken glass. It's not raw in the way that early Crystal Castles or uncensored Yeah Yeah Yeahs is raw, but it is raw in the emotion it rips out of you. 17-year-old jaded Jill stood there in bad headphones, still not quite sure of her musical preferences or even what the fuck she wanted out of life, and everything slipped even further out of place while simultaneously hitting harder than it ever had. There's a depth to his voice, a kind of yearning for something inarticulable, ineffable ---- the song is downtempo, slow, but throbbing: volatile. It feels like something is seething beneath the surface.


It's hard to get into how deeply I feel this song because it's been around and intense, every late winter, since 2004. Seven years of memories inextricably tied up in synths, echoes, something barely contained. I can't distinguish between how much of my love for this is based on everything I feel from cegep, from university, even from last year -- this song has become part of my emotional makeup -- and how much of it is because it's objectively a good song.

Either way: this song is quintessential February. Pushing through the snow (and occasionally the rain), but with a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe. There's no answer, really, just more uncertainty -- but if you can feel this much, at least it's possible.
I AM VERY HAPPY TO BE SHARING IT WITH YOU. ♥