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Up and Away
Dave Matthews
Some Devil
2003

Okay, seriously now, I have done ^ that part of this post 4 times--each time with a different song.  I have never had such a difficult time making a decision.  I had my song selected by the end of last week and listened to it plenty of times after I decided that it was "the one".  But then, yesterday when I was walking home from Typhoon, I listened to it again (with more attuned prepping-to-post ears) and I just wasn't feeling it anymore.

Last night, I got reacquainted with a lot of music I haven't listened to in a while.  This song popped into my head just as I was rounding the corner of Royal and Cote St. Antoine on that walk home.  I was very pleased with having thought of it and my mind started to go in a dozen different directions as I plotted out my post.  But then I actually listened to "Up and Away" and thought, this is kind of the fucking cheesiest thing I've ever heard (hence the seesawing back and forth between this song and others).  I started to feel kind of...embarrassed.  Like I didn't want Dave Matthews, or this song, to be added to our playlist.  And, there was the fact that I couldn't post Dave Matthews without delving into my past and, after Tuesday's meltdown, I kind of wanted to avoid doing that, haha. 

Let me start at the beginning.  My friend Ashley (the one I paid to go to Tori Amos with me) got free tickets from one of her mother's friends to see The Dave Matthews Band at the Bell Centre.  Neither of us was familiar with DMB and I already had a kind of predisposed distaste for them lingering at the back of my mind.  They were a tie-dyed, pot-smoking, jam band (like Phish, and my Dad emphasized his hatred for them on more than one occasion), their fans seemed kind of weird and their music had never really appealed to me.  Moreover, I didn't want to like them.  I left the concert without having had a transformative experience.  In fact, DMB irritated me even more than they had before.

Fast forward to my second year at McGill and, more specifically, a Concordia ski weekend.  It was the first time in ages that all my friends were in one place for an extended period of time.  Part of me was kind of disappointed that it wasn't just us--that we wouldn't get a chance to catch up or play silly games or talk until 3 in the morning.  I didn't want to have to share them, or have to act out a different version of myself.  I felt left out.  My friends were each rooming with their respective boyfriends and I would be sharing a room with the other single girl on the trip, whom I had never met.

The only people who hadn't brought their own skis were me and this boy, Taurek.  When we got to the hill Friday night, my friends all headed to the chairlift to get in their first run and I was left with this random boy in the ski shop.  I hated my friends at that moment and for a good part of the evening because Taurek and I were never able to join up with them.  They must have been coming down the hill when Taurek and I were going up and vice versa.

When we met up with everyone at the bus I was annoyed.  Back at the condo, I was introduced to a little something called Malibu Rum.  Our relationship was short-lived, but intense.  A few MR and pineapple juices later (ugh), and I was feeling great.  We congregated in the condo's living room and blasted this new band my friend Chris had found called Franz Ferdinand.  Sitting in clusters on the plush carpet and sprawled on the couches, we forgot about time.  I was sitting with my friend Ashley on the couch with my back turned to that Taurek guy.  He was excitedly telling someone about the new Dave Matthews album (he had brought his copy along on the trip) while shifting his beer from hand to hand.  Suddenly, my hands moved of their own accord.  My fingers crawled across the small space of cushion between myself and Taurek before wending their way up his pant leg and onto his knee.  I did this without acknowledging it.  It was like my hand, my foot, my leg were independent from the rest of me.  

Sometimes I am a little surprised when my behaviour has consequences.  Or, maybe those aren't the right words, exactly.  It's a kind of confusion, or seperateness.  Like maybe it's that I feel so seperate from that behaviour that it is a bit of a jolt when my mind catches up.  Needless to say, I was...startled when the party broke up and, when upstairs in my room, I turned around and that Taurek guy was standing there.  It was like a combination of pleasant surprise and panic (with panic winning) flooded over me.

Some Devil was the starter album that paved the way for the rest of the DMB catalogue.  I liked Some Devil because it left out so many of the classic DMB elements that irritated me--long, dueling saxophone and fiddle solos, music that calmored and crashed and climbed and went on and on and on.  It's a melancholy, but uplifting album and, when I first listened to it, I thought it was quite beautiful.  It's weird what circumstances can do to taste.  I didn't go from hating to loving Dave Matthews in an instant--obviously I was more patient with his music and more inclined to like it because it was a means of establishing a connection with Taurek.  My infatuation with him fed my infatuation with the music.  I don't really like to think that I changed myself for someone else.  Or that I felt that I had to change myself?  I don't know.  Maybe that's like a thing.  Maybe it was more like being more open to someone else's interests, part of becoming a _____ & _____ unit.

"Up and Away" was the song I listened to on repeat when I was up pulling an all-nighter to write an English paper.  It was the height of the post-ski weekend bliss and the words of this song lifted me up--so much that I felt the need to print them up and paste them in my journal.  I look at them now and they make me cringe.  They are generic and sappy; the polar opposite of how I would choose to describe love.  The organ and Dave Matthews' drunken, halting delivery of the words is off-putting.  Still.  Listening to it last night I experienced that familiar sense of being lifted--lifted back to this particular time of year and to that specific period of time in 2003.

Nothing came of Taurek, but my love for DMB intensified and lived on.  I became one of the fans that I had previously mocked--printing out that infernal DMB dancing sprite symbol, completing my album collection, watching live concert DVDs and downloading bootlegs.  It's funny because I don't feel the same now.  My connection with DMB was a bit like my relationship with Malibu Rum: short-lived, concentrated in one period of time.  I can't quite forgive the music the way I did then.  It doesn't sound the way it did then.  It's like I was listening to it through some sort of filter that has since disintegrated.