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Apartment Story
The National
Boxer
2007

I managed to resist posting "Theme from Beverly Hills, 90210" (this week, anyway, heh, heh, heh) even though it would have suited this theme perfectly (it's true and you know it).  I love lazy mornings in general, and lazy Saturday mornings with you, in particular. I like eating breakfast late, sitting cross-legged on the couch (sharing a blanket, looking at the sun-dappled leaves shiver outside the window, listening to that douchebag crow caw, caw, caw). I love those weekend mornings when I wear my pajamas until noon (or later); when I'm not in a hurry to go anywhere. When I can crawl back into bed and surround myself with pillows and blankets and books, and you.

When I was younger I would listen to the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 every Sunday morning on the little white tape deck in my room-- my index finger hovering over the "record" and "play" buttons to catch the song I was dying to "own". When I was a bit older and still living at home, my mom and I would sit at the kitchen table on Saturday mornings, talking, reading (and making fun of) The Gazette, drinking one, two, three cups of coffee and eating toast with smeared with peanut butter.  Lazy mornings are for catching up; for doing nothing and anything and not feeling guilty about it.

This album makes me think of cold winter mornings rather than warm summer ones; of December 2008 and January 2009. I have lyrics from "Apartment Story" and "Slow Show" copied into one of my Five-Star notebooks from around that time. "Sleep in our clothes and wait for winter to leave" and "I want to start over, I want to be winning/Way out of sync from the beginning" written in careful, curly script. At the time, I bent and shaped the lyrics of "Apartment Story" to fit snugly around the edges of my depression, but I hear and feel the words differently now. Lyrics like:

We'll stay inside 'till somebody finds us,
Do whatever the TV tells us,
Stay inside our rosy-minded fuzz for days

echo differently now. Less depressed-staying-in-bed-staring-at-the-television and more infatuated, absorbed, head over heels, wanting to spend a string of days with the person you love, bodies held close, limbs tangled in the bedsheets, safely cocooned, marooned on a kind of bed-island. Lazy mornings are a kind of "rosy-minded fuzz"--delightful in that the outside world can completely fall away, obligations and responsibilities can be pushed to the back of your mind for a while.

Boxer is a very warm and warming album (irregardless of the feelings being expressed in a given song, I think). Matt Berninger's voice sounds like wool sweaters and thick insulation. I seem to have a thing for steady drum beats.  I like the rocking lullaby quality of the drums in this song...they seem to emphasize that warm, enveloped feeling.