#18: An Ocean in Between the Waves
A couple of years ago, I started a column at The Alternative called “On Shuffle.” It’s all in the name — I’d put my library of songs on shuffle and write extensively about my experience with whatever song came up first. It was really fun to do and I probably would have stuck with it a lot longer had I not published the first entry on my very first day of graduate classes. That’s the kind of timing I knew was doomed to fail. I did a few more entries over the next year, but I was too busy to ever keep it up consistently.
A few months ago I got the idea that I might try to start the column up again. The format was a really nice balm for the feeling that I was in a creative rut, the conceit inventing its own prompt. The song that shuffle gave me was “An Ocean Between the Waves” by The War on Drugs. I started writing it and I found that things started to go a little off the rails. Months later, I decided to embrace it and finish what I started here, but I found that the final product reads a little more I Keep a Diary than The Alternative, so I’m sharing it here. Here it is:
On Shuffle is a recurring column dictated by a combination of computerized chance and personal history. For each entry, I’ll put my iTunes library—which I’ve been cultivating in some form since at least 2007—on shuffle and I’ll write about whatever song comes up first. All of these are songs that I’ve added to my library over the last 15 years, so all of them have a reason for being there. I may or may not remember what that was. To read more about why I’m doing this, check out this intro post.
This week on shuffle: “An Ocean in Between the Waves” by The War on Drugs
In the Fall of 2014, I spent all my time getting lost. I was a junior in college and I was studying abroad in Oxford for the semester, the first time in my life I had really lived anywhere outside of Florida, and I was comically unprepared. The friends I met all gave me shit for this — they’d ask, as I walked into their apartments and stripped off my three (3) H&M zip-up hoodies, why I didn’t have a proper coat. They’d point down at my disintegrating blue Vans Classics and yell at me for not wearing boots as the chilly rain poured down day after day.
I recently had a good friend ask me for recommendations on where to go if they were to take a day trip to Oxford when they visit London later this year. I found myself coming up pretty empty. I don’t really remember the restaurants or the bars or anything like that. I don’t remember the names of most of the landmarks, the little town square with the farmer’s market where my friends and I would eat dumplings or the coffee shop where the barista would give me big, free cookies. I was mostly broke, my love for the place rooted in my ability to keep myself going, so far from home.
This I remember as the first time in my life that I had ever felt anything close to free. Though looking back, what I did with that freedom wasn’t really much in practice. I walked circles around the little park next to the music building at Christ Church where I’d meet weekly with a young graduate student for my tutorial — a kind and shockingly approachable man of whom I was completely intimidated. I’d walk through cobblestone alleys, avoiding muddy puddles from the previous day’s steady drizzle. At night, I’d walk around the center square, occasionally filled with folks loitering and chatting in the mist. I let my notebook get wet while I sat on the stone steps of an old fountain and I talked to none of them.
It’s not correct to call myself a loner during these months. Like any young, unformed person shoved from their comfort zone, I formed exciting and memorable friendships with people in my proximity whom I would never see again after our time was over. But our individualized schedules varied wildly, which often meant that many of us would be deep into writing a paper just at the moment when one of us had finally turned in their weekly assignment, mercifully free until they had to start the process over again in a day or so. More than any other time in my life, I loved that feeling of relief. What I remember most from that time are those lonely walks right after I turned in a paper I had likely spent five days thinking I would never get finished, after I met with my sweet, terrifying advisor and didn’t die. And I remember the songs I listened to while I got lost in the muddy alleys and the misty squares.
The day I first listened to Lost in the Dream, the third record from The War on Drugs, was bright and wet, and I had the full day before me. I remembered exploring crevices of the city that I could never find again — landmarks away from my home college, creeks where ducks waddled defiantly along the trail. A huge old gothic-looking building, a manor or a church I never knew because I couldn’t hear anything the nearby tour guide, talking to families with little twirling children, was saying. I was subsumed. Everything I saw, I saw through an imagined haze as Adam Granduciel’s dusty mumble echoed in the distance, his errant solos and watery synthesizers bouncing off a distant, unseen wall, loud enough to come back to me, take me over.
Today, shuffle directs our attention to “An Ocean in Between the Waves,” a truly beautiful song and one of Granduciel’s most thrilling compositions on 2014’s Lost in the Dream. I remember when I first heard it because I remember when I first heard the rest of the record, which mostly stuck together to me as a single solid piece. I remember that intoxicating feeling of tentative curiosity as I explored Oxford that day, listening to Lost in the Dream over and over.
I remember getting back to my apartment, finally taking off my headphones, and shrugging. That was okay, I remember thinking. For months, I had been exposed to an onslaught of hype over the War on Drugs — including elated reviews from Pitchfork and Stereogum, and a lot of talk on the messageboards from forum tastemakers I tended to trust. After a day spent with the record, which I remember buying months earlier on CD and loading onto my iPod Classic, eyeing it as the year went on just waiting for the right moment to finally put it on, I can’t say I was really all that impressed.
One potentially fraught result of thinking about music as a kind of personal archive is the odd texture it can take when the music lives on beyond the moment. I can say now that I have listened to Lost in the Dream, and the two subsequent War on Drugs albums, for that matter, dozens and dozens of times in the last decade, that I have been deeply moved by this music. I can say that while I listened to Lost in the Dream and “An Ocean in Between the Waves” for the first time, I was young and in the midst of a rapturously happy time. It’s so easy to conflate these two things — listening to some of my favorite music during one of the best times of my life — and I did conflate them when I started writing this column. I started writing this essay about this incredible piece of music that so perfectly soundtracked this unique part of my life. But these emotions, these experiences, are misaligned in time. They don’t go together. They are associated in my mind, but maybe they shouldn’t be.
I don’t think I listened to this record again while I was in Oxford. I mostly listened to Copeland’s Ixora, Jenny Lewis’s The Voyager, Fucked Up’s Glass Boys. I think about that time in my life when I hear Lost in the Dream now, but really I wouldn’t love a song like “An Ocean in Between the Waves” — with its crisp clipping beat, steady for seven minutes, and its rangy, impressionistic guitar wading in and out, its miraculous rockstar stature — for at least another year or two. The notion of this song, or this record, being a major part of my semester abroad, is false. I made it up.
At least in some sense. Maybe there was some emotional truth in this song, long and steady and confident and free, that I didn’t recognize was landing on me that day. Maybe it knew something I didn’t know, about what this time might mean to me later. What I’ll say here is that, when I started writing this essay months ago, I was left with a sinking suspicion that some things weren’t right with the story I was trying to tell about Oxford and the War on Drugs, that something in my memory was wrong. I took things offline and I wrote pages and pages about my experience, things I had never been able to wrap my head around before. I realized that this was a period in my life when I was reaching an important personal intersection, one at which I’m pretty sure I made the wrong choice, that I made some things more difficult for myself in the wake of all that freedom. This to me is the funny thing about music in the moment — sometimes it’s building a bridge back you didn’t know you might need.
I realize I’m being opaque — one of the reasons I’ve been writing (or sharing my writing, more accurately) a little less in the last year is that I’m at a point where the things on my mind are things I think I want to keep to myself for now. This makes it hard to write personal essays, as you can imagine, and must be frustrating for you too. But I am also thinking about music, and what it has done with my memory, how I have tied them so deeply to one another, how they have cracked and refracted and remade each other in ways that are true and in ways that are not. How I have to consume all of those contradictions individually, then at once, to really get somewhere good. How sometimes there’s a song in there somewhere, like a treasure in the dirt, one you didn’t mean to leave at such a crucial point. How it waits, stalls, biding time for the right moment to pull you back into the mist.
Some newer songs on which you might implant your complicated memories:
I love Ratboys. Their new record The Window is probably my most anticipated right now. Yesterday they released “It’s Alive!” and it rocks. The long, rambling nature of “Black Earth, WI” might also speak to any War on Drugs fans out there:
Yesterday I walked home from work through the thick smoke plaguing the northeast from the canadian wildfires, eating a Wawa hoagie and listening to records from local singer-songwriter stars ther and Greg Mendez. (It was all very Philadelphia.) The former is important for fans of Mount Eerie, the later for fans of Elliott Smith. Two of my favorites of the year so far, not to be missed under any circumstances:
Nothing better than Bigger Better Sun in the summer:
Bye bye.
My name is Jordy Walsh, and I’m a writer based in Philadelphia. I Keep a Diary is a newsletter about music, books, and writing. You can follow me on Twitter for more thoughts on all that stuff.