Age 5: UNCHAINED MELODY (GENE PITNEY)

The albums we had at home were either classical or Broadway; my mother, the musician in the house back then, was no fan of pop music, no Beatles or the Rolling Stones.  So I must have heard this somewhere outside the house – on the radio? in the store? Maybe the distance I felt between home and this other kind of music expressed itself in the plaintive melody. Such a weary song for a five-year old.  But then again, why should we doubt that any child wouldn’t know a thing or two about loneliness and the slowness of time?

Age 50: LION IN THE WING (ESSRA MOHAWK)

I’m almost sure I never would have found Essra Mohawk without the Internet. I  certainly knew of her, knew she was from Philadelphia, knew that Laura Nyro was an influence – or at least that she was compared to Laura. But one day Essra shows up on a YouTube recommendation, and I’m instantly drawn to Primordial Lovers, her 1971 album, as much as I am to the music of my youth. The piano chords, the both stark and lush; the rhythmic freedom; the melodic spontaneity; the violin line – it’s all here, a song that feels as fresh as anything written right now.

Age 10: HEART OF GOLD (NEIL YOUNG)

At first, this feels unexpected. It has none of the weird chords of Joni Mitchell, none of the discontinuities of Laura Nyro. It’s funny that the song’s obsession with age – ”and I’m getting old” – would have possessed me at ten, but I never took lyrics in back then. Maybe my attraction had something to do with the strange placement of Neil Young’s voice – half male, half female; half adult, half child; half human, half wolf. I was already a developing hybridist, but I couldn’t have known that yet.

Age 45: IN LIMBO (RADIOHEAD)

One morning you’re standing on your street corner in Manhattan, looking up at the top stories of the North Tower on fire. You don’t even know what you’re looking at, nor do the people on the sidewalks to the right and left of you. The shape out of which the fire sprawls looks like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Was that moment of not knowing worse than the interpretation that came just minutes later? I don’t quite know the answer to that, but I hear the uncertainty of post-9/11 New York (as well as wars, war crimes, fundamentalism, the desolate political landscape), in the low apocalyptic intensity of this song.

Age 15: AND YOU PURSUE ME (HUUB OOSTERHUIS AND TOM LOWENTHAL)

What could be more interesting than a love song to God that didn't name God? The text of this piece is suggested by the psalms, but you might not know that unless you heard this in church. I spent all four of my high school years playing in and writing music for church, and this was one of my favorites. Luckily, our music director tended toward songs that were theologically progressive, particularly songs that didn't wear their religiosity on their sleeves. Huub Oosterhuis, a former Dutch Jesuit who later started his own church in Amsterdam, seemed to do that authentically, without making too much of it. I'm still stirred by this song, decades later.

    am no great fan of the linear.  I do whatever I can to disrupt it in my writing, because my sense of time is all over the place. Isn’t it just a myth that our school-age anxieties are so far away? Or that we don’t already know what it’s like to lean into our canes, in our aged bodies, as we stand at the second-floor window, waiting for the bus? Of course

Birthday: A Playlist...

by Paul Lisicky

one’s birthday rolls around, and those questions shut off. A birthday bears down on us like nothing else, and even though we might think of ourselves as twenty years younger – I’m about 32, I like to say – we’re fending off all the words that come in as good wishes. Still looking good, dude.  Hello, old man. Happy birthday, old friend. Old? Old? So in the spirit of rebellion, I’m going to mess around with time a little bit, especially as yesterday was my birthday, and I’m not quite sure my designated age is a suit I want to put on just yet. Here’s a playlist of songs made up of music I’ve loved at five-year interval points in my life. The format comes from Pitchfork, though their guest artist lists are decidedly linear. It shouldn’t surprise you that I have a different plan.

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