Tuesday, June 26, 2007

I ain't got no cigarettes

Is there a better summer album than R.E.M.'s Dead Letter Office? Well, yeah, there is, I'm sure. But for me this is it. I can remember listening to it in the backyard of the new house we had built, five years after my injury. Those five years, in an old house, with hallways so narrow I was literally scraping down both sides of the hallway that led to my bedroom. Or I had to be carried into the bathroom because it was so small. Every morning before school I washed my hair leaning over the kitchen table, my head in a bucket.

But Dead Letter Office is that summer the new house was built, watching these clannish Alabama contractors raise walls and sheetrock and everything else involved with building.

"There She Goes," "Burning Down," "The Voice of Harold," "Ages of You," "Walter's Theme." Gems all, surprisingly good for a B-sides and odds and sods album, and looser than you ever hear them, aside from live shows.

Summer. Which I'm currently burning up in.

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Mailing back my contract today, which had to be notarized. So I've been running around in 95 degrees.

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No progress, really, on a place to live. I'm picking out curtains for my windowless box.

2 comments:

C. H. said...

I used to put on that REM album in high school and write poems. They weren't very good ones, but the REM, I'm sure, helped!

august said...

Ages Of You is incredibly catchy. The very mention of the song will give me a six-day earworm.

Voice of Herald gives me weird dreams.

I love that album two. I had not thought of it as summer, but you are right. It's hot, slow, humid. Normally that wouldn't be a compliment, but it is in this case.