The Lost CD of 2004
PLUS: a new print, a discount, and photos of me when I was 16.
A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
Dear Friend,
Huge news: my friend Jess found the CD Ben Stevens and I recorded in the year 2004! Until this week, I thought it belonged to one of multiple Rubbermaid bin sacrifices that carved my adult self into being, lost to time. BUT JESS, ONCE AGAIN, HAS COME THROUGH.
(Weirdly, it’s time for a content warning here: I’m going to mention self-harm, suicide, and a few other similarly dark things in this post. No graphic details, but if the mention of these things is too much for you, skip this one! I will be throwing some of these words around a bit Willy nilly.)
You are falling all over yourself with questions about my album and my band; I get it. I’ll try to answer them.
Q: What was the name of your band?
A: The Esplanades, pronounced Ess-plah-NODs, named after the East Bank Willamette River walkway that Ben and I thought had to be the most beautiful, romantic place on Earth. It was truly just a well-paved cement pathway that was on the other side of the river from the side we lived on, but when you’re 16 and you find a place your parents never took you, it’s like you’ve discovered God. (I asked Ben what he remembered thinking about the East Bank Esplanade, and he replied, “The Esplanade felt like a very mature, deep place. Like it made me feel very adult to have this place I liked to go only because it was quiet and beautiful, made me feel interesting to have a spot like that.”)
Q: What instruments did you play?
A: Typical band: I played piano and sang, and Ben played cello.
Q: Cello?
A: It was beautiful.
Q: Who were your influences?
A: I think I thought our influences were Ben Folds Five, but listening back, it’s deeply obvious that my sole influences were Fiona Apple and Something Corporate. I’m not sure that was something I wanted people to know, so I didn’t let myself know it. The year we recorded this, I was really into the concept of Dashboard Confessional, too, but didn’t like any of his music in actuality.
Q: Does the CD have scratches on it?
A: Tracks one through six skip like it’s their job.
Q: What was the title of the CD?
A: God, I can’t remember. The first CD I ever recorded was titled “Mary Jane,” which was not a marijuana reference, just a name I liked, and I thought you were supposed to name most things after pretty girls. To reiterate: I didn’t know a single Mary Jane, but in my mind’s eye, she was misunderstood and girl-next-door beautiful.
Q: Where did you record this?
A: At some point, I told someone that we recorded where Elliott Smith recorded his albums. That was not true at all. We recorded it at some jaded guy’s suburban home, where he had mixing boards and a small, soundproof room. For $100 (2004 dollars), you could spend one hour with him, and he’d record whatever for you, and “mix it,” which felt absurd to me, because what was there to even mix. This wasn’t a cake batter, it was a CD!
Q: Will you let us hear a song?
A: Yes. I will let you hear a song. It’s hard to choose which of the two non-skipping songs to share with you. Track 7, “Dirt,” is a breakup song. Track 8, “For Snow,” is about how I had secretly started dating Ben (Yes! The Ben in the band!), even though I know that it was a bad idea. (It wasn’t, like, that bad of an idea. It’s so much easier to practice cello-piano songs when you are also wanting to kiss the person.) I haven’t decided yet.
The song I want to share with you (the skipping makes this a non-starter) is Track 3, which is called “Tragic.” It is a song about a girl, with an abusive father and an “empty” soul, who dies. It’s not clear how she dies. Maybe suicide? Overdose? Something sufficiently unnamable and fitting of the song’s title. Here are the opening lyrics:
It was a rainy Monday morning, and they were crying.
It was a closed casket, she would have wanted it that way, and they say,
“She could have been something, you know; but we’ll never know, no no no.
All for a reason, I guess, but she would have looked so good in a wedding dress.”
A lot of my songs of this era were about girls like this — ones who had wasted potential and sad stories they’d only allude to. I wanted to be one of these girls. I wanted Andrew Cavanaugh, the lead singer of Something Corporate, who sang the song, “I Want to Save You,” to want to save me.
I worked hard at cultivating this image. I cut my arms with safety pins. I wore black eyeliner. I developed an eating disorder because tortured-attractive girls were always bony. (Thanks, all of pop culture. See, among others, The Virgin Suicides, whose protagonist was constantly drawing comments about “her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and […] how the basins of her collarbones collected water.”) Here are things boys said to me in these days that I considered compliments:
“You have a certain sadness behind your eyes that doesn’t change even when you laugh.”
“I don’t know how to love you. You are damaged goods.”
“I’m not sure I could handle the darkness of your secrets, but I want to hear them anyway.”
I remember these sentences verbatim, because I’d play them for myself on repeat in my mind (along with any time anyone said or implied that I was “too skinny”) at night as I fell asleep. They were evidence that the movie of my life was unspooling accordingly; up next, plot-wise: a featureless tall man who would let me put my head on his chest as we rode on some kind of train.
Honestly, I didn’t want anyone getting too close to me not because my secrets were too dark (the guy who said the thing about “dark secrets” to me said it while he was showing me his childhood collection of Ninja Turtles, just to set the scene); it was because I worried they wouldn’t be dark enough. My family had dinner every night at 6:30 p.m.; at the table, we played Trivial Pursuit cards, and there was ice cream for dessert. It wasn’t like I was waiting up until 2 a.m. for my alcoholic father to come home from cheating on my mom with his secretary, so he could punch me in the face for catching him in the act. My dad was usually doing a jigsaw puzzle of cats.
I’ve taught teenagers for almost a decade now, and I see them doing this same kind of thing: many write poems, songs, short stories, comics about tragedy so unspeakable it makes a person want to call social services. If you ask them about it, they turn their heads to the side and sigh: “I don’t want to talk about it,” they say, just like on Degrassi. “Family emergency,” “hard time,” “stuff is dark.” I remember giving this exact same testimony to adults who worried about me. I was trying to say, “I am really hurting, but I don’t think you’re going to understand if I give you the facts of my situation, so I’d rather you imagine something really bad.”
Adults are not immune, though we’re more artful. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve talked to someone Really Going Through It who recounts a story and then says something like, “Do you think that counts?” As in: “Is it really all that bad?” “Do I deserve to be feeling this way?” “Am I overreacting?” “Will other people perceive me as overreacting?” “Is this a big enough deal?”
If I could go back and tell Teenage Sophie one thing (and barring winning lottery numbers or something else practical), it would be this: It doesn’t matter what happened. The feeling is real. You don’t need to prove your trauma. You don’t need to put your thing up against someone else’s thing. Being on Degrassi isn’t what makes something substantial. (Just ask Kendrick Lamar.)
My heart breaks when I see teenagers with their own broken hearts adding to their own misery by believing their truth isn’t enough to merit sympathy or softness. Being a teenager is VERY HARD! Compassion should not be a resource so scarce that it only goes to triage Level One.
The thing of it is, if you’re aching, and you try to get a need met by projecting yourself as a broken dish from a television show, you’ll never get the need met. You’ll find plenty of people eager to put the television dish back together, and you can praise them and thank them, but your own particular ache will persist until you can tell the truth about what’s causing it.
Listening to this album warms my grown-up heart. It’s an artifact from a time when I didn’t know how to get the things I needed — but I was trying to learn. It blew my mind that I met a boy who cared about me enough to be willing to come up with cello parts for my songs. His very existence gave me hope that it could be possible for someone to really love me. I rushed through the songs on this recording; played them way too fast because I didn’t want to go over our allocated studio hour; I didn’t want to get in trouble. (Today, I’d take my time. I’d ask to start again. I’d slow down.) I imagine myself thinking, “This guy in his living room must hear my deep, dark lyrics and know that I’m old beyond my years.” I imagine the guy whose living room we were in, rolling his eyes, thinking, “This kid still has to find out how hard it is out there.”
The kid found out it isn’t really that hard out there. People want to love you. They may not want to make you a famous musician, but they definitely want to love you. And I think that’s way better.
I’m going to play you the breakup song, because in some ways, it is the most hopeful. I need you to understand something before you listen to this: I had a thesaurus, and I fucking loved it.
Good luck out there, bravely facing all that breaks your heart.
Love,
Sophie
Housekeeping
Here’s the winning print design!
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Loose Thoughts:
For the first time ever, I’m about to make falafel from scratch in the way that requires you soak your dry garbanzo beans for 24 hours ahead of time. I am SHOCKED at how much bigger they get in the water. I mean, the recipes all tell you that they’re going to do that, but DANG, garbanzo beans! You really come into your power in water!
What is your least favorite kind of weather? I think mine is CLOUDY and HOT. It’s too bad I hate it so much, because in general, I am a hot weather person; but I saw a week of cloudy-hot weather in the forecast next week and felt so depressed about it. I kinda thew a bit of a fit.
I live in house that is on a corner, which seems cool, except that it requires a lot of side-lawn upkeep. I am thinking I want to take a portion of the side lawn and cover it with pebbles or cement or whatever and then set up a little picnic table there so people can have a little sit if they’re on a walk. This is absolutely not legal, but I also don’t think we’d really get in trouble about it. We have done a lot of not legal things in those side yards. (Namely, we’ve planted trees and made raised beds.) I think a sitting place would be a public service that the city would turn a blind eye to.
T’s current obsessions: glasses, picking out her own shirt, “the more we get together,” and her friends at school. And drawing every member of an extended family, which she has learned in songs. Mama, Dada, Baby, Grandma, Grandpa, Sister, Brother. Gotta teach her “queer platonic life partner.” Maybe The Esplanades will write a song to help her learn that one.
Speaking of great songs for children: Sia’s “Riding On My Bike” is a BANGER for all ages. But it is an ear worm. You have been warned.
this song was exactly what i thought it was going to be in the best way!! and can strongly relate, as someone who was in a fiona apple cover band (singing and playing cello) for two months in college :)
I definitely remember seeing you and Ben perform at the RCC coffeehouse in 2004! It's actually my first memory of Ben, and then for years in grad school we would go to parties together and people would ask how we met (they must have thought we were dating) and I would say, "oh, we went to college together, but we weren't friends then," and Ben would say, "you make it sound like we were enemies." I should have said I knew him from The Esplanades.
I also have another friend (and coincidentally coworker, but that happened later) who I met through being groupies of a band Ben was randomly in with people from Craigslist. I was there to see Ben and Jen and my friend/coworker was there to see his friend the drummer. After a few shows we realized that we were the two people who showed up to every show and we started sitting together, and then years later I ran into him at my office and it turned out we both worked there. Now it's 10 years later and we both still work for the same company and SO DOES BEN. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, but if you would like to take credit, feel free.