constellations #90: five songs

Hi again.

This month I made a zine. It’s about five songs I love and the specific memories they hold for me. I’ve been thinking about making this zine for years, because the combination of memory and feeling was probably my first great love when it comes to writing. And also, I miss writing about music. I miss writing in general. My relationship to it has felt awfully messed up in the last few months as I’ve been re-evaluating whether I will be able to find another media job — whether I have or will have the hustle, the skill, the fortitude, the good luck, the drive, etc. to make it happen, or if I really ought to be setting my sights on employment elsewhere. I’m really not sure. (I know a lot of other people are, or have been, in this strange cycle of dread, too; the atrocious layoffs at Pitchfork and the LA Times just within the past week have only compounded it.)

Anyway. Below you can read the introduction I wrote for the zine, and if you want to read the rest, you can purchase it. It contains stories about: a bad job, a bad mushroom trip, the ugliest apartment building in DC, friendship, French fries and Diet Coke, the MBTA bus system, regretting grad school, and more. And a bunch of songs. It will cost $2 for a digital version; for $5, I will send a physical copy to you in the mail (assuming you live anywhere in the USA … if I have to pay international shipping, it may cost a little more). As I mentioned, I am currently without a full-time job, so frankly I could use the money, but really the reason I am charging for the zine is because it contains very personal writing and it feels very vulnerable to share it, and so the money is symbolic of a good-faith investment we are making in each other.¹ (It also covers the cost of printer ink, which is so very expensive.) I am still finalizing some things but it should be done shortly. Just reply to this email if you want to purchase one.

Here’s the introduction to the zine:

I have been wanting to make this zine for a while. I started writing it in 2018; there’s still a draft from back then on my laptop. The original idea was to write about memory and music — those songs that, by chance or by luck or by fate, soundtracked a particular, unshakeable moment for me. They weren’t life-altering moments in any grandiose way, but it’s exactly that sense of smallness, of specificity among the everydayness, that made them precious to me. I wanted to pay tribute to those memories, and to the way the songs have clung to them.

I started (re)making the zine now, in 2024, as a writing exercise. Months of un/under-employment and other challenging circumstances have shifted my relationship with writing and I guess this is my way of trying to find its pulse again. I miss the feeling writing used to give me — that I was sorting out how I felt in real time, that I was making sense out of chaos, that I was drawing myself close to something meaningful and if not true, at least deeply honest — back when I wasn’t really thinking about anyone reading my writing or what they might think. I made a lot of zines in that way. So I thought making another one might reconnect me to that time, or at least to that way of thinking.

I gave myself some guidelines for this project: five songs, five hundred words each; each memory would be dated, and no two memories would come from the same year. The goal was: write fast and from the heart; commit to making something and then make it. I wound up focusing on a stretch of time in early adulthood — the middle of college through my first couple of years in DC — only because that’s what first came to me. But I think that’s when my taste in music really solidified, where my brain really started to get rewired around the sounds I love. It was also a time when I struggled immensely with the uncertainty of my future. Every decision I had to make felt like it was dooming my entire destiny. How frightening to feel like every choice is an unforgivable fork in the road, rather than simply the next step. Or the next few steps. Maybe that is why, the more I worked on these mini-essays, the more I realized they are each about songs where I found refuge — places I could rest until I figured out how to get going again. We all need that sometimes; I have needed it a lot lately. I hope, in these strange times, that these little essays remind you of the shelter you’ve found in your favorite music, too.

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: a beautiful rainbow in Boston, pictured above; Molly by Blake Butler; How You Get Famous by Nicole Pasulka; a bunch of movies, including I'm Not There, All Of Us Strangers, Town Bloody Hall, and The Last of Sheila; this appreciation for pioneering guitarist Cordell Jackson; the new Sleater-Kinney album, Little Rope; Rick Maguire from Pile live in Brooklyn; this playlist of indie remixes from the peak bloghouse era, which I have been listening to exclusively at the gym — ideal; the conclusion of the first season of The Curse … dang; a wonderful black sesame latte from Jacob Alejandro in Troy, NY; a pepperoncini martini from Oddly Enough in Bed-Stuy; the two-week span of January (still in it) in which two of my sisters and four of my close friends all have birthdays(!); the knowledge that (some of) the lyrics to the Dropkick Murphys’ song “I'm Shipping Up to Boston” were written by Woody Guthrie (the first fact I learned in 2024 — thank you to my brother for texting me this information first thing in the morning on Jan. 1)

***

This time last year I was: holding my grudges; and before that: reading about freedom, writing thank-you notes & gossiping

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you. See you next twenty-fourth.

xo,
M

1. If you’ve also recently been laid off, you can have a zine for free, of course!