Love Notes, Revisited (No. 1)

So apparently I’ve become really bad at this blogging business. In an effort to rekindle my passion for frequent updates to this once-ebullient, though recently-dwindling (and still contractually-required!) blog, I’m revisiting a theme of some of my older entries - this time they’re all centered on music:

(LOVE) NOTES THAT I WILL NEVER SEND TO PEOPLE I DON’T KNOW

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To: Jonny Greenwood
From: Rachel Harkai
Re: There Will Be Blood

Dear Jonny,

You might not believe in love at first sight, but what about love at first listen? I’ve been loving you from a distance since that warm autumn afternoon, sophomore year of high school, when I heard OK Computer for the first time while riding home in a friend’s car. The attraction was immediate. During the following months I pooled my meager adolescent resources - money earned from teaching afterschool piano lessons, and Kazaa - to get my hands on every song you’d ever made. When I heard Kid A, it only got worse. Though I wouldn’t say my Radiohead-love has ever compared to the frightening obsession paraded proudly by many of your fans, I’ve followed the band’s music diligently over the years. And strangely enough, I feel almost as though it has somehow followed me around in return.

A few years ago, in summer, I camped somewhere unmarked in the middle of the barren Utah desert. Leaving the campfire at night, I wandered over a dune with a boy, searching for the source of some distant pulse we thought we heard. We finally found it by a lake full of hot water, where we swam in the company of a small colony of campers traveling the west in ancient conversion vans. They were blasting Idioteque.

But even though Radiohead has punctuated some of my life’s strange and poignant moments, I find that I have a hard time listening to their music anymore - even the newest In Rainbows - without feeling washed out by the angsty, high school feeling that I once succumbed to so often while listening to it (how funny now, to think of myself at fifteen, when I thought life was so hard!). And even though I often try to evade the nostalgic feelings supplied by those albums, their songs seem to resurface in my life again and again, always bringing me back to memories of those most inconsequential moments - the early escapes from school, Scrabble games played in the diner that burned down, the conversations I could have had, but didn’t, because we were listening in silence - moments that somehow became meaningful simply because of the your music’s presence.

I’ll admit, I wasn’t ready for Bodysong when it first came out late in my freshman year of college. Even after the depatures made in Amnesiac, and to a lesser extent Hail to the Thief, something about your first solo effort seemed too dilute for me to grasp. So it wasn’t until I started writing seriously, nearly two years later, that I added Bodysong to my list of regular plays. Though I wouldn’t say I considered it “background music,” I found it to be a good album to write to - lyricless, but engaging, though not too distracting to affect my work.

Then, last month, I saw There Will Be Blood. From the very opening notes of the film’s soundtrack, I was dying to know what composer had scored it. When the end credits finally flashed your name, all I could say was, sheepishly, “Of course.” I’ve listened to the film’s soundtrack probably ten more times since picking it up last week, not as background music, but as an activity in its own right. And I like it more and more with each listen. Something about it feels already familiar to me, maybe because I am beginning to hear in it the qualities of so many great composers I already love - that lyric violin of Samuel Barber, the percussive dissonance of Shostakovich, perhaps a bit of Stravinsky’s strange humor, and obvious homage to Morricone.

We all know I’ve always had a soft spot for men who could write good music - and I don’t mean decent lyrics slapped on some I-IV-V chords - so even though I may keep trying to grow out of Radiohead, its becoming clear that the beauty of your solo work has the potential to evolve with me for a long time. (This is starting to sound like a marriage proposal, isn’t it?) Well don’t worry, I know you’re already spoken for. And frankly, I don’t think even my angsty sixteen-year old self could deal with your emo hair. So keep it up, Jonny. I’ll keep listening.

Love,
Rachel