Distant flickerings, it’s greener scenery, this weather’s bringing it all back again.
Great adventures, faces in condensation, I’m going outside to take it all in.

Often times I leave my iTunes on shuffle when sitting at my computer working.  I used to maintain a ‘work’ playlist but then I’d get sick of those songs, so now I just throw it on random and skip any songs that begin to play and I’m not in the mood to hear.  It’s working better for me than the playlist was, for the most part.

Every now and then a song comes on that is one of ‘those songs’.  One of those songs that evokes such an overwhelmingly  emotional surge. One of those songs that not only presents my mind with such vivid imagery of a time and place from my past, but also the smells, taste, and even temperatures that I felt and experienced at the time.  Imogen Heap’s Speak For Yourself album is twelve songs of just that.  A trip.  A trip on sounds, a trip into my past, a trip to the winter after graduation.

I was 21 years into life.  I’d been living in Manhattan for a few months, and had recently started my first job in the ‘real world’ as a full-time web consultant/rover/coder/content-migrator/convio-tweaker/torture-document-search-engine-creator/anything-that-Amanda-wanted-to-do-but-didn’t-have-time-for at the ACLU. I had just discovered the album (I don’t even remember how, surprisingly), and had thrown it on my iPod Nano. I was listening to it everyday in my headphones on the walk to the subway, on the subway, and the walk from the subway to the office on Broad Street, all day at work, and then back again.

At the time I was sharing an office with Amanda, who was pregnant with her first child, and also (unbeknown to me) was binging on some good old fashion Imogen too.  I still remember the day when Amanda asked if I minded if she put on some music (which she often did, and which I never minded), and out of the speakers came the sweet twinkling sounds of snowflakes falling (that’s what they are in my mind) that make-up the first few seconds of Headlock.  She said something to me like “I’ve been listening to this Imogen Heap chick a lot lately, do you know her?” I proceeded to share that I was addicted to the album as well and for the next few weeks we listened to more Imogen then any two people should ever consciously do.

It was winter in the city (always a depressing time for me), I had just split with my girlfriend of four years (always a depressing time for me), and I found solace in how lost the album allowed me to get.  I would wander in her voice and the sounds that she (more than any other experimental electronic artist I’ve ever heard) manages to couple together in such marvelous and enlightening ways.

Now, years later, whenever one of those twelve songs come out of my speakers, my skin gets cold, I smell the condensation of my breath in a subway station, I feel the ice slush in my socks, and I see the carpet in the office that Amanda and I shared for those first few months.  I didn’t know then how much the album would come to mean to me.  I didn’t know then how much that job would also come to mean to me.  I didn’t know then how much the fact that Amanda also loved that album would mean to me.

Both the album and my job were bright lights in what was an otherwise dark time of my life.  Almost five years later, even though I am in a much brighter place, they both still shine bright  The album holds so much weight with me that it’s the only thing that makes me miss winter in a winter-less place.  That says a lot. The job (more importantly the person who gave me the job despite my 0% experience/formal-education in the field) held so much weight with me that I forwent the opportunity of a full-time salaried/benefited employment in hopes that we could make it work as a tag-team of self-employed information/knowledge workers. That says a lot.

Thanks Imogen. Thanks Amanda.

Tags: ACLU, Amanda, Breath, Headlock, Imogen Heap, Manhattan, Playlist, Subway, Winter, Work

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.