Deep Cuts

by Holly Brickley

“See? The most beautiful part of the verse is just him riffing. A great song—and I’m talking about the pop-rock world here, obviously—can be improved by riffing, or ruined by riffing. But it cannot rely on riffing.”

This is annoying lmao

“all breadth, no depth,” a view I still held: music was a collector’s habit to those guys, a sprawl of knowledge more than a well of joy.

Who cares

It didn’t suck, which I recognized for the enormous miracle it was.

Real bc when a guy tells you he's gonna play you a song.....

Instead of sleeping that night I revised my end of the conversation in my head over and over, a lifelong pastime I always rationalized as productive since the lessons could apply to future interactions, though that never seemed to happen.

Real

“No.” I took too big a gulp of coffee and burned my throat. “I have no talent, just opinions about people who do.”

Didn't like her at first but unfortunately I feel a kinship w her

I had this dreamlike feeling of nearing some place I’d been looking for—a vacancy just my shape, hidden inside an enormous puzzle.

This is meant to be a good line that hits hard but unfortunately it's corny

a Vitaminwater bottle that possessed a seemingly endless power to infuse dragonfruit essence into drinking fountain water,

how does it do that though

It’s just that authenticity seems to me only one metric by which to judge music, and I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun.

“Why? Why’d you get so into music?” “I didn’t get into music,” I said. “People who work at Amoeba, they got into music. My mom got into music. I got into songs.”

??

“I think songs gave me a window into a magical life,” I said. “Something bigger, or whatever, waiting out there. And I felt like the only way to get there was through the songs. Like the songs, if I listened hard enough, would show me how to get it right.”

“My favorite part was when you said you can’t mosh because your boobs are too big,” she said, spooling spaghetti around a fork. “I’m hoping you do more of that stuff—that’s what zine culture is all about.”

Zoe is my fave character so far, this is a girls' girl with no weird jealousy complex and supported Percy when it would've been easier to take her friend's side !

But it would be a lie to say these incidents didn’t leave their mark. Each one seemed to deepen a dark, murky well that sat just below the surface of our friendship. Maybe that well was normal, though, I remember thinking. Maybe it was just the complexity of really, finally knowing someone.

They were soulful and comfortable and had all the amenities that actually make people happy, like porches and window seats, and none of the things we believed to make us happy, like open-floor plans and living rooms optimized for Super Bowl viewing. They were built for reading and close conversation. Berkeley felt like a glitch in the modern machine, back then, an alternate universe for the chosen few. Maybe this is how everyone feels about their college towns.

It is not

They didn’t know they were the best friends I’d ever had. How can you tell that to people you’ve known only a few months without sounding pathetic?

That’s why the song was so short, I decided—because connection, like memories, came in the briefest of flashes.

“Look,” I said. “I want you to know I’m not waiting around for you to change your mind. What you’re saying, right now, is never—you and I are never going to happen. And never is a promise.” This was a Fiona Apple song I had loved in high school. I intended it as a negotiating tactic—fishing for a shrug, a foot wedged in a closing door, a never say never. What I got instead was a look of recognition, and a slow, serious nod.

Ouchhhh

I saw it clearly, finally, a Venn diagram diverging in my head. He needed me to be his critic. But a critic will never be girlfriend material.

Of course I’d judged his commas; his commas were like gnats that crawled onto the screen and settled in random corners of his sentences. But I had surprised myself from the very beginning by not caring. What had all my proficiency with the English language gotten me? Joe could play guitar. He could sing. I would trade every last drop of my innate understanding of punctuation for a voice like Joe’s.

Deeply real of her

“Writers are not natural collaborators. Which makes writers’ workshops an odd experiment, don’t you think? Maybe that’s why everyone’s making out. We don’t know how else to help each other.”

I found it deeply disappointing even as I related to an awful seed of truth inside it: that all my attempts to grow, to find creative independence and purpose, were at least partly in service of becoming more lovable.

Living in New York made you feel heavy and lonely but full of promise, like listening to those songs.

“Did Tapestry assimilate you?” He laughed. “What do you think?” “I think she should’ve sprung for a Run-DMC cassingle.” “Probably. But then I wouldn’t have become who I am, which is a grown man who sings ‘So Far Away’ in the shower.”

I liked New York, I remember deciding in that moment. I liked working at home, then slipping out anonymously into a loud, churning world. It was just two different flavors of aloneness, but they complemented each other: when I had maxed out on solitude, the city made me feel observed and alive.

It was my first time at the Bowery Ballroom.

“The way you were moving, I was like, okay, wow, why not.”

Ewwww

Senior year we’d seen each other nearly every day—he’d helped himself to my fridge, and I to his—and now it had been six months since we’d even been in the same city.

“From the woman I love’s ba-a-a-ay window”—gorgeous melisma on “bay”—“I watch the world begin to end.”

Oh man

“You and your bridges.” “They’re important, Joe! They’re the release. The emotional center. The climax.”

“Percy Marks realizes she might be wrong about something. Call the newspapers.”

Janis may not have written about Cohen, but Joni did: in “A Case of You” she depicts him as a poison for which she has developed such tolerance that she can easily consume lethal amounts.

Sorry??

But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels somehow wrong—sad, almost—that it didn’t come from your own brain.

Of course, songs have been written about Joni too. The most famous is Graham Nash’s “Our House,”

Why am I learning all these things in this book

“Our House” has remained frozen in the public imagination as an ode to domestic bliss. But the song’s almost comic naïveté—the “very, very, very fine house,” the bridge of la-la-las, the two jokey drum hits echoing the cats in the yard—whispers the truth in our ears: This is all a fairy tale.

Oh man

It’s like Nash knew when he wrote the song that his greatest fantasy had come to life and it was still just that: a fantasy. Worse, that it was more his fantasy than hers. Because “Our House” isn’t about Joni Mitchell. And “A Case of You” isn’t about Leonard Cohen, and “Chelsea Hotel #2” isn’t really about Janis Joplin either. We are all just writing about ourselves.

“I’m never bored, per se, when I’m reading Percy’s stuff. But as with her previous pieces, I find myself wondering what the point is.

This was me reading that whole essay

“I do know these songs, and I’m not sure I’ll ever hear them the same way again,”

Me

Best friends and partners since middle school, André 3000 and Big Boi were growing apart musically, and this latest release was the most striking illustration of the rift: a double album that was basically two solo albums, each with its own title and lead single. André and Big Boi weren’t in the studio at the same time; they didn’t even sing on each other’s tracks. But the label insisted both albums be credited to OutKast. And in interviews, no matter how much they griped about each other, it was clear they still saw themselves as a team. A maddening, dialectical union. They needed each other, if only as listeners to their own solo work—that crucial first ear.

How many more Beatles albums could we have gotten if they’d taken this approach—if they’d set each other free but kept lending their ears?

Yeah I definitely thought about the Beatles here and not one direction definitely definitely

He pulled me into the room and the door closed behind us. “I’m ready,” he said. I felt disoriented to the point of dizziness. He bent down until our faces were touching, his nose lying alongside mine. He smelled like shaving cream and toothpaste. “I have a boyfriend,” I said. “Fuck him,” he said. “I’m your boyfriend.”

IM YOUR BOYFRIEND, ENOUGH

All I wanted was more, everything, and maybe that’s how I became a person who has an affair in a hotel room—maybe it was the sheer relief of the fact that I wanted it.

These people exhaust me

He said he loved me, which did not come as a surprise; of course Joe loved me, of course I loved him.

Happy for you and all but we really just went from 0-100 in an instant and I have whiplash

Did he feel whorey up there, playing requests for cash, butchering this classic for a bunch of hipsters and their uncles?

Ouch

I hated how objectively desirable he had become—his off-center attractiveness now rewritten as plain fact, no longer my little secret—but

Yikes!!!

“Why now? You said you’re ready, but what did you mean by that? Ready how?”

That's what I'm saying!!!

“Is this what you were thinking that night in my hallway, after your first show? ‘I’m hot shit now, I’ll get back to you after I go bang a bunch of groupies real quick?’ It was, wasn’t it?” “I was twenty-one, and I’d only ever slept with a lesbian who hated my body!”

Omg

“If you’re feeling guilty, I have to say, I don’t think it should count as infidelity when it’s with the person you were always meant to be with.” This annoyed me—the idea that Joe and I were each other’s answers, no matter how we arrived; that he got to travel the world, playing music and gorging himself at a groupie buffet, while I waited patiently at our inevitable destination.

I'm sorry that's not how that works girl

“I was ready to leave him,” I said, my face hot with shame. “That was my plan, all night. But—” I didn’t finish. A noisy mess of hooks clashed in my head: turn on the bright lights and bring it on home to me and our house, with two cats in the yard.

For I cannot stand her like make your choice and live with it then but to decide over OUR HOUSE that he's not worth it now is insane

“He makes me feel good,” I managed. “You make me feel small, and bitter.”

Well you cheated on him and don't even really LIKE HIM that much so

“So you’re torn between two men,” she said flatly as she dried a ceramic platter. “Less dramatic than I was expecting.” “I’m not torn,” I said. “I decided.” “Did you? Sounds to me like you just picked the impossible option. The option you ruined. Which means you decided on neither.”

Ok go off mom

How awful, to get old. As if it wasn’t bad enough being young. At least our knees responded to our commands.