Black Tin Box by Miike Snow
You can’t keep track of where you’re living when you first hear the song but what you remember is driving out to Malibu for a hike like you did that one other time four years ago when things felt messed up but when you still had so much in front of you, more health, more love, more sex, more comfort. It starts with a cymbal roll and then bass percussion and then adds layers, so subtly you hardly notice. By the time Andrew Wyatt’s voice comes in, it’s almost a surprise because, instrumentally, the song has worked so well on its own. There are repeating patterns on top of repeating patterns.
Wyatt sings, I bought you a black tin box… the edges were sharp, trading refrains with a theremin-like whine. A barely-noticeable rippling pattern begins under the other layers. When the first verse ends, you hear the rippling clearly for the first time, along with the rhythm that glues the whole song together. Then there’s the repeating black sheep black sheep in the aftershocks, thought he could survive in the black tin box… repeats over the rhythmic pattern, and then Lykke Li comes in at the beginning of verse two and slides on notes at the end of phrases where she sings the word “comforting” and “superman” – like comfortiiiiiing and supermaaaaaan and you are so happy driving to Malibu with this song playing because you are driving away from chaos and away from the multiple storage places – garages, basements – that hold your stuff now because you don’t have an apartment anymore to keep all of it or to keep yourself. And that rhythm of four and seven back and forth keeps going and you want to keep up with it and you beat it out on your steering wheel.
Later the rippling pattern has another pattern on top of it, more hooks to hang things from, and the rippling seems to mimic the rhythmic patterns and the second melodic pattern starts out mellow but grows in fervor and picks up different voices along the way, one on top of the others.
When you’re driving back from Malibu it’s harder to listen to a song like this because it’s a melancholy song but it’s also an escape song, and when you’re driving back into the city, into reality, listening to this song feels sad. But as you’re driving back you think about the place you once lived that wasn’t far from Malibu, in the Pacific Palisades, up on a cliff a couple of blocks from the edge that overlooked the ocean and some of the town below. It was the most beautiful place you ever stayed in Los Angeles but of all the geographic memories it might be the saddest. You used to walk to the edge of that cliff and stare out on the horizon because you didn’t have a car when you were housesitting there that summer. The only way out of the neighborhood was by one bus that only came every 45 minutes because nobody in that neighborhood didn’t have a car. There were nights when you were out in the city and you wouldn’t even be able to get home late at night from Hollywood or wherever, because the buses stopped running, so you had to take a bus to Santa Monica and a cab from there.
The cab would take you up the PCH and very late at night you would realize how little life was happening around you out there in those sleepy, filthy rich neighborhoods where mostly white, older people and celebrities lived, and the streets were so clean. It felt eerie coming home to a sleeping street, with only the sound of breeze off the ocean making the jungle of plants rustle in the yard. Sometimes the quiet kept you awake at night and every sound was someone trying to break into the huge house and just as you were finally drifting off, lulled by the view of the moon through the skylight, you’d start awake, sit up straight and it would take a split second to remember where you were because by then you’d already stayed in more places than you could count on both hands. In those moments you’d start to panic that you were about to be killed and then you’d tell yourself how unlikely it is that someone breaks into a house, especially out here in the relative boondocks, and you’d slowly lull yourself back to sleepiness, despite the brightness of the moon and the too-quiet surroundings. In the mornings when you woke up you sometimes pretended that you really lived there, that the beauty surrounding you in that bedroom and in that house and on that street filled with trees and flowers was real, was permanent, was yours.
Sorted for Es and Wizz by Pulp
Tomorrow morning you will leave LA for the first time and now you’re with your best friend driving to dinner. The sun is perfect—approaching magic hour, the air warm but not hot and the sun is coming through the trees on Highland making the music more than it is, or maybe it’s the other way around, the music making Highland Ave and Hollywood in general more gorgeous than you ever remember. Though maybe it looks so beautiful because you’re leaving.
The music starts with a crowd cheering and then the synths, which sound like a 90s or even an 80s sound, that theremin sound, like a sound effect from Scooby-Doo. The first line is one of the best first lines of a song ever written: Oh is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel, or just 20,000 people standing in a field… and as Jarvis Cocker sings tell me when the spaceship lands you realize the brilliance of using that synth sound because it sounds like a spaceship and it all seems perfect because in the morning you will get on a plane and fly thousands of miles away and that feels wrong because how can anything be right if it’s not THIS RIGHT HERE?
You and your closest guy friend who, may have become a boyfriend in an alternate universe, but didn’t in this one, will eat and after dinner you’ll drive up to the observatory and sit on the stone benches and overlook the city. The benches will be warm even in the dark and you’ll tell your friend you just slept with a guy you met through him, a guy you barely know, a guy you slept with to try and stop the buzzing in your ears whenever you think about departing, and you feel vulnerable because you’re trying to explain this to a guy you have loved now for over two years. And you were attracted to that guy you just slept with in the moment, but you were also fucking crazy drunk and if you’d been sober, you almost certainly wouldn’t have slept with him because you would’ve been too worried that sleeping with him would mess up your friendship with this guy, the one sitting on the bench with you right now. The one who could have been your boyfriend in a different life, and all you want to do is tell this guy how you feel, how important he is, how grateful you are to him and how you can’t imagine days without him there to talk in funny voices and roll his eyes at people you both find ridiculous.
And I don’t quite understand just what this feeling is, but that’s ok cause we’re all sorted out for e’s and wizz… you assume “e’s” is ecstasy but you’re not sure about “wizz,” but later find out it means Speed. When you were a high school student going to raves, you once did Speed without knowing, and you don’t go to raves anymore — mostly because they don’t exist like they did before — but even if they did, you can’t imagine going now because now you’re too aware of danger; of things that can happen without you knowing, or expecting.
The melody is so full of longing and you want to suspend this moment in the car with your friend, and Jarvis sings at 4:00 the normal world seems very, very, very far away… and you know he means 4 am but you have this flash that he’s talking to you, talking about you, because right now the normal world seems so far away that it doesn’t even exist, and there’s this sense that the song is about this moment, here in Hollywood in your friend’s car.
The world is both present and past. After tomorrow’s flight, when you are back in your hometown of D.C., you’ll drive around listening to the same song, thinking about when you went to raves with your high school boyfriend.
Just keep on moving, Jarvis sings and you hate to agree but it’s sort of all you can do. You don’t know why you’re leaving and you hate that you’re leaving because there’s that fucked up feeling of how impossible it is that you can be in such different surroundings only six hours later, and that makes you feel like you’re on another planet or everything is backwards. You want to call your mother and say mother I can never come home again, because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire… you don’t know how to stop time so that tomorrow morning doesn’t arrive. Even the next morning, your friends have dropped you off at the airport, you’ve lugged your bags to the counter, checked them in, gone through security and, gotten on the plane, and it still doesn’t feel real. In the middle of the night it feels alright but then tomorrow morning oooh then you come down…
When you land in D.C. it’s night, and your brother picks you up and drives you to your parents’ house. You dump your bags in the room where you grew up and it feels small and suffocating and the important part of your brain is back in Hollywood, sitting on that stone bench with your friend, watching the lights of the city. You did come home again; you did come back. You came down.
Jessie Rothwell is a writer, editor, musician, and sometimes living-room-concert curator. Her essays have appeared in Best Small Fictions, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Furious Gravity (the 2020 installment of the Grace and Gravity series), and on Minnesota Public Radio’s Classical blog. Her poetry has appeared in Breadcrumbs Magazine. As a musician, she has performed around the U.S. and in central and Eastern Europe. Her own music has been performed at HERE, and The Frying Pan in New York, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and The Wulf in Los Angeles, as well as in living rooms around LA, New York, and Washington, D.C.