Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 45: Joe

Prompt: "A song with one of the following punctuation marks ; = ^ ¿ _"

Selected by Joe

"Cause = Time"

Broken Social Scene

You Forgot It in People, 2002

After today, we'll have written exactly one quarter of all the Song Challenge blog posts that we've committed to writing during the year of 2024. Pulse check: how we doing? Doing okay? Hanging in there? You're still reading this on April 11th, which is a promising sign. If you've made it this far, then there's no reason why you wouldn't also be able to hang on deep into the Christmas season.

In terms of my experience as a YSC participant and writer (which is completely separate from my experience as an editor and as a reader/listener, both of which have been going swimmingly with no complaints), I'd say that I'm feeling pretty good about it. A couple blog posts I can hang my hat on, and only a few blog posts that will cause me any sort of embarrassment when I stumble upon them in five or ten years. If my own personal intentions are to write and to write regularly, then consider those intentions fulfilled and then some. Ignore all questions posed by today's song choice—no need to fuck the cause here; the cause is worth the time in its own gentle and unassuming way.

One regret I have, just in terms of my own individual role as a participant here, is that I'm finding that I'm having trouble maintaining a balance in my song choices. Here's the balance I'm talking about: I want to respond to each prompt correctly, with a great song, and with a song that's going to inspire me to write about something unique. When I talk about a feeling of imbalance, I mean that lately, I feel like I haven't put enough of a focus on the second goal there, the self-imposed obligation to choose songs that I think other people would enjoy if they listened to them.

I'm not saying that I've been purposefully picking shitty songs. I'd argue that the only straight-up bad songs under my byline have been those which were chosen because the prompt required them to be bad. But I do think that there have been more times than advisable when I felt a push to choose the song that fits the prompt and allows me to write about something I want to write about, even if the song itself is mediocre. Day 44's was a pretty good example. I made myself laugh a lot, remembering and writing about a truly bizarre night of fasting from my youth, but the song itself wasn't all that great. I've never been a huge fan of Illuminati Hotties. A few good songs, but none of the good ones had parentheses and mentioned something about food. And so I chose to write instead of doing what other people are doing in YSC and having just as much fun with it: choosing good songs because they are good and because other people will think they are good.

I guess that ends up being one of the more interesting aspects to Yearlong Song Challenge, how different people are approaching the project in their own unique way. To be clear: I am loving each and every approach. I've discovered great music, and I've discovered wonderful connections to my friends, and I've read some really fantastic and heartwarming blog posts. In a perfect world, I'm personally taking every approach at once. Unfortunately, under the gun, I'm going to prioritize the writing over the music. And if you really wanna hear some good music at Joey's recommendation and YSC ain't doing it for you, then let me point you to about seven other weekly or monthly columns on this blog where you can get what you crave.

Or you can listen to today's song, which fulfills the (purposefully dumb) prompt, and also acts as a really fantastic song. Broken Social Scene are some of the best to ever do it, and this is one of their Top Five songs (Top Ten, maybe, so great is their craft). The gleefully pretentious Genius.com song description reads that "it was this peak mid-album track that both consolidated the album's textural sprawl and confirmed Broken Social Scene's own transformation from ambient hobby project to powerhouse rock band," and I am hard-pressed to disagree. Any time BSS can get their shit together and wrap that chaotic noise up in a propulsive beat, it ends up being one of my favorite songs ever.

There's a song that I heard maybe two months ago, a new song from this year that completely fucking knocked me over sideways the first time I heard it. It's called "Lagunita" by an artist called Lizzie No. I've been trying my damnedest to squeeze this masterpiece into YSC somehow, but I can't find a prompt that works with it. There's nothing weird or unique about its title or lyrics or artist, it's just a straight-up banger of a song. (You might have heard it on XPN, but for every time they play this one, they play Lizzie No's other single "Halfsies" at least seven times, and I fucking hate that song.)

It makes me think of a lot of stuff (most of which will have to be imported over to another song write-up at some point if I can't find a way to make "Lagunita" work here), but it definitely makes me think about the idea of a song being so powerful in the moment it hits you that it rewires your brain, and permanently stamps the location of that moment onto your soul. For example, I first heard "Lagunita" while I was in the minivan by myself, pulling into a spot in the Krewstown Aldi parking lot. I didn't leave the car until it was over.

Now, the facts of that context of that particular listen—the time of day, the vehicle, the parking lot, the Aldi—none of that is particular important to the song. It might be the least important thing about my relationship to the song, especially due to the fact that the details are incredible banal. And yet, whenever I hear "Lagunita" now, I am transported back to that exact spot in that exact parking lot at that exact time of day. I remember everything about that one single moment, and I'll remember it every time the song enters my brain via my ears.

That speaks to the power of music, and I wonder if anyone has had that sort of experience with any songs in Yearlong Song Challenge so far. Whether you'll hear a particular song again a year later and you'll be brought back to that Thursday morning in April when you were drinking your coffee in the kitchen and listening to the new batch of songs while answering some work emails. Maybe "Cause = Time" will be that song for you, the one that will bring you back to these words that you're reading right now on your screen, so changed on a physiological level is your brain now that you've heard the tune.

I mean, it's almost similar to a trauma, ya know? A positive traumatic experience. When a song affects you that deeply, then you remember everything about the moment you were first effected. I remember the first time I heard "Cause = Time." I can smell quite vividly the dusty books on the top-floor mezzanine in the Connelly Library that I was rearranging for minimum wage on that quiet winter morning before the semester started. I don't miss the library, and it's not like I think this song is "important" because I listened to it in that particular library or at that particular time in my life or any narrow-minded selfish bullshit like that. I'm just saying that I can remember the moment because the song changed me, and I know it changed me because I remember the moment.

Not that all these songs chosen for YSC have to change you in some way for this project to be worth it. I'm just acknowledging that I could do a better job at choosing Great songs instead of settling for Good Enough songs.

We are 1/4th of the way. Keep going!