Lost in Translation

by editor Michele Catalano

I keep my Apple Music playlist sorted by date, earliest first for easy access. I have more than 100 playlists, so I rarely scroll to the bottom. Today, however, I was looking for a specific playlist and came across one I made many years ago. It’s called “That One Summer,” a companion to the summer of 2006, when I was in a new long-distance relationship. It was the summer of love for me, and it had a soundtrack.

Those were heady days if you were on the internet. There were literally thousands of websites to keep you occupied for an entire workday. The web as we know it was still in its infancy. People were enamored of it, instead of scared of it. We couldn’t get enough. I’d spend all day on web forums and on sites where I could play games or watch funny videos or hang out with like-minded people and make fun of everyone else. One of those websites was called Fark. Fark had a paid version where you could hang out in these forums called Total Fark. That is where I met my ex, on a website whose logo has a squirrel with large balls. 

We bonded over the band Clutch. He had just gone to see them, and I made a comment about how I had just listened to Elephant Riders. We ended up taking our conversation to MSN Messenger, and that was that. What was born from a sludge rock album became an actual relationship by May 2006. We decided that he would come to Long Island from California in late August, for my birthday. We would meet and see if what we had translated well in person.

We started trading CDs. Well, it was kind of one-sided. He sent two. I sent several, all with handwritten annotations for each song. I packed those fuckers full of emo, indie, rock, metal, whatever I could think of that would help him get to know me and possibly fall deeply in love with me. It was like making mixtapes, but also nothing like that. 

He was into very different music than I was. Mostly early 90s California punk and some garage rock. The CD he did send had mostly music that I had never listened to before or hadn’t heard in a very long time. It definitely wasn’t what I was into at the time. In 2006, I was very much in an emo phase; so this CD with bands like Circle Jerks, MCD, GBH, and Turbonegro felt unnatural to me. It was the opposite of everything I was feeling as I was wading waist deep into this relationship. I wanted love, I wanted aching and yearning. I did not want songs about millions of dead cops. At least not at that moment. 

But I listened. I got in my car and put in the CD . I listened to every song and tried to guess what, if anything, he was saying to me. It was a lot of hate, drugs, sex, debauchery, living fast and dying young. It was good music for driving Ocean Parkway on a Sunday afternoon with the windows down. Not really great music for wooing a potential partner. 

I have to say, I was a little disappointed. I gave him songs such as “Existentialism on Prom Night,” and “Play Crack the Sky.” He gave me “I Want My Baby Dead.” I gave him songs that were flirty, sweet, sometimes sad. He gave me songs that were aggressive and off-putting. The music he liked was very much of a “had to be there” scene that he was very much a part of. So I listened with that in mind, thinking he was giving me some kind of personal journey through music, as I was doing for him.

I drove around Long Island on my days off, just to kill time until August. I’d park in lots here and there and call him, just wanting to hear his voice, to make sure he was still there. I wanted to tell him excitedly that I’d been listening to his music. I wanted to impress him with my new-found knowledge of ‘90s California punk. We’d talk in ten-minute bursts; I’d tell him what song was on, he’d tell me a little about it. I’d ask him if he wanted me to talk about any songs on the CDs I sent him. Not really.

I kept making CDs, even though I knew he was just giving everything I wrote a cursory glance. It didn’t matter to me. I was putting myself into these compilations. I wrote thousands of words. I poured out my heart and soul. I transcribed lyrics. I gave him the manifestation of my love via a spindle of Verbatim 80-minute CD-Rs. The whole process of putting the CD together, from picking out the songs to going to the post office with it, was an act of devotion that always culminated with me sitting in my car outside the post office, wondering if I was putting too much into my CDs and reading too much into his.

I started listening to a lot more punk. I went back to my roots for some, explored his CDs for others. I made playlists on my iPod specific to his influence. I had a heavy diet of Fugazi, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü going. I kept driving, kept making CDs for him, kept learning his music, because that is my love language.

For three months of that long-distance relationship, I kept close to him by getting to know him through the music he listens to. Listening to Black Flag made me feel close to him, as if he was there within the music he chose for me. Never mind that “Depression” is not exactly a romantic song; it was still a song shared between us. 

Music was the thread that wove us together; it’s why we started talking in the first place, and what tied together so many of our late night conversations. Sometimes, we would play music for each other over the phone, and I’d lie in the dark listening to his selections. It was mostly punk rock, but every once in a while he’d surprise me with the Cars or Neil Diamond. 

Finally, my birthday rolled around. He flew into New York so we could see how we worked in person. I picked him up at the airport, and, when we got into my car, I had “Just What I Needed” queued up on the iPod. This would begin a series of musical hints I would leave for him throughout our relationship. He didn’t comment on it at all. 

The thing is, he never understood this language I was speaking to him with music. He took my CDs, my songs, at face value. He wasn’t into deep or meaningful lyrics. He wasn’t bogged down in the ritual of figuring out what a song is really about. He was a thoughtless listener, whereas I was a deep diver into lyrics. We were like two people who spoke a different dialect of the same language trying to communicate with each other. 

He later admitted to me that he never really listened to my CDs, let alone read the annotations. I was hurt, and he couldn’t understand why. Music just didn’t mean the same thing to each of us. Even as a musician, he couldn’t fathom speaking this love language, and he certainly didn’t understand it. 

When he left me, I turned to music to console myself. I tried to remember what was on those CDs I made for him. I tried to recreate my old playlists. Before I settled on sad songs, I listened mostly to songs from the summer of 2006, when I drove around familiarizing myself with the songs he loved, to keep close to him while we were apart. 

I eventually put those songs away. I had enough. All those years later, still trying to decipher him through Circle Jerks lyrics, then realizing that, for him, it was all superficial. 

I feel bad for him. I speak a beautiful language. He just couldn’t hear it.