dear yo la tengo,
is it possible to have a crush on a series of songs? it is uncanny how fitting your music is to this neighborhood, to all the surroundings i see every day. who needs photographs, who needs scribblings, when you have this?

you have been with me through so many weird times. you were the soundtrack to my daily treks into and out of the city on the train, its lights flickering as we passed through the secaucus swamplands and the abandoned tunnels of jersey. listening crouched in the last train with my headphones on during the summer nights i was twenty, catching the last train home and crossing my fingers that my mom wouldn't still be up waiting to kick my ass, my hair sticking straight up and reeking of cigarettes and my lips bruised from kissing outside the PATH station, kissing and kissing until i missed one train and then another and then another.

and three years later the cute kids at the record store start jumping up and down when they tell me about how your next album is the "best one yet." so i go home and listen to the latest one all day, watching snow fall and whispering, long-distance, into the telephone at three in the morning.

i go to work with two hours of sleep, bags under my eyes. and i meet him at the train station and we stay up all night, talking and kissing on my couch, because now i'm old enough to have an apartment and he no longer sleeps on the floor. and the heater stretches and clanks and i put the CD on repeat.

sinatra and mozzarella sandwiches aren't the only good things to come out of hoboken.

yo la tengo


(picture shamelessly stolen off the matador records website.)

Sunday, January 23, 2000


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