Side A of a Record I Only Play When I Am Missing Someone Specific
A track by track walk through the one record Dmitri saves for a very particular kind of absence.
Some records live in the main rack, alphabetized, available to anyone. This one lives behind the others, spine in, like a letter filed under a false name. I only take it down when I am missing one person in particular, and I will not say who, though the sleeve has a faint ring where a coffee cup once sat on it during a conversation I replay more often than the record itself.
Track one is a slow shuffle recorded in a single afternoon, according to the liner notes, in a converted chapel with terrible heating. You can hear it in the way the singer holds her breath before the second verse, as if the cold were a third musician. The drummer plays brushes so softly that the first time I heard it I thought my own pulse had been mic'd. I turned the volume up to check. It was only the room, leaning in.
Track one is a slow shuffle recorded in a single afternoon, according to the liner notes, in a converted chapel with terrible heating.
Track two is where the engineer made an unforgivable and wonderful decision. He left in the sound of a chair creaking as someone shifted closer to the microphone. Nobody has ever confirmed who. I like to think it was the pianist, edging toward the singer the way people do when they stop pretending a song is only a song. Every pressing keeps the creak. Every pressing, I'd argue, is better for it.
By track three I am usually standing at the shelf with no intention of sitting down. The bridge climbs on a chord that resolves a half step too late, a trick the arranger apparently borrowed from an older, lesser record and improved beyond recognition. That delay is exactly the size of what I want to say and have not. I let it ring. I do not reach for the phone. Someone ought to give the needle credit for restraint on my behalf.
Side A closes with a ballad that has no business being so quiet. The last line fades on a vowel, and the groove runs out into that soft, repeating tick that sounds like a door almost shutting. I stay for it. I always stay for it. If you would rather hear that fade in a voice than imagine it in mine, Katya reads these notes aloud on TheFriend, gravel and all, and she is kinder about the ending than I am.
Hear Katya read the rest of Dmitri's notes on TheFriend, including the verse he never says out loud.
Continue on TheFriendMeet Katya: open Katya's profile on TheFriend.