262. Song No. 3,922: “Going to Happen,” Koufax
It Had to Do with Love, 2000

I’ve never really gotten into the synthy ’80s throwbacks that weave in and out of both mainstream and nichier musical worlds from time to time, but Koufax is among the glorious, irresistible exceptions to that rule, even if for only one album (they have a total of four LPs, three of which I’ve owned at some point, but it’s really only their debut record that survived rounds and rounds of college-era CD purges—though I do have a vestigial fondness for the title track from their sophomore release Social Life).

In another win for record labels’ generously packed sampler compilations that sound a lot like a mix I’d’ve made my own damn self, the veritable smörgåsbord of goodies that was Vagrant Records’ Another Year on the Streets introduced me Koufax by way of “Going to Happen” in all of its catchy-as-fuck glory, flanked by a ton of other tunes from bands I loved mightily in the early aughts (namely Alk3, Saves the Day, The Get Up Kids, New Amsterdams and The Anniversary, and it even briefly had me playing the hell out of a No Motiv CD that’s since been lost to time).

Emo and its various cousins don’t dominate my musical tastes like they once did, but going back to the stuff of my high school soundtrack is a uniquely delicious treat I’m always delighted to get reacquainted with, especially when it’s something I so enthusiastically over-played that it feels like so many different coalescing eras and emotions firing off their associated memories in all directions in a spectacle of youth. Koufax being both unlike anything else I was listening to at the time and a band that I largely loved in isolation infused the music with a palpable sense of ownership, a feeling amplified more than two decades later by Spotify pointing out that this band that peaked in the early millennium has less than 1,000 monthly listeners, which is pretty par for the course when it comes to the music I still love.

However. On the topic of tunes transcending time:

I guess I saw it coming
But still I need the truth
So please accept my asking for it
Just to get it out of my heart

Dwelling in grief that’s not even a full month old yet is an odd, uncertain place to exist, and I feel like a frigid bitch at best and outright monster at worst admitting that its silver linings keep announcing themselves with varying degrees of success, straightforwardness and shameless sobbing jags because I have no idea how to process the magnitude of gratitude that comes with having friends who will, like, drop everything to drive to a hospital in a perpetually blighted city to retrieve your house keys right before spending a few hours babysitting your dog made of separation anxiety and intestinal dramas. Or fly across the country without a second thought and then apologize profusely for moving in the first place. Or just let me work out everything I need to cry about (which apparently includes a solid decade and a half of accumulated unspokens, because catharsis becomes a floodgate entirely too quickly when you’ve been prodigiously self-medicating with weed and gin for two surreal and terrible weeks). Undeniable displays of people proving how much they love me and hubs and our charmingly neurotic pooch has been the best kind of overwhelming, which has absolutely inspired the vulnerability and frank conversation that suddenly get a lot less scary when you’re also grappling with the shock of sudden and profound loss.

I’m an emotional person under normal circumstances, and I’m at the point now where I am both tired of crying and desperate for whenever I finally get to feel the same feeling for, like, maybe half a day. I’ve never existed hour-by-hour before and I don’t like it at all: I’m used to being a fuckpile of feelings internally, but their insistence on tumbling out all at once got old within days of this bullshit, and I am so very existentially tired. And while I’ve gotten an incredible, tangible reminder of how many awesome people my self-sabotaging, aggressively introverted self has in my life despite being the way that I am, people do eventually go back to their own lives and the check-ins wane and time marches on. And that’s where the music kicks in (and is also why I’ll have no problem besting last year’s scrobble count by the end of September).

I have been listening to so goddamn much music lately (I mean, and D&D campaigns, too, but this is a music blog). So much time at home (because even the job that makes me drink like a stressed-out journalist has been fucking amazing and surprisingly generous with bereavement time) has meant so many opportunities for escaping into music. Some has been…. uh, we’ll say biographically curated, but most of it has been falling back on comfort music, whether that means a favorite album, songs I know by heart or the stuff that reminds me of less-oppressively-sad times, all of which could describe almost anything that has been or will become a part of this project. But it’s also tinged those long-loved songs with a new interpretation, whether it’s hearing familiar lyrics a new way or something more akin to surviving a terrible shared experience with an old friend. And while it’s a little uncomfortable liberating some of these songs from the amber they’ve been suspended in for so long to let them evolve into something with a newly acquired deeper significance, the very point of 12,700 Songs is rediscovery, however life mandates it’s going to happen.