168. Song No. 2,495: “A Diamond and a Tether,” Death Cab for Cutie
The Open Door EP, 2010

There is something to be said about listening to the band you used to love with the all-consuming obsession of a high schooler while you’re idly washing dishes as an adult who feels less like a real grown-up and more like the eternal imposter, only to fall in love with a song of theirs that’s never really been more than background noise in the otherwise ordinary process.

On the rare occasions I talk about 12,700 Songs, I always feel obligated to couch it as a knowingly self-indulgent vanity project. Like, I’m going through nearly two decades of my own lovingly curated collection of music that is largely white and male and also deliberately nichey because, hoo boy, lemme tell you about my insufferable years as an indie-rock snob (though do I need to rehash a period I’ve written at great length about already?), and I’m putting it all out there for other people to read like anyone can relate to it. Who honestly cares, and why should I expect an audience when I’ve been historically vocal about loving inaccessible, hard-to-find music that is not even close to everyone’s cup of tea?

Death Cab for Cutie is one of those bands I loved before everyone else and had an especially hard time accepting that I would have to share them in a way I was getting uncomfortably accustomed to because they really were one of my favorites for so long. And I suppose I do still carry around an awful lot of love for them and their music, even the post-Photo Album stuff, which arrived on the scene after my rabid affinity for them had already reached its peak.

One of the more personal motives I’ve admitted to with 12,700 Songs is the opportunity for rediscovery that comes with studiously revisiting more than half a lifetime of collected music that’s survived a few halfhearted waves of purges. The well-fed “second chances” tag and its corollary playlist are ample proof that this project is serving that purpose well.

But rediscovering new things to love about old favorites is especially magical, and I can’t believe there’s so much Death Cab to be smitten with. Or how much I still genuinely love them. Or how falling in love with this band all over again as an adult isn’t the profound, all-consuming experience it was for Younger Me, but how its older incarnation feels more meaningful and makes up for in depth what it once had in intensity. What was transcendent then is the best, most imaginative escapism now.

This EP came out a year after I’d gotten maried, so my days of wondering if the diamond’s promise of forever was ever coming were years in the past when it was new; I finally got smacked in the face with its poignant, palpable regret while so comfortably married that I was elbows-deep in the assuring domesticity of sink suds and rubber gloves, and it was a joy in the way it can only be when you love the home you’ve made with the only person who feels like forever. It’s been a long time since I realized I was in a relationship that couldn’t give me the stability and future I need, but this song rocked me right back to that insecurity and uncertainty. And while I don’t go looking for that in the things I enjoy, I can’t help but be impressed as hell when it happens.