256. Song No. 3,837: “Girl You Look Amazing,” Nicole Atkins
Slow Phaser, 2014

This is one of those songs that I kept loving in sequential pieces until the whole thing felt anthemic and familiar and lived-in and mine, while also completely missing the point of this fever-dream of a David Bryne-ish tune.

I don’t think any song titles wind through my head as often as this one does: Every time I want to compliment a femme friend, it’s a battle to not deliver it as an off-key reference to this track; “In the gutter / You discover / All the things you miss” is a lyrical snippet I sing to myself with a wildly varying array of feelings entirely too much and too often, and it lingers especially hard for days after I’ve listened to this song—and I listen to this song a lot.

It kills me how starkly my personal distillation of this song stands in opposition to its reality: This is not meant to be the first thing you think of when you want to tell your female friends that they’re radiant smokeshows as anthemically as possible, it’s the story of an habitually drunk girl going home with another professional partygoer again and again. It is also one of those deeply unfair times when a song sounds one way and the story it’s actually telling careens off into an entirely incongruous direction.

But, honestly, I don’t care: Hubs and I danced to a breakup song at our wedding because it meant something special to us, a thing we had to explain to so many freaking people. But I think all the infinite permutations of ways a song can be sent into the world with one intention and be embraced with another is one of the best things about music: The text doesn’t have to support the thesis to be a viable association as long as the context does, which can be as wide-ranging as the vivid constellation of its audience. And that freedom of personalization is one of those ways a song can hit you in just the right way that it becomes as yours and as much an automatic part of you as the feelings and people you associate it with, for worse, out of habit and for better—or for as good as the way you wield it.