Today’s song rec: “High School Gym” x Dougie Poole
I’ve been looking for a new home this month, so it’s been a little while since I wrote one of these. July has been a really weird one, boys! This whole summer has been a bit of a whirl, actually. There’s been triumphs, and growth, and love and luck straight from the universe herself — and there’s also been a whole lot of loss and impulse and grief.
For me, summer started on May 26 at a Dougie Poole show. I’ve been a big fan of his since the release of his second album, The Freelancer’s Blues, which I’ve always seen as this great contemporary take on folksy petit-bourgeois culture and the “working class” history of country music. He followed that album up with The Rainbow Wheel of Death, another reference to the postmodern ennui of a creative class defined by wealth precarity.
So! As a long-time fan, I was really hyped to see him at Public Records and maybe even buy him a drink after the show. The show was great and the attempt at drink-buying was horrific. I mentioned this in passing in some other post, but after trying to strike up a conversation that he clearly was not trying to have (I’ve since convinced myself he had simply expended too much energy performing and talking to other random people), I left the backyard-patio picnic table he sat at rattling with pure humiliation. I, of course, then tripped up the stairs in front of him and the rest of the bar, scraping my legs and marking the beginning of a summer full of shots taken, shots missed, shots rebounded and shot clocks just plain runnin’ down.
Despite feeling deeply embarrassed, I walked home alone in the early morning listening to Poole’s “High School Gym” on repeat, a song about being faced with grief as it creeps up through his subconscious in the form of a recurring dream. Everyone he’s lost sits in the bleachers of his old school gym, which is quickly filling up with loved ones like his “old man smoking his Pall Malls” and “old good time friends, who showed up early, with the powder and the pills.” The song’s dreamy synths give it a bittersweet twang that’s only disrupted by awakening (“so when I wake up crying, I'm alright, but you know where I've been”), manifesting as a pair of hard-strummed, arpeggiated exhales.
I’ve long envisioned life as a collection of little humiliations and little joys and big bouts of grief, all bubble-wrapped in a bittersweet nostalgia so thick that it stops anything from leaking or leaving wounds that are all that deep — but the yearning pain of missing someone who has passed, that’s something too prickly to not break through all of those protective layers from time to time. Choosing to listen to a song about grieving so stunningly written by someone who made me feel so dumb was a choice, but I think it’s a treasure. The melancholic joy that it brought me really launched me into one of the most emotionally complex seasons of my life — perhaps not so much “summer,” but my late 20s, more generally. I’ve already lost two people since that night, and it’s always a stunner that creeps up at the most bizarre times. I know it only becomes more frequent from here.
So, I feel you, Dougie. Thanks for the song
Photo from Dougie’s Bandcamp.
P.S. If you were recently at a party in Brooklyn and talkin’ good about my blog, lemme know!! A game of compliment telephone haunts me and I’d like to thank you. And if you weren’t at a party in Brooklyn talkin’ good about my blog — whaddaya doin'? Do better.