A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.
I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.
This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.
For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.
The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)
My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.
My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."
The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)
I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!
But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:
I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.
Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)
I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.
...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:
Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.
Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":
Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.Now take these rings and stow them safe away,I'll wear them on another rainy day.Take these rings and stow them safe away,I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)
I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."
Chill but you can also jam out to it I
guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged
millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to
music.
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