Back in the day, namely, the 80s and 90s, we had mix tapes. Think of it as your Spotify feed, on a cassette tape. Friends made them for one another, and the message was, "I love this so much, I want you to love it, too."
My senior year of High School, I did this thing where I was dating two guys at the same time (briefly), and they were best friends. One of them made a mix tape for their whole friend group, but because I jilted him for his best friend, he obviously didn't give me one. But his bestie bootlegged a copy and gave it to me.
It was titled "No Mercy for the Flingèd", because the creator, and many of the friends, were into Frisbee Golf - bless their fuzzy hearts. The tape included a lot of songs that I liked then, and like now. But there was one, the final song on the second side, that was haunting and beautiful, and I loved it. It was an instrumental. I knew the name of it at one point, then time and circumstances happened, and I probably threw the tape out in a fit of passion, or, whatever. I genuinely don't recall.
I also didn't recall the title of the song correctly, because some years later, I went to look for it, and couldn't find it. Yesterday, it found me.
Here's what I will tell you first, about what I remembered. I thought it was a piece by Phillip Glass. I was wrong.
I walked in to Matt watching a movie by David Byrne called True Stories. At one point, the narrator of the film is driving along, and the song starts playing. My brain lit up, and I Googled the song.
The name of the song is Glass Operator, by Talking Heads.
As soon as I found out the title and artist, everything clicked. One of the other songs on the mix tape, and in fact, probably my favorite song on it, was also Talking Heads - Nothing But Flowers. In fact, there's a line from that song that I think of often, "I dream of cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies...". Because of my raging sweet tooth.
Anyway - Glass Operator has re-entered my life, and I'm pretty stoked about it.
As for the best friends, both are married and have kids - I have not friended either of them on Facebook. I'm friendly-ish with the bootlegger - we stayed in touch a little and although he dumped me via email, I harbor very little ill will. The guy who created the original tape - he lives in the area we grew up in - I've been thankful to not run into him - it's a small world, but thankfully not that small. We went to college together and things ended with us very, very badly after I got fed up with being treated poorly. We were NOT supposed to end up together. Actually, the same is true with both of them. I cannot imagine being married to a HS sweetheart. Even someone from college is a stretch, and that's from someone who married a guy she went on one date in college with.
Now, speaking of both music and college, here's a hat on a hat. We went out to lunch over the weekend, and the music playing in the restaurant was 1990s country. Now, here's what you should know about me. I listened to a lot of country music in the early to mid-nineties, while I was in college - because I had friends who also listened to country - including, but not limited to my bootlegger. So, I have the melody and lyrics of a lot of songs from that timeframe. I was singing along to one of them, and my husband seemed surprised that I knew the song. Well of course I knew it. It was from 1994. The rest of the lunch was the same - the songs kept flowing. We ended lunch on Wide Open Spaces, courtesy of The Dixie Chicks. Music transports you back to time and place as fast as anything, honestly.
But Glass Operator - that was unexpected, weird, and wonderful.
ae
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