#thank u greenie for indulging me as always

[sparklyslug]

Highly recommend for Americans In Despair on this Weird Fucking Holiday

[greenlikethesea]

five songs you listen to - greenie gets personal edition

🎶✨ when u get this u have to put 5 songs u actually listen to. then send this ask or tag 10 of your favourite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool)✨🎶

tagged by @tolkientrash! thank you!

i just did one of these, but i think that whenever i’m tagged, i’m gonna do one of these. i do listen to these songs on the regular, but these hold very specific memories for me. get ready! i like writing them, and you all seem to like them. maybe they’re self indulgent, but it’s been nice to share. I have a few tags to catch up on and I will get there!

1. Whiskey - Nicole Reynolds

when i was newly 19, i went to a house party that was also sort of a jam session, a few blocks away from my house. i brought my ukulele, inside my big coat because i didn’t have a case for it, even though i only knew a few chords. there was a girl there -- we’ll call her b -- that intrigued me, but i wasn’t sure why. my own feelings about girls were rich and complicated, having been burned by my ex-girlfriend in high school, but i wanted her to notice me. after a while of mingling, i ducked into a side room, where she was fiddling around on her guitar -- a far better player than i ever will be. she started playing this song, whiskey, a tune about loving someone despite their flaws. the tune is easy to discern, so i was able to pick up a harmony pretty quickly, and our eyes met. i figured it out -- i liked her. i wanted to know her the way nicole reynolds knew her lover.

2. Puzzle Pieces - Tiger Trap

as some of you know, i dated the same person on and off for seven years. we dated all throughout high school, took a break (where i dated b -- i’ve never cheated), and then resumed the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. i went to his house in the guise of going to a hike, but that was a bullshit ruse -- i went over to have sex with him. and we did. and we laid together, me unsure of what had happened, because he always kept his feelings to his chest. but he got his ipod and put one earbud in each ear, and started to play this song. “whenever i played this song, i thought of you. it was your song.” he had never gotten over me. i was, at least for a time, his puzzle piece.

3. everyone blooms - The Front Bottoms

after I broke up with the person mentioned in 2, we attempted to maintain a friendship. this, predictably, did not go well, but a safe topic for us was always the music we had in common. when this album came out, we both discussed our favorite tracks and his happiness about the return to form (i had liked going grey, nut he hated it for being too poppy.) we both carefully avoided talking about this particular track, which felt too familiar for comfort. “sometimes we talk/it’s a total mistake/just the memories of us/feel so real, must be fake.” this, in turn with the music, dizzying and the sonic equivalent of banging your head on a wall after spinning in a circle, contributes to the crushing, quiet desperation of it being too late to change, but that’s okay. “wherever you are, don’t worry/you’re gonna be fine, fine, fine/everyone blooms in their own time”

4. So Unaware - Best Coast

the corniest thing about me, probably, is that I like to listen to music by California artists when I’m in California. best coast, to me, represents what SoCal is now — dreamy, lonely, vast, vacuous but for pockets where you find meaning. Bethany Cosentino is a lyricist who gets straight to the point, and her arrangement work with Bobb Bruno on this album is all structured around a descending arpeggio of a guitar riff. the primary lyrical theme is myopia, either on her part or the part of her departed lover. and man, there,s something about winding around mountains, 65 in a 40, with the exasperated plea, “I’ll never understand you, never understand you, never understand you now.”

5. West Coast - Coconut Records

alright, so I will own that this pick is me being sentimental and romantic. lyrically, this song is so subtly artful that you barely notice it on the first lesson. I’m a real fan of two things this song masters: a simple image being a stand-in for an evocative feeling (“I love you, standing all alone in a black coat” — small, stark, a pop of inky dark in east coast grey, singular in the eye of the beholder) and a chorus beginning and ending with the same line, with the meat of the sandwich changing the line from start to finish (“I miss you, I’m going back home to the west coast” — in the beginning, a simple statement of intent, but by the end, the narrator wishing his love would stop him).

Sorry, that was deeply personal and you did not ask for all that! But welcome to my brain!

Do not feel obligated at allllll — Tagging some of the usual suspects and a few newbies @friendship-switchblades @sparklyslug @serskets @gothbat99 @sea-heaux @dallae @xstevex-world @dodger-chan @leftofus @geddyqueer