I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NADA SURF–North 6th Street (1999).

In 1999, Nada Surf released this collection of songs.

It was named after the street in Brooklyn where we first got together. It has our first singles, some 8-track demos we made in our practice space, some alternate versions, french versions, a couple of unreleased songs and a cover.

Collections like this can be hit or miss, especially when a band had progressed from their original sound.  But there’s nothing embarrassing about this collection at all.  In fact, there’s a lot of really charming stuff on here.

The first two songs, “The Plan” and “Deeper Well” are labelled as 7″ Version.  I don’t really know what that means.  Both songs appear on High/Low.  “The Plan” is a little shorter than the record and “Deeper Well” is a little longer.  They sound similar, although there’s a different drummer, Aaron Conte.  But they both sound really good and are a nice reminder that Nada Surf can really rock out.

The next three songs are demos of songs from High/Low: “Ice Box,” “Psychic Caramel,” and “Popular.”  These also have their first drummer.  These aren’t boombox recordings.  They sound well produced, although they do feel a little more grungy than the album.  “Popular” sounds the most different.  There’s female vocals in the beginning.  The tone of this version seems a bit angrier, but otherwise similar.

The next two songs are French versions of songs from High/Low.  Matthew Caws and Daniel Lorca met at a French school in New York, so their French is quite good.  It’s weird, but cool to hear familiar songs sung in a different language by the same vocalist.  These songs, like the whole High/Low album were produced by Rik Ocasek, so I’m assuming they were done a the same time.

“Traffic” and “Me and You” are (I believe) previously unreleased.  “Traffic” is a quiet instrumental propelled by Daniel’s bass and some gentle pretty guitar picking.  The ambient noise of an ambulance is a nice touch.  “Me & You” is a full-on folk song–acoustic guitars and possibly a suitcase for drums.  Each of these songs is 1:47 long–snippets into bits of songs.

“Silent Fighting” and “Spooky” are alternate versions of songs that appeared on the band’s reissue of their album The Proximity Effect.  They weren’t on the original album (which was lost in record label hell for quite a long time), but they are the final songs on the version that’s largely available.  “Silent Fighting” is a demo version, but again, it sounds professionally done.  And “Spooky” is listed as an Alternate Version.

The next two songs are also unreleased elsewhere.  “The Manoeuvres” is a quiet acoustic ballad.  “Sick of You” is an Iggy Pop song!  Like the original, this song is slow and moody with a distinctly Iggy tone in the vocal delivery.  And like the original, it rocks out in th emiddle with a full on punk assault.  It runs over five minutes long

Up next are two more demos from The Proximity Effect.  “Robot” is a lot quieter.  You can hear the lyrics more clearly and the heaviness is toned down.  “Amateur” sounds pretty similar–full with a great bass sound.  Although it’s missing the wonderful “ooh ooh ooh” part.

“River Phoenix” is a rocking song with a spoken vocal line and fascinating lyrics like:

River Phoenix
Ian Curtis
And river Phoenix
And me and you

And it’s quite catchy.

“Mother’s Day” is another demo from The Proximity Effect.  This is a fantastic anti-rape song with brutal, angry lyrics.  This version sounds a little different–a little less distorted, a little less loud, but still angry.

“Dispossession” is an alternate version from The Proximity Effect.  The album’s guitars sound a bit rawer, the guitars a little crisper and the whole things feels a bit more wild.  This version is a bit cleaner, except for the wild guitar solo.

[READ: November 7, 2020] The Midnight Library

S. brought this home and really enjoyed it.  She thought I’d enjoy it too.  Of course she was right.  I’d probably enjoy most of the books she reads, but I already have my own dozen dozen authors that I like to read already.

The book opens with the fascinatingly dramatic opening sentence:

Nineteen years before she decided to die, Nora Seed sat in the warmth of a small library at Hazeldene School in the town of Bedford.

Nora is playing chess with Mrs Elm the librarian when Mrs Elm gets a call that Nora’s father has just died.

The book jumps nineteen years ahead to “twenty-seven hours before she decided to die.”  The next few chapters list the miseries of her life: her cat is hit by a car, she gets fired from her lousy job (her boss has the funniest, meanest line I’ve read: “I can’t pay you to put off customers with your face looking like a wet weekend.”)

She gets a text from her ex-fiancee, Dan.  She broke off their wedding just a few days ago (the wedding was in a couple of weeks).  He wants to talk.  She doesn’t.  Also, her former best friend had moved to Australia and Nora was going to go with her–what else did she have to do?  But inexplicably Nora bailed on that as well and Izzy hasn’t spoken to her.

Then she finds out from Ravi that her brother Joe was in town but didn’t stop by to visit her.  Nora, Joe and Ravi were in a band that had been offered a record deal, but Nora broke up the band because she was having panic attacks.  Neither of the boys has forgiven her yet.

The final straw is when her only student (she teaches him piano) decides he doesn’t want to do piano anymore (actually the boy’s mother decides, but the result is the same).

So Nora has nothing.  No job, no friends, no cat, and no one to miss her.

She decides, as the book tells us right from the beginning, to die.

She “wakes up” in a giant library.  Mrs Elm is there amid an endless array of books.  Mrs Elm explains that she is in the Midnight Library.  The first book she shows Nora is her Book of Regrets.  Every regret she has ever had is listed in the book–from minor to major.

Then Mrs Elm explains that all of the other books around her are possible lives–parallel lives in which she has been living a different version of herself.  At every decision she made throughout her life, a new life was created.  Mrs Elm says that if she picks a book, she will enter that life.

Nora doesn’t care about that.  She wants to be dead.  But Mrs Elm encourages her to try out one or two, maybe as a way to get rid of some of those regrets.

And so the next dozen or so chapters explore different lives that parallel Noras have led.  This must have been so much fun to write, because in each scenario, Nora is herself, but different.  What’s really fun about this life-jumping is that Nora is always herself from her core life.  So when she jumps into her body in another life, she doesn’t have that version’s experiences.  She looks like she does in the new life, but she has her own original memories.  So she can talk about things that her parallel selves don’t know, which obviously is weird.

In the first jump, she finds out what it would have been like had she married Dan–they’ve opened a pub, which was always his dream.  But not hers.

She jumps into a life where she kept her cat indoors.  But the cat died anyway (he had a heart condition).

Slowly, her Book of Regrets is getting lighter.  But she is still not happy.

What other lives could she have had?

What if she pursued her father’s dream and became an Olympic swimmer?  She barely even recognizes herself.  What if she hadn’t broken up the band?  That would have affected her brother’s life as well.  What if she pursued her own childhood dream of going to the Arctic Circle to save the planet?  Boy is she not ready for that.

Each one of these possible lives is fleshed out–some longer than others.  It’s fascinating to watch Nora try to learn about and then fit in with these other versions of herself.  It’s also strangely comforting to realize that when she leaves these parallel lives, those versions of herself do continue on, only with the version of herself from that actual timeline (so the people whose lives she has interacted with don’t disappear or anything).

Eventually Nora finds the perfect life–who could ask for anything better?  But even that feels wrong.

Every time that Nora leaves a life, she returns to the library.  There are literally infinite lives to choose from.  But she does not have infinite time to choose.   And the library seems to be on shaky ground–lights flickering, walls creaking.  Who even knows what happens if she’s in the library if it collapses.

There was so much to like about this book.  The lives were interesting and the way they played off of each other as she learned more about how her lives played out was really neat.

I also loved that Nora had studied philosophy, so there was a whole philosophical thread to the book (beyond the whole parallel lives idea).  The prose was quick and fun to read as well and I will definitely look for more books from Haig.