Destroyer - "Farrar, Straus and Giroux".

The song fish-hooked me.

I'm walking, listening, and then suddenly each image is a chime; each sentiment familiar. We want this from music - to hear something so close that you feel it slip down your throat and catch in your chest. We talk of "hooks" in songs. Of being "grabbed" by a "catchy" song. We remember such moments: strolling and hearing a track that expresses all that rustles in your bones. The song at the concert, that time, when you felt like you were tearing in half. The song as you walked down the aisle. Something on the tape-deck as your headlights are white beaming. The last dance. Everything just yes.

"Farrar, Straus and Giroux" was destined for a mix CD I never made. For many weeks I kept the song aside. And when I took it out it had changed. Become a long line of familiar truths - of coincidences (eerie, splendid) reeled out slow. From smiles to stones to my "temporary age of 24"... Each time one of these things rings & stings, I feel the fish-hook tug.

"If there is such a thing as ill-timed August rain?" Bejar sings, and the way he asks it would almost break your heart were he not caring enough to shrug and pivot, to say "all right" and then play the piano runs generous and inevitable, Destroyer-typical, that will remind me always of the "Aria".

Yesterday my friend Darek, whose first language is not English, asked me the difference between the words coincidence and synchronicity. I said that synchronicity was Jung. That it was a "system of coincidences". This system might spell the name of God, or humanity, or truth. Or love. Or nothing at all.

But I regret speaking of systems. Let "synchronicity" be instead the collective noun for coincidences. A flight of swallows, an anthology of flowers, a synchronicity of coincidences. A synchronicity. Who's with me? (Who's even still reading this?)

It's such a shiny word, synchronicity. Shiny as a new Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. Shiny as Destroyer's electric guitar.

Shiny, friends, as fish-hook.

[buy / this post first appeared in 2006]

Sleeping Bag - "Beside". Two jewelled saddles, resplendent. The cowboys ride, with underarm cereal boxes. Crunch, crunch. Two crunches, like a Japanese poem. The first cowboy squints at the horizon. These are the richest cowboys in the West. They got rich on friendship. They look at each-other now, putting simultaneous toothpicks between simultaneous canines. The cowboys have never high-fived. They have never shaken hands. They have exchanged glances and these glances have stood for embraces. Their saddles are made of onyx and emerald. Their horses were raised in Delaware. When they are ready, the cowboys will gallop through the scrub the way that birds move through Spring. They will gallop all the way to the lake.

[I last wrote about Sleeping Bag's 90s nostalgia in January. It's like a blunt instrument, I wrote, a cotton-gloved fist, pounding the sleepy smile into your face. The band's entire album is now streaming at Bandcamp and, they say, it desires vinyl pressing. I hope it gets its wish.]