Galaxie 500 - "When Will You Come Home"
Ought - "Habit"

Last week, at karaoke, Mark described a guitar thing more perfectly than I've ever heard anything described in my life. We were talking about "The Final Countdown" because he had just done a perfect version of "The Final Countdown," and I said I've never really thought about the guitar solo in that song before but it's actually pretty nuts, and Mark said: it's like there's a grate, and you open the grate and a whole bunch of crazy flames just leap right out of it, blazing. And then you close the grate and the flames just instantly disappear.

Objectively speaking, there is really nothing more useless or unfun than a guitar or the sounds it makes - but at the same time that's how it is with people, and we still manage to fall in love with those all the time. I don't know what it is. Sometimes the sound of a guitar will come speeding along out of nowhere and just fucking concuss you; a stray twinge will brush against your earlobe and suddenly you're nothing but a cloud of bright dust and glitter floating around the city, shooting lightning at the sidewalk from your clumsy mouth. Sometimes it's like flames coming out of a grate.

But other times it's just familiar. Past uncanny. You will hear some song for the first time and not know which of you is the one in the mirror; you will hear some song and feel its rising line stitched right into your DNA. We learn from childhood on that familiar is a necessary positive, that if something "feels like home" we're supposed to be in love with it - but your own terrible body's like home too, and what does that feel like? Sometimes you hear a song like this and you can't stop listening to it. Sometimes you hear it once and then you never, ever need to again. Some guitar-sounds aren't good or bad; they're just a map of your true nature spooling out in front of you, coiling back into your contours. True sympathy doesn't always feel good, it just feels like being known. Like someone reading the whole story of you to you out loud and backwards, in right time.

[Buy On Fire / More Than Any Other Day]