write down the soundtrack of my life (so far)

...is it me you’re looking for?

Trust, To Wish Impossible Things, Treasure, The Reason, Like A Stone, I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues… There are a hundred songs that take me back to those long months of waiting in vain for someone who never had the courage to love me.
But there are others, those that really have become part of the soundtrack of my life. The Promise, Hold Me Now, If You Leave… the songs he used to listen to when he was a lonely, unhappy teenager, growing up in Washington DC. Songs like those are to him what Fascination Street is to me…
For some reason, I like that sort of music very much. Whenever I knew I’d see him, I’d bring something I was sure he’d recognise, and he always did. He would get so happy, so excited to hear the familiar melody of some song he hadn’t heard in years, that took him straight back to the way he felt back then, to his afternoons dancing alone in his bedroom, his long, long walks, and the intensity of his isolation. He told me stories of those fierce years, and he felt I could understand him. And I felt that way too.
...Even now, when I close my eyes to sleep, the last thing I see before me is your beautiful face, the pained look on your face, your absolute, heartbreaking helplessness, my poor lost love… that lifelong trouble of your brow.

Fascination Street, by The Cure.
I listened to Disintegration non stop for about four years, until I finally started to buy other music for myself. I walked a lot in those days, and Fascination Street is what I listened to when I walked. I loved walking into the shady parts of town, with Disintegration in my ears full blast… I had one of those Walkman tape players that weighed as much as a brick, and that is still with me, even after quite a few accidents…
The whole album takes me back to the times when I was so young and mad at everything, when I spent Christmas at the beach with my sisters. And that song in particular makes me feel just as if I was thirteen again…

My father used to love Anna Oxa, ten or so years ago. (He used to love all things Italian… like Chianti, music, and Florence). So he gave me a cassette -in fact, I stole it…

Years later, I was at pains to find Anna Oxa’s Storie. Such beautiful face, such powerful voice… I still shriver every time I listen to her!

E’ Tutto un Attimo, Senza di Me, Quando Nasce un Amore.

How could I even survive without Massive Attack?

When I’m low and blue, I put Teardrop or Protection and turn up the volume; when I’m walking down the street, musing and thinking of nothing in particular, I’m listening Blue Lines or Daydreaming; when I’m happy, it’s Weather Storm or Eurochild playing in my heart.
And when I’m not precisely myself, as it’s happening quite often lately, Sly and Heat Miser walk besides me.

My last days on Barcelona kept the Daft Punk rythm.

Ever since I was a boy I loved Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock: the free life and bold fight of this most unusual hero and his most melancholic starship.

Then Daft Punk had the brilliant idea of hiring Matsumoto to develop some new characters and scenes for their Discovery CD. He did so; and I watched in amazement the resurrection of the 70’s style of anime in the Digital Love music video (my favorite song, BTW).

Every time I listen to Digital Love I go back to my childhood, to those long afternoons with Harlock’s Arcadia and that dearly old anime.

Digital Love, One More Time, Around the World and Something About Us.

There used to be here a very beautiful and sad webpage, Arinya.

A quite simple and sweet animation, some words, and music by Groove Armada.

The first time I heard it, I cried. Then I sent the link to a (then) good friend of mine, and she cried too.

Then I bought some CD’s… and have walked around with Groove Armada in my mind.

Edge Hill, Hands of Time, Think Twice, Inside my Mind (Blue Skies) and At the River.

Back in the 80’s, they were listening to Bon Jovi and Gun’s N’ Roses; I had Sam Brown and Suzanne Vega.

Sam Brown’s Stop and April Moon, and Suzanne Vega’s Luka, Marlene on the Wall, Book of Dreams, Tom’s Diner and Left of Center.

is a poem by Keats

_ I saw pale kings, and princes too,_
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;They cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans MerciHath thee in thrall!’

That I knew by heart when I was 18 years old. (I admire Keats and Poe most of all; and Coleridge, and Byron…) Twice, in the middle of an eerie trance, I composed two similar poems (in Spanish, of course!), with the same phonetical structure and very intrincate rythm and rhyme; but with different endings.

La Belle Dame… tells the story of a knight who loved the Queen of Fairies -a story very familiar to almost any culture. Obviously, at the end, the knight stays alone -forever, since no one can take the place of a Queen of Fairies in his heart.

The first of my versions has the same ending; but in the second, the knight is able to finally take the Queen, who resigns her powers and becomes a mortal woman -just to love him for the rest of her life.

I knew, then, that I was somehow re-writing the script for my life.

And later, much later, I found two songs that closely resemble La Belle Dame…: Marillion’s Cover My Eyes and The Left Banke’s Pretty Ballerina (of which Alice Cooper has a very good cover).

And found, eventually, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. But that is another, long, wonderful story…

Mr. Jagger said it bestThat you can get… no satisfaction…

Eight or nine years ago, I stumbled upon a really sweet girl. She had bright, green eyes -the eyes of a cat; a beautiful smile and cinammon skin. And I liked her rough voice -it used to break in the middle of a conversation in a very peculiar manner.

I liked her a lot. She wasn’t good for me, I knew that; but I liked her nevertheless.

At the end of an affair that never was, The Saint came out, with a very good soundtrack. (In fact, the only good part of the film…)
A soundtrack I immediately bought. So, while I was trying to forget her, I was listening to The Sneaker Pimps, Daft Punk, Underworld and Duncan Sheik.

Some time after, I bought Sheik’s first, wonderful album.

In the Absence of Sun, which reminds me of this girl; Barely Breathing, which reminds me of another girl who also had cat’s eyes; and That Says It All, which reminds me I’m still alive.