You wake up, think your first post-dream thoughts of the day and when you’re cleaning last night’s dishes you find your id singing you a song. How it lands on that tune is unknown, but after a few days, weeks, months would make up a great playlist. So lately, my subconscious jukebox has given me:

5-12-17: April in Paris, Count Basie Orchestra – All those false stops basically guarantees that this song will loop in your head, just like it does on the record. And then the Thad Jones ‘Pop Goes the Paris’ trumpet solo that has inspired and frustrated players for decades.

5-10-17: Theme Song from Archer. Marathon binge fallout.

5-4-17: Don’t Spill the Bottle, Mark Mallman – Any of the songs from Mallman’s catalogue will comfortably lodge themselves in your ear, the only rule – like on the playground – is, “Whoever gets there first wins.” Best Minneapolis singer you’ve never heard of.

5-3-17: Waiting For the Worms, Pink Floyd – Obviously a rough year when you wake up thinking about a song warning about rising racism and belligerent nationalism.

4-17-17: Theme from Route 66, Nelson Riddle – Who wants to get on the road? This is the perfect melodic embodiment of the open-range, when the open-range means station wagons and multi-lane highways rather than wild horses and vaqueros. The instinct to flee the city to a 1950’s soundtrack could easily be the result of the day prior spent on Staten Island where the 50’s took a dump and forgot to flush. Who wouldn’t want to leave? But it’s much further to Chicago where Route 66 starts at Jackson & DesPlaines than it was to Queens where minds occasionally revert to an Eisenhower-era atavism, but only for a waking second.

4-15-17: mindspace occupied by the sounds of a couple fighting upstairs, their song to the apartment building…

4-12-17: Vasoline, Stone Temple Pilots – Cultural references enter the personal vernacular undetected. I said, “I’m through,” to my roommate in the exact same inflection that Harrison Ford does it in ‘Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade’, except I hadn’t breached the Breath of God – I was done using the bathroom. So when scrubbing dishes back-and-forth, and the tonality reminds my subconscious of a tune that has the same meter, there is such deep resonance between the action and the song that I don’t notice I’m singing Vasoline for a minute until the Late Scott Weiland’s voice slithers in… and this disturbs me to find his voice as integral to my childhood memories as baseball. This song is all about tone, especially for the first eight bars (feedback intro notwithstanding), which is just two crunchy notes and a bended string at measure seven… it crunches, it screams, they don’t care that you don’t like it, and that’s all you need for rock ‘n roll. And, in this case, bongos.

4-8-17: 8:05, Moby Grape – Listed by music historians and in liner notes amongst the bands that represent the Haight-Ashbury 1960’s, Moby Grape is not memorialized by an endless stream of bootleg tapes a la Grateful Dead, or the feminist heroism of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. Rather, they may be an obscure track on one of your Dad’s 1960’s compilation records, or that double album you got out of the $1 bin and forgot to try. But they were just good enough to get the Pete Best status of San Francisco 60’s bands, and just enough to wind up in a state of semi-consciousness on a Friday morning. This is what 1971 must have felt like. Or like what Leaving on a Jet Plane would have been with less syrup.

4-4-17: Just in Time, Tony Bennett –  Probably a leftover thought of the anniversary weekend, that if I hadn’t met my wife when I did and moved to New York five years later, the gravitational pull of Chicago would have been so great so as to create a singularity between me and the city. This outcome is not measured by ‘good’ or ‘bad’, just by a statement of the fact that people have the power to alter gravity. Gravity and pheromones.

4-3-16: Material Girl, Madonna – My brain only knows little bits of this song and not a single complete verse, but it plays the scraps in loops and remixes them so seamlessly that I think I’m hearing the original. I never knew Madonna had a purchase on part of my inner-self, and maybe its not her but an essay that I recall reading in 1997 from Henry Rollins, praising her for codifying the harsh principles of success. This message is refuge after a weekend money hemorrhage, so I should be grateful for the promotion of action inherent in the song rather than, say, Here’s That Rainy Day.

4-1-17: One Fine Day, David Byrne & Brian Eno– It’s not hard to figure out why this song came to me upon waking: it was the last song I listened to before going to bed last night. It’s also that personal song that kicks in when life peaks – last night was my 5th wedding anniversary, and the title of the song itself brings me back to that incredible day and night where our great friend Jack married me and Alexis Buryk in front of our friends and family in a Manhattan BBQ restaurant… one fine day, indeed.

The message is not assertive or definite, but above that uncertainty is inevitable goodness. We cannot go too far astray because we’ve been so badly lost before, and where we’ve been right is always being relearned and rediscovered. One Fine Day is the sound of solidarity.