The soundtrack to my life without a montage

I grew up in the last flush of mix tapes, I still have them tucked away in my bookcase all those hand lettered track listings and little drawings and love notes to each other and to the music. Computers broke albums down into their component parts. We burned our own CDs when we could, our own playlists and our own soundtracks. I still have a few of those as well but they weren’t works of art painstakingly compiled and lettered just so – you only had one chance to get it right. This is what nostalgia looks like.

All our carefully compiled segues and titles and hours queuing outside venues in the cold for fourtyfifty perfect minutes of our own movies. Then when I was older private file sharing communities, digital radio, listening for hours and noting down the ones which hit just the right note and then tracking them down.

Visiting Disney World Florida as a younger girl I was fascinated by the soundtrack playing throughout the park, by the way they carefully blurred the lines between fiction and reality because that was all we wanted really. Our own soundtracks. When I was older I appreciated the amount of work that went into creating that (pitch perfect) experience, around the time I stopped thinking of the Disney World music as ambient and started thinking of it as diegetic. A simplistic explanation would be that music in a performance (be that film or theater) is considered to be diegetic if it exists within the world of the characters as music rather than being layered on top.

But then we have music created by bands (who exist in the real world) as part of narratives (which do not) released under fictional names. How do we feel about Lily Chou-Chou, the difference between Olivia and Olivia inspi’Reira, about Scott Pilgrim and the recursive meta? For that matter what do you do when a fictional author from a tv series becomes a real world best seller?

We are mixed media.

In between typing this up in my room (curtains closed and ambient noise of cars passing, birds singing) I am putting together a playlist which will help me take that first step out of the house tomorrow. Creating a narrative in advance of the situation because the world is only occasionally co-operative regarding my musical pathetic fallacy and I prefer not to leave these things to chance.

“The angels all have guns now, the angels aren’t anyone you’d want to pray to

No-one here has goals like get a job, get married, have kids

The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing

No desire to get rich, become famous, move out

The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing”

- The Ambitions Are, The Golden Palominos