when I get to troubles with language...

I like things that make me feel different when they're done with me.

Sometimes, it is really difficult to figure out where events of my life end and their soundtracks begin. This seems like the most base of sentiments, rooted in the piles of mix tapes that made up my youth, and I have to confess that with each passing year I continue to assume that this allegiance will end. On occasion, I convince myself that it has.

[When asked what it is I need in a significant other, one of my best friends asserted that I was insane if I thought I could ever be with someone who's not passionate about music. "But that's not something I ever think about immediately when I meet someone," I protested.

"That's because you don't usually have to; everyone you know is really into music, so those are the only kinds of people you meet."

To my chagrin, I later tested this theory and realised he was right.]

I'm curled up in the guest bed at my parents' house somewhere in the suffocated Midwest, making a belated Christmas gift of a mix CD for Christiana. She recently confessed to not having much knowledge of Ted Leo's music, and as a longtime fan I jumped at the chance to compile a favorites collection. Now, I'm leafing through a set of songs I honestly haven't lent my ear to in years, and it's just about making my heart fall apart.

To the best of my recollection, I first saw Ted Leo opening for someone (the Dismemberment Plan?) at the Bowery Ballroom in 2000 (or 2001?) My memory as measured by time is obviously hazy, but my memory of the moment itself is rock solid. Songs, it seems, are what keep me rooted in any kind of personal timeline at all.

The song that stuck with me that night was my first - and still - favorite, "Under the Hedge." The feeling that a song is changing your life as you're hearing it for the first time never seems to stop happening, even as age indicates that newness should no longer be possible. That night, age was barely comprehensible and "Under the Hedge" hit me with all the subtlety of a 10-ton brick:

"Oh I've been sometimes under your wall.
Keeping it out where I'm not welcome.
I've seen you one time stumble and fall
but I still love you, you see?
I've been five times back to the well
seeking to turn myself in something.
But you can't teach what you can't sell
and I'm not the only one it seems.

And then he continues on with "I still would say if you asked, it's building on bonding," and basically it would be all over from there even if the whole thing wasn't wrapped up in one of the most interesting hooks I'd ever heard. That night, I forgot about the band I was there to see and walked away with an indelible image of a scrappy looking dude and his band of merry men, and that song stuck in my head.

It continued from there - when The Tyranny of Distance came out, I formed new alliances with "Biomusicology" and "Stove By a Whale." Over the course of the next three or four years, I saw Ted Leo and the Pharmicists well over 30 times. "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?" and "The Ballad of the Sin Eater" became my kind of weird dance anthems, and I aligned his music with my favorite summers (4th of July barbeques at Brownies!) and my worst and sappiest moments (("None) on repeat, for no good reason.)

And then came 2005.

This whole story starts with a song and unfolds from there, and of course it's a Ted Leo song. "Me and Mia" starts out with a pre-chorus of affirmation: “Do you believe in something beautiful? Then get up and be it!” From there, the turn in narrative gets dark, fast: “Fighting for the smallest goal - to get a little self-control. I know how hard you try, I see it in your eyes.”

I listened to this song for the first time in bed at the physical rehabilitation arm of Beth Israel hospital, and more than any other thing, it speaks volumes to an experience I've waited five years to have the words for and still fail at.

At this point, then, it's been at least nine years since the first of these songs made it to my ears, and I expect all the sparkle to be gone. But with each track, I'm transported: "Under the Hedge", I'm front row at the Bowery, waiting for the band to go on; "Me & Mia", in a weird haunted hospital room on 1st avenue; "Your Star Is Killing Me", in a car with the windows down driving through southern California; "Come, Baby Come," dancing through the streets of New York on any given bad day.

If there's a sole artist that soundtracks the last ten years of my life, it's Ted Leo. It takes a land hundreds and hundreds of miles from home for me to remember this, and as nine years rolls into ten, I'm wildly curious about what happens in the next decade. Where the words to explain it all went, I'm not sure, but I'm glad to have a soundtrack that does it for me:

"It's the sonics, not the phonics, and it's all in the delivery."