Not that this is unusual for me lately, but I’ve been in such a slump lately. Coming down from the trip is harder than I expected; it’s been a month and I’m still dreaming of London and being depressed because I’m indoors all the time with no job prospects and all I do is listen to music which is good but not good because it’s making me terribly lethargic. And then last night I found a CD in my car that I made when I was 13, and this song was on it and it took me right back.

1. Flavor of the WEAK! WHAT AN AMAZING PUN!
2. There are some songs that you can go for years and years without hearing, and yet the second you put it on it’s like you heard it just 5 minutes ago. The words are still fresh in my mind and I can still sing along to them exactly. Makes me feel free.
3. It’s just a really rad song okay.
4. STACY JONES WAS A DREAM BOAT.

I am so sorry about my lack of posting lately – my inbox is brimming with releases from so many amazing bands and yet my internet has been misbehaving like never before, so there’s been little opportunity to post anything! I am also heading to Europe in a week and a half and will be travelling until the second week of November, when I land in Sydney again, so things will probably be quiet around here for the next little while (aside from talk of the wonderful music I see overseas, of course!)

I have missed three weeks of Throwback Thursday, so here are three songs. On Monday I celebrated one year with my Peter, and these are three of the main songs that sum everything about us up and are some of my favourite memories. Yep, I know it’s cheesy, but it’s who I am… So deal with it!

This is the first song Peter sent to me, a little while before we began to officially date. He said “listen to this song, but ignore those three words!”. We don’t have a ‘song’, but if we did I think this would be it, for sure. of Montreal is one of his favourite bands, and one that always puts me in a good mood. I love this song and I think anyone could agree that having it sent to you is the sweetest thing.

One night we were watching Rage and this song came on and I literally struggled not to fall off the bed in excitement, despite anything else that I should have been focusing on at the time. We bonded so much over Talking Heads when we first met – I don’t really know many people my age who share my boundless enthusiasm, so to find someone who did, and who’d also seen David Byrne live, was a goddamn miracle. Our music tastes aren’t exactly the same all of the time, but this is something we agree on 100%. Stop Making Sense is our go-to DVD when we can’t figure out what to watch. It’s all magic.

One night we were listening to Moon Safari and Peter proclaimed, “The second song was written about me”. This is the second song.

Awww…

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This week’s throwback is a little different, as it’s not so much to a song or a band as it is to a show – my first show, in fact! At the age of 13, I went to see Sum 41 and New Found Glory at the UNSW Roundhouse. The date was 10 August, 2003 – you see what I’m getting at here, as 10 August is only a few days away from now. On top of that, the leaked Soundwave lineup that was splayed all around the intertubes last night includes these two very bands! So I decided to take a little trip down memory lane.

We discussed my foray into punk/whatever last week, and Sum 41 was one of the bands that made that happen. I don’t remember exactly how I got into them, but I bought All Killer No Filler in 2002 and really loved it. I was pretty into New Found Glory too, but perhaps not quite as much – the first album of theirs I got was Sticks and Stones, released the same year as the show, and I really enjoyed all their various covers as well.

We won’t get into the nitty gritty details of all the things I wanted to do to Cone from Sum 41 or my desperation to go to a pool party with them that was hosted by Nova or 96.1 before they were ‘The Edge’ or…god, I don’t really remember and it’s probably a good thing that I don’t. But let’s just say that my Sum 41 obsession was a little bit out of hand, and I cried when my sister called them devil worshippers and to this day I still know all the words to all the songs on All Killer No Filler. Moving on.

For the purposes of further nostalgia, let’s have a read of what I wrote about this show in 2006, when I was looking back on all the gigs I’d been to so far at that point (if you want to read more of my early “reviewing” work and promise not to judge, click here).

This was my very first concert when I was 14 years old. Sum 41 was one of my favourite bands back then and I went along to this concert with Sophie, Kaitlyn and my cousin Van. The atmosphere was something I had never experienced before and it felt pretty amazing to watch people I had admired for so long up there on stage, singing along to songs I had become so familiar with on CD.

The first band was In The Grey, a smallish Australian act who I had not heard before. Being the first live band I had ever seen, I had nothing to compare it to but I do remember them doing a particularly good cover of 50 Cent’s ‘In Da Club’, which will remain one of my favourite ever concert memories. NOTE: THIS IS NOW NOT ONE OF MY FAVOURITE EVER CONCERT MEMORIES. WHY DID YOU LIE, 17-YEAR-OLD GISELLE? YOUR PREDICTIONS WERE WRONG. IDIOT.

Although I don’t listen to these bands any more, this is a very fond concert memory as it was my first, and it also exposed me further to Australian music through the support band.

So there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. I swear to God if The Ataris, Sum 41 and New Found Glory end up doing a sideshow together for Soundwave I will blow my load everywhere… I live for nostalgia and that would be the ultimate. It’s been a long time between pop punk shows and honestly, sometimes the crowds at the sorts of gigs I frequent these days aren’t anywhere near as passionate about the music they’re seeing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to sing along to ‘Fat Lip’.

Some of my favourite (and most embarrassing) memories are from the year 2002 – the year I discovered the Sex Pistols. Up until that point I’d never given my parents much grief and was, for the most part, a quiet, hard-working kid, but the moment this strange new world was opened up to me I craved so much more. Of course, in retrospect it’s all a bit hilarious, but at the time I was dead serious.

There were a lot of words I’d never heard of before hearing this song (and others, like ‘God Save The Queen’). I had no idea what anarchy or fascism was and, growing up in a middle to upper class family, I really had no reason to – nothing to complain about at all. But upon discovering the meanings of these words I, of course, decided that I had been oppressed my entire life. Flipping open any of my personal diaries from that time, you’ll find many charming entries – “Dad told me to go to bed early tonight. I said no because I was expressing myself. He told me to go to bed. FASCISM IN THE HOUSEHOLD.” I took on the hardly ideal Sid Vicious as my role model, beginning every diary entry with “Dear Sid”. My screen name was 51D L1V35 (figure it out yourself – I cannot bear to talk about that) and I wore a padlock around my neck until it rusted onto my skin.

It’s ironic how strongly I felt about punk back then, because the other bands I worshipped were the laughing stock of anyone who considered themselves to be real aficionados on the topic. Good Charlotte, Sum 41, Blink 182 – hardly punk at all. And yet I took on this air of self-importance, denounced every kind of “system” there was (don’t you love 13-year-old girls?) and often spat lengthy tirades concerning Avril Lavigne.

I guess every kid goes through a stage, and this one eventually morphed into emo, which eventually morphed into a subcultural vapour – I don’t really think of myself as belonging to anything nowadays and listen to music from all over the shop. It’s really funny to reminisce though and hearing this song really takes me back – even though I was a total angsty brat at the time with nothing to even angst about, it makes me smile to think of the days when all of this – anarchy, padlocks, Sid Vicious, safety pins – meant the world to me, and I hope other people look back on their silly stages in just the same way.

My parents left for Europe on Tuesday. They’re gone for a month and it’s weird that I’m as sad about it as I am – any other 21-year-old would be rounding up the troops for a good old party time, and yet here I am, missing my mummy’s company already. Oh man.

It’s the first time they’ve jet off together for more than a week, so naturally my mother was worried and reminded me of all sorts of things. Don’t forget to lock the doors. Don’t cook just in case you burn the house down (hah!). And please, Giselle, for the love of god, PLEASE don’t crash your car.

Which brings me to this song.

As you all probably have noticed by now, I’m a big believer in nostalgia and often talk with fondness about songs older than my entire life. Simon & Garfunkel is always number one, of course, but then there’s The Carpenters, The Beatles, Anne Murray and so on. And John Denver. My parents were always big fans of his and, despite being laughed at on more than one occasion for enjoying ‘country bumpkin’ music, have always been very fond of him. I grew up listening to him and was always so jealous that they got to see him live shortly before he died (and last year, upon meeting one of my now very good friends, I died with jealousy to learn that she, too, had seen him live. Gosh!).

This is the song I remember most from my John Denver-filled childhood, and it came back to me in the worst of ways last year. My mother had given me a copy of his Live at the Opera House album and I was pretty stoked, playing it over and over in the car. This particular night, I was driving to my best friend’s new house in the city that I hadn’t been to yet, so I was unsure of the directions. I was driving down a one-way street singing ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ at the top of my lungs, unaware of my surroundings, and realised quite suddenly that I had to make a right turn, so I went for it, still singing along – and crrraaassshhhhh!

I was turning right from the middle lane and collided with someone who was driving down the right lane. Yep. Leave all your sexist and racist jokes out of this please, I know I’m far too easy a target! So not only does ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’ remind me of my childhood and parents, it also reminds me of being unable to open my car door and a $2000 insurance excess. Oops…

If you’ve been following the blog for a while now, you’ll probably have noticed that the thing that I’m most passionate about in life is (other than overeating) Simon & Garfunkel. I find it unbelievably difficult to express how much their music means to me, how it’s shaped my life and continues to do so, and I hate that I was born a couple of decades too late because I’d give anything to have been one of the first people to experience their music as a fresh new sound in the 1960s. If I believed in God, I’d say that this duo was an act sent from him/her/it. That’s how much I love them.

Like many of my favourite things, I discovered Simon & Garfunkel through my father. He is a really wonderful man – we have our differences and he’s not exactly the most gregarious of characters, but from time to time we sit down and talk about anything and everything, and from childhood to the present day I’ve never admired anyone quite as much. My dad is so grounded and smart and knows so much about so many things. He’s like a walking encyclopaedia! I’m pretty blown away by his mind and I pick it at every chance I get. So it’s only fitting, really, that my favourite thing in the world came from his influence.

I can’t remember the first time I heard them because they were such a constant in our household when I was growing up. I’ve probably mentioned car singalongs ad infinitum on the blog in past Throwback segments, but they were really one of the highlights of my beautiful childhood – road trips to the beach or far-off relatives’ houses, windows down, music blaring, children and parents harmonising together (my dad was big on teaching us to harmonise). ‘The Boxer’ was one of those songs that I heard all the time, learned to sing at an early age and belted out at any opportunity I had.

My father and uncle briefly had a musical project together in which they imitated the style of Simon & Garfunkel and wrote some pretty great songs about their experiences as refugees and their experiences now in Australia. I really wish I had mp3 links to post up, because they were really brilliant. One was ‘Twenty Years Ago’, and one was ‘Ballad of a True Friend’, dedicated to my dad’s beautiful friend Pam Baker when she passed away in 2002. The harmonies that my dad and uncle created were very much inspired by my favourite duo, specifically ‘The Boxer’, so that’s another reason why this song is particularly dear to me.

There are countless memories attached to the song – my sister making awful “tell the truth” puns relating to the famous “lie la lie” chorus, my mother imitating the cymbal crash directly after that, the first time I heard it live last June and the second time I heard it live the day after. It is one of those songs that I have constantly revisited over the years and found something to silently sing about inside. It’s not my favourite Simon & Garfunkel song (that title goes to ‘America’, which incidentally is also my favourite song of all time tied with ‘The Temptation of Adam’ by Josh Ritter and also a song I have no real recollection of hearing in childhood, with second place going to ‘A Poem on the Underground Wall’) – but it is the one that I recall the most when thinking about how I came to love the thing I love the most.

I am constantly trying to convince people to listen to Simon & Garfunkel. They seem to be one of those bands that everyone is aware of, but few people, that I’ve met anyway, are truly excited about any more. The reaction I get when telling people that they’re my favourite is either “oh, that’s cool!” or “my dad listens to them, you loser”. I’d like to turn the entire world into “oh, that’s cool!” people – or even better, “me too!” people. Starting with all of you.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about making a post about why pop punk actually has merit, why it shouldn’t be discredited. It’s incredibly hard to explain to people who have already made their minds up – to them, it’s a bunch of middle-to-high-class kids whining about their first world problems to a similar audience. And I guess there is merit in that conclusion, to some degree, but I really do think that nobody can understand the impact of this kind of music unless they experienced it themselves.

I don’t talk about it much any more, but when I was younger I suffered from both obsessive-compulsive disorder and clinical depression. It was hard for me to accept, largely because I felt too ‘different’, ‘abnormal’, ‘weird’, you name it. A lot of people used it as fodder against me, which made it even more difficult – if I’d known the things I know now, it would have been much easier.

This was one of the songs that kept me from doing anything I couldn’t take back. I realise how stupid it sounds; of course I do. I’ve been amongst the people having a quiet lol at those who say “x band saved my life”, but the truth is that for so many people, that was the exact case. And sure, I did have a pretty flawless upbringing compared to other people, but everyone has their demons, everyone has their bad days, and coupled with mental imbalances, sometimes it feels like you can barely make it out alive. I remember nights holed up inside my blankets when things felt so bad that I could barely breathe, and yet putting this song on repeat through my Discman did a world of good for me, telling me to just stop for a moment, think about what I was thinking about, and hold on to any good thoughts I may have had left.

It could be a while yet before I finally piece together the right words about why and how pop punk made me the person I am today, mostly because I want it to be perfect in a way that might make detractors finally understand how important it was, and is, for so many people. It gets a much worse rap than it deserves to – anything that has helped to solve anybody’s problems, however insignificant, should be respected in its own way, even though you may not lend any gravity to a 14-year-old girl’s depression. I am thankful every single day that I heard this song when I did, because if I didn’t – and I realise how cheesy this is – there’s a chance that I wouldn’t be writing this at all.

I’ve been listening a lot this week to Weezer‘s self-titled album (Green) – my younger sister recently got her license and we’ve been sharing a car, and the girl is a total Weezer tragic and I can’t be bothered changing the CD so it’s been ‘Knock Down, Drag Out’ day after day.

It reminded me, though, of when I first heard the band – I can’t remember the year and Google isn’t helping, but I’d estimate around 2001 or 2002 when there was a Snickers ad using ‘Island in the Sun’ as their jingle. The ad showed a guy in a house looking out the window, with an attractive girl waving to him, only for him to later realise that she wasn’t actually wooing him but actually trying to alert him to the fact that his house was on fire. Pretty funny ad, but the song was what stood out to me the most (and apparently to Weezer too, seeing as they put it on not one, but two of their albums!).

I bought Maladroit around the same time and was pretty underwhelmed by it – honestly, the reason I bought it in the first place is because it was 10 dollars from some dodgy record hovel in Parramatta – a few good songs, sure (‘Keep Fishing’, awesome) but nothing outstanding. But a couple of years later I discovered the glory that is Pinkerton, and even now I struggle to think of any other album that is as consistently brilliant; it’s a timeless classic to me, even if Rivers Cuomo might disagree, even if it was critically slammed when it was released.

And what do I have to thank for my ongoing Weezer love?

This week I realised something – I am getting really, really old. Okay, so maybe 21 isn’t exactly old, but it’s just one of those periods (hehe, periods – alright, definitely not mature) where I get to thinking about the last 10 years of my life and what I’ve actually done. Sure, I passed the HSC with pretty good marks, got into uni, did some cool stuff while I was there, graduated. I’m in a pretty critical stage of my life right now – I just booked flights to Europe for a two-month holiday in September and when I get back, it’s time for me to settle down and find out where I fit in in this world. But I’d give a hell of a lot to go back a decade and feel exactly how I felt then without the worries of growing up.

So what the hell does N*SYNC have to do with any of this?

‘Bye Bye Bye’ was released in the year 2000, exactly ten years ago. I was 11 years old, just about to finish primary school and discovering music for myself, rather than just listening to my parents’ old records. I remember hearing this song and being instantly attracted to it (don’t ask me why because I have no idea), and on the day that No Strings Attached came out, I went to Sanity (oh, the days when people actually went to Sanity), shelled out a pile of earnestly saved pocket money, and bought a copy for myself. Incidentally, this was also the first record I ever purchased for myself, not including countless singles (oh, the days when people actually purchased singles on CD) – and yes, I’m perfectly willing to admit to that.

Although I’ve obviously grown past the boy band stage now, at the time it was the world to me and countless other kids (do NOT even get me started on the Backstreet Boys. Ever). I memorised all the songs on No Strings Attached (‘Bye Bye Bye’ still remaining the firm favourite, though), danced to them, sang my little heart out to them, watched the videos with the creepy fascination of a pre-pubescent girl (hello, I was one), pretended to faint when Lance Bass was on 7th Heaven (when I heard he was gay, my 11-year-old self died a slow, painful death. Even though that was in 2006). I really, really dug this record, even the weird shitty songs like ‘Digital Get Down’ which make my 21-year-old self side-eye so hard that I don’t even know what to do.

Around 2002 I became a “punk” (hah, no really, I don’t ever want to talk about that) and decided it was time to throw out my old records that provided evidence of my tween self. Out went N*SYNC. Out went Britney. Out went the Backstreet Boys. I gave them all to friends at school, family friends, whoever – just as long as they weren’t in my room to prove to everyone what a mainstream teenybopper loser I used to be (this was also around the time I called people ‘poseurs’, so pay no mind. At all).

And then a few years after that, I realised that what I’d done had been a gross mistake. Who the fuck cares what I liked when I was 11? The point is that I was 11. This shit shaped how I felt and what I liked and what made me happy, and I asked for my records back and got most of them. No Strings Attached was, sadly, never recovered, and to this day a little bit of my heart breaks whenever I hear any of the songs and pine for the physical product once again, with my name so lovingly written on the inner sleeve, as I used to do with all my albums.

The point is that even though I have this big, huge, scary future in front of me, I’m never ashamed to look back at the past and relive it when I need to. Sometimes it’s hard to believe than ten years really has passed. I know so many people who pretend their silly childhood years never happened, who claim that Pavement has been their favourite band since the tender age of 5 minutes, and sure, I used to want to be that person, but not any more. ‘Bye Bye Bye’ is my motherfucking jam. Yeah, I still wish I had a chance with Lance Bass. And since JT also got a little bit hot in the last couple of years, I’d take him on, too. I’m happy to live in the past while preparing for the future – the present is just a mixture of them both.

The moral of the story is, don’t ever let go of your childhood pleasures – you’ll really only be letting go of yourself. (Or if I wanted to be heaps shit, I could say “don’t ever say ‘Bye Bye Bye’ to your childhood pleasures”. She shoots, she SCORES!).

Here’s to the next ten years and looking back at 2010 with the same nostalgic eyes.

I was wracking my brains on the drive home from work tonight thinking of what song to talk about for this week’s throwback, when I suddenly remembered a funny incident that happened years back in regards to a Bruce Springsteen song. As I giggled behind the wheel and kept thinking, it occurred to me that a lot of fun things in my life have been soundtracked by this dude, and so it was only fitting to create a post dedicated entirely to him. Here’s to you, buddy.

I first heard ‘Shut Out The Light’ when I was about 16, in an English exam, no less. It was one of those types where you listen to an audio text and analyse it in question and answer form – for instance, “how does the protagonist describe his journey?” or something equally inane. I’d heard of Springsteen at this point but I’d never consciously been exposed to his music and if we’re being truthful here, I was rightly annoyed by it – I couldn’t understand what he was singing and nor could anyone in my class, especially since we only got two listens before having to answer questions! We all ended up with dismal marks brinking on failure because instead of writing legitimate answers to the questions, we decided it would be a hoot to write things like “I’d answer the question if I could understand what he was singing”. Oh, to be young again. (And of course, upon listening to the song again years later, it confuses me greatly how I could ever have been confused about the lyrics – his enunciation is perfectly clear!).

Another fond memory I have is of ‘Dancing in the Dark’ over the years. I first heard this song not long after The Great English Exam Incident of 2004, and I was immediately hooked on it and played it ad infinitum to anyone who would (and wouldn’t, actually) listen. I remember racing around Parramatta in my school uniform after class with my friend, singing at the top of our lungs and probably annoying the pants off everyone around us. I remember dancing on my veranda while I set up for my ’80s themed 21st with this song playing (the man who delivered my hired jukebox was also named Bruce, and I was sorely disappointed to see that, upon arrival, he wasn’t the Bruce I’d been hoping for). If I had some Polyjuice Potion, by the way, I’d definitely lace it with the hair of Courteney Cox circa 1984 if it meant that I could dance with Bruce.

When interning at Rolling Stone at the end of my first year of university in 2007, I was given a style guide (a feature common to most, if not all publications), and I remember chuckling in amusement at the rule to “never refer to Bruce Springsteen as ‘The Boss’ (on request of Mr Springsteen himself). Funnily enough, I’m quite sure I haven’t called him that since I saw the style guide all those years ago. Hope you’re happy, Bo- I mean, Mr Springsteen.

To be completely honest, Born in the USA is the only Springsteen album that I know back to front – but boy, do I know it back to front. I bonded with a girl who is now a great friend because she wore a Born t-shirt to work one day – one that I also owned, actually – and we’re still planning to overload the office with awesome one day soon by rocking up in identical Bruce-tastic outfits.

I also went out to the local flea market one hot afternoon to discover a truck full of old vinyls, and after chatting a little with the guy sitting in it, found out that he was once a DJ and was getting rid of all his old things. Digging through his stash, I was elated to find a mint copy of Born that the bloke said had only been played once (and I verified this by looking at the actual disc itself), and for only $3! Bargain of my life.

So you can imagine my blend of disgust and hilarity when, last weekend in an old record store, I spied two 15-year-old wannabe hipster boys, Sennheiser oversize headphones enveloping their puberty-free selves, shuffling through the piles. One of them leaned over and said to the other, “It’s just him singing ‘Born in the USA’ over and over. Terrible song.”

That kid’s gonna look back one day and realise that he is, in fact, a prize idiot. Mr Springsteen, you can sing whatever you like over and over and still create a little party in my soul every single time. Thanks for the memories!

(And just quietly – WHAT A FOX. Considering that he’s older than my mum? Dayyyyyyum boy.)