After graduating high school I took a year off to pursue a career in film production, a career that I had already been working at since I was 14. At 18 years-old I was working 14 hour days on set with a 90 minute commute back home to Long Island. When the commute was too much or the trains already stopped running for the night, I would stay at friends or crew members apartments. I would hang out at union square on Thursday and Friday nights where large groups of young people, who were all older than me at the time, would gather to celebrate being young and free. It was a fun, chaotic, experimental, slightly irresponsible, sometimes plain old stupid period in my life to say the least. The undiagnosed bipolar disorder raging in my brain was driving my often erratic behavior. I was manic. I thrived on set and in the editing room. Then I would crash. I would come home and cut myself, the bandages dismissed as just the cost of working a physically laborious job.
Music was constantly blasting in my headphones to drown out my own self-destructive thoughts. But music was also a trigger. I felt music so deeply and personally, a single song could alter my mood like turning on a light switch. A bass line could make my heart race, a verse could stop me from going off the deep end, and a great bridge could push me off. This playlist is from a very specific time in my life that I can only half remember because depression blacks out memories. But certain songs hold onto those memories for me.
There’s a Fire – OKGo
I went to every OKGo concert in New York City between 2013 and 2016. The only reason I stopped is because they stopped touring. They were and still are one of my favorite bands.
“On the count of three we’re all gonna stomp. One, two, three…” The front man Damian recorded the audience on an iphone stomping, clapping, hissing, and clicking. Then the drummer tapped at the phone using the audience’s sounds to create the beat of their song There’s a Fire. A beautifully simple song about a boy who cried wolf. “I mean it, there’s a problem here / this time it is for real / How can I make myself more clear?” “There’s a fire” And there really was. This song felt like the back and forth in my mind about if I was actually in crisis and how do I tell someone when I’ve pretended to be ok for so long?
Cherry Blossom – Paolo Nutini
It was the most beautiful day, it was summer in the city and I was on an upswing after a bad depression. I was a production assistant on a mission to pick up a fog machine from some prop house in Brooklyn and deliver it to Long Island City. I listened to this song on loop almost the entire hour and a half trip. On the cab ride back we drove under a canopy of cherry blossoms. It was a moment of bliss bathed in pink flowers.
Someone New – Hozier
I’ve fallen in love over 1,000 times. 995 of those times lasted less than two days. Hundreds of those lasted the amount of time the A C E takes to get from Penn Station down to West 4th Street.
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards – Tame Impala
I had a crush on this sound guy that I was working on a feature film with. I was the 2nd assistant director and I was only 19. Is that a shameless humble brag? Yes. But it also expresses how fucking surreal my life was. I smoked pot for the first time with that sound guy. He showed me this song. I don’t know if it was the melody, the pot, or him but it made me feel like I was falling backwards infinitely through a hypnotic spiral. Having said that… I realize it was definitely the pot.
When Did Your Heart Go Missing – Rooney
Rooney has a real Cali livin’ kind of vibe. They put a California filter over my gloomy New York lens. One of the most unreal things that happened in my film career was when a friend flew me out to L.A. to be the assistant camera person on his senior thesis film. I made a playlist for the trip and 80% of it was Rooney. I always daydreamed about moving to L.A. to be a director and listening to Rooney as I cruise down the pacific coast highway.
