Last night, I couldn't sleep because I was caught up in nostalgia--a very specific moment of my childhood, a memory I couldn't stop thinking about. I was a kid, small enough to stand upright in a car without hitting my head. I was driving somewhere with my grandpa and my dad, my grandpa driving his metallic green Pontiac. I was standing in the back seat, leaning over the front. We were drinking little cans of V8. The hot, Utah sun was pushing through the windows making the vinyl seats sticky and smelly. The radio was on, that tinny hollow of an AM car radio.
The radio is what started me thinking about this memory, that sound that only old AM radios can make, that sound that makes some songs sound so impossibly perfect. I'd been thinking about old country songs from the sixties and seventies and how much I like them and how my reason for liking them was very much because of the drone of the AM radio in a sunny, sleepy car.
So, here for you are a couple of songs which may not sound as good as they should in their MP3-ness, but maybe they will take you to a sunny car somewhere perfect, some time ago.
Ruth Asawa retrospective in MoMa
5 months ago
