also i'm going to go shopping at american eagle

I've been having a weirdly nostalgic music day. It started out looking kind of bleak -- for those of you who don't know, DO NOT listen to Bright Eyes first thing in the morning -- but went off in an altogether unexpected direction.

I've been listening to a ton of Mike Doughty this week. He's got a new album coming out in February, and recently did a tour wherein audience members could put questions into a jar and he would answer them onstage. I found two amazing bootlegs from last month on Archive.org, and have been playing them nonstop. Even at the worst of times, Doughty is one of the most electric performers I've ever seen, and on these shows he's at the top of his game. The tone is energetic, experimental, playful. And the new songs are rickdiculous.

So it's not all that shocking that I found myself listening to Haughty Melodic this morning. No, what's really shocking is where that led. Dave Matthews' backing vocals on Tremendous Brunettes made me miss him, and I found myself playing Crash for the first time in I don't know how long. I really got that feeling like I was in 10th grade again. You know, kind of awkward.

As Josh used to say back in the day, there's something inherent in Matthews' voice that makes you vaguely and aimlessly nostalgic. Perhaps that's what did it.

I didn't get all the way through Crash before I had to go answer a call, and I was away from my desk for so long that there was really no hope for my attention to be intact when I got back. Imagine my surprise, though, when I was struck with an indelible desire to listen to David Gray. As if by some strange providence, I found White Ladder on my iPod. This is really beyond explanation, but it was amazing. It's almost like that record only exists in the fall of 2000, and you literally have to go back there to listen to it.

I'm really fascinated by humans' internal clocks, the weird rhythms of our bodies and the strange connections of our subconsciouses. So I'm very serious when I ask, is it possible that some recess of my brain has been jarred by these strange flights of fancy and is actually triggering desires that I had back then? Because I'm very serious when I say that I'm listening to Third Eye Blind's second album right now.

I actually go back to their first record quite a lot; it's incredibly good if you bother to actually listen to it, and remains one of my favorite albums, if only for playing such an important role in my formative years. Say what you will, I was 15, and I'm telling you, listen to it. I cannot say the same of their second record.

Blue is troubled to say the least. There are some real interesting moments, and throughout you can hear that they're trying something, but you never get a real sense of what that is. Like, say, the children's choir singing, "Baby daddy keep your boo;" where are you going with that, exactly? I was a little surprised that there are two tracks, "Anything" and "Darkness," that still seem to hit me dead center. They're both for the most part unfussy, or at least less fussy than the rest of it, and as a result come off as the most earnest parts of the album.

Maybe I'll go home and watch Dawson's Creek.