by Hannah McLeod
What everyone knows about the song “Baby” by Ariel Pink is that it feels like the type of song that plays as you become untethered to your surroundings, levitate and then float away while watching the perfect summer day unfold below you. You aren’t concerned at the floating away because you’re probably drinking a milkshake and will end up asleep in your bed at the end of it all. Or under a nice tree. Or back in the chair from whence you departed after ingesting a substance that Nancy Reagan told you not to.
What I assume everyone knows about the song, because I tend to be the last person I know to learn wild things, is that it is not in fact by Ariel Pink, but is a rerelease of a 1979 version of the same song by Donnie and Joe Emerson. If you’re wondering who Donnie and Joe Emerson are, picture two white dudes with black hair and tight white button up shirts, with impossibly large collars, unbuttoned well below the nipple line. IDK it was the seventies.
What no one knows about that song is that one sunny morning in September, 2017 my best friend (best feels possessive and childish but couldn’t be more appropriate in this instance… the term could be replaced with magnificent, true, or only), tired of waiting for me to wake up, barreled through my bedroom door on uneven feet, holding two cups of coffee and plopped down on the bed beside my legs, unperturbed by the sleeping man that neither of us knew very well. After reluctantly sitting up in the tangle of white sheets she handed me one of the cups and curled her legs in toward her onto the bed.
At once it was story time — the dreaded hour for those among us humans that tend to lack control when it comes to ingestible poisons and one of unmitigated joy and pretension for those that don’t — a time to rehash whatever dumb shit had happened the night before, the relics of which still breathed softly beside me. As this glorious woman always did, she found the music that very precisely fit her mood, clicked play on the cracked phone screen and set it on the window sill. She laughed without restraint as she recounted events already long forgotten by my own undependable brain, resplendent in fresh lipstick, the tone of her voice a constant invitation for intimate proximity.
What I remember about that morning is the song “Baby” was playing from her phone on the sill.
When “Baby” was rereleased by Ariel Pink in 2012, she and I had been everything to each other for more than 10 years already. It was a soft place we kept coming back to.
This memory is made up.
Not the whole thing. I know the particulars of that morning occurred partly because it is so unspectacular I wouldn’t have manufactured it, but mostly because there is a dumb photo of this person sitting on the end of my bed, holding a cup of coffee, phone on the window sill beside her, looking decidedly less shabby than I remember feeling, which is time stamped 9:38 a.m. Saturday, September 16, 2017.
What I did is make up which song was playing. I did that because I never saw this human again after that morning — not the sleeping one beside me, I would see that stranger too many times in the months to come before never seeing them again — but the lovely girl crammed against the window sill on the edge of the bed smearing lipstick onto the disposal coffee cup lid as she drank.
Music was a big part of us, a miniscule sliver of the light she brought to my life. I know she loved that song long before that morning and I loved it long after and so for some reason I can’t discern, I decided a while ago that this is the song I want to have been playing that morning, when, even with a stranger invading our bond our peace our privacy, we were together like it used to always be. I think I made it up because it felt like betrayal to forget.
In reality there probably wasn’t just one song, she probably played one of her countless playlists that were curated to fit moods as general as “red wine, pizza and conversation,” or as specific as “driving to the coast in late July while dark clouds weigh heavy on the air and a warm wind tousles the trees just enough to see the light greygreen underside of leaves otherwise covered in the deepgreen of late summer,” or “get well, papa.”
Our first mutual playlist love came in the fort beneath my bunk beds when we watched and rewound and watched and rewound the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie until the VCR gave out on us. It didn’t matter because by that time we knew every line and the general hum of the background music that accompanied each scene. Neither of us were coordinated enough to reenact the fight scenes but we lunged and thrusted in valiant attempts all the same. Bandanas on heads.
There was the particularly nasty one we created in eighth grade, full of the voices of women scorned, after the knowledge of her father’s betrayal came seeped into our understanding. There is no cure for the feeling of being pushed off a cliff, no way to catch someone who feels that way, but sappy songs and white cheddar cheetos are helpful.
Maybe she had the perfect playlist for that sunny September morning, for whatever the mood is when you’re just hungover enough to be voraciously hungry, still a bit giddy, and are looking forward to a day spent doing nothing with the person you love.
I don’t know because I can’t remember. But “Baby” by Ariel Pink looks like the milky pale color of her skin, it smells like her hair and feels like the ease and stillness of lying with the person who knows you better than you know yourself and effortlessly appreciates you exactly as you are in each moment.
