Run My Heart | Twin Shadow

Sunday, Another Day. Another Track turned one year old. 

Crazy. One year. One fucking year.

I remember writing the first review. Sitting in my hotel room during the Eyeo festival in Minneapolis. Feeling a little lost. Feeling a little injured. I remember inadvertently watching Twilight, hearing a Bon Iver and St. Vincent song, and being compelled to start a music project that had been floating around in my head the past few days.

The months before Eyeo, I’d been sitting on a train everyday listening to the same song over and over again. While I asked the same questions over and over again. And coming up with the same answers that made my eyes well up…and made me get angry at myself for forgetting kleenex over and over again.

I remember during Eyeo, listening to Nicholas Felton talk about Feltron.com and how he collected his data. I remembering wondering what my quantified self would look like. What would be the data points in my life that would show me the patterns of the my year? 

Easy.

But how could I quantify the music I listened to? And what did it mean if I was listing to the same track? If it was on repeat for months, could I look back and tell that I was stuck dring those months? Would the song tell me anything about why I was stuck? Would a tag cloud of lyrics identify when I was hurt? Could a BPM indicate heartbreak?

Maybe the quantified self didn’t work here. Maybe just seeing the song I listened to one day wouldn’t tell me anything about why I felt I had to listen to it that day. Or how it changed my day after i did.

Maybe I would just have to write about it. Maybe I would just have to sit down and be honest about why I listend to a same song over and over again. And asked the same questions over and over again. Maybe I would need to realize that it wasn’t the music I had been listening to and writing about for The Owl Mag that needed reviewing.

I spent the last night of the Eyeo festival drinking with my friend Luke. A random guy I met the first day there who became my Eyeo partner in crime. A week of going to talks, lectures, and meet-up, culminated in a brilliant night of beers, brainstorming, laughs, and postulating. But one part of the conversation has stuck with me.

Me: “I never fuck up.”
Luke: “And that’s why you haven’t had many relationships.”

Yep. Someone who had known me for less than a week called me on my shit. And made me realize that there were a shit ton more songs that I needed to listen to.