I Learned the Word “Palimpsest” This Week

I’m not totally sure about any of the actual details — where I was, who I was with, why I even first picked up the album. It was probably 1993, based on album release dates. I was still in a weird space, taste-wise — desperately searching for an identity, vacillating between mainstream metal and the early days of hit-making grunge. There was no Sunny Day Real Estate yet, no Stranger than Fiction, no mix-tape-from-a-girlfriends-brother to introduce me to early R.E.M. We were still two years away from my first punk show. This was proto-Corey, music-wise at least.

But there was this. A cardboard jewel case, a cover with orange and yellow fire (I think), and a lowercase “n.” Six songs, 91 blank tracks, and then two more songs. The first song started at silence, getting louder over its entire one minute and three seconds, until it suddenly cut out to start the next. Then, the sound of white noise or an air duct or something not unlike the wind straining through a slightly cracked window on the interstate.

The white noise cut out. The words began.

This is the first day, of my last days.

And then the guitars. H O L Y S H I T. I don’t know guitars or anything but I can only imagine these guitars were specially built by agents of Hell, distorted and screaming, the sound garbled past the point of mortality, unlike any guitars I’d heard in my life. This was not Kirk Hammett. This was not Scott Ian. This was certainly not Kurt Cobain. This was something else.

This was Nine Inch Nails, and this is what it was like listening to “Wish” for the first time. Nothing had ever sounded like this in the history of recorded music and I was hearing it, right then, for the first time, and my head might have exploded, except I know it didn’t explode because I am still here and I continue to listen to that song and will continue to listen to that song until I am no longer alive to listen to that song. This song is a part of me; it changed one small element of how I think about music, about heaviness, about electronic sounds and cool jewel cases and weird album numbering systems.

And that’s literally all I remember. The feeling.

The older I get, there are more songs like this; songs with no return address, where I still remember the sounds and the transitions and the overall vibe while losing the memory itself. Not that the details aren’t always there — it would probably take me about five seconds to text someone and confirm who introduced me to Broken — but that the details no longer matter. Just the song itself. The borders dissolved and the context was lost.

Two weeks ago, as our ongoing denial of global warming served us a perfect February spring day, it happened again: The Promise Ring’s 30 Degrees Everywhere — an album I can generally place in time (released in September, in heavy rotation the winter of 96–97 in advance of an opening slot for Texas is the Reason in early January 1997), but cannot place why it puts me in springtime. I don’t know who introduced me to it, though it was definitely introduced to me, because you don’t just stumble onto The Promise Ring in the mid-nineties without help. I don’t remember what I thought before it started or what I did when it was over. I just remember “Everywhere in Denver” — one chord, chugga chugga chugging into my life, Davey von Bohlen’s voice arriving lisp-riddled. It’s impossible to explain to anyone but myself. That’s just how music goes, I guess.

There’s a word for this, kind of: palimpsest. Because parchment was expensive, it would tend to be re-used — the words erased and scraped off but the impression still remaining like ghost text. The “feeling” remains, in a way, and if you squint enough you can apply this to these songs. I can still feel it there with José González’s cover of “Heartbeats,” with the first few minutes of “Firestorm,” with the spacey desolation of “Cowboy Dan.” We think of songs as reminders — you hear something in a grocery store and you’re suddenly nineteen, in a specific car, on a specific road, the whole memory arriving uninvited. The song is the trigger; the situation is the thing. That’s the normal way it works.

But there’s a version where the impression is all there is, the details scraped away while the vibe remains. You hear “Wish” and you feel something — some residue of a moment, the vague emotional shape of an experience — but when you reach for the details, there’s nothing to grab.

The song becomes a weird ghost. Recognized as having mattered, but lost in time, like a photograph of a room you don’t remember being in.

These songs have implied history. You can feel that something happened, a door that opened a crack and then closed again, the shape of the room still faintly there in the dark. Something happened. The song remembers it, even if I don’t.