Album of a Year

Soundtracking twelve months in LA

October 1, 2015. I have a reservation at JFK (or was it LGA?) and a one-way ticket to Los Angeles, no U-turns. I am 29, single for the first time in a long time, freelancing. I have never lived alone. I have never lived anywhere but New York. These are the songs that drowned all of that out ^ in the year that followed.

October

“This Year,” The Mountain Goats

Months before the move, this song sends me to PsychologyToday.com to find a therapist and when I’m all fixed up — fixed up enough — it drives me to the airport. It checks me into the Airbnb on Laveta Terrace and sleeps at the foot of my renta-bed. I am gonna make it/ through this year/ if it kills me on repeat. I text the video to my dad, a guitar player, “Can you learn the chords before Christmas?” (I don’t see my parents for Christmas.)

Only three months left in the calendar year and I can make it, right? I have my doubts. But now, walking down Sunset Boulevard for the first time, all sweaty earbuds and miniature next to home-dotted hills and flamingo-legged trees, now: I’m finally here and I’m thinking every time I breathe there’s a little more Los Angeles in my lungs and so far that’s a good thing and I bet I won’t stop breathing yet — not until 2016, at the very least.