1997
Autumn Sweater
Yo La Tengo
In the summer of ’96, I was about to enter my fourth year of college and my second year at the University of Houston. I was looking for a new place, and I had heard through a friend that a fellow UH student was looking for a new roommate, so I got his number and reached out to him.
Patrick rode his bike up to meet me while I was working box office at the Landmark River Oaks 3, the arthouse theater at the corner of Shepherd and West Gray. He seemed even taller and skinnier than me. Older too, with shards of grey in his jagged mop of black hair. He was gangly and wore glasses, and he talked with a funny accent I’d never heard before. He was from Queens, but it was not a New York accent. He spoke like a witty professor, every word considered and sculpted before it was spoken. He was an architecture student, and I was to Iearn later he was a guy who built his words carefully, and who listened well, so that you could add to the structure.
We met and chatted briefly at the theater, then I drove over the next day to check out the place. He was renting a spacious but spare two bedroom upstairs apartment in the heart of Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, which was known as the city’s gay / bohemian neighborhood. But in the mid-90s it was one of Houston’s only truly walkable neighborhoods. Rent was $550 plus utilities, and I was to pay half.
I moved in within a week after only meeting twice. And in retrospect, I have no idea how Patrick put up with me. I was loud and opinionated and I smoked in the apartment. I would do dishes, but I was not neat. I would talk constantly while he tried to work at his drafting table in the kitchen. He didn’t have a TV when I moved in. I insisted on getting cable. Where he once had enjoyed a quietude with his former female roommate, I was a jackass braying about.
But if Patrick had reservations about me moving in, he made no mention of it. And I took to him immediately. He had a combo record / cd player on one side of his drafting table and a box of vinyl record albums on the other. I loved going through his music and listening to stuff I’d never heard. I remember he had a couple of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (OMD) records, and I’d never heard of them. Simon and Garfunkel. Talking Heads. Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Dire Straits’ self-titled debut. He also had Beatles* Past Masters on CD, and I had never listened to the Beatles before outside of what I knew from the radio. In the two and half years I lived with Patrick, I would fully absorb Revolver, Abbey Road*,and* The White Album*. I also made my way through the Beatles Anthology documentary on VHS which came out in 1996.
In 1996, my music collection was much more extensive than Patrick’s, but he wasn’t much interested in the music I liked. I would play him stuff, and he’d say listen for while, before saying something like, “Interesting” or “Hmmm.” He eventually would admit he wasn’t very interested in most of the stuff I played him. And he didn’t spend time combing through my collection the way I had dissected his. Patrick had an intense relationship with a small number of songs and albums he already liked, and he listened to them repeatedly. At the time I met him, he wasn’t listening to much new music at all.
There was one band I played for him that he really liked, and fortunately it was my favorite band of all time: Yo La Tengo. After I showed it to him, he listened to their album Painful a ton in his obsessive way. Sometimes jamming it all night while he worked on his portfolio projects. I was proud as hell. I at least had one significant victory in my tiny, personal campaign to win him over to my favorite musics.
I talked to Patrick recently, because I told him I was writing this essay about him and Yo La Tengo. We discussed the day I walked up Montrose Boulevard to Soundwaves to buy the new Yo La Tengo CD, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. Almost 30 years later we both remembered it was a sunny afternoon when I returned home and popped into the tray and hit play.
“I took to it immediately,” Patrick said. “I didn’t have that kind of natural reticence that I normally have with with any new music. Like I just, I just kind of glommed onto it.” As he did with Sade and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?,” he became obsessed with one song in particular playing it over and over again for weeks. That song was the closest thing the band ever had to a hit: “Autumn Sweater.”
As Patrick and I talked about the song, it dawned on me that I had misunderstood the lyrics for literally the entire time I’ve listened to the song. In my head, I always thought it was a date situation, a girl was coming over to go on a date with the singer. That’s why he’s nervous when he hears the knock at the door and “couldn’t catch my breath.”
But Patrick’s reading of the song is that it’s about a couple who are already together. One of them (Ira Kaplan, who sings and plays organ on the song) is an introvert and the other (Georgia Hubley on drums) is having a group of people over to hang out.
“What any introvert really dislikes, Patrick said, “is the idea of people coming over. We agreed a week ago that this would be a good idea for everybody to come over, but now it’s actually happening, and I, I’m struggling to deal with it.”
Suddenly, talking to him, it’s obvious Patrick is right about the song. In 1997, Georgia and Ira had been married for 10 years and writing songs as Yo La Tengo since 1984. In the song, Ira has agreed to host this party, but he’s simply lost having to talk to all these people when what he really wants to do is “slip away / wouldn’t that be better / me with nothing to say / and you in your autumn sweater.”
Even if I was wrong about it, with Yo La Tengo and “Autumn Sweater” I had finally broken through. Patrick liked something I played for him. But it was frustrating too, because he wasn’t really into the whole album like I was. “Autumn Sweater” wasn’t even my favorite song on the record. Probably wasn’t my fourth or fifth favorite song. What did Patrick like so much about it?
“I loved Simon and Garfunkel and I loved, you know, other other, like folksy music,” Patrick said. “I really seem to enjoy music that one would be incapable of dancing to. But like, here, you had introduced me to a band that wrote this completely grooving song with with, like an introvert’s voice at the center. Yeah, so, like, I didn’t, I didn’t know that there could be a song like this. I didn’t know that a song like this was possible.”
“He’s not shouting,” Patrick continued. ”He’s something between talking and whispering. ‘I tried my best to hide in a crowded room. It’s nearly impossible.’”
The more we talked, I started to appreciate the way “Autumn Sweater” spoke to the odd-couple collision between Patrick and me. Patrick, reserved, quiet, studious, older than me. And, certainly at the time, early in my 20s, I was not quiet, studious, or reserved. I hosted parties. I drank and smoked. I played in a rock band and practiced guitar quite loudly. I wrote and sang all my songs in the living room without regard to the silence.
“Autumn Sweater” is a lonely dance party of a song that seemed to capture both of us. A minor key organ and quiet singer ruminating his way through a party in his own home he wants badly to escape. When they play it live, though, it has a monster beat. Because Kaplan’s bandmates, Hubley and bassist James McNew, are both hammering away on the drums throughout the song. “Autumn Sweater” is the sound of that organ trying to slip away from the persistent, oblivious rhythm swirling all around it.
But if Patrick and I were an odd couple, we remember the two years and change as a beautiful time for both of us. We read the New York Times together on Sundays and drank our coffee. We’d watch Law and Order and Martha Stewart. Play Mario Kart on Nintendo 64. In a city where nearly everyone has to drive everywhere, we mostly walked and rode bikes, and took the bus. Living in the heart of city, wherever we went felt like a college campus. Neither of us had money to burn. But we could get 99 cent pizza at Bambolino’s on the corner and $1 margaritas at Chapultepec across the street.
Each of us late into our college years, with no other pressing responsibilities and oceans of free time. It’s was the time of your life where two years feels like 20. I could write a whole book about my adventures with Patrick in those last few years before graduation. Maybe one day I will.
If you’re this far down, you probably feel like I already did.
**Favorite lyrics: **
So I looked for your eyes
And the waves looked like
They’d pour right out of them
I’ll try hard, I’ll try always,
But its a waste of time
If I can’t smile easily
Like in the beginning