Photobooth

Back in the mid-90s, I went to a college party in Austin with some high school friends of mine. People I was friends with all through the 90s, don’t but really see anymore. We were tight then, though. And the party, it was big enough that I didn’t know everyone, but small enough that I ended up talking to everyone who was there.

So at one point I got outside to have a smoke, and I was chatting with some kids who were about my age, but I didn’t know them. I can’t remember what we talked about, but it was late and I was drunk enough to feel at ease—even with strangers. Eventually we decided to get in the car and drive around and share a joint.

As we drove, a girl in the front seat started talking about how the kids inside were such assholes, so she just had to get out of that apartment. These people back at the party were stuck up and condescending and insufferable. It took me a minute, but I realized she was talking about my friends.

Here’s the thing though, the kids in the car were just like my friends. In the way every close friend group is a version the Scooby Doo Mystery Gang. The pretty one and her well-adjusted boyfriend. The the other pretty one who’s slightly nerdier. The tall, awkward guy who also eats dog food. The weird one where you can only understand like every 5th word or so, etc.

I didn’t think my friends were assholes. I think being an outsider and trying to interact with an insular group of friends can seem simultaneously impenetrable and familiar—they’re just like us, but they are uncanny-valley versions of our own friends, with a shared language of inaccessible secrets and in-jokes.

Like the season-6 episode of the Simpsons where all the people in Shelbyville are near-mirror images of their counterparts in Springfield. Or the “Bizarro Jerry” episode of Seinfeld where the gang runs into their own doppelgängers. I’m not a person who makes new friends easily, but every time I’ve gone to a new school or started a new job, I find new versions of my old acquaintances, who have the same hair, or the same way of speaking, and I slip into my new situation like an old pair of jeans.

That’s what this felt like.

At one point one of the kids in the back wondered where we were gonna go next, and I said, “I kinda need to go back to the party. That’s where my ride is at.” Now these kids all seemed to realize I wasn’t part of their group. “I thought he was he with you,” one of them said. It was awkward. But they were nice about it, and they dropped me off back at the party.

When I heard “Photobooth” for the first time, this mid-90s college moment came rushing back to me out of my memory. It was two lyrics in particular. The way Ben Gibbard sings “you were so condescending,” I can hear front-seat girl saying it in my head. Or maybe she didn’t say those words exactly? Who knows, but it’s what think of when I hear that line.

And as the summer's ending The cool air will push your hard heart away You were so condescending

And then this part:

Cup your mouth to compress the sound Skinny dipping with the kids from a nearby town

That’s feeling: experiencing such brief intimacy with strangers or friends-of-friends or short-term acquaintances, and how it can help you figure out who you are. Or maybe who you shouldn’t be. It’s a song about nostalgia, and all the inadequate ways we capture our memories. A song about how old lovers and friends can be mirrors of selves we can’t access anymore.

A janky beat from a toy keyboard opens and closes the song. The Casiotone drums and the fading quality of a photobooth picture; these elements reinforce the compromised fidelity of our shared pasts. It can be hard to remember what was said, or who was at fault. And what we do remember is unreliable at best.

I have photos of me as a little kid, but after that the earliest photos I can find go back to 2003. I’m not really friends with my 90s friends anymore (and it’s entirely my fault—in so many ways). I can’t remember the people I worked with in the year 2000 at that first job out of college, and I can’t find them on Facebook or LinkedIn. There’s a lot of ways in which my late teens and twenties don’t really exist anywhere but inside my head.

I can go back there any time I want, though. It’s all there in the uncanny Shelbyville of my mind.

Favorite Lyrics:

And this is all that's left Scraping paper to document I've packed a change of clothes, and it's time to move on

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Bonus: My favorite EPs.

“Photobooth” comes from Death Cab for Cutie’s excellent Forbidden Love EP. Here are five other other incredible EPs that were important parts of my musical life.

1. Spoon - Soft Effects. This EP changed my life in a Garden State kind of way. Especially as a musician. Discovering Spoon changed the way I wrote songs and the way I sang them. I’ve never been as good as Britt Daniel, but I’ve always wished I were.

2. Yo La Tengo - Camp Yo La Tengo. This includes the lovely, Georgia-sung version of “Tom Courtney,” and a bone-rattling cover of the Seeds’ “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” If I were a baseball player, the opening trem-soaked chords of this song would be my walk-up music.

3. Pixies - Dig for Fire EP. Yes, I know their first album Come On Pilgrim is really an EP. But that’s too obvious. Instead, I’ll take this little CD single that contains the Pixies’ cover of Neil Young’s “Winterlong.” Kim Deal and Black Francis never sang more sweetly together than they do here, and that’s why this is the best version of this classic song.

4. Belle and Sebastian - Dog on Wheels. This one has my favorite Belle and Sebastian song “The State That I am In.”

5. Calexico / Iron and Wine - In the Reins. Apex Calexico and Iron & Wine together on an EP that’s nearly an album. “History of Lovers” is an all-timer. Just try not smiling when the horns come in. Can’t be done.