Tag: nostalgia

ONLY NOISE: My Parents’ Tapes Taught Me How to Love ‘Uncool’ Music

Kiri Oliver dyes Easter eggs at her grandparents’ house in the Car Tapes era.

ONLY NOISE explores music fandom with poignant personal essays that examine the ways we’re shaped by our chosen soundtrack. This week, Kiri Oliver takes us on a trip with the soundtrack to her childhood – before “coolness” dictated the playlist.

Growing up, my parents rarely played albums in the house — I mostly remember hearing classical radio in the background. But they had three portable cases of cassettes that they brought on car trips, most often to my grandparents’ house in Connecticut. It was an eclectic mix of ‘80s and ‘90s albums, many of which remain among my favorites to this day.

I’ve realized over time that these albums embody a strong sense of nostalgia for me — nostalgia for a very specific set of circumstances that allowed me to listen to and absorb music without context. It was the pre-internet era, and therefore pre-everyone having takes on everything all the time. It was also before I started talking to other people about music, going to shows, being a part of scenes, and building my identity around the bands and genres I liked.

I really appreciate that I had the experience of learning what I liked musically as a kid and preteen without anyone telling me what was cool or not—messages I later had a hard time disentangling from my tastes. In some ways, I knew what I liked when I was nine and rocking out in the backseat more than I did when I was 19 and hanging out with indie rock snobs who worshiped Pere Ubu and said things like “don’t worry, your tastes will mature.”

And now, when I go back and listen to what my nine-year-old self flipped out over, I still hear what excited me so much the first time around. I also hear so many of the elements I’m still drawn to as a fan and songwriter, including theatricality, giant hooks, piano, harmonies, and vocals shot through with emotion. A few highlights from the car tapes are below, and my full playlist is here.

Enya – “Book of Days”

I don’t know why my parents were so into Enya, but we had at least four of her tapes in the car. My favorite song was “Book of Days,” a lush, rousing number with approximately 1,000 layers of vocals in Irish Gaelic that predicted my obsessive love of the Titanic soundtrack. I listened to it just now and had a minor life crisis wondering how I never noticed the chorus was in English—according to Wikipedia, the original version was replaced with a bilingual one that now appears on the album instead. Irish Gaelic 4ever.

REM – “Try Not to Breathe”

REM was another heavy hitter in the car rotation. “Try Not to Breathe” from Automatic for the People was always one of my favorites, but I honestly didn’t realize until now that it’s about death. How did I not get that before, you might ask, when it includes lyrics like “I will try not to breathe/This decision is mine/I have lived a full life/And these are the eyes that I want you to remember”? I have a different relationship to the music I loved when I was very young, which I didn’t necessarily absorb or connect with on a topical level even though I could sense the feelings being expressed. So I knew this was a sad song—just not this sad.

Phil Collins – “Something Happened on the Way to Heaven”

I still haven’t figured out whether liking Phil Collins is definitely uncool, or passably cool if it’s ironic, but I don’t care—I love Phil Collins. This song’s dramatic, horn-laden introduction sounds like the lead-up to a West Side Story-style dance fight. In 2018, the chorus lyrics “you can run and you can hide, but I’m not leaving unless you come with me” sound a bit ominous and coercive. But in the song, Phil sounds naively hopeful enough to pull it off—and the cheery horns definitely help.

Sarah McLachlan – “Vox”

Before she was known for her coffeeshop fare and Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan made ethereal new-age albums in the ‘80s. My evidence backing up this statement is that I listened to her album Touch a LOT and the tape said 1989 on the back cover. Anyway, “Vox” is music for frolicking fairies, full of sparkling acoustic guitar and soaring vocals (including a less-angsty version of a Tori Amos wail). It also has a bouncy synth riff thrown on top of all this, which both makes no sense and is perfect.

Live – “Pillar of Davidson”

Is it weird for a 5th grader’s favorite song to be an almost 7-minute album track that I just learned is about factory workers’ rights? Probably. Does this song still rip? Absolutely. It starts with an old western, rolling-tumbleweeds feel and escalates into one of the biggest choruses I’ve ever heard, with Ed Kowalczyk rhapsodizing about “the shepherd of my days” while the drummer goes to town on the ride cymbal. I still lose it every time I listen.

Patty Smyth and Don Henley – “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough”

This is a beautiful and melancholy duet about adult heartbreak that I couldn’t have possibly understood at the time, but it still genuinely moved me. Did I know from my ten years of life experience that “there’s a danger in loving somebody too much”? Definitely not. Did I personally relate to Patty’s lament in the bridge that “there’s no way home when it’s late at night and you’re all alone”? Nope, but I’ve apparently always been a sucker for power ballads.

Meat Loaf – “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”

My revelation from revisiting Meat Loaf’s albums is that Bat Out of Hell is the original American Idiot. Listen to this song from part II: it starts with a chant of “wasted youth,” it ambitiously crams a ton of parts into 7.5 minutes, it has a whole background choir, AND it’s about both war and chicks. Key lyric: “You gotta serve your country, gotta service your girl/You’re all enlisted in the armies of the night.” It’s insane to me that it took until 2017 for Bat Out of Hell The Musical to exist (it ran in London and Toronto, with a tour and NYC run in the works).

I think my parents still have the tapes in the back of a closet, although they’ve long since upgraded their car to one without a tape deck, and I’ve achieved the stereotype of native New Yorker who can’t drive. But I’ve been rocking out to my Car Tapes playlist for a few years now, and I’ve found that it brings me comfort, joy and a break from the endless pursuit of keeping up with new media. We spend so much time taking in new information so we can carefully curate our image and tastes for the consumption of friends, acquaintances and strangers; it feels like a radical act of self-care to detach and dance around my room to a goofy song I loved deeply and unironically when I was nine. I was so sure then of what spoke to me, without needing to explain or even understand why. All these years later, with a head full of countless other people’s musical opinions, it feels so good to tune that out and tune into a channel that feels like mine alone – a channel that happens to play a lot of Enya.

PLAYING DETROIT: Sammy Morykwas Pens Bouncy Ode to Sipping Arnold Palmers

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Photo by Jordan Isom

Here in Michigan, we are the type of freaks that wear shorts when it’s fifty degrees out. After a long, long winter, the sun has finally graced us with its presence, lifting Detroit from its collective seasonal depression. Just in time for this changing of the seasons, local producer and songwriter Sammy Morykwas released his first solo single, “AP,” and it is, in my humble opinion, the song of the summer.

“AP” is a deliciously nostalgic hip-hop track that flows as easily as those tall-ass Arizona Arnold Palmer ice teas, which Morykwas sings about with impressive ease (try saying Arizona Arnold Palmer five times fast). Railing off totems of yesteryear, like Hi-C, superman ice-cream, and the word “hyphy,” Morykwas brings us back to a simpler time when summers were spent drinking Four Lokos and passing out in a field somewhere. The song’s bouncy rhythm and Morykwas’ clever rhymes make the song feel like a more sophisticated, upbeat version of LFO’s “Summer Girls.”

After one play, you will undoubtedly be singing about Arnold Palmers for days and itching for a carefree summer fling. Listen at your own risk below.

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PLAYING DETROIT: Prude Boys “The Outlaw”

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When the sandy shores of a zombie beach party meet the salty lawlessness of a vintage wild west shoot-out, you would likely find yourself galloping within the Tarantino-lite dreamworld crafted by the latest tracks from garage pop threesome Prude Boys.

The Outlaw, though only two tracks long, make for a grungy Lee Hazelwood x Nancy Sinatra reboot while garnering imagery of seduction and escape with their uniquely refined and playful nostalgia. The opening riff from the titled track is reminiscent of The Dandy Warhols lick from “You Were the Last High” but in Prude Boys uptempo context feels urgent and authentic surrounded by vocalist Caroline Myrick’s haunted warble. Wildly expressive without much deviation, “The Outlaw” is genre-less and toggles between what feels like fantasy cinema and curious reality like a chase through the Hollywood backlots and sound stages, dipping in and out of backdrops of ghost towns and real life coffee shops.

“You Plague My Dreams” follows “The Outlaw” with a jutting rock tale of a lingering lover. Tormented by wanting to stay but the unfair crimes of still hanging around even while deep into the R.E.M cycle, our antagonists find ways to make resentment soft and make guitars sound as though they are slamming doors. Though a little less obvious in its cinematic tonality than the EP’s opener, “You Plague My Dreams” finds itself in the closing credits territory which is apropos for a band with a knack for seeing the bigger picture.

Saddle up and get rowdy with the latest from Prude Boys below:

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ONLY NOISE: A Man Called Priddy

madison bloom grandpa

I am a scavenger, perhaps an opportunist, although that doesn’t sound very rugged. Ever since moving to New York in 2008, I’ve developed a wild thirst for the “hunt” whenever I return to either of my parents’ homes. The “hunt” occurs when after only moments of being beyond the doormat, all I want to do is rip through bookshelves, closets, photo albums, the garage, etc. It is a side effect of my severe addiction to nostalgia; a dangling carrot suggesting that around every nook I might find something exquisite. And, I typically do.

Despite the virtue of minimalism, I’m grateful as hell that my parents, especially my mother and grandparents (who we called Papa Charlie and Yaya), have saved so much over the years. At times, their collections verge on the side of hoarding. I once opened a drawer in Yaya’s house to find, among other useless knickknacks, a mason jar filled with tiny rosettes she’d fashioned from gum wrappers. There was nothing utilitarian about her “collecting,” but how can you deny the artfulness of such a thing? I couldn’t throw them out.

Madison Bloom grandpa. jpg

I could write a book gushing over all of Yaya’s clothing and bizarre creations I’ve acquired over the years, and someday I just might, but as I sit in my grandparents’ living room in Huntington Beach, California, it is Papa Charlie’s record collection that is scoring the evening.

Traditionally, I think of the “musical side” of my family as stemming from my father’s half of the tree, with so many songwriters weighing that branch. But, it was Papa Charlie who upheld the musical fanaticism on my mother’s side. As I flip through the dusty stacks of Charlie’s vinyl collection, my mom stands in the kitchen reminiscing about her wily dad.

“Back in the day,” she says, “after my mom would go to bed, he would whisper, ‘Go get another bottle of wine,’ after already drinking two or three, and we would just sit in the living room listening to jazz and big band, getting smashed. He would say, ‘Oh! Oh! Listen to that! Isn’t that marvelous?! Do you hear that?!”

I’ve certainly inherited Charlie’s propensity to always have a favorite part of a song, and then subsequently shove it down peoples’ throats while listening to it. I also share his need for ritual while playing records-attentively putting them on and just sitting and listening.


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Charles Priddy passed away in 2002 near the Texas County he was born in. At the time I was on the heels of 13 – in peak preteen misery. I had relinquished the clarinet for electric bass in the hopes of making it as a punk musician someday. Papa Charlie, who was a devout fan of big band clarinetist Benny Goodman, was noticeably disappointed when I abandoned the woodwind. I couldn’t understand why. I had never thought of Charlie as an interesting person when I was younger. I knew he was a geologist, and one of the few members of my family who went to college. I knew he was an immense connoisseur of wine and rich food. I knew that he used to bury fossils from all over the world in his Orange County yard to “confuse future scientists.”

It was only years after his passing that I came to realize we would have gotten on famously. Today, as I flipped through his vinyl, through Django Reinhardt’s Swing It Lightly, Tex Ritter’s Blood On The Saddle, and countless albums of jazz, big band, bossa nova and flamenco, I wished more than anything I could sit with him, a glass of Syrah in one hand, just listening. I wish I could relay to him that my musical tastes have broadened since we last saw each other, and that with all the “noise” I love, I also dig on Artie Shaw and Art Tatum and Sergio Mendes, just like, and probably because of him. We would have a whole hell of a lot to talk about; food, my Yaya’s native Spain, our collective disbelief in god, food, and of course, music.

One of my favorite finds of today has been The Language and Music of the Wolves, which boasts recordings of actual wolves, narrated by Robert Redford. It is the land-dwelling equivalent to one of my favorite records in my dad’s collection: a collection of whale songs narrated by Leonard Nimoy.


Charlie was someone who was absolutely full of surprises, darkly hilarious, and smart as a whip. I credit all of my sarcasm and black humor to him, for better or worse. After he passed my mother was attempting to clean out a closet filled with cases of wine in his California home. Tucked away in a dirty little corner was a stack of Charlie’s vintage Playboys. The scoundrel.

But his reading habits weren’t solely of the centerfold kind. He was a massive fan of Hemingway, and shared the author’s love of Spain. When he married Yaya in the ‘50s, he quickly learned her native Castilian tongue and would take my mother and his wife back to the homeland often, stopping at as many of Hemingway’s old haunts as he could locate. On more than one occasion in such an establishment, my mother would look around at the bar, quickly noticing the dress of the female waitresses.

“Dad, are we in a brothel?” She would probe. Charlie would glance side to side. “Shh. Don’t tell your mother.”

His love for Spanish culture is evident in his record collection as well, with piles of flamenco LPs and recordings by classical Spanish guitar players such as Andrés Segovia.

My grandfather was a scientist and a romantic all at once. He could easily break things down with materialist logic, but he chose to save that for the workplace. He was a sort of bacchant, relishing in life’s edible and artistic pleasures with a pagan fervor.

My discoveries of the day do not shock me for the most part…though there is one outlier I don’t understand. Throughout my sifting I found a fair amount of German folk music. I ask my mom about it and she confirms that he loved polka in addition to Dean Martin, Mel Tormé and Edith Piaf.

“We used to go to this place in Anaheim called the Phoenix club,” she says. “It was a German spot and they used to have live polka music. One night he and I were quite a few beers in and we were dancing all over the place-so hard, that grandpa fell right on top of me on the dance floor. Yaya had to drive us home, cursing at us is Spanish as we drunkenly sang polka songs in the back seat.”

I continue to dust off albums, and there before me is a record that explains it all: For Singing And Dancing: Beer Drinking-Songs by the Zillertal Band. A nice marriage of interests, at the very least.

beer

I of course cannot turn back time, or resurrect the dead. But I can sit in Charlie’s armchair, and put on Taboo by Arthur Lyman with a glass of wine in one hand, shouting “Oh! Oh! Listen to that! Isn’t that marvelous?! Do you hear that?!” to no one in particular. And sometimes, that’s enough.