Songs to listen to while skateboarding in your city
On meeting your friends for drinks, finding your favorite streets, growing up, and listening to Fazerdaze, This Is Lorelie, and Cassandra Jenkins.
One of the great joys of picking up skateboarding in my thirties was finding myself listening to more music. This is probably true of any age, but I’m in my thirties, so. Like many, I’ve found myself reading fewer books and listening to fewer albums. This disturbing trend goes hand-in-hand with a career behind computer screens and sitting at home all day. To put it simply: thanks, I hate it. The motivation to start skating was to drive less and get more exercise without having to travel at the slow pace of walking, but an unexpected benefit was that I got to know the city streets more intimately and spent more time listening to music — you can’t listen to a podcast while skateboarding unless you’re a narc.
Last year, I spent an entire week obsessively listening to Break!, an EP by New Zealand artist Amelia Murray, who goes by Fazerdaze, every morning on my way to the coffee shop. My days began hearing Murray sing:
A low-key loser, a stranger to herself
For the moment, drift into her hell
Look around her, three years wasted now
She sinks in further, dead ends multiply
The opening lyrics to the EP’s first track, also titled “Break!” find Murray reflecting on her time away from music following professional burnout and the end of a relationship. “So, I put Morningside out, and then I disappeared,” she reflects in a short documentary about her sabbatical. “I was putting my dreams ahead of my health. I was putting Fazerdaze ahead of Amelia.” The lyrics throughout the entire EP are simple and self reflective, the riffs and beats propulsive and infectious. It’s thoughtful and meditative and firmly in the bedroom guitar rock I like. It’s essentially self-help music, but Murray doesn’t have an agenda; there is no lifestyle or guide to sell; though, she does, at one point in “Overthink It,” guide herself through a meditation in the middle of spiraling thoughts:
Focus on your breath and just try to clear your head
Filter out all the voices and dispose of all the dregs
In a music video for her earlier album, Murray also skates around listening to music, pleasantly drifting across a small street with palm trees that could be Southern California but is, actually, her home country of New Zealand. It’s not hard to imagine that some of her time away from music was spent skating around the streets. The practice of skating around your city while listening to music is best when you can enter a kind of flow state where the necessary movements and precautions are never far from your mind, but you’re also not capable of absorbing involved information or noisy distractions. Skating through the city requires a lot of navigating, paying attention to people walking, cars pulling out of driveways, uneven sidewalks, acorns from fallen trees on the road, especially if you’re not a confident or skilled skater like myself. Checking messages or an app notification isn’t really possible without putting yourself at risk of getting tripped up or hit by a car.
This is why I try to find streets with ideal skating conditions. 3rd Street, with its wide bike lanes, large trees that provide shade, and lack of favorite neighborhood haunts, is such a street. The same goes for songs. Ideally, they should be straightforward and infectious. “I’m All Fucked Up” by This is Lorelei is such a song. “You sick little thing, you had your fun,” sings Nate Amos in a voice that reminds me of Stephin Merritt’s of The Magnetic Fields, a mythologized band that I could never get into, over a riff that is joyously bouncy. It’s from the 2024 album Box for Buddy, Box for Star that Amos made after getting sober and becoming obsessed with Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” for a summer. It’s the perfect song to soundtrack skating to your favorite bar to meet your friends for a beer. It reminds you of all the joys of a night out with friends along with a warning that a beer can be a nice little thing, but be careful now, don’t forget you have to skate home in the dark and hangovers hurt more than you care to remember.
Like Amos, I’ve been a sick little thing that’s had a lot of fun drinking, but I’ve largely left that behind and pretty much don’t drink anymore. In my twenties, when I used to drink like I was on the clock, I always thought quitting drinking meant losing my edge and giving up on having an uncontainable spirit and big emotions, but I found that not to be true. For me, it just meant growing up and being more present with myself, paying better attention to my spirit and emotions. It’s why I love Murray’s Break! EP so much; I relate to a lot of the fears and feelings in the songs. “I had to grow up and be an adult and just let go of my dreams and just be like okay, bye, I’m looking after me,” she says in the documentary. “And then when I started looking after me, that’s when everything came back.”
The soundtrack back home is markedly different. It needs to match the cinematic feel of the city at night and the strange melancholic buzz after having a good time. “On and On” by Grace Cummings always does the trick, with its glacial pace, expressive arrangements, and Cumming’s powerful voice. “Could it be so happy?” she asks throughout the song. “What is this, happy? I think I’ll go on.” Another option is Mk.gee’s “Alesis,” with his warm, humming guitar, warbly voice, and obtuse lyrics. (When he sing-cries, “Why me?” I always hear “Bobby.”) The longing at the center of the song makes for a nice listen if you are also traveling with big feelings.
Sometimes, on nights that I’m lucky, I’ll be able to skate down Florida, a small one-way street lined with parked cars on either side but otherwise empty and with enough pools of darkness between the streetlights that it gives the closest thing to a sense of privacy while traveling in public. In these moments where I feel small and alone, and I want a song that matches those feelings, I’ll listen to “Delphinium Blue” by Cassandra Jenkins. (Jenkins’ My Light, My Destroyer was my favorite album of 2024.) In the song, she talks to someone (a partner, an unrequited love, an old acquaintance) during a shift at the flower shop where she works. Voices float, guitars buzz, drums bump along as she sings her small confessions:
I picked up another couple of shits
I hear your voice when I’m closing
The nights fall like thorns off the roses
The exchange is so simple and intimate — I love it so much. On nights with “Delphinium Blue” and Florida Street, I take my time, pushing off and letting myself slowly glide, waiting until my momentum runs out before pushing again.
Reading + Watching + Listening
Currently reading: The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner.
I spent much of last year relearning how to read, which means catching up on a lot of books I should have read by now. That includes Rachel Kushner’s work, which I became interested in after Kushner's husband went sicko mode on a Brandon Taylor for his pan of her latest book, Creation Lake, in the London Review of Books. The library didn’t have it, so I checked out and started reading her book of essays. I love it so far and find myself wishing I had found her writing earlier. Here’s a passage from “Picture-book Horses,” an essay on Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy:
As I revisited the trilogy recently, I was in my home office that is walking distance from the largest bas-relief military monument in the United States, celebrating the 1847 victory of Los Angeles in the Mexican-American War. This enormous terra-cotta bas relief of a battalion of soldiers, one on horseback, and the rippling American flag they raise, lies diagonal from the huge criminal court building in downtown Los Angeles. Mexican Americans stream past this monument celebrating Mexico’s defeat, dwarfed by its fifty-foot height, as they make their way to court, where disproportionate numbers of Latinos are arraigned, tried, convicted, and remanded to state prisons.
Currently watching: Memoria’s YouTube channel
Memoria is a Youtuber I know very little about, but, according to her, she’s a “bad video gamer.” Regardless, her videos are so fun and warm and I love her channel. My fiancé and I watched one named “alpha business bro tutorial 🔥💯🤑” where she plays supermarket simulator and giggles as she runs a “humble cereal shop.” It’s delightful content! Her most watched video is “i played every obscure pc game this guy made,” the guy being Rod Fisher, a man who got into the hobby of making computer games in the early 2000s at 70 years old. The ending is surprisingly heartwarming and contemplative. The last words Memoria says are “In other words, just do whatever. I don’t know,” which I think is beautiful.
Currently listening: Citizen Sleeper (Original Game Soundtrack)
I’m literally listening to this right now. (As I work on this newsletter; not as you’re reading this.) It’s from an indie game that I love called Citizen Sleeper. I won’t go into why I love the game because it will be part of another essay I’m working on, but the soundtrack by Amos Roddy is the best. It’s been my recent go-to when writing, and I couldn’t ask for a better writing companion: engaging and motivating without being distractive or noisy. Thank you, Citizen Sleeper (Original Game Soundtrack)!