Airport music

This one is less about music and more about flying.

By flying, I really mean airports, and by that, I really mean the hours I have spent pacing a terminal and listening to my favourite bands. I mean I have spent hours stranded in the airport twilight with little else but some dude from LA screaming through my headphones.

I mean sometimes I forget to download new music for the flight so I dig through the hodgepodge of albums I already have, trying to decide (usually) between Billy Woods, Frank Ocean, Black Country New Road, Beyonce and, just yesterday, a Terrance Martin album I forgot about.

My downloaded music is a junkyard of half-favourite albums, though some have become full-favourites. Every time I come back to Calgary I play Hometowns. It’s an album that feels less like home than it does coming home. It’s an album lost somewhere between departures and arrivals, the frosted glass just before I see the people I love after months apart. It’s a dear friend.

Once, I flew home from the East for the very last time in this chapter of my life. Indigo De Souza’s “Younger & Dumber” played from my headphones as I headed for the baggage claim. All around me, the incessant airport hive caught connections, bought tchotchkes, slugged back fifteen-dollar morning beers and, presumably, thought of everyone they may have left behind. I cried and Indigo sang “I don’t feel at home in this town” and when the song ended I dried my tears and stepped through the glass and collapsed into the arms of family.

I usually fall in love at the airport, and text my best friend that I’ve fallen in love, and I’d like to think that everyone entertains this brief fantasy at some point in their travels.

Platitudes about transit and liminal love and temporary, all-consuming imagination. Soundtrack: one time I wept heavy tears when “Visions of Gideon” played at the end of Call me by your name while I was somewhere over the Atlantic.

One time, I tethered myself to another person with a headphone cord stretched across the aisle somewhere over the Atlantic. I don’t remember the music so much as the shared listening.

I like to save new albums for flights, just so I have enough time to properly digest it. I first heard Igor not on the plane but on the drive to the airport. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is an airport album for me. The same goes for I Am Easy To Find, Zach Bryan, and Circles.

When I have time in an airport I walk the terminal end to end. I listen to hiphop and punk. I usually dance a bit. I imagine our collective restlessness is made of the same stuff as an amped-up crowd crammed into a too-small venue. I wonder who might see me doing my thing and who might maybe secretly fall in love with me as their plane departs.

I often listen to an album and fall asleep and digest the album not as a whole but as a mirage of slightly related sounds.

On special occasions, I tune into the music channel on the in-flight entertainment and settle in for some seriously wack shit.

For all the anxious and uncomfortable baggage of flying, my music is a simple joy. My half-lived love is a simple joy. I hope nothing but the same for you. I hope you remember to download some new albums. I hope you get where you’re going.

I really do.

(There’s a line in this that goes “I wrote this on an airplane / Where the people looked like eggs” and that’s about as far as my thought process went)