2017 in songs

Music is not welded to its own time. It travels, it changes shape, its sound alters in the shifting light of emotion and season. You might fall for a song at fifteen, then fall for it all over again for entirely different reasons at twenty-five.

But to compile a list of songs that have shaped your personal year is very different to compiling a list of favourite songs released that year. New releases always lay claim to the limelight of the present, but there continues in the background a slow, personal acquaintance with all the music that came before. My 2017, for example, was flush with formative experiences, and the songs tangled up among them hold a potent nostalgia. These songs did not belong solely to 2017 but include Ventura Highway (1972) and This Must Be The Place (1983). One day I will put together that personal playlist. For now I want to concentrate on 2017 itself.

2017 is the year I finally sign up to Spotify. I'm still not totally convinced. I've read about the algorithms and the corporate undertones, the illusion of choice and democracy. Equally, though, I love to make and share playlists, and stalk the playlists of others, from Teju Cole's 'a history of jetlag' series, to a playlist of every single song titled 'Autumn Leaves', and The War on Drugs' 'road jams' from their recent tour. Before Spotify, I was stuck in a mostly Springsteen-shaped musical rut, and while that is arguably no bad place to be, Spotify has put paid to my musical snobbery and stubbornness, catching my ears and heart and blowing them wide open.

Ran / Future Islands
The Far Field

I begin 2017 running long distances around a wintry Baltimore, which is pretty much what Sam Herring does in the music video for Ran. The single drops at the beginning of February, followed in April by the rest of The Far Field, in which the immediacy of 2014's Singles gives way to something slower, deeper, rawer.
There's the opening/closing line of Time On Her Side: 'the sea was large today, just as any other day'. Debbie Harry making Shadows her own. Beauty Of The Road, about how travel takes you to wonderful places, but takes you far from the people you love. The opening verse of Aladdin, which Herring says he couldn't have written without his hiphop alter-ego Hemlock Ernst. But it was Ran I heard first, Ran which became a staple road-trip song, Ran which I almost bust a knee dancing to at their London show this autumn.
The Far Field takes its name from a Theodore Roethke poem ('I learned not to fear infinity, the far field, the windy cliffs of forever' ) and Roethke's presence, along with other American giants like Jack Gilbert, can be found within the stark beauty of Future Islands' lyrics. A gathering of landscape and heart and synth, their songs celebrate the power of emotional vulnerability.
How it feels when we fall, when we fold / How we lose control on these roads / How it sings as it goes

american dream / LCD Soundsystem
american dream 

A hot bright sky beats about our rental car as we ascend a freeway ramp in California, following signs for LA, curving over the traffic that cuts this golden landscape. Then somebody puts american dream on, and the song's opening seconds glue themselves to this particular west coast memory.
After a year spent swapping the American dream for the American reality - observing firsthand post-election pain and sorrow, experiencing capitalism's rampancy in my rent and grocery bills, growing accustomed to the abundance of homelessness - LCD Soundsystem's american dream sounds about right to my ears. Urgent and languorous at the same time - America's two preferred speeds, it seems - the song adds a necessary note of disquiet to the halcyon romance of our Californian road trip.
And you can't remember the meaning / But there's no going back against this California feeling

Shark Smile / Big Thief 
Capacity

In June I'm in a succulent-clad coffee shop in Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy neighbourhood when this song starts up. I don't know it's called Shark Smile, but Shazam is about to tell me.
And while Spotify has - for better or for worse - overhauled the way I listen to music, in a way it's Shazam that has proven to be the more radical influence. Travelling around America all summer, Shazam is a way of mapping the cities I walk through the songs I hear, adding a spatial dimension to my interaction with music. Songs become pins pushed into the map of the public sphere, charting coffee shops, bars, Trader Joes stores. Travels dictating taste, songs as souvenirs.
Ninety miles down the road of a dead end dream / She looked over with a part smile / Caught up in the twinkle, it could take a while

Selfish / Future
HNDRXX

There's a low-key beauty to what DIY describes as a 'stand-out slow-burner on an album of shadowy, gloom-drenched rap'. Featuring Rihanna as guest vocalist, Selfish articulates a specific emotion I find tough to describe, except that it's about acknowledging feelings, finally finding yourself alone with that person, and ignoring the rest of the world. The chorus reminds me of a quote from Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveller, about how within love, 'times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space'.


Sunscreen / JeanGa and George
European Repetitive Beat

When I hear the first few seconds of this release from the anglo-franco dance duo, I am back on the hot streets of a New York summer, walking over the Brooklyn bridge through a glitter pink sunset, alone in the city with too many feelings to carry by myself.
There's a fire over here / And I miss you so much

Lies I Chose to Believe / John Moreland
Big Bad Luv

Part of me will always believe Bruce Springsteen sings this song. But while John Moreland's voice often has an undeniable similarity to my favourite rugged New Jersey baritone, he possesses a huskiness and a command all of his own. I play this record to death all summer, then catch him live at September's End Of The Road festival. Big Bad Luv tempers the gravelly sorrow in much of Moreland's previous work with the arrival of something happier: love.
And love ain't a sickness, though I once thought it was / When I was too surrounded to see

Aboard My Train / Kevin Morby
City Music

We're driving around the foothills of North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains, where 'there ain't no soul I know / no commotion for me to be a part of'. The roads are slick with summer rain, the banks and verges lush green, and Kevin Morby is singing about tears.
The poignant yet playful wisdom of 2014's Still Life continues in City Music. Morby already had me with tracks like Dry Your Eyes and Flannery (an excerpt from Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It All Away) but I really love Aboard My Train too.
In my time I'd like to stay young forever / Like a tide, the crest beneath sunny weather / May we fill these lungs with laughter / And may we shake these bones with style

Cut To The Feeling / Carly Rae Jepsen

I recently read an excellent piece by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib about Carly Rae Jepsen, the Kingdom of Desire, and falling in love with friends. Cut To The Feeling is a perfect pop song and I refuse to be embarrassed by the number of times I've listened to it.
Take me to emotion, I want to go all the way


In Undertow / Alvvays
Antisocialites

Wishy-washy indie pop, but done so damn well.
"What's left for you and me?" / I ask that question rhetorically / Can't buy into astrology, and won't rely on the moon for anything


Put Your Money on Me / Arcade Fire
Everything Now

Oh, Arcade Fire. Their first album in four years glittered with promise: Everything Now, the first song to be released, was described as 'ABBA-meets-Talking-Heads' (what more could this girl want?), and the album aimed to tackle issues of modernity, technology, and connectivity, in the band's usual grandiose style. What defines Everything Now for me, however, is lazy lyricism and a sound that doesn't quite come to anything. I don't care if the lax lyrics are a meta-comment on the dumbed-down superficiality of today's society. This album promised so much, and it hasn't delivered.
Except for Put Your Money on Me, a song so good it almost makes up for the rest of the record.
If you think I'm losing you, you must be crazy / All your money on me


Right On Time / Nadia Reid
Preservation

We're in a field in Dorset on an early September morning and it's raining hard. Turns out our green Aldi pop up tent isn't too concerned with repelling water: everything's soaked, from roll mats to underwear. To top it off, the tent's zip is broken halfway up, so we have to essentially dive out into the soggy grass.
The rain is an uninvited headliner on the final day of 2017's End Of The Road. Regular festival-goers sit smug-faced in waterproof palaces, poaching eggs on proper stoves. I've seen tents with chimneys. I've watched somebody hoover the floor of their tent. But the majority of folk are like us, glumly packing up a day early, wrestling with pop-up tents and sleeping bags in pounding rain, trying in vain to keep possessions dry. We join a doleful procession heading to the car park. My arms ache. Everything is drenched. It is miserable.
Once the car's packed, though, there's a dry set of clothes, hot tea and a cooked breakfast, and the warm fug of the Tipi Tent, through which Nadia Reid casts a spell over its rain-sodden occupants. Her voice is strong and graceful. I will reach my destination, she sings. I will reach my destination.
There's a ship out in the harbor / Carrying my love / I ain't gonna wait forever / I ain't a turtledove

Evening Prayer / Jens Lekman
Life Will See You Now

With underlying disco rhythms and an infectious pop sound, Life Will See You Now continues Lekman's trademark buoyant melancholy. His End Of The Road set is a testament to this record's desire to make you dance. Later that night, walking back to our tent, I hear Lekman's dulcet Swedish tones drift across the dark field and realise he's one of the secret midnight acts. I'm still sad I missed the chance to hear Your Arms Around Me, the best ever musical reference to an avocado.

Nobody Else Will Be There / The National
Sleep Well Beast

It's tough when one of your favourite bands release a new album. You're so wrapped up in love for their previous material that you don't know if you've room for anything more. And then they somehow convince you that you definitely, desperately need these new songs in your life, that Slow Show and About Today and Graceless were never the only answers.
Meet me in the stairwell in a second / For a glass of gin / Nobody else will be there then


Nothing To Find / The War On Drugs
A Deeper Understanding

I see The War On Drugs at Ally Pally in November, and remember the mediative quality of their live shows, how you lose yourself in the drawn-out dreams of their songs. During the slower burners my thoughts meander around everything and nothing, only to be brought back to earth with punchier tracks like Nothing To Find. Their music is built for summer sun, and though I've listened to this album a lot already, I know I'll be listening more deeply come spring.
Oh I'm rising from within / I see it every morning / Tell me where the rhythm ends

* * *


other deserved mentions

On Lankershim / Foxygen  Hang

Sick Bug / Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever  The French Press

DNA. / Kendrick Lamar  DAMN.

Jag bryr Mig / Mwuana   Triller

Soulfire / Little Steven  Soulfire

Love / Lana Del Rey  Lust For Life

Many Moods At Midnight / Ghostpoet  Dark Days + Canapés 

Another Weekend / Ariel Pink  Dedicated to Bobby Jameson

Caledonia, My Love / Hiss Golden Messenger  Hallelujah Anyhow

Lush / Four Tet  New Energy

New York / St. Vincent  MASSEDUCATION

No Exit / Tennis

I Don't Know / BADBADNOTGOOD

Spring break (i) | a great letting go

'This song is about a great letting go,' said Sam Herring of Future Islands at their second show in London's Brixton Academy last week, before launching into an anguished Long Flight.

this is the way that it all falls / this is how I feel / this is what I need

You see, spring break is about a great letting go, and a great opening up.

For weeks afterwards, I hold those days on the road tight to my heart. All the time I am worried that life might never again feel so full, so bold, that the colours will cease to leap up in front of my eyes. (I'm wrong of course; I guess the biggest satisfaction from writing months after the fact is knowing that this trip was only the first indication that a deeper, canyon-like change had occurred inside me.) On the road, in Yosemite, Sequoia, Death Valley, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, I've never felt farther from the limited safe life of my past self. The days tangle in the type of mad rush I normally tend to avoid. Everything at once. And it is okay - more than.

In the aftermath of spring break, that quiet past self returns, tries to pick up and examine every fragment of the trip, and arrange them in some orderly fashion, like repairing a torn up map. She is confident no experience will ever be as good, and terrified of forgetting even a second of it.

Yet something stops me from writing out the trip immediately, and so, inevitably, I do forget things. And by the end of the year abroad, when I've seen and experienced more than my memory can handle, I learn a painful but important lesson: some details will always be lost. You're not supposed to remember it all, to possess a seamless and unabridged recording of the past. And if you truly want an accurate chronicle, you write as you go. It's just sometimes life is too fast for the pen.

'See enough and write it down,' Joan Didion tells herself at the end of the recent documentary about her life and work, The Center Will Not Hold. 'And then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder,' she continues, 'some day when I'm going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write, on that bankrupt morning, I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest. Paid passage back to the world out there. It all comes back. Remember what it is to be me. That is always the point.'

I see enough, record the bare bones, and leave the rest for time to erode: the passing weeks and months will gnaw at this overwhelming mass, excavating to leave behind memories as bright and enduring as crystal. I have forgotten, conveniently, the times I felt tired, stale, fed up of living out of a backpack and an overloaded car. But I will never forget the waterfall rainbow in Yosemite, hearing a bear growl in Sequoia, the feel of my first desert, drinking Blue Moon by torchlight in a Vegas hostel room as a dust storm howls outside, the Grand Canyon's snowy top and sunny bottom, or driving round LA at 3am singing along to David Bowie. You just don't forget those kinds of things, even when they happen all at once.

'You'll never make it,' I am told every time I describe our spring break plans to American classmates and friends. Their faces a perfect blend of aghast and pity-for-the-naive-visitor, they proceed to tell me that our itinerary is too complex, that we'll run out of time, that we'll be driving for too long. When an American tells you that your drive is too long, you should probably pay attention. But a bunch of study abroad kids with limited funds and time - and a whole damn continent to see - were never going to listen. And we saw it all, and we stayed on track, and we used the long distances to sleep and share music. And it was the craziest week of my life.

It remains difficult to write about. Not just because I'm so far from that life now - scuttling about cold grey London, deficient in vitamin D and decent bagels, having swapped Californian freedom and handsome poetry professors for dissertation confusion, life responsibilities, and the big stressful what's-next - but because to write about spring break is to cope with an awful lot of content crammed into a short space of time. Others have waxed lyrical about Yosemite in long academic essays, turned LA into novels about hardboiled detectives and frustrated women and freeways, conjured songs out of Vegas glitter, and shot feature-length films in the desert. We swallowed all of that in a single week. I want to talk about the land, the cities, and the travelling in between. It's going to take some time.

California, month eight | tidefall

Full force happiness now. If I spent fall semester slowly wandering campus and Berkeley's peripheries, stunned that such sunlit joy can exist, that it is laid out here, for me, then I spend all of spring semester putting that love to practical use. You can see it in the careful construction of my fall semester posts compared to the compiled-months-after-the-fact jumble of spring.

Berkeley's rain sodden winter months, along with a doubled study load, daily French classes, regular seven am work shifts, and half-marathon training, should surely force a collapse, a retreat into my well-worn shell of routine loneliness. But I am rarely alone now. There's always somebody to spend the next hour with, to study with, to dance with; an inverse correlation between alcoholic intake and hours of sleep; a continuous battle between over-caffeination and under-caffeination; a head too full with things to process; and I have never felt this happy before.

Full force happiness: a gale so wild I have to correct my previous understanding of the concept of 'happy', readjust the scale to fit these new feelings in.

Early one Saturday morning in March we stand outside our apartment building, backpacks on the kerb, looking out for a car. It's so foggy we can't see beyond our block, let alone down to the bay. As Camille drives us north towards Marin County, though, the haze disperses, replaced by the clear Californian visibility that bewitched me last semester. Winter is beginning to drift away from these northern coastlines. 

We're heading to California's Point Reyes National Seashore, to hike to Alamere Falls. Sweeping and rolling straight into the sea, Alamere is technically a 'tidefall', and I adopt that term as noun or verb to describe how spring semester feels. A tidefall of events and emotions and faces and feelings, of everything I'd suppressed behind canal gates for so long. There are only six of these ocean-bound coastal waterfalls in North America, twenty-five in the whole world. Tidefalls are rare. Both the geographical kind, and my kind.

After tracing wide open cliff tops for a while, a makeshift sign of white pebbles laid on the ground indicates a narrow path ducking left into woodland and eventually opening out on the edge of the land, closer to sea level. To get down to the cliffs and beach Alamere Falls calls home, though, requires a precarious scramble. Jump (or slide) down a sandy coloured rock face: vault, before the eyes of all other waiting visitors, a gushing stream that's too wide for even the longest pair of legs: propel yourself over deep gaps in the cliff face. It's a tall order for some visitors. Flip flops just won't cut it. Not everybody makes it across the stream.

Granted, this is no Appalachian trail, and I can't compare one short hike to weeks of fell-walking in the UK's Lake District, but already I'm struck by the differences in hiking culture in America. For example, flip flops aside, people play music out loud as they walk, and while I'm no stranger to the joys of a bluetooth speaker, there's a time and a place. Maybe I'm too schooled in Wordsworth and Whitman, but the whole point of getting out 'into nature' (whatever that phrase means) is that you're away from nature's opposite, the noise and metal of the built environment. I can't identify birds from their chatter, but I can hear how a breeze sounds different near water, or notice that in a landscape left to its own song the pace of visual and aural stimulation slows, and your own mind adjusts accordingly. The change in speed and perspective feels like a relief and a newness. It's no place for Bieber, or even Bruce.

Down on the beach you can walk right up to the tidefall, let it bellow in your ears, stand in its spray. The Pacific beats in and out fast, and catches my Converse unawares. My feet dry quickly on the rocks, but the sneakers stay stiff with salt and sand all summer.

I fall asleep as we drive back south, across the Golden Gate Bridge and through San Francisco, tracing its ups and downs. Waking up, through the rear window I watch the streets curl up to meet the sky and the dipping sun. Don't make me go home, I think for the thousandth time. I am so happy here. I couldn't be happier.

I'm wrong, though: tomorrow, Sunday, I will read Faulkner on the sand at Half Moon Bay in the first wave of summer warmth, nothing but sand and ocean and words. In two weeks one of my oldest friends will fly halfway across the world to visit me. Before the month is out I'll be midway through the first of two once-in-a-lifetime style road trips, the kind you get notions about from Kerouac and summer movies, travelling with a bunch of once-in-a-lifetime style people. I will spend the rest of spring semester mooning over the first road trip, and the rest of the year mooning over the second.

Andrew arrives one afternoon the week before spring break. All of a sudden he materialises on this continent, standing casually outside downtown McDonalds waiting to cross University & Shattuck as if he'd been living in Berkeley for years. It is a rare thing to have a friend willing and able to make the five thousand mile journey west to see you: even rarer to have a friend who puts up with your dribble of a shower and your endless supply of vegan meatballs, who gets up at four am to stand in a dark park without complaint and watch you run a half-marathon, and who bakes croissants for the party you throw on the first evening of spring break.

On the days I have too much school, Andrew walks around San Francisco, visiting places I still haven't got round to seeing. He acquires a tote bag taut with poetry books, and boots that give him blisters. We hang out on campus in the sun and the rain. I take him to my English lecture and he falls in love with the professor's hands.

It is once again odd to see a face from home here, let alone one that does not belong to my family, who have seen me everywhere I've been. Andrew knew me as a shy oversensitive fifteen-year-old, and he will also know me as I am in Berkeley, twenty-four and insanely happy. He will know, if transiently, the rooms of my apartment, my favourite bars and streets, the feel of Californian rain, the faces of my friends.

If I had to pick the happiest day of the year so far, poised as I am at the end of March, it might be this one: Sunday the twenty-sixth, leaving the apartment gut-wrenchingly early to stand in a pitch black Golden Gate Park with a bunch of other sleepy runners; taking in thirteen and a bit miles around the city; running over the Golden Gate Bridge and back, Bruce's 1978 San Francisco show in my ears; the waves and shouts of Bea, Connie, and Andrew propelling me along those final metres; crying at the finish line.

And the day doesn't end there. From the finish line at Civic Centre we ride an Uber back to Berkeley to pick up the car that's going to take us on next week's adventures. There's a mad tangle of sleeping bags and tent poles and jumpers, and suddenly we're jammed into the car, six of us, duvets and crisps and all, and we're away, all of the west at our feet.

Songs: month eight

Portions For Foxes / Rilo Kiley
Stolen Dance / Milky Chance
American Boy / Estelle
I Melt With You / Modern English
Leave Before The Lights Come On / Arctic Monkeys
Racing in the Street [live from San Francisco, 1978] / Bruce Springsteen

Bury me deep in love

California, month seven / liner notes 05 | moving real fine

1. W E A T H E R

At seven am the world always feels like it's ending.
We sit under the canopy drinking coffee in the pouring rain and the sun glows through the wet.
Three degrees, uncharacteristically cold, a cruel lean wind.
With E by the fountain in afternoon sun, squinting like lizards.
A postcard from L in Cuba. She describes the mango trees and how she is wearing all of the summer clothes I left behind in Baltimore.


2. R U N N I N G

Zig zag hill training runs.
Eight and a half miles north to Indian Rock Park, weaving a figure eight back south to Elmwood. The psychology of longer distances, how easy it is to adapt to a different scale.

How are things on the west coast / I hear you're moving real fine

3. M U S I C  +  L A N D

Fifties teen culture and coffin songs, doo wop, mixtapes, Skip James.
Writing about John Henry in a cafe when the electronica soundtrack turns to the folk tune Doin' My Time: 'you can hear my hammer, you can hear my song.'
A slightly tipsy 1am Ebay purchase of eight vintage music publications for 99c turns out to be a very good decision. They all feature Bruce Springsteen on the front cover.
The American landscape as discovered from the west, Malcolm Gladwell on sneakers, small American country towns, and 1930s squatters camps.
Academic approval to write about the industrial landscape of Bruce Springsteen songs and seventies roadside all-night diners.


4. T A K E  M E  O U T  T O N I G H T

A sort-of-frat party that ends just after midnight, because everything in America ends hilariously early. So we tumble down to a basement for beer and cheez-its, and get to bed at five am.
A Berkeley co-op party where each room has a theme. We crawl through cushions into a dark room where we're fed 'worm slime' (sour worms soaked in an unidentifiable spirit) and one of us has to 'do the worm'. In another room there are three kinds of disco light and a screen endlessly repeating dank memes. In another, rosewater punch.
Let loose on a dive bar jukebox. Springsteen, The Clash, Otis Redding, Curtis Mayfield, Pixies. Free bottomless popcorn. And to think we didn't feel like going out. E says, 'that is the happiest face I've ever seen in a bar!'


5. ' E V E R Y  D A Y ,  O N C E  A  D A Y . . . '

Late night toast, imported marmite and expensive cheddar, Twin Peaks, food pantry hauls (Barbara's Oat Crunch, organic peanut butter, endless oats, alfredo sauce, Acme sourdough, frozen spinach: Berkeley food is expensive, and the pantry keeps us from starving), Trader Joe's trips for samples and the eighties playlist, iced coffee with milk and honey, frozen yoghurt trips, too much sleep, not enough sleep, rainstorms, nine-grain bagels.

'Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee.'

6. S U N S E T S

One: walk through campus - watch the bridge and the dusky sky - realise how much I'll miss these California sunsets - feel happy and sad and happy. I wait a while under the campanile where the air stretches out to meet the Golden Gate Bridge and the western hills, and see the sun, and a delicate slip of moon.
Two: every night brings a sunset as beautiful as the last, but always a little bit different. Tonight, dark orange and indigo and the hills and the city glittering in the fiery depths of the sky.
Three: walk home from j-class across campus as the sun sets and the warmth fades, pass under palm trees and through the heavy scent of bark and eucalyptus. Californian spring assaults all my senses in the best possible way. This is the happiest I've ever felt.
Four: a glowing, opaque veil that presses down hard into the edges of streets and buildings, the light reaching along telephone wires and illuminating the rigid lines of tennis courts and parking lots.


7. T H E  H E A R T

Yesterday was a long drag, a lingering blink, that gut-howling misery of the alarm going off at 6.30am, brain cogs too tired and squelchy to turn, pointless hours in the library and the cafe, head scratching until late, falling into bed feeling like I hadn't achieved anything at all -
But I am on the west coast, and I am moving real fine.

To a girl born in and shaped by London, California does not seem a real place, but it is a damn happy interlude.

This world, this world right here, this world is for you.

Songs: month seven

John Lee Hooker For President  /  Ry Cooder
Romeo and Juliet  /  Dire Straits
Tumbling Dice  /  The Gaslight Anthem
A Little Faith  /  The National
Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard  /  Paul Simon
Like Crying  /  Fleetwood Mac
Try A Little Tenderness  /  Otis Redding
Twisting the Night Away  /  Sam Cooke
Only the Lonely  /  Roy Orbison
The Heinrich Maneuver  /  Interpol
Headbutt  /  The King Blues 

California, month six | that great strong land of love

Apartment twenty, early January 2017. C arrives in a rainstorm, late the first evening, and we brew tea immediately. The new place is a mess: floorboards awash with scattered q-tips and dustballs and broken clothes hangers, strange objects huddled in corners (a china monkey money box, an elephant-shaped watering can, a half eaten bag of cough drops, a dented can of chopped green beans), the rooms heavy with the cloying odour of a four-week full bin. All day I'd cleaned and unpacked. I wiped, dusted, sprayed, filled bag after bag with rubbish, and swept the floors with a plastic orange brush I bought at the Japanese dollar store. When I'd arrived that morning, shoulders burning after carrying my bags up to the second floor, it took all my willpower not to sink into the bottom bunk's bare rubber mattress and sob. Everything was so dirty, and I was adrift in unfamiliarity again. But instead I put on some music, rolled up my sleeves, and got to it. By the time C's at the door, the rooms are a little more habitable, and when I hear her moving about in the living room, putting the kettle on, it already feels like home.

Peace and sun, those first few days. Golden hour is ridiculous from the window of our new room. Last semester I could see the Sather Tower and used its hourly peals to structure my day; now I can watch the hills behind campus, the way they reflect the sun at dawn and dusk, the way the small houses at the top wink in the dark.

Day trips to the city. Waiting for the bus with 7-Eleven coffee and donuts.

Loafing at the top of Bancroft with thermos flasks as the sun dips. It's warm enough to sit outside, though you'll need a scarf. It doesn't feel like any January I know.

Getting tangled in freeways on the first few half-marathon training runs.

Saturday afternoon at the farmers' market. Everybody outside in warm blue. Herb bundles in bicycle baskets, a girl in dungarees with fruit under her arm, that sort of thing. Fresh bread and sunshine. So far, January in California feels like April in England, and I am very much ok with that.

When Trump's sworn in nobody wants to look. I'm at work, anyway, and I have to make smoothies for a bunch of Trump supporters. The peanut butter scoop shakes in my hand. Later we race down Telegraph towards Oakland to catch the tail end of the inauguration day protest. Police in riot gear wait along Oakland's peripheries as the protestors head towards the city centre, yet all is peaceful: downtown we're met with free pumpkin pie, not tear gas or stun guns. The air isn't charged the way it was on election night, not raw with pain, yet the voices are louder, more defiant.

The following morning we make signs from cardboard boxes raided from the recycling bins. NASTY WOMEN UNITE. VIVA LA VULVA. GRAB 'EM BY THE PATRIARCHY. The San Francisco bus is full of students: it almost feels like a school trip: there's not much traffic on the bridge: a parade of children forced on a pro-life march drift past the bus windows and we all get angry: and then we're in a one-hundred-thousand strong crowd at Civic Center, a damp fierce knot of umbrellas and battered signs and fists. It's International Women's Day. In the dusky rain we march and sing, and are filled with hope.

'I refuse to call him president,' says the elderly lady sitting next to me at Caffe Strada a few days later.

Solace, as ever, is sought in the words of my favourite poets. Thousands of miles away in Australia, Bruce Springsteen speaks out against Trump's Muslim Ban. 'America is a nation of immigrants,' he says, 'and we find this anti-democratic and fundamentally un-American'.
And then there's Langston Hughes:

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed --
Let it be that great strong land of love

Alternative coping mechanisms are also available: homemade cocktails (White Russians and hibiscus gin), playing every song that ever existed, dancing on chairs into the wee hours. Federer winning the Australian Open, his eighteenth slam at the age of thirty-five. Saturday evening at the marina with friends, sitting on the rocks by the water to witness a sunset too beautiful to hold on to. Faces and hair lucent with golden light.

Most of all though, a visit from my mum.

Spring semester is relentless. The workload is final-level-Tetris heavy. 'I don't know what I'm writing,' I complain to C one night. 'I'm two letters into a word and I don't know what it's going to be yet.' Classes almost doubled, I take the early morning shifts at work. The alarm's set for that pre-7am no man's land, but as a night owl, sleep is unavoidably sacrificed. I learn to survive on five or six hours, but this hallmark of adulthood won't stay with me long: as soon as school ends and life slows down in June, my nine hour nightly dosage resumes. For now, though, daily life has changed hugely. Yet the change itself occurred unnoticed, giant and silent in the corner of some room I might've walked through once. I no longer have time to burrow deep into the frivolous recesses of my brain; every scene passes by too fast, like trying to take a picture from the window of a speeding train. I think I like it this way, though. It's true: the busier you are, the more you do, and the more you do, the more you want to do.

Mum arrives the night of the Milo Y riots. As I open belated Christmas presents in her Airbnb apartment we hear the rumble of helicopters over Telegraph. My social media feeds erupt with footage of fires and bangs. 'Berkeley's not always like this,' I feel compelled to point out more than once. The streets are scattered with debris and people smoke against makeshift wire fences, eyes bright, bodies still charged. Walking to work the next morning, the physical effects of the riots are clear in the cold eye of dawn. Anti-Trump graffiti embellishes the walls of the bank, a building made 'riot-proof' in the sixties. On campus, trees are singed black at the tips, the Amazon locker room windows smashed in, and the hulking jumble of burned tech equipment sits sooty in the middle of Sproul Plaza like some kind of contemporary art sculpture.

Mum's staying in the 'Purple House', a wood-walled ground-floor apartment in Elmwood. I love staying there with her, love the non-student perspective on Berkeley life it provides. We shop in Whole Foods and cook together, finish morning runs with coffee. I show her the campus, the streets, the city across the bay. I introduce her to my friends and my favourite bus routes. She keeps me company on coffee shop study dates and buys me the enormous slice of apple pie I've been eyeing all year. It is a special twelve days.

After days of rain, the sun returns and Mum finally sees the California I've been raving about, the clear blue skies, the dazzle at the ends of streets and hilltops. We spend her final weekend in San Francisco. Resistance posters have appeared in windows both sides of the bay, and in the Mission District, Four Barrel's coffee cups come stamped with the words 'Resist Fear, Assist Love' in rainbow ink.

Catch the bus to Haight-Ashbury. Get coffee at Stanza, or Flywheel, which sits at edge of the neighbourhood where Golden Gate Park looms dark. The Goodwill store is messy, and 80% junk, but if you hunt hard you'll find things at a tenth of the price of other Haight thrift stores. There's a real good bookstore somewhere along the street: you'll find it. Buena Vista is all steps, but catch another bus a little south, as the roads start to climb. It'll only take you halfway up; when you alight, follow Twin Peaks Boulevard as it snakes uphill, and eventually you'll reach the carpark and viewpoint at the top. Most people drive up to Twin Peaks but it's better to watch the view unfold gradually, angles and gradients shifting, until the rusted tips of the Golden Gate Bridge poke out above buildings and cloud to your left, and the entire city arranges itself around you, better than any virtual map could. You'll finally understand the confusing geography of San Francisco, how the multiple grid systems shuffle against each other, the dance of streets and hills. You'll note the physical relief of the landscape, from the smooth natural contours of the earth to the tall stubbed cluster of the financial district. The white buildings shine pristine in afternoon light, so that the entire city looks celestial. And all of it held by the water beyond.

From the peaks of the city, move to its edges: ride the Muni all the way through Sunset out to Ocean Beach, and watch the sun sink softly into the water. Everybody will stand motionless on the sand to watch, as if it's a drive-in movie. Colours will drift about and alter the look of the water, sand, and air. Deep sky blue, viridian, turquoise, champagne pink, peach, apricot, tiffany, pale indigo. To heighten the liminal magic, you have the beach's routine haze and majestic scale: the height of the waves, the sand's expanse, how the scene looks both stretched out and zoomed in, like so much of the American landscape.

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Songs: month six

Fluorescent Adolescent  /  Arctic Monkeys
Get Lucky  /  Daft Punk
Wild World  /  Cat Stevens
Christmas in February  /  Lou Reed
Pacific Theme  /  Broken Social Scene
Stolen Dance  /  Milky Chance
Mother & Child Reunion  /  Paul Simon


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California so far:

California, month one | in and out of the game

California, month two | the dust settles

California, month three | your lows will have their complement of highs
California, month four | throw comfort out