When I was eighteen, I had a best friend named Colin S_ who lent me his bicycle and let me live in his room when I got kicked out of my house. Some miscreant stole his bicycle, U-locked and chained, from the front of the Japanese restaurant I worked at in downtown Victoria. Colin stole my girlfriend: I came “home” one afternoon to find them spooning on his bed to what was then the girl’s and my song, Queensrÿche’s Silent Lucidity.
It was a weird time. I’d met Colin, a year my senior in high school, in the library of Lansdowne Junior High. We’d formed a band: me on drums and vox, him on guitar, a gaggle of other vagabond minstrels on various instruments. I’d met the girl on a dial-up forum—think Discord or Messenger but stone age in implementation—and had my first virtual love affair. I learned young that the real world and the digital ones hardly ever intersect in meaningful ways.
That’s not the story I’m trying to tell here. I only bring these glimpses of my sordid past to light because one of the primary soundtracks to that time was Utah Saint’s eponymous album. I rode the crap out of Colin’s very expensive 21-speed mountain bike from downtown back to his parent’s place daily for months until it vanished, and Utah Saints was in heavy rotation. Those tracks helped me up and down the gruelling hills that punctuated those journeys, and I can still remember biking in the flashing shade of the towering evergreens that lined the road that cuts through Mount Douglas park.
Given enough first-hand listening combined with experience, music can become a time machine. Whether hopping in a particular Delorean will be worth the 1.21 gigawatts of potential emotional damage is always a question you should ask.
2025.02.15 – 2025.02.16