Shuffle Synchronicities 362
Jan 2022
“I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)”
Summer afternoons in the American South are a docile time. No yards are being cut; no outdoor projects completed. No one moves. It’s much too hot for all that. And yet this past August, as I walked from my car to the rear entrance of St. Francis Hospital, it wasn’t the heat I feared, but the cold. Nothing will twist a man into a frenzy faster than the full-throated gonzo attack of an air-conditioned Southern interior during the height of Summer.
My mom and I had developed a little routine: drive to the hospital; walk inside; sit with dad. During these visits he mostly slept while the two of us watched television. Every so often, however, he’d wake and join in the conversation.
“In the office at home, on the floor next to the TV, you’ll see a box with all the knives in it.” My dad was telling us where to find his collection of pocket knives. He wanted me to have them. He was a collector, though not of any renown. He belonged more to the curatorial school of if it’s found its way into the house then the polite thing to do would be to refer to it from this point forward as a collection. Old bills, magazines, bottle caps, construction cones, jackets he’d found, records, anything he could grab, barter for, order on Amazon, or accept in the mail without request he collected. Pocket knives were one such genre.
Later that evening I went home and found the box right where he said it would be. Written on the outside: Pocket Knives for Matthew. I have no idea when he put it there.
Several days later my dad passed away. After the funeral I drove from Memphis back to Los Angeles. On the seat next to me, the Pocket Knives for Matthew.
I, too, like pocket knives. I have a small collection I’ve gathered over the years. And not just knives, but pens, notebooks, tiny flashlights, and so on. There’s an entire cottage industry built around this particular genre of goods: Everyday Carry. The useful things we equip ourselves with each day. Wallets, watches, knives, pens, flashlights. I like all of these things, especially pens. I like the act of writing things down, of taking notes with pen and paper instead of my phone. Taking pleasure in documenting the things I want to remember: a stray thought; a list of records I want to buy.
So I find it interesting that I approach playlists the same way. For me they’re not mixes; they’re not vibes, either. They’re notepads. A collection of songs I want to remember, notes that I can refer back to when needed. They have funny names like Soundhound (named for the app I use to recognize and collect songs when I’m on the go) and References. That is, all except for one. The last playlist I made. The one that still sits atop all the others. Body and Soul. A mix of my dad’s favorite songs to be played at his funeral. I’m not ready to revisit that one yet. So I go to the next one. Liked Songs.
It’s a January morning in Los Angeles and I’m in my office. In front of me is my computer. I set the playlist to shuffle and then… I hit play—
Chet Baker. “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” Pacific Jazz Records, 1954.
“Put on a sad song,” Nora said to me. We were driving along the spine between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills on our way to her house. With a mile to go she pulled the car over and asked me to call an Uber. This, the corner of Doheny and Olympic, was as close as I was allowed to get. Any closer and this ride would have to mean something, and she didn’t want this to mean anything. A few weeks earlier Nora had put an end to our relationship—I had served my purpose. I was the shiny object meant to get the other guy’s attention. I guess I succeeded.
Another time—also while driving—she told me that earlier in the day she had been listening to Amy Winehouse to “feel sad.” I initially thought this was about me. I found out later it was about the other guy. At least I think it was later. It’s been years now since our relationship, and what memories I have left appear out of order. I don’t remember which car ride was first. I don’t remember a lot of things.
For instance, I don’t remember where I first heard “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” My father—a hobbyist piano player—hosted a radio show at the local jazz station every Friday night when I was in high school. And though I also went on to study jazz in college, I don’t remember ever hearing that song in our house, and I don’t recall ever performing it in school. Its origins in my life are unclear. It’s as if it’s always been a part of me—preloaded on some internal hard drive at birth—and therefore reminding me of home.
Nor do I remember why I chose to play it that night when Nora asked. I don’t think there’s any question that it certainly qualifies as a sad song. The vocal delivery has a kind of late night whiskey lament to it, and the song’s melody—borrowed, in part, by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael from Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu”—hangs mournfully in the air like mist. Yet, I would never place it atop any definitive ranking of the world’s saddest songs. It’s much too smart for that. By which I mean the obviousness of its sadness is more intellectual than emotional. That’s not to say that sad songs can’t be smart. It’s just that the ones that are capable of making us feel “the most sad” do just that—they make us feel. They announce themselves through the senses not unlike the first whiff of chlorine before seeing the pool. They don’t enter through the mind.
As a part of the jazz idiom, “I Get Along Without You Very Well” intrinsically affords itself a kind of sultry posture—it’s to be expected. So as a result, it becomes incumbent on the lyrics to tell you how to feel. You have to be an active participant in order to follow the narrator’s proclamation for the aptitude to which he “gets along very well” without his lost love, just so long as absolutely nothing reminds him of her. And of course everything does. By contrast, songs like “Jude” by Dan Mangan & Jesse Zubot, or “Dogwood Blossom” by Fionn Regan lay a heavy smack of sadness on you right from the start just by the way they feel. Their lyrics are almost irrelevant. The songs just sound sad. They’re much more passive in that way. Being active is a happy man’s game. True sadness is passivity.
Nora didn’t want to be active in that moment. “Play something else, something more modern,” she said. I didn’t understand her then; what she wanted, why she didn’t want me. I think I do now.
These last two years have been unspeakably difficult. At the beginning of the pandemic I went through another breakup. Then my mother got sick. Then my dad died. And I went through all of that, in large part, sitting alone in my apartment—my family 1800 miles away—as the rest of the world did the same. Together we all lost a sense of routine, of self, and of normalcy. We lost what it was to be us—the us we thought we were before the world shut down. That’s a tremendous amount of loss to endure.
Lately I’ve found a satisfying comfort in nostalgia. TV shows from my youth, music and movies that remind me of childhood. This isn’t uncommon. Dr. Kirby Farrell writes in Psychology Today that as our anxieties grow, we devise shelters in culture, home, and the past. And as we lose parts of ourselves—childhood, parents, relationships—we mourn them through the creation of symbolic iconography. After the death of my father I started rewatching the 80s sitcom, “Night Court,” a show that routinely played in our house when I was growing up. I did this without thinking—my consciousness just needed a safe place to go.
I don’t get along well in the wake of loss. I think the point of the song is neither does anyone else. Sitting in Nora’s car all those years ago, waiting for my Uber, I was in mourning. Mourning the loss of who I might’ve become had we stayed together; the loss of who I was all the years before her spent alone; and genuinely frightened about the uncertainty of the future. We were divergent, she and I. She wanted something sad to feed her grief and I needed safety to ease mine. And I found it in a piece of nostalgia borne away in me with origins unknown. I found it in the comfort of my youth, of my mom and dad, the street we lived on, Halloweens and soccer games and trips to McDonald’s together. I found it in Chet Baker crooning “except perhaps in Spring, but I should never think of Spring,” and anything else I could muster up to stave off the eventuality of things like one day having to make playlists called Body and Soul. I did all of this in an instant without thought, and then I played “I Get Along Without You Very Well” as we sat on the side of the road. Somewhere along the way that song had become another one of those useful things I had equipped myself with each day—my everyday carry. Reminding me that as long as I have it, that one day, hopefully, I’ll get along pretty well too. Of course, I will. So long as I never think of Spring, as that would surely break my heart in two.