an appreciation:Personal by Eleni Mandell

As a continuing feature, I'll be highlighting songs that I like. This is a song off of Eleni Mandell's Artificial Fire album.

One of the themes of the discussions that I've had with friends about popular music is about how it's gone from being a soundtrack for a certain partying lifestyle to being about that partying lifestyle with all of its repetition and cruelties. Take for example, "I got a Feeling." It's a song about going out night after night (and apparently on Saturday, twice).

What about music for people who don't partake? (One of the themes of this blog will be that entire genres are out of touch with the lives of their listeners and are instead as Carl Wilson likely says (can't find the reference) "music for making critical judgments.")

I've been reading an acquaintance's online-dating/advice blog. It contains reasonable, well-meaning advice. What's interesting is the conception of dating there which is to find some online who is not too bad, who fulfills a list of requirements, contact them meet up and hope that "chemistry" developments. And for a lot of men and women, this is dating. This should be a good source for a song. Yet I can't think of any grown-up songs about online dating. Sure, there's a lot of novelty songs about people misrepresenting themselves online and mistaking online relationships for real ones. But what about trying to commodify yourself, grading others while knowing that you are being graded, meeting a stranger, the weird drive to move the relationship forward with all the usual romantic preconceptions of what a relationship should be, even in the absence of social context, often without the excitement of, say, seeing an attractive stranger at the bar, and the sheer repetitiveness of this.

In that sense, "Personal" is a pretty great song even though it isn't specifically about online personals. It is personal in two senses. There's the personal ad which leads it off in which the protagonist distinguishes herself with specific details (and which is followed by the universal, "I like to feel hopeful.") But it's also personal in the sense that the listener is mostly excluded from the relationship between her and her crush. What happened in Audrey's backyard? Why is she expecting him to make a move? Has she been deluding herself about him? Here are some lovely lyrics from the song:

I thought about love
And how I love somebody else
But is that enough?

Lining up memories
Each one a hair
At the edge of the mirror
I count and I stare