#126, "All Tomorrow's Parties," The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

150 Favorite Songs: #126, “All Tomorrow's Parties,” The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

I used to be friends with a film student who would tell me about the ideas that she had. “I was walking home early in the morning after a long night, and the sun had just come up. After the bus drove off, there were no other cars on the street, even though it's usually really busy. It was just this really beautiful, quiet moment with the sun coming up. I want to use that image in a movie,” she would say. Things like that. 

It made sense to me why she felt like that moment belonged in a movie—because it made her life feel like one as it occurred. Everyone adores those moments when their lives feel heightened and cinematic. It's like a movie transferred to real life, briefly. 

But those things don't transfer back again. We like our real lives to feel like stories, and we like our stories to feel like real life. 

Which is why it's hard for me to write effectively about why I love “All Tomorrow's Parties,” because it's tied into a moment that felt very much like my life was a scene in a movie. 

Here's the scene: It's 2004, and I am on tour with my friend Tony. We've been out on the road for about a week, each doing solo sets, and we're in Baltimore. We have ten weeks left on this tour, and the dates have not been inspiring. We'd just played two shows in Asheville the night before, and our show on this night has been canceled. We're broke already, and don't know anyone in Baltimore. (Nights off are deadly this way—it's usually not too hard to find someone who will let you sleep in their house after you play a show, but if there's no show, you're out of luck.)

We go to a coffee shop that has wifi so we can try to find a hostel or something, and maybe Tony can cash in one of the savings bonds that his grandmother had given him when he was a little boy so we can afford beds. I pull out my laptop, and the barista notices the sticker on the top—one of those "Don't Mess With Texas" stickers from the anti-litter campaign.

So we start chatting with her and her roommates—another lady and a dude—who have all moved to Baltimore a month earlier from Houston. We talk about our predicament, and the dude tells us that we have to stay at their house. 

It's a fine moment, the kind that reminds you of the eternal kindness of strangers and the way that people who owe you nothing will sometimes treat you like they're your family for reasons you can't understand. They're going to cook us dinner that night, and as the coffee shop closes, the five of us walk through the streets of Baltimore to the house they all live in. 

As we wait to cross the corner in Little Italy, there are two buskers, a boy and a girl, with a violin and a guitar. The girl's voice is lovely, and we stand there for several minutes, listening as she sings about what costume will the poor girl wear / to all tomorrow's parties? 

And my one dollar until the next night's show, it goes into the guitar case that they're collecting money in, because I'm confident that our new friends will take care of us. I want to help them, because they've made this night feel special in ways that I am failing to describe even now, so I won't need the dollar to buy oranges the next morning.

And that's a nice memory for me, but it doesn't come across when I write it down like that. It doesn't carry the significance of the uncertainty that was facing down another ten weeks on tour when the first week had been so underwhelming, it doesn't take into account the twinges of homesickness that were assuaged by meeting those kids from Houston, or the beautiful old house in Baltimore that we slept in that night.

It's not a memory that I access very often, but it comes back up for me every time that I hear “All Tomorrow's Parties,” which isn't a song I listen to as many as most of the other ones in this list. 

There's a power in preserving the memory tied to a song, if you're someone who uses these things as bookmarks. So many of the songs I love have grown with me, but “All Tomorrow's Parties” is a song I only really loved once, that night in Baltimore, and I only love it every time I play it now because it reminds me of that night.

That's a power that is tied into these songs, for so many of us, and the fact that you can't capture it properly in words, or in pictures—that you couldn't make a movie of it—is entirely superfluous. I don't need to. I have “All Tomorrow's Parties.”

(I used the version of "All Tomorrow's Parties" by Iron & Wine and Calexico up there, because it reminds me of the buskers more than the original by the Velvet Underground.)