Taillights Fading

A song about cars and driving is a natural selection for driving music.  This album essentially lived in my car’s CD player for weeks.  It was a time when I was starting to see a new therapist that was halfway across town.  A meager few miles would take half the length of the album to traverse because I’d have to drive through Harvard Square and then through every busy intersection of the Allston/Brighton corridor, competing with rush hour traffic and two street-level Green line trains.

“Title and Registration” is probably my favorite track from the album, but it also seems fitting in the context of why I spent so much time in the car.  Therapy is so much about looking backwards and examining the past, exercises that Gibbard does himself within the course of the album and especially in this song.  The symbolism of traveling and of looking through old pictures are easy ways to hook into the retrospection of the song, and it often helped distract me from the horrendous Boston traffic and focus on the task at hand.

The whole album had a way of getting me from the head-space of my current life to thinking about the past, places I used to live, people I used to know.  Gibbard’s lyrics about distance, time, and geography resonated with me.  His symbolic obstacle on the album is the Atlantic ocean; mine was the Charles River.  “All different names for the same place,” as Gibbard sang on a later album.