Deep Cuts

The King of Carrot Flowers Pt. One

I spent that weekend in the library, studying a little but mostly writing for Ring Finger . With my Dickies bag full of PowerBars, ripe bananas, and a Vitaminwater bottle that possessed a seemingly endless power to infuse dragonfruit essence into drinking fountain water, there was little reason to leave. I enjoyed myself despite a blooming awareness that I had no idea what I was doing. Each column would focus on a single song, that much I knew, but everything else was in question. Which songs? How personal was too personal? What did I want to say? I kept starting pieces and abandoning them when I found a new way in—there were so many ways in to a song!—and then starting over again.

“Surf’s Up”

When my mom introduced me to the Beach Boys song “Surf’s Up,” I was still Eileen.

Do I seem like an Eileen to you? Doesn’t it sound like the name of a 57-year-old woman who weighs her food on a scale and calls her jewelry “jewels”? It’s so stiff, yet delicate, like an overly starched doily. I swear to God my earliest memories are of lying in a crib, being called Eileen, and thinking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

One night in high school, at dinner, I announced to my family that I would henceforth be called by my middle name, Percy. Definitely used the term “henceforth.” My dad was on board—the name had been a reference to his Greek grandmother Persephone, the star of all his childhood stories and the only extrovert ever to grace the branches of my family tree, from what I could tell—but my mom got up from the table and scraped her plate into the garbage. Offending her taste was the closest I ever got to rebellion, to being the punk I

“Surf’s Up”

The Beach Boys have a real punk streak. Stay with me here. When Brian Wilson wrote the songs for their album Smile, including my favorite, “Surf’s Up,” he was radically unconcerned with what the world expected of him. He was giving a gorgeous middle finger to the pop music of the time.

My mom, who introduced me to “Surf’s Up,” has a similar streak. She sat out the musical revolutions of her generation, aside from a passing interest in ’70s Stevie Wonder, a little Joni. As a child she’d played violin so impeccably they let her move to New York as a teenager to study at some academy—but when her dad died and their family’s money vanished, she didn’t go home right away. She played in quartets and orchestra pits and even dabbled as a singer, covering standards at boat clubs, until something happened, or didn’t happen—she never talks about it except to say she met my dad and “chose the simpler life” back in Indiana. But she wasn’t like the other Indiana moms.

“Surf’s Up”

My mom isn’t like your mom. She hates almost everything: restaurants (“How do you know what they’re putting in the food?”), museums (“Art zoos!”), travel (“Bragging rights for sale”), camping (“Trying on homelessness”). Music is our only common interest, but she ruins that too by having the world’s stuffiest taste. Mozart, Beethoven, all those white-wigged ghosts.

So when she sat me down to play me a song one hot afternoon at the end of eighth grade, I was wary—and, when I saw the CD cover, baffled. The Beach Boys? I had aged out of the oldies. A tinny Dookie brayed out of the headphones around my neck.

“You need a break from that Green Day,” she said, emphasizing both words of the band’s name as if speaking a foreign language. “I’m worried what it’s doing to your brain.” She cued up the song and turned to me. “Anyway, this is not the Beach Boys you’re thinking of. The title is a joke, like ‘time’s up’—they were done with the surfing thing. The lyrics are strange, but trust me, it doesn’t need words to make its point. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, go back to your angry pop.” She pressed play and went out through the sliding-glass door to the garden.

Instantly the song transported me somewhere Dookie could never exist. “Columnated ruins domino”! I turned to look for my mother out the window, feeling suddenly lonely. I’d never heard the word “columnated” (still haven’t), but I could see the image clearly: the cascading end of a civilization. It made my sunbaked skin prickle. The second half of the song was a whole new song out of nowhere, like a bridge that never ended. I heard no closure, none of the resolving chords I’d come to expect, just doors opening to bigger doors that opened to a sky. Look, the song whispered to me, that day in my living room. Life can be so big.

I played it again and felt tears rolling down my cheeks, into the soft pads of the headphones around my neck. Finally, unsteadily, I slid open the sliding glass. “Mom, it’s so beautiful!” I called, my voice thick with snot.

Her butt was in the air, her hands in a gopher hole. She twisted briefly to give me a thumbs-up.

“Surf’s Up”

My mom was my piano teacher for one stressful year in grade school. Fifth grade? Sixth? Post-boobs, pre-bra. We sat together at the upright in our dining room every day after school for an hour and a half. I could get my right hand to play okay and my left hand too, but they did not seem to work together the way nature intended, and the foot pedal required a level of concentration from me that seemed to cause my mom actual concern, like maybe I had suffered some previously undetected brain damage at birth. When I finally begged out of our lessons, she failed miserably at hiding her relief.

A few years later she played me Brian Wilson’s piano demo of “Surf’s Up” and I hated her for letting me quit. I couldn’t stop wondering how the shape-shifting chords and haunting melody of “Surf’s Up” would show up on the map of the piano—wondering, really, how the song worked. I suppose like most young music fans I was at this point still harboring dreams that I could make the stuff myself one day, and cracking the mystery of “Surf’s Up” seemed an important first step.

The upright in our dining room had been hauled away by now, but there was a Casio stored on a card table in the basement, an old Christmas gift for my brother he’d barely touched. I pulled up a plastic bin of winter coats to use as a chair, plugged in headphones so nobody could hear, and tried to pick out the song—first the vocal melody, which was relatively easy, then the chords, which were not. I spent a handful of afternoons down there that summer, switching the headphone plug back and forth between my Walkman and the Casio, trying to understand what I heard.

By the end of summer I’d given up. Some chords were impossible for my ear to decipher—and most frustratingly, I couldn’t see why Brian Wilson had chosen them, how he’d thought to go from that chord to this one, and how on earth it all managed to sound so good. There were people who could make something like “Surf’s Up,” I decided—people with talent—and there were people like me who could only appreciate it. But at least I had that. I could appreciate “Surf’s Up” so hard. I could live on the way that music made me feel, its endless unfurling of emotion and possibility, like a private magic carpet I could ride into my future.

I shuddered. “Surf’s Up” was clearly a bad idea. If I was going to go this personal, it should at least be relatable to my audience. So I started over with the ultimate college band: Neutral Milk Hotel.

“”

I discovered In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as a teenager, when an internet friend burned me a copy on a shiny gold CD-R and sent it to me in the mail. I can still see its Sharpie scrawl: “NMH” was all it said. The absence of artwork or liner notes rendered the music even more magical, more mysterious, like finding some dazzling treasure in an unmarked cardboard box.

I spent my senior year obsessed with the album, desperate to talk about it with someone, anyone beyond the primitive message boards I could access only when my brother wasn’t tying up the phone line. That this desperation was mirrored thematically by the album, a visceral treatise on the human need for connection, only intensified my experience of it. As did my family’s wholehearted hatred of the album—a shared joke that bothered me more than I let on. “Nobody on this album has any idea how to play their instrument, including the singer,” my mom used to say, and oh, how they’d laugh. (Every time In the Aeroplane Over the Sea lands on one of those “Best of” lists, which isoften— Rolling Stone ’s Best Albums of the ’90s, Pitchfork ’s Greatest All-Time—a tiny idiot inside me crows victoriously.) The lyrics are dense and intense, drawing inspiration from The Diary of Anne Frank and singer Jeff Mangum’s traumatic childhood, but shot through with moments so tender and beautiful, they make all the darkness worth it. It was just what I needed as a teenager, even though I had no trauma to speak of beyond a persistent invisibility. (Anyone else have a sports hero for a brother? It takes a surprising amount of family effort to prop up that kind of muscular talent: driving to neighboring counties for games, quizzing him on the playbook, saving for gear. My thing was academics, which required very little of anyone else.)

Through sheer force of will, I did eventually get my only friend to like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea . Sandy was sharp and curious and

“”

My only childhood friend, Sandy, was sharp and curious but saddled with strict Korean parents who barely let her out of the house. Our friendship had been arranged like a marriage by grade school teachers who didn’t know what to do with either of us, and persisted over the years as alternatives failed to present themselves.

One of my clearest high school memories is the time just before graduation when she called me up to tell me she liked the first track of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, “.” I’d been trying to get her into the album for months. I talked at her nonstop for an hour. I told her it was the third-best song on the album but still a solid choice. I told her the phrase “carrot flowers” referred to real carrots carved into flower shapes, like my mom used to make as decorative garnishes on party platters; the king of carrot flowers was a child who excelled at making them.

“Hmm,” Sandy said into the phone. “Based on the nature setting of the other lines in the verse, I would think he meant the real wildflowers that grow from the tops of carrots when they are mature.”

It was obvious. “Oh my god. I’m so stupid.”

“Stupid people don’t get into Berkeley,” she said. I had just gotten the acceptance letter.

I stood and wrapped myself up in the coils of the phone cord. “I’m not ready, Sandy! What if I say something like that at a party, at college?” I was half joking, or pretending to be. “I need more time!”

“That’s, like, the ninth dumb thing I’ve heard you say in twelve years of friendship,” she said. “Divided by four years, that means you’ll probably say three dumb things at college. Not enough to be statistically significant.”

Sandy was the best. We lost touch swiftly after high school.

At college, I discovered that parties were not places where people discussed “The King of Carrot Flowers”; parties were sonically aggressive affairs at which music’s essential role was forcing people to shout to be heard. It wasn’t until I started working at record stores that I met Neutral Milk Hotel fans. I liked to tell my co-workers the story of how I’d thought the carrot flowers were garnishes, expecting to have a laugh about it, expecting it to launch us all into tales of what the song meant to us—how it eased the domestic tensions we absorbed in our youth by projecting them into the most extreme, colorful drama; how it made sex feel like a deep spring of joy and purpose awaiting us in adulthood. But almost invariably, people would say they’d never thought about the carrot flowers at all and had no opinion on the matter.

By this point I was embarrassing even myself. Whatever vacancy I’d seen for myself in this scene, I knew this was the wrong way to enter it—too gooey, too vulnerable. I saved the document with an inconspicuous name and buried it in an Archives folder, in case Megan borrowed my laptop, then banged out a slight, lighthearted piece about an obscure No Doubt song that had nothing to do with my life. I knew this carried its own risk, to write about a mainstream band, but this was the kind of rebellion that suited me.

It was getting late now; only the hard-core students remained in the reading area, the ones who had covered every inch of their desk area with open books and unpacked pencil cases. I stood to unplug my laptop.

But then I sat down again. I dug up the hidden document, dimming the exposure on my screen so low I could barely read it myself. I didn’t even bother to change names.

“”

Neil and I worked together at Amoeba Music. A recent grad with a nine-to-five schedule, he seemed stuck, socially, between the undergrads and the elders of the place. One day we found ourselves in the break room alone together while he went on and on, as usual, about songs he hated. He loved to talk about how “Let It Be” was sentimental pseudo-religious pap, an opinion he spouted with a frequency that would suggest he was the first person ever to have it. And then he had the gall to attack In the Aeroplane Over the Sea .

“Overrated,” he said, after lifting the top of my Discman and dropping it quickly, disappointed by its predictable contents. “Their first album was better.”

“Congratulations, you have a stupid opinion,” I said, and began popping and un-popping the aluminum lid of my Peach Tea Diet Snapple. “But why? Why don’t you people ever talk about why ? How does their first album make you feel ?”

His lips curled into a smile. “Are you the one who likes Tracy Chapman?”

“The chorus of ‘Fast Car’ is the most moving musical moment of the eighties. That’s all I ever said about Tracy Chapman.”

The lip curl moved from one side of his mouth to the other.

Neil is just a few years older than me, but he is deeply rooted in that Gen X hatred of the mainstream, an aversion as much political as it is aesthetic. It’s not that I don’t get this. It’s just that authenticity seems to me only one metric by which to judge music, and I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun.

Anyway, Tracy Chapman has more authenticity in her little finger than half the drivel Neil worships. So does Neutral Milk Hotel, in a different way. Their songs simply can’t qualify as deep cuts because of their popularity among a certain subset of collegiate, and this makes them automatically suspect to people like Neil. I personally like to pretend the phrase “deep cut” has a totally different meaning, one that has nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. How deep does it cut? How close to the bone? How long do you feel it?

“You haven’t answered me,” I challenged Neil.

He appeared to be considering the question for a moment, and then he leaned across the break room table and kissed me. I kissed him back as if my mouth were performing a programmed response. It was my first kiss, my first anything, but I felt nothing until later that night, when I was consumed with the bright satisfaction of having passed a difficult level in a video game. Two weeks later he introduced me as his girlfriend at a show; a week after that he allowed me to play Neutral Milk Hotel while he took my virginity, or attempted to, until I pushed him off in the middle of the act (“Communist Daughter,” second verse, searing pain). I ran from his apartment without my underpants and never went back to Amoeba on a weekday.