“Come here. You’ve got to hear this song – it’s my favorite. You know Phil Collins, right?” Mark clicked through his iTunes library, finally landing on “Sussudio.”

It was getting late, probably around three in the morning. The party downstairs was starting to die down. This boy was irresistible.

It was late September of my freshman year in college. I’d had the best summer of my life, emancipated from the shackles of responsibility. Untied. Liberated. Self-governed. I belonged to no one, to no foundation, no institution. In between the bonds of high school and college I celebrated myself. My friends felt it, too. That summer we laughed harder. We stayed out longer. Everyone and everything seemed to be at peace. And nothing, even the uncertain future ahead, was anything to fret about. We breathed in the summer sky and felt limitless.

But now, the air was starting to cool and the sun began to set earlier each day. There was something magnetic about his eyes. Green or hazel? I couldn’t tell. There was something in those eyes I couldn’t read, or touch – something wild.

I had met him a few nights earlier at a party. He was a junior. We had glanced at each other across the room. I felt that I already knew him; he looked like the kind of guys I knew in high school.

When the cops came to issue a noise complaint I followed him down to the basement of the house – I was underage, trying not to sway when I spoke. We ended up talking in that basement for hours. He wore seersucker shorts and a white polo shirt. We smoked cigarettes and talked about eighties music: The Band, Phil Collins and The Talking Heads billowed over the smoky room and left us buzzing, humming, smiling about the promise of someone and something new.

Eventually we moved to his room on the third floor of the frat house. We sat on a moldy, beer-stained couch, but I overlooked the squalor of the setting and felt my chest flutter.

Then paint-chipped door of his room burst open. Three of his friends fell in, toppling over each other. They sat down and nodded in my direction. I sat quietly, shifting in my seat between the couch cushions.

“Does she…?” Mark’s best friend asked, lifting his chin toward me.

“No, I don’t think so,” Mark answered.

Do I what? I shifted in my seat again. The crust on the cushions grazed my legs. Phil Collins’ “Sussudio” played in the background; the metallic rhythm of the song drilled against frat photo composites lining the walls. A cool breeze floated in through the open windows. What were they talking about? Do I what?

An awkward silence radiated. Phil Collins persisted quietly in the background. Mark scooted away from me. He leaned back into the couch cushions and reached into his front jean pocket. He pulled out a small clear pink plastic bag, the smallest bag I had ever seen. I stared. Phil Collins droned on about being too young, his love just begun. One of the frat brothers handed me a framed picture of Mark and his family. I held it briefly before turning it over to Mark. He looked young in the photograph. He was smiling and holding a diploma, his dad’s hand on his
shoulder.

Mark lay the picture face up on the coffee table in front of the couch. His friends sat across from us, listening to the music and bobbing along, grinning. He emptied the bag onto the picture. White crystals scattered across the glass. I looked at Mark, but his face was expressionless, his eyes focused on the frame before him. He mechanically removed a twenty-dollar bill and credit card from his wallet.

My cheeks felt hot. I’d heard numerous accounts, warnings and nicknames for the substance in front of me. But I had never seen it, I’d never sat down with it poured out in front of me. The breeze had faded and the the room felt suddenly stuffy. Stuffy and still. Motionless.

The metallic beat of “Sussudio” fell hollow in the background.

Sometimes we joke about asking a band to write a theme song for this website, but it’s never happened — perhaps because we feel awkward asking a band to write a song for a website full of stories about songs people can’t stand to hear. Imagine our delight, then, when our friend Matthew Perpetua posted about Shrag’s “Forty-Five 45s” over at Fluxblog.

Bryan asked Helen Shrag about those 45 ruined songs, self control and why some bands should just shut up and play.

Bryan/RM: I love the video for “Talk To the Left.” It looks like you gave the bar a good scrubbing! The song gives some good advice to keep one’s mouth shut and get down to business: Aside from romantic situations like the ones in the song, can you think of any other times when it’s best to keep your mouth shut and get to work?

HS: Our friend Tony Tronic did a remix of that song and basically inverted the message, isolating all the sleazy words we sing and putting them together again so that the end result is us filthily urging potential lovers to ‘talk dirty’ to us during the ‘romantic situation.’ It was worryingly convincing. And yeah, the video was meant to stress that we weren’t making a dirty song (we’re cleaning!), with a nod to the OCD leanings of some of the band.

I personally should be advised to keep my mouth shut at all times. It’s always good advice for me, I am terrible. Especially if I have a crush on someone, I am embarrassingly obvious. Not even obvious, flagrantly overt. No self-control.

Shrag keeps it clean.

RM: On a related note, what’s your best between-song stage banter?

HS: As far as between-song banter goes, it normally involves the rest of us being mean to Bob about incessantly tuning his guitar. He usually keeps quiet and lets us abuse him, but he can give as good as he gets when he chooses to, and normally he wins. In general I am not keen on us doing between song banter. We’re all too awkward and annoying and probably not very funny. Some people are very good at it, but others (like us) should just play the songs.

RM: I’d heard Shrag before, but it was a post on Fluxblog that led me to your excellent song “Forty Five 45s.” Relationships ruining songs is, obviously, a big theme around here, and that’s exactly what your song is about. Is it a true story? Have you really had forty-five different songs get ruined?

HS: It’s ace that there’s a site all about this. I always thought the ruined records thing was a symptom of the way I listen to them; I’m not always listening to a broad range of music but tend to get obsessed with records one at a time and listen to them repetitively, which is probably a really rubbish way to listen to music, but anyway. The result is I get this intense association between whatever was going on at that time and the particular music I was listening to. And I will inflict it on others over and over again so they are forced to join me in the associaton. With boyfriends it’s always intensified cos you feel all romantic and profound, so songs get invested with this huge significance, and that makes for bad fallout if things go wrong.

Yeah, the song is kind of based on a specific experience, or set of experiences, from when I was younger and had gotten involved with this person who knew tons more than I did about music. I think I was a little bit in awe in that way you are when you’re younger and infatuated with someone. He’d make me mixtapes that I would listen to obsessively, and then I’d go out and buy all the records by each of the bands he had put on there, that kind of thing. I’d listen to the records at home and try to contextualise his choice of songs (Why didn’t he put this one on there instead? What could this mean about him? Or about how he feels about me? Etc., etc., yawn). This meant that whole discographies were potential casualties - I find it very hard to listen to anything by American Music Club, Slint, the whole of Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs (though I can listen to Black Love because I unwittingly salvaged it by playing it all the time with one of my best friends at the time; I associate it more with her than him). “One More Hour” by Sleater-Kinney, despite being one of my favourite songs ever, I find difficult. “Bachelor Kisses” by the Go-Betweens. “Fuck and Run” by Liz Phair. “Shadowplay” by Joy Division. So much good stuff — which made me feel slightly less facetious about the ‘forty-five’ 45s thing.

When the relationship ended I became aware of the secondary loss, which was all the music I had nailed firmly, desperately, to it. It wasn’t his fault, it was mine, I think most of the relationship had gone on in my head anyway, but there it is, inextricably associated, and broadly unlistenable. Also, it sucks if you go out with or have a crush on someone in a band that’s actually good. Following the inevitable failure of the relationship or crush, you’ve absolutely lost out there. It’s very difficult to disassociate the object of your affection from the record when they are actually singing/noodling/whatever.

RM: You’re our first international interview, by the way. So who are some new U.K. bands we should watch for?

HS: Some bands we’ve played with and who we like a lot: Das Wanderlust, Venus Bogardus, Peepholes, Los Campesinos!, Congregation.