Fall songs

There was a time in late October 2005 when I was riding my bike across 36, and down its frontage road Moorhead on which I lived, and Billie Holiday’s “As Time Goes By” came on my iPod. Now, there is not much of a Fall in Colorado, before the snow sets in, but there was sort of one that week – golden Cottonwood leaves that were quickly swept to the side of convex streets and were brittle and crunched like tight plastic when you stepped on them. Of course, I was riding to my bike and listening to my iPod so the sound was a figment then. Billie’s voice was the only sound I heard.

I’d downloaded the song from a number of things I stole off my friend Mitchell’s computer in Washington, D.C., and, sure enough, this was the first time the song had played on my iPod, which was always on shuffle. Now, that iPod at that time seemed always to know the right song to sing, like a friendly bartender, but this was a pretty incredible moment. “You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, on that you can rely.”

I was wearing a lightweight t-shirt and no jacket, and it struck me at the time that it was late in the year to not need a jacket of any sort. I thought it wouldn’t be like that for long, most certainly not, maybe within the week the snow would fall. Maybe it did, it’s hard to remember now. The truth is it wasn’t important what happened afterwards, it was the moment – the last moment of calm breezes and atmospheres, of things feeling just as they should be, with an understanding of discomfort to come but pleasant and warm right then – something that was, for the last time that year, just right.

That’s what the song is, I think – just right. It is a song that hardly needs my input. I couldn’t possibly count the versions of it that have been recorded after Humphrey Bogart asked Sam to play it again back in 1941 – most recently, that Casablanca version acted as ironic commentary during the ending credits of The Sopranos’ “Cold Stones” episode in 2006 – a literal comment on Carmela’s visit to Paris combined with the stinging line “the world will always welcome lovers,” which spoke brutally to the fatal beating of Vito, the outed mobster killed by Phil Leotardo’s goons (the world most certainly did not welcome those lovers). That was a thrilling use of the song, but then too it was perfect, and then too, it felt like Fall – the episode took place, in that Sopranos storyline, just before Thanksgiving.

That is what I think a Fall song needs to be – calm and accepting in the fate of oncoming gloom. Today I played the Billie Holiday version on a rare warm October day. For us in Seattle this year, there wasn’t much of a summer as we rushed into a perennial autumn, beautiful, enormous, kaleidoscope of leaves that mat streets and sidewalks in gooey glaze. On your shoes the leaves don’t crackle, they feel like bug guts smashed in your soles, and make you wonder the nature of the grime they track onto your rug. I rolled the windows down in my car and blasted the song along 45th Street through Wallingford. Again, it was perfect.

Plenty of people talk about Summer songs, and even Winter songs – songs that are frothy and fun, or spare and cold. Fall is something different, a calm aware of the storm. I’ve heard songs that strike that mood before too, but not often. They certainly aren’t like Billie’s version of “As Time Goes By,” but they come to mind – songs I’ve heard during the same time of year to the same effect. Leona Naess’s “Calling,” which played its bittersweet piano cords to me on a bus ride through the changing trees around Green Lake. Neko Case’s “Fox Confessor Brings The Flood” driving through rain storms. They’re there, Springsteen’s “Two Faces,” Dylan’s “Shooting Star,” Fiona Apple’s apropos “Pale September.” They’re the leaves as they near the end of their year, beautiful and final, unconcerned by everything that might be ahead.