Album cover for Metro Area, 2002.

On a rainy Sunday evening driving home from a trivia night where we lost, I think about this upcoming week’s “One Album a Day” theme. It is the eighth week of the year, eight is my lucky number, and H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Sometimes it’s that simple to think as the rain drizzles onto the windshield as I wind down Sunset heading east that the theme will be happiness.

“Siri, will you play me Metro Area by Metro Area?” I ask the car. And so it begins a few hours before midnight of Monday.

“The beauty of daily projects,” I like to tell people who ask me, “is the constant making of choices. You have this absolute freedom to craft rules and then break them. It’s a game with creativity and yourself as well as a test of resilience and longevity. It’s very liberating to make choices that evoke pleasure during a time that so often feels painful.” There I will pause.

At trivia night, the MC played snippets of songs for us to identify in the final round. I had difficulty identifying almost all by name. My friend who invited me seemed surprised of my cluelessness. I think of myself as musical, but the songs in my head are mostly composed of beats, sounds, whirls, echoes, loops. If there are vocals, they’re minimal, breathy, incomprehensible. Unless they’re sung by singers with weird voices. Those I love. Driving home I thought of myself as blissfully ignorant of music that everyone else knows because they’re told they should. I can recognize the music I like because I listen to it and I enjoy listening to it. The library of songs in my ears is vast, but it’s not defined by charts popularity, for better or worse. The library of songs is delineated by memories and musical friendships.

In the rain, on my normal circuitous route across Hollywood, past the canyons, through Los Feliz and into Atwater for the stretch home, I thought about what Metro Area meant to my group of friends in the early 00s around the world. I don’t think we ever talked about it per se, but there was a period of time before 911 and then after that everyone I knew was obsessed with this album, this funky electro and sexy record of songs, with perhaps the only lyric a harmonious, “ooh.” When tracks like “Miura” got dropped on the dancefloor, it was a siren song to stop what we were doing and just dance.

I’ve always found the Metro Area dancefloor a beautiful place to be in the dark, safe, blissful, escapist. Sometimes that dancefloor was with others in clubs or warehouses around the world, but more often than not the dancefloor was in my car speeding through the city, or pressed in cramped window seats traveling to places around the world to listen to others needs, or in bed alone or with another. The album is one that conjures happiness and fulfillment. It is a beautiful, timeless piece of art and I’m so happy for it to introduce this week’s theme and to listen to it not just tonight, but again tomorrow for Monday’s choice.

Welcome to Week 8.

2.19.24