I love this song.

See A Little Light – Bob Mould

In fact, I keep this album (don’t know Workbook? Rectify that immediately, please) on fairly heavy rotation — I may even count it among my Top Five Favorite Albums of All Time. Depending on the time of year.

And it’s that time of year. Workbook has a wintry feel to it and this morning, which was a frigid 13 degrees Fahrenheit ¹; with vividly, almost unnaturally blue skies; snow residue crushed up against curbs and dripping off tree branches . . . it was a Workbook day. (Workbook season, FYI, lasts through the early spring; it is particularly appropriate for March thaws when crocuses start popping up and the air has a pleasing wet dirt smell.)

It’s also a traveling album; specifically, traveling by train. It’s what I listen to almost every time I head to Trenton for a weekend — because I am obvious, and start humming “Brazilia Crossed With Trenton” as soon as I schedule the trip, and also because it’s one of the precious few above-ground train trips I take on a semi-regular basis and there is something about watching the stark industrial landscape transform into tree-lined suburbia out the window of NJ Transit while “Lonely Afternoon” pipes through my headphones that I find remarkably soothing and tranquil.

I’m listening to “Heartbreak A Stranger” right now and in my mind’s eye I am sitting on Amtrak, December 1990, en route from Chicago to Boston. I am 19 and on my way to visit the boy I’d met over the summer for no other reason than to continue the fling we’d had in July. To this day “Sinners and Their Repentances” reminds me of him because, well . . . because. Because when we met we were both entangled in other relationships. Mine was in that summer-after-freshman-year-of-college limbo stage that left everything sort of open-ended and tenuous; no promises had been made but kissing someone else still felt transgressive.² He’s the first boy I remember looking at and instantly wanting, and being afraid of that force but also too intrigued by it to wave it aside, damn the consequences. He wound up staying an extra week in Minneapolis because of me, and when he went back to Boston we stayed in touch, not sure of what would happen next, but soon making plans for me heading out there over winter break. What I remember most is how thrilling it was to plan this, how romantic I thought it was, how the anticipation throughout the nearly 24-hour trip was so pulsatingly distracting that Workbook was the only thing I could listen to.

Though this memory is the most potent of all in my history with Workbook, I don’t feel it as strongly as I did 10 or 15 years ago.³ But I do like that it makes up part of the reason I am attached to the album, that it serves as a sort of foundation of all the other memories I have for each song, that it enhances the excitement of traveling to visit a friend, or the crispness of a perfect winter day.

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