I’d always liked These Days as sung by Nico. In fact, I’ve always liked anything Nico’s laid her vocals over, but These Days adopted a new sense of likeability for me after I first met Andy.
The night I met Andy, I had dragged myself out of relative hermitness (a schedule of working at the library, studying, volunteering at the mental hospital and probably lying face down on my bed with earphones on – a seasonal phenomenon that occurs when your roommate is your only friend, and she practically works nights so you rarely see her) to hang out with Milk and Davey. I often went through phases of hating to be around people, constantly being around people, then wanting to be left alone again. I guess I wasn’t ever really a true hermit, as I had a small circle triangle of friends who I guess I won’t name since they probably don’t want their social statii (statuses? what?) decreased by the admission they were indeed befriending a hermit for most of 2005-2007. It’s not that I didn’t have social skills; sometimes I just begrudged having to use them and thought it more appropriate that during times I fancied communicating like a neanderthal, I should just keep to myself.
Anyway, I was out in daylight to meet Milk and Davey for some food. After we had dinner, we returned to the porch of their rented residence to consume our personal pots of Ben & Jerry’s (which were on sale at Smiths).
At the time, Milk and Davey were living with Christopher Johnson, Patrick Harding, and Andy Martin in a house on 800N. I’d heard of Andy from various sources, none of which I’d bothered with since I didn’t know Andy. To avoid contention, I’ll just generally note that some of the things I’d heard put Andy in the “potentially unfriendly” category of person and one of the more favourable opinions was from an arguably biased source. To be honest, I didn’t give the topic second thought because I didn’t really care either way. So far as I knew, “Andy Martin” was a name floating on the Provo breeze. And probably down the Provo river with a gaggle of dumb Provo fake-vegan girls who like to sit around and define themselves according to which Devendra Banhart track their aura best related with. Then, in the same way that once you learn a new word you start hearing it everywhere, after I heard Andy existed, I suddenly heard of a trillion Provo girls who had Provo crushes on him. Anyway, who knew/cared. I for one did not. In fact I was resurfacing from a weird relationship I had suddenly started hating earlier that year, was tangled over an old romance, and was certainly more interested in downing ice-cream than meeting new people.
I think I was about half of the way through the pot of Ben & Jerry’s I was downing on Milk and Davey’s porch when Andy appeared out of the evening dark. He removed his earphones (which were notably and pleasingly not blinding white (alright, so I judged off first appearances, bite me. And no there’s nothing wrong with having iPods, it’s just that… nevermind. That was a pretentious thing to say)), waved a general Hello in our direction and scooted inside the house.
I’ll be honest: I’m not going to be scrupulously honest about what actually crossed my mind upon first seeing Andy.
Andy reappeared a minute later, sitting on the doorstep to shove his feet into green Duffs which bore the scuffs of many a pavement. Apparently he was waiting for Davis to go and skate. The Duffs made sense. Davey had been telling me that Andy had guitar skills (which I’d heard from Crystal), so Davey asked if Andy would demonstrate said skills. I hate playing my violin on demand because classical music isn’t super accessible and that’s all I could play, if mentally unprepared I play terribly, and because it’s plain awkward for me: I’m not a performer. Andy obviously wasn’t struck with the same stagefright, easily agreed and reappeared a second later with a guitar.
Trying to mentally recollect what I’d heard about Andy, I assumed he was going to play some horribly croony version of a New Order song. I braced for the indie-worst and was surprised when he started to play These Days, a song I hadn’t heard live on the guitar because frankly, it takes finger-picking abilities to play, and he could sing (added bonus: he wasn’t trying to sound like Ian Curtis). Davis appeared, Andy returned his guitar to someplace in the house, politely introduced me to Davis (who I’d already met at least 3 times, but was somehow talking to me like he’d never met me) and they took off on their skateboards. I was a bit shocked, and a bit smitten. By Andy that is, not Davis.
You’re probably all bored to death by now of my reminiscing (if you even made it this far), so I’ll wrap this monster-post up.
Andy posted a video of Nico’s These Days on his blog a few days ago and that’s what made me think of all this. There was absolutely no reason why Andy chose to play These Days the night we met; he had no interest in impressing me (in fact he barely spoke a word to me that night) and so far as he goes, it was just a good song to play on a porch. The song had little importance or significance at the time, but from where we are now, it signifies the start of all things good for me. So I like it even more than I did before I met Andy.
I especially like the video because I haven’t seen Andy in almost nine weeks and I think he’s rather easy on the eyes, he plays it well, and I got to see Moses make a cameo appearance in the background (he’s getting fat!). You should have a peep.
In case you don’t know what happened the day after we first met, we got together the day after (my move) to see if we could do Bob Dylan’s Oh, Sister (Andy’s idea) and were practically dating from then on. Apparently Davey called us getting hitched that same night. I probably owe him some money on that or something.
I hope you have, or will have, an equally solid How We Met story.
