Bullyheart’s Holly Long, The TVD First Date

“Records are raw. Emotional rawness. In fact, there’s something wrong to me about listening to a clean, new vinyl record. Maybe because all my memories of LP indulgence include the necessary pops, hisses, a skip or two rendering some pretty amazing lyrical malfunctions, and most definitely reaching for the needle to switch from A to B—a big hairy fur ball at the end. I could have made cat #3 out of those in college.”

“Clearly I was not super involved in taking care of my albums in the early years. What I was more interested in was diving deep into the beautiful angst winding its way out at 33 rpm. By the time I was buying records of my own and seriously listening to music of my choice, my family was equally seriously on the rocks. My parents’ marriage was in lethal trouble. And me, who at 10 was already crying at Coca Cola commercials, I was a wreck even before teenagehood kicked in. So, record spinning for me was almost something like therapy.

I have to out myself that it kinda all began with some serious So Cal pop rock. Nothing fringy or edgy. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours pulled me in with Christine McVie’s mellow throatiness and Stevie’s weird warbly white-girl croon. I remember hours staring at the black and ivory cover wondering what the fuck adult men were doing dressed in tights dangling things over wanton ladies. And how perfectly it reflected my feeling of also being on the outside of understanding the kick ass lyrical syllables that wound their way through the electric melodies. How did they DO that? What where they SAYING? How did they know it would sound so AWESOME?

That theme sort of stuck with me. Words and music. Rhythm of words and music—how lulling and powerful they could be. Destined to become a twenty something brown-haired piano chick trying desperately to shake the Lisa Loebness from my soul, I’d grow up to write with longing sensual content. While the folks became engaged in full-on divorce and the comfy warm middle-class rug was ripped out from under me, I was late to Bowie (hello thirty-something Holly) but first in line to Prince. The Cure. The Police. So wanting to connect with what I heard as my own powerful, awkward feminine urges and frustrations reflected in male voices. Of course I listened to both sides of Purple Rain 19 times in a row. Sitting in the cramped attic room of my equally awkward, equally wallflower pal, Jennifer. Nodding to each other meaningfully through “When Doves Cry.”

But something changed after a few years of requisite mid-eighties Zeppelin and Pink Floyd immersion. The Violent Femmes show up in pop culture, and it opens doors to me to a little more punk. At this point, the dude I am crushing on is of course the bass player in our huge public school’s most “successful” teen punk band—the one getting driven by his single-parent mom to the weekend Cubby Bear gigs in Chicago. He’s ahead of his time, in my eyes. Already ironically sporting a paint mottled Go-Go’s Vacation T-shirt along with thrashed Doc Martens. Though I know we are internally of the same mind, and should be riding off on his skateboard into a metal-studded, mohawked sunset, for some reason my church-going, straight-A outward appearance made it impossible to explain to him and all those hot punk rebels that I totally understood “Blister In the Sun.” I was LIVING it—just on the inside where nobody could see.

So of course I soon found myself deep inside Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. Here was a hot, drippy brown hair chick totally unafraid to be gushy and strange. She and my Yaz-obsessed girlfriends then led me onto the Cocteau Twins, where I found my own voice in Elizabeth’s Frasier’s goofy, primal mix of gibberish, English, Gaelic, and maybe alien. “It’ll End In Tears” became the mantra of my lonely misunderstood soul. Really, anything on the 4AD label would do at that point. I just desperately wanted to be English. Almost as badly as I wanted my punk bass player. And to honestly be filling out my size B bras.

Thank god I did that eventually. Though it kinda took getting pregnant to make it happen. And by that time, I’m moving backwards again, opening my eyes for real to someone I should have heard when she first began—Chrissie Hynde—my eventual Auteur Du Jour. By the time I’m finally buying Pretenders albums and really listening to her singing about “I’m not the cat I used to be, I got a kid, I’m 33, baby,” the connection is so visceral, I feel as though I went back in time to 1979 and whispered that line into her head.

If nothing else, over the years I’ve learned one thing for reals about me. When it comes to making and hearing music on vinyl—it’s personal. It’s deep and sad and filled with longing. There will always be whispers, weird warbles, and hairy fur balls. Inside and out.”
—Holly Long