“It’s Not Up to You” - Bjork.

Possibly my favorite song of hers. Every time I fall into a routine, and think I might be able to guess what I’ll be doing this time next year, I remember the lyric, “Unthinkable surprises are bound to happen.” (Technically, it’s “about to happen,” but I’ve always heard it the other way.)

…Cause the evening
I’ve always longed for
It could still happen

How do I master
the perfect day
Six glasses of water
Seven phonecalls

If you leave it alone
it might just happen
anyway

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was

…

If you wake up
and the day feels broken
just lean into the crack
and it will tremble
ever so nicely
Notice how it sparkles
down there

I can decide
What I give
But it’s not up to me
What I get given
Unthinkable surprises
about to happen
but what they are

It’s not up to you
Oh, it never really was… 

(Source: bjorkish)

It made me so happy, in that scene of The Kids Are All Right, when Mark Ruffalo’s character said his favorite Joni Mitchell album was Blue and then Annette Bening’s character started singing “All I Want.” Like a conversation with a new friend, each step made me want nod my head faster and faster: You like Joni Mitchell? No, I only named my kid after her. (Yes!) What’s your favorite album? Blue. (Yes, me too!) Oh, that album killed me. I used to sit in my room and just… (Yes, I know exactly what you mean!) Oh man, “River?” “All I want?” “A Case of You?” (Yes! Oh, I know. Yes!)

When I was twenty I wanted to shout the lyrics of “All I Want” to every male I talked to about relationships:

All I really really want our love to do
is to bring out the best in me and in you
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause - life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
my mind see-saws

I added it to my road-trip playlist, too (for the “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling / looking for something, what can it be?”). I sing it in the shower, in the car; sang it during the rare times I worked alone at the reserve in Ecuador. It’s not the first Joni Mitchell song I’d ever heard, but it was the first one I’d ever listened to.

“A Case of You” might be my favorite song of hers. (I would have posted it instead, but the file was too large.) It wasn’t when I first started listening to her - I think I used to not like it, actually - but I’ve since started drinking wine and doing other adult things that led me to nod my head at the first line, “Right before our love got lost you said / I am as constant as a northern star.” So when I’m not singing “All I Want” in the shower, or doing some impression of Regina Spektor, or Joanna Newsom, I tend to sing this lyric over and over: 

Oh I am a lonely painter
I live in a box of paints
I’m frightened by the devil
and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid
I remember that time that you told me, you said
love is touching souls
surely you touched mine
cause part of you pours out of me
in these lines from time to time

I’ve sung it so often and so long that when I play the song in the car and try to sing along, my version is completely different, in the way that language separated from its origin has a chance to grow. My version is the valley girl dialect of American English.

Sometimes I hang out with friends who read my blog, and they refer to things I’ve said on here. It’s only on occasion that I consider how many people I am sharing my shower playlist with.