TUNES // Medium Build – Crying Over U
Post by Misha
The last place I lived in Los Angeles was an old subdivided Victorian house in Echo Park. Tired and haunted looking from the outside. Peeling paint, cracked windows, slumping into its foundations in the middle, like an old couch. The lock on the front door had broken at some point and instead of replacing it the landlord had, for some reason, opted to simply add a new doorknob below the old one so that in order to get inside you had to turn each of them, separately, in opposite directions. Not an easy feat with an armful of groceries.
Inside, the walls still bore the easter egg shades of a previous tenant’s bad paint job. Lilac in the living room, sea foam in the bathroom, pepto bismol for the bedroom. It really was a terrible paint job. Streaks bleeding over onto the molding all over the place. The yellow on one wall stopped several inches short of the ceiling, like they ran out of paint and never bothered to come back to it. The floors had never been refinished, I have to assume, from the number of splinters I got while living there. Most of the windows were painted shut. There was a fireplace covered over with peel-and-stick vinyl tiles. My room came with a set of rattling bay windows and a hazy old rust-spotted mirror built into the wall.
Anyway, it was grimy and bizarre and overpriced and I loved living there. I’ve been occupied recently with the idea of coming home. Not as easy as it sounds. You can live somewhere for a long time and never come home. I felt that way the first few years I lived in LA. Convinced that I would never feel like myself under its smoggy skies. That city really showed me. I’m not sure what did it, if it was the palm trees or the carnitas or the strip malls or what, but it really got me. Now I feel like crying every time I think about the smell of jasmine, or the shape of the freeways from above.
I was thinking about that house in Echo Park because there’s a line in this song: Corner of Glendale and Montana, when how much I love you reaches up and hits me in the mouth, and that’s right where it was – that intersection. Those streets, all the colors and the smells, reaching up to hit me where it hurts. Lilac and sea foam green, dust burning off the heater, half rotten wood, the smell of home.
For obvious reasons, LA has been on my mind a lot recently. Though I no longer live there, it will always be home, a little bit. Please consider donating to the fire relief efforts if you’re able. Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful:
GoFundMe Directory for Black Families displaced by the fires
Good Music Compilation – This fire relief benefit compilation will be released tomorrow, 2/7, and features a whole bunch of our favorites – Faye Webster, Perfume Genius, MJ Lenderman, Madi Diaz, and lots more. Check it out.
Buy Medium Build’s music here