We got a new-to-us car last year and one of the things I love about it is that the car stereo has a pretty good bluetooth receiver and my phone easily connects to it. I know this isn’t an especially new experience for many people these days, but I’m usually the passenger when I get in the car. And I ride and I ride, usually listening to whatever the driver wants. But now I can sometimes control what we’re listening to when K and I drive around together, and that’s just nice. I can skip songs so easily now. I can do little DJ sets if I want to. It’s nice, and still kind of miraculous.
Having grown up with car floors littered with cassettes and CDs, elaborate music carrying cases and — for the rich kids — five-CD changers that were housed in the trunk. It was not uncommon to drive around with a portable CD player plugged into both the cigarette lighter and the tape deck like some sort of Car Stereo Centipede. Sometimes you might be stuck listening to the same tape over and over and over again, so much that you’d start hearing the tape degrade in real time, stretching and distorting and cutting out.
It’s still unclear to me exactly how the new stereo does what it does when it connects.
Sometimes I get in the car and it connects right away, picking up where my Spotify playlist left off when I left the house two minutes before. If I’m listening to WFMU in the house, that comes on in the car. Sometimes it connects but it needs a little nudge and I have to hit the play button. And then sometimes it just doesn’t connect at all.
Lately, however, a new thing started happening: it connects to my Apple Music account, even though I never use it.
For all the years I used iTunes as a player, I rarely bought music from Apple. Until 2023, I somehow only accumulated six albums via Apple: the scorned free U2 album; Beyoncé; Lloyd Cole’s Broken Record; Pariah Piranha’s People People; a ca. 2008 SXSW compilation; and The Success of Failure (Or, the Failure of Success) by Cynthia Hopkins.
But then Jack Pinder of Manners Manners messaged me to ask if I’d like to hear the latest mixes of his latest recording sessions and I said boy would I. So he sent me some files and I popped them into my iTunes and you guys — it’s so good. If you already know and love Manners Manners, you are in for an exciting time. This new EP is the sound of a fantastic queer rock band blossoming into something new, and I promise to write more about what I love about this record once you can listen to it too.
But for now, sometimes I get in the car and new Manners Manners songs start playing immediately, and that my friends is queer magic.
