Playlist #15: This morning person is heartbroken all over again

We want grieving to be a linear process so we don't have to deal with the low points. Alas, it still pops up once in a while, no matter how much we insist we're good.

“You should watch more shows,” Camille told me at the end of Clara Benin’s show a few weeks ago.

She is right. I should. That’s precisely the sort of thing that I should be doing now. Come to think of it, I’ve always been keen to watch more shows, even before I first dipped my feet into music blogging over a decade ago. The key hurdle was that I lived quite far away. If you read my essay on why the Philippines isn’t ready to be part of The Eras Tour, you would’ve read about how the southern part of Manila is underserved by public transport due in part to NIMBY-ism. Well, I lived further south, in the province of Cavite. Sure, I lived close to the border of Metro Manila, but again, no train lines. Jeepneys would only run until just before midnight. Taxis won’t take me unless I allow them to go off-meter and I pay almost a thousand bucks. Having fun late at night is out of the question.

But there’s another hurdle: I am, and have always been, a morning person.

Except for very few circumstances—holidays, a really good phone call—I am not comfortable with staying up past midnight. I suppose it’s okay if I’m doing something, like playing Civilization IV, but otherwise I start feeling uneasy when it’s already one in the morning and I haven’t fallen asleep yet—and ironically, that leads to me feeling more awake. This is why I usually avoid coffee from two in the afternoon, although since I’ve been drinking it more in the last few years, I think it’s not waking me up the way it used to.

Except for this night. I was prepared. I deliberately drank coffee at eight in the evening—a Vietnamese-style latte, cold brew—so I would stay awake during the gig and, more importantly, on the drive back home. If I am to go to more shows, then I should get used to this. I may be 35, but it’s not too late, right?

I went through the old music blog’s archives and remembered that I had been writing about Clara for years—she sang in a McDonald’s ad! I also remember including her album in a “care package” I handed over to a friend in Kuala Lumpur seven and a half years ago. Human Eyes, her debut full-length of a more stripped back persuasion, was the “no-brainer” in the list.

I talked about her Befriending My Tears album a few playlists ago. I like the album—it’s more textured, but somehow doesn't break her fragile delivery—but I was also keen to hear the songs from it live, in a full band setting. There is something about hearing them in a small room, with the Boards of Canada-esque atmosphere washing over you, preparing you, but not really, for what’s next. When she ended her set with “Don’t Hurt Yourself Trying To Get It All Back”, I pretty much cussed. “This song broke my heart!” I told the bemused couple beside me.

What I am highlighting, though, is another song from that album. “Small Town” is much more about a break-up, specifically about finding yourself in the same spaces you used to go to with the one you loved.

This is such a small town
I know all your favorite places
I know where you are now
So I’ll go the other way

I’m not sure why this song went past me the first time I listened to it while waiting for my Singapore-bound flight to take off. But it did now, and I think it’s also because I made the mistake of listening to another song in particular on Valentine’s Day.

“In The Same Place” is one of those K-pop songs that get spoken of so fondly by those who were there at the time it came out, but doesn’t get much play to the rest. What makes it more difficult is that it’s composed especially as a competition song for the first season of Produce 101, the survival show that brought us I.O.I and many of the biggest female idols in K-pop today, including Jeon Somi, Kim Se-jeong and (G)I-DLE’s Jeon So-yeon.

If you watched the show when it premiered in early 2016—Niko, this song is that old!—you’d know that song as the “first present” from B1A4’s Jung Jin-young, his first stab at composing songs for a girl group. You’d know the song as the one that virtually launched the career of Yoo Yeon-jung, now of Cosmic Girls. Perhaps the song was built to succeed seeing as it’s a cutesy song compared to the other compositions for the third round, but damn it, it’s just really good. Or maybe it’s because I was not-so-secretly rooting for Kim So-hye, the season’s fish-out-of-water-who-probably-shouldn’t-be-there—but she is so cute! She inevitably had more success as an actress, although she did feature in one of my few favorite Korean rap tracks… but that’s because of her, again.

By the way, I’m posting the performance video—if you’re not used to Korean TV’s editing style of going back, and back, and back to critical moments, well, be warned.

Anyway, it is, like “Small Town”, a song about being in those places.

같은 하늘 같은 시간 같은 곳에서
Under the same sky, at the same time, in the same place
이젠 다른 사랑 다른 사람 만나고 있겠죠
We’re now seeing other people, other loves
우린 너무 어렸죠 사랑을 몰랐었죠
We were too young and we didn’t know love
행복을 빌게요 이젠 안녕 안녕
I wish you happiness—now goodbye, goodbye

I’ll admit, I was considering putting this song in one of my playlists last year. I dropped it, because… how do you wish happiness on someone who deliberately hurt you? But I really like this song. (This version, not the one that Kang Sira released.) It sucks that I have to think about that now when I hear it—I should never play this in February—but, well…

A friend once chastised me for not quite moving on. It’s been nineteen months. “She always comes up,” she said, and I felt invalidated at that moment.

“I am making new reference points,” I said, barely resisting the urge to cry. “I can’t just forget the fact that we happened because, if I did, then what am I getting hurt for?”

At the end of a break-up is the finish line, and that is almost always the concept of “moving on”, the point when you can forget about that someone, maybe the point when you’ve rebounded and found yourself in a new relationship. I feel we are being rushed to that point—”maybe it’s time for you to move on?” is such a scratched-up trope in pop culture—so that they don’t have to suffer through us having those moments of grief when one least expects, or wants, it.

At this point I feel I have to defend myself. I am over her, but I am not over it. I don’t miss the person, but the pain lingers, if only because it heightens those life-long feelings of not being chosen, of not being appreciated, of not being loved. (As if to prove my point, I rewatched My Dress-Up Darling last month—a really difficult watch the first time around—and felt, you know, no pangs in the chest.) But clearly we all want to just see happy things. So we don’t feel guilty? So we can tell ourselves that we are ultimately good people and we can’t do anything about their problems?

I mean, I get it. I mentioned before how it’s tiring to end up talking about the same thing over and over again. I’m tired of myself, most of all. But sometimes it just happens. You spiral into loneliness. You can’t distract yourself. You yearn for a hug. You listen to the wrong songs… or the right ones.

A new edition of Plaka Notes drops on 22 March, and then—perhaps after a Hyperfocus essay—a new playlist drops on 12 April. It’s going to be a busy few weeks, so I hope to be able to hit those deadlines. As always, I’ll talk more about the songs I picked on the Once Monthly’s socials—and you can also drop me a line at nicksyoncemonthly@gmail.com, in case you have a song recommendation. That’s why Valentina Ploy is on this month’s hour, really. Camille, that one’s on you.

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On the playlist

• The Cardigans—“Lovefool”
  First Band on the Moon (1996)

• Self Esteem—“Prioritise Pleasure”
  Prioritise Pleasure (2021)

• Kimbra—“Miracle”
  The Golden Echo (2014)

• Valentina Ploy—“Breakup Never Felt So Good”
  single release (2023)

• Eliza Rose and Calvin Harris—“Body Moving”
  single release (2023)

• Nadine Shah—“Greatest Dancer”
  Filthy Underneath (2024)

• Paramore—“Burning Down The House”
  Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (2024)

• Fabiana Palladino—“Stay With Me Through The Night”
  Fabiana Palladino (2024)

• Bombay Bicycle Club—“People People” (featuring Liz Lawrence)
  Everything Else Has Gone Wrong (2020)

• Queen—“You’re My Best Friend”
  A Night at the Opera (1975)

• Takeshi Nakutsaka—「力になりたい」 (I Want To Help)
  My Dress-Up Darling Original Soundtrack Volume 1 (2022)

• Frank Sinatra and Nancy Sinatra—“Somethin’ Stupid”
  The World We Knew (1967)

• Lisa Ekdahl—“Stop! In The Name Of Love”
  Grand Songs (2021)

• First Aid Kit—“Fireworks”
  Ruins (2018)

• Clara Benin—“Small Town”
  Befriending My Tears (2023)

• Girls on Top—“같은 곳에서” (In The Same Place)
  Produce 101: 35 Girls 5 Concepts (2016)

• Glen Campbell—“Wichita Lineman”
  Wichita Lineman (1968)