All By Myself

There’s a music stand next to the piano in our living room where we display the album jackets that are currently on the turntable. My home stereo setup isn’t quite as elaborate as my dad’s or father-in-law’s was, but the space it lives in is inviting. We used to have an old upright piano against the short wall that served as the focal piece of our music room. We took the front panel off so that the strings and inner workings were exposed. It looked so cool, but it was old and damaged, and there was no restoring it in our future, so we replaced it with a smaller digital console. It still has 88 weighted keys, so it still feels like a real piano, but you can use headphones or change the tones. The space on the wall the old upright piano once occupied is now covered with albums in frames and pictures of family and friends.
The wall next to it has a window with bamboo blinds and guitars displayed on either side. It felt like a natural choice to move the record player under the window on top of a six-cube storage shelf that fits our albums quite nicely alongside our bookshelf speakers. I love walking through the house and glancing over to see what album my kids were listening to last. My daughter has a particular fondness for Green Day. For her eleventh birthday, she asked for their album Dookie.
Every time I see it on that music stand, it takes me back to 1994 when I was an eleven-year-old unwrapping the CD case I’d just bought. My friends and I rode our bikes to the brand-new Barnes & Noble. It was the first one in the state, and it was built right in our neighborhood. We used to ride our bikes on the dirt mounds they used to level the lot while they were constructing it. So naturally, when they finally opened, our first order of business was to ride over and listen to the new CDs they had in their music section. I remember huddling around those clunky headphones and scanning the barcode on the back of the CD case to hear a sound clip. That was enough for me. I took the album up to the checker who was guarding the entrance of the music section and pulled out my Velcro wallet. A twenty-dollar bill that was once in a birthday card from my grandma was just enough to cover the $15.67 and still leave enough for a bottle of Fruitopia for the ride back home.
It’s one of the most iconic album covers in punk rock. The chaotic, colored-pencil scene captures the high-energy, explosive counterculture of the pop-punk scene in the nineties, featuring the “Bad Year” blimp, planes dropping “DOOKIE” bombs, and the band’s name, GREEN DAY, exploding in all caps out of a mushroom cloud with the album title in lowercase letters on the bottom: dookie. This album was the first one I can remember not getting permission from my parents for; I bought it with my own money. It was the first album that didn’t fit into my parents’ taste, and I was all about it. I learned every word.
My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Whitman, was in disbelief that I knew the words I was singing. She looked like she could be my great aunt. Short, kind, always smiling, and always wearing a sweater buttoned up over her shirt. I remember her asking me if I even knew what “neurotic” or “melodramatic” meant.
My daughter, Parker, sings Green Day songs all the time, and I don’t have to question if she knows what the words mean. She’s a brilliant, voracious reader. The eleven-year-old inside me gets so excited when I hear “Basket Case” playing on the speakers in the music room from downstairs, because I know Parker is in her happy place and Green Day’s Dookie album is displayed on that music stand in the corner.
If you let the CD spin past the official tracklist in 1994, through minutes of empty silence, a hidden song called “All By Myself” eventually crawls out of the speakers. It’s unlisted, unpolished, and entirely unexpected. I left this album off my original list because it didn’t fit the pristine, curated aesthetic I thought that original post needed. But music is rarely pristine. It took my daughter spinning a thirty-two-year-old pop punk record to remind me that some of the most important tracks in our lives are often the ones we didn’t plan for. The beautiful, unlisted bonus tracks are the surprises that make life beautiful.