I spent an awful lot of time looking at maps as a child.
Any map would do, but my favourite source was my parents’ huge Rand McNally atlas. Published in the mid-1970s, it was just about the heaviest thing I could lift at the time. The cover was hard and textured, rough like my dad’s mid-1970s sweaters. Inside, it featured close-up maps of major cities, pages of population data, and an indefinable smell somewhere between damp basement and old bookcase.
I would spend entire Saturday afternoons turning its pages, memorizing its numbers, tracing its lines.
I became obsessed with its lines. On those close-up city maps, I would study the complex spiderwebs formed by New York’s streets and the bulls-eyes of European ring roads. If the angle of a certain intersection was particularly pleasing, I would take a pen and carefully trace the angle so as not to forget it. Normally, I wouldn’t think of defacing a book, but for some reason marking out my favourite spots in my parents’ atlas didn’t feel wrong.
My parents, who have recently sold their house and done some significant downsizing, asked me if I wanted the atlas. It was nice to know they remembered how much I had liked it, but having no particular need for a 20-pound pile of outdated demographic data, I almost said no. In the end, I was unable to stomach the idea of all those secretly vandalized pages ending up in the garbage.
So now it’s here. And I’ve got some more lines to trace.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Novo Amor, a producer and multi-instrumentalist from the wonderful country of Wales, has perfected the plaintive falsetto style of Bon Iver, but with an even smoother delivery.
2. At 1.14, some soft percussion begins in the background, and it sounds a bit like someone dropping a large atlas on a table.
3. It opens up a bit at the end, but only for a moment: horns and strings emerge from every corner, only to vanish again after just a few seconds.
Recommended listening activity:
Searching maps of other countries for streets that share your name.