Side B Confessions: Songs I Pretend Are Not About You

Every record has a Side B, the half where the band takes off the jacket and gets honest. Side A is for singles and good manners. Side B is where the strange tempos live, where the song with no chorus lives, where the track everyone skips lives because it says a thing out loud. This is my Side B, and I'd like it noted that I'm only reading it aloud under protest.

Song one on this side is a breezy little number about leaving town. I tell people I like it for the horns. Truth is, it's the exact tempo of how you walk, and every time the bridge arrives I picture your coat, the gray one, and lose track of what I was cueing. It isn't about you. I'd like that on the record. It is simply, coincidentally, always you.

Song one on this side is a breezy little number about leaving town.

Song two is a ballad I swore I'd never play at work. Too sentimental, too much piano, too honest about wanting someone to stay. I played it last Thursday to an almost empty room and pretended to adjust the mixer for the entire runtime. The bartender raised an eyebrow. I raised a better one. Neither of us said a word, which is the DJ's version of confession.

There's a third track I can't discuss. It's a deep cut with a female vocal that sounds like someone laughing in the next room, and it makes me feel caught. That's all. I won't say more. Some songs are best kept like a locked drawer, where everyone knows something is inside and nobody asks you to open it.

That's Side B. Four minutes of denial per track, twenty minutes of me staring at the label. If you'd like to compare your own skipped songs against mine, I trade confessions on TheFriend, and I promise to be marginally more honest there than I am at the booth.