A love letter to Just Jack

I put down my headphones on Sunday night and wrote as much blog as I could possibly muster and I flopped. I flopped, not just literally but mentally, and it was a little grotesque, now I think about it, just how excited I was, how greedily I guzzled down the silence that I had almost forgotten could exist. After a few minutes of stupor I made my way downstairs, radiating – I imagine – a sort of beaming disbelief, and told my housemates, who smiled a bit and half-heartedly congratulated me, I think – I don’t really know, I was in my own little place – I’d done it. I’d done it.

I’d done – what? Listened to a stupid song a few hundred times? Set my iPod to repeat, turned the volume down a bit and went about my normal day, just with someone crooning in one ear? Is that really such a big deal? At no point in the week did it cross my mind just how trifling a challenge it was, probably because the first question people asked, every time, was how could I cope with it – that it would drive them to distraction, and that it would do the same to me.

And it did do the same to me. I went nutty in new, previously undiscovered ways. No one I’ve spoken to this past week really understands or believes the extent to which Starz in Their Eyes ruined me, because it didn’t ruin me in any nice, obvious way, oh no. It went and sat in my brain and, rather than just messing with all that grey matter, rather than driving me thoroughly, entertainingly insane, the song just sat and coolly snipped at small, essential wires in my head. So, while I could still do the biggies like chat and smile and eat and blog, when it came to things like, I don’t know, getting dressed, or taking a shower, or holding a conversation longer than a couple of minutes, I found myself curiously incapable of doing any of these things without thinking thinking thinking of Just Jack, and the damned blog. I was obsessed.

But – again – was it really that bad? My friend’s mum came up to visit him on Day Seven and he introduced me as ‘the one with the ridiculous blog.’ I gave a wry little half-smile and prepared the “Oh, it’s not so bad, I guess I do go a little crazy at times” spiel, and his mum said “Of course, you’re the one who’s sleeping outside in a cardboard box for a week to raise money for charity!” I blinked, and feebly replied that no, I was just – I was just, um, listening to a silly song a hundred times a day. Nothing too heroic. The sheer emptiness of the whole ordeal hit me in a horrible bolt of home-truth, and a great big ‘WHY?’ stamped itself on the inside of my head, which – though I scrubbed harder than on any post-Willow morning to get rid of it – just wouldn’t go.

I think I worked out an answer of sorts that very Sunday evening, which was lucky, because I’d really done enough tireless soul-searching for one week. To drown out my pesky thoughts, which from one side were shouting “You hero!” and from the other “Congrats on the 2.2!”, I put those headphones back on and gorged on all my favourite music that I hadn’t been allowed to hear for seven whole days. It was delicious. It was transcendental. It was – it was all a bit comfortable, really. You love comfortable, I thought. Stick with it. You know these songs. You know all the lyrics. Hmm. I know all the lyrics to Starz in Their Eyes, I thought, but that doesn’t make it a good song.

My eye wandered treacherously to the play counts. Radiohead – Exit Music: 128 listens. Mumford and Sons – Roll Away Your Stone: 73 listens. Scroobius Pip – The Beat That My Heart Skipped: 35 listens, in less than a fortnight. Obviously, none of these quite rivals Just Jack – Starz in Their Eyes: 700 listens, but those are 700 against-my-will repeats. There were almost a dozen songs that I had double-clicked on over a hundred occasions, and that’s just not quite right.

So, even though I started this blog without any hope of actually taking anything away from it – the very idea of ending it with a fairytale ‘and he learned never to overlisten to a song again’ seemed quite twee and contrived – it turns out that it has helped, a little bit. It’s brutally hammered home the understanding that familiarity with an artist is not everything, and not really that ideal, either. I’m still going to stay well in my comfort zone, in my little bubble of cosiness. But maybe I’ll listen to some better music while I’m in there. Thanks for everything, Jack.