It’s a story as old as time: girl meets boy…in college. They fall in love. They talk about having sex. And that conversation absolutely ruins a song forever. Avery Trufelman, the host of Articles of Interest, and formerly at The Cut podcast and 99% Invisible, joins the show to tell the story of how her ex ruined a Grizzly Bear song in spectacular fashion and how a chance encounter with Ed Droste, the singer of the band, made it even stranger. The conversation only got spicier as we went, and we just might ruin a “Weird Al” Yankovic song for you.
Links:
Buy the books mentioned on Songs My Ex Ruined.
Listen to Courtney’s “Love Is No Big Truth” playlist on Spotify.
If you need to bleach your brain about “Weird Al” after this podcast, read Courtney’s article on his use of parody and satire.
If you really want to know which songs Courtney thinks are sexy, listen to her on Switched on Pop talking about what made songs sexy over the past five decades.
Show highlights:
01:27: Avery reveals which song an ex ruined and tells the story.
03:30: Avery tells the story of meeting the lead singer of Grizzly Bear.
08:14: Can men tell women what an orgasm feels like?
12:43: Is it okay to recycle songs from relationship to relationship?
15:14: What’s a song that makes you blush when you hear it? And the stories of two make out songs gone horribly wrong.
Transcript:
Melissa: We are gathered here today to discuss songs that have been ruined by our exes. We are joined by Avery Trufelman, an incredible podcaster and an even better human being.
Courtney: Avery, tell us about the song that was ruined for you by an ex.
Avery: It’s funny because we were just talking about like millennial oldies or just like songs that were popular, sort of like early 2000s, that are now latter day Steely Dans, and I feel like this is, this is one of them. It’s a Grizzly Bear song. I know that the band is for like a niche demographic because when I first moved to New York in 2020, I dated someone much younger than me, who was 24, and I mentioned Grizzly Bear. I think I even mentioned this song, and she was like, “Who’s Grizzly Bear?” But, um, Grizzly Bear in college was one of my favorite bands, and they have this song called “Yet Again” that has a really beautiful music video about like a figure skater wandering through the woods wearing ice skates. Courtney, you’re nodding. You know it? Yeah.
Courtney: Oh, I know it well, know it so well.
Avery: It’s so good. The guy I was dating in college at the time, I, I had, I had never like orgasmed before from sex, and I was like asking him what it felt like. And he was like, it kind of feels like that song, “Yet Again.” Because the song, I honestly thought it was like quite poetic at the time. I was like, oh my God. And I thought the song was like the hottest thing cause it kind of chugs along at this normal cadence and then the whole thing just explodes in this ecstatic way by the end. And I was just like, “Oh my God, that’s what it must feel like. That must be incredible.” And um, I think it’s not like that song comes on very often, but like Spotify will deliver it to me and I’ll be like, oh, that’s like this, like weirdly non-sexy, sexy song to me. And then, uh, and it just became so powerful. Almost like the, the mythos of like one day something that I hope to feel, something like this song.
Melissa: So Avery, I, I do have to ask, does sex feel like that song to you now? Did you finally have sex? And then go, “It does feel like Grizzly Bear!”
Avery: You know, some sex feels like “Yet Again.”
Courtney: Yeah, that’s the thing about telling someone that an orgasm is like any song. Cause everyone’s orgasms are. And they’re quite different from lover to lover, even from sex to sex. I mean, that’s a big, that’s a big precedent set in someone’s mind.
Avery: That’s true. I think it really set this idea that like, “Oh, I’m doing it wrong,” if it doesn’t feel like explosion in a million places. Yeah.
Courtney: Which sometimes it can be quietly beautiful like an Edith Wharton novel. Much slower, much calmer and more demure, but also spicy and full of gossip.
Avery: Randomly, a few years ago, some friends were visiting the Castro. Some friends from L.A. were visiting me in the Bay Area and they were like, “We wanna go to the Castro.” And they, they were lesbian. I was like, the Castro’s not really gonna be your scene, but whatever. We can go hang out there if that’s what you wanna do. And we went to this one bar there. And they ran into someone they knew, and it turned out to be the lead singer of Grizzly Bear, Ed Droste.
Courtney: Oh, Ed. Yeah, wow.
Avery: Yeah, and it was so cool to see him, but he and my friend were like chumming along and it felt like the wrong time to fan girl out. Especially in this particular way to just be like, “Your song kind of like told me what like good sex was supposed to feel like. Your song has loomed so large for me.” And then it got weirder because — I remember this so vividly for some reason. Grizzly Bear was on the cover of New York magazine, sort of at like the height of their fame because they were the first rock stars playing Madison Square Garden that like kind of couldn’t pay their rent. It was the first time and we were like, oh, music isn’t making money for people. You know, this digs with like this post-Napster economy were like Pitchfork was on the ascent, but no one was paying for albums. So you could be really hyped up and really famous, but not actually make money. That had always struck me as something kind of cruel that Grizzly Bear was singled out for. But then meeting Ed at this bar, he was like in grad school, he was sort of in a new chapter of his life, and he was expressing a lot of regrets and, you know, doubts, and I think he was getting really sad that day. And then as he went on, it felt even more inopportune to leap in and be like, “Hey, I love your work. Like it meant so much to me!” But I really, I, I really wish I had. I don’t think I said anything. I think I just sat at the table and was silently like, “Oh, this man means so much to me.”And then he turned and looked me right in the eyes, and he was like, “You know, you look exactly like my college girlfriend. You look like the only girl I’ve ever loved.” And I was like, Oh. And then it got even weirder to be like, “Oh, like you mean a lot to me too,” cause we’re just like two strangers. Our cab was coming and we had to go. And so now the song has a double meaning of, of just like, this song touched me in this way and meant so much to me and my youth. And I didn’t have the courage to make him realize it. And you know, the funny thing is I usually really pride myself on reaching out to people whose work I like and telling them, even if I think they don’t need to hear it. The song is almost not ruined. It’s just like very heavy. It just like really gets in my head when it comes on. I’m like, oh man. Life is wild. Life’s a trip.
Courtney: Well, I think Ed actually would’ve really liked that story. From what I know about him, first of all, he’s a little bit of a gossip and he likes a little bit of a gossip. And I think he would’ve enjoyed these insights. But I love that this is like a doubleheader situation, that there are two different scenarios that this song brings you back to now. How do you, which one, which one feels like the stronger memory?
Avery: The memory of like a, a boy very authoritatively being like, “This is what sex feels like.” And it feel, and I don’t know, I, I did appreciate… the sort of abstracted quality to it did make me wonder and doubt if I was doing it right for a long time. And it made the song like so hot to me. It was like the hottest. It turned it into like a very sexy song for me, even though… I don’t know. Would you, you know the song, would you call the song sexy?
Courtney: I, it would’ve never occurred to me to think of it as sexy, no. I could see it being on in a make out session.
Avery: Totally.
Melissa: Yeah. So when you hear the song now, do you blush? Like what’s your reaction when you come across it?
Avery: Yeah, I do kind of blush. And I get like a little turned on and I get a little sad and I sort of blush. And like the meetings of those two interactions sort of fold all over themselves for me. But, you know, give it 10, 20 years and maybe this will be the kind of song that is playing in the supermarket?
Melissa: Yeah. Or…
Courtney: It needs another 10 years, at least.
Melissa: Or in a Subaru commercial, and you’ll be like, “Damn it!” What… Yeah. Do you think if someone told you that, now that you’re older and your cerebral cortex is a little more developed, do you think that would have had the same impact on you? Like when you’re college, I feel like you just feel things so much more strongly.
Avery: Totally, and I think I was also very ready to be, you know, in the same way that you were talking about how, how boys can sometimes sort of inflict music on you? I think she was like, “Sex is this way.” And I was like, “Whoa. Okay, cool.” You know, if I could go back and be like, “Well I think it sounds like this. And sometimes it’s, you know…” just what you were saying, like it sounds a lot of different ways, but I think at the time I just sort of like received it as gospel truth and was like, huh.
Courtney: I think everyone listening to this podcast, no matter your age, the lesson that you should leave today’s episode with is: Always be suspicious when men tell you what a woman’s orgasm should feel like.
Avery: Okay, in his defense, I think he was saying what it felt like for him. But like still, it’s a very objective thing to be able to point to.
Melissa: So, uh, are there other songs that just feel like too, I don’t know, sensual now? Like, I know there are certain songs that like, I, like honestly the artist Miguel, I cannot listen to Miguel in public.
Courtney: Oh yeah, it’s just so overtly and obviously sexual that you’re like, really? And I wonder if my parents felt that way about Prince when I was a kid. If they were like, “Oh my God.”
Avery: Well, you know, the funny thing is I feel like, I feel like there’s a difference between like generally sexy songs and songs that you have with someone else. And like Eileen Myles writes about this in one of her biographies. She like walks in on her ex, like sleeping with another woman, listening to what she thought was their song. And I’m totally forgetting now, but she has this beautiful metaphor. She was like, you know, I thought I was a part of her story, but she was just on her own. She was like one train moving along and I was just like part of the scenery passing by, and this was her soundtrack for her life. It’s like so devastating.
Avery: I can hear like Miguel or Prince or something, or like Rihanna, that’s like sexy and makes you sort of like, “Ooh.” They’re like a little titillating to hear in public. But I feel like when you hear a song that has been your song in your life with someone else, that’s what makes me blush. Mm, these are intimate, these are like very intimate to be playing in public. Mm-hmm.
Melissa: I’m gonna tell a story. So, I used to live in a house in Washington D.C. And my downstairs neighbors were this couple, a lesbian couple. And as far as I could tell, whenever they got in a fight, when they were ready to make up from their fight, they would start playing Dido’s “White Flag.”
Avery: No.
Melissa: Really, over and over until the other was ready to make up from their fight.
Dido: I will go down with this ship.
Avery: Okay. I’m sorry, that’s kind of cute. I kind of love that. I’m sorry.
Melissa: It’s cute. But then you hear it 30 times in a row and you’re just like, I’m going to murder you both.
Avery: Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa: So like, they’re not I, they’re not really my exes, but I cannot hear that song ever.
Courtney: Their relationship is imprinted on that song for you.
Melissa: Yeah, it’s like they, they’re like my ex-roommates.
Avery: You never started playing it for them just to like fight fire with fire?
Melissa: Eh, it was kind of like before streaming and I wasn’t gonna buy it.
Avery: Oh right.
Melissa: Like cause I heard it often enough. I didn’t need to buy it in addition to… I could have like paid for it on iTunes, but I didn’t want…
Courtney: That song was truly on the radio all the time. When it came out to, it was inescapable.
Avery: Totally.
Melissa: Yeah.
Courtney: And lots of Joss Whedon shows, if I recall.
Melissa: He’s an ex that’s been ruined for me too.
Courtney: Oh god, yes.
Avery: Wait, so what happens when you hear “White Flag” now?
Melissa: I actually just get really tense. Like I’m already pretty like adverse to confrontation and so I think I just would get way too enwrapped cause I’d hear the song and be like, “Oh my gosh, what happened now?” Or like you’d hear yelling, you start hearing the song. The whole thing is just way too like emotionally fraught for me. Cause I just don’t like hearing yelling anyway. So, every time I hear now I sort just like freeze up and I get really tense and then I’m just like, “What happened, what happened?” And then I started laughing because what a weird story.
Avery: Yeah. Makes me feel tense on your behalf.
Courtney: I find the level of love and like devotion that’s expressed in “White Flag” to be really off-putting. Like I don’t want to be in a relationship that’s that cloying ever. So the idea that two people would play that to bring themselves back together kind of makes me wanna hurl.
Melissa: Yeah, but they’re waving a white flag.
Avery: There was a just really great cover of it. It’s like a mashup of actually like Dido’s aria and Dido’s “White Flag” by Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo. You can listen to it. It might cure you of your associations with it.
Melissa: I would love to track them down and just be like, “So, how do you feel about this song?”
Avery: Oh my God. Can you imagine if they’ve broken up by now? That surely must be a song that they mutually ruined for each other. A hundred percent. Unless they have developed a culture when they just play this for all their exes now.
Courtney: Do we have an opinion on this? Could you recycle songs from relationship to relationship? Is that kosher?
Avery: Um, if you keep saying the same song is like, this is our song, then that’s like weird. Yeah. And then you’re not building a new relationship. But I don’t know, I feel like part of life is like learning songs from other people. And if you’ve really thrown yourself into a relationship, that will kind of embed itself in a lot of songs into a lot of periods of your life. And like, I think it’s okay to share that with other people as long as you’re not like pretending, you know what I mean? Sharing songs that maybe other exes have shared with you or you have shared with other exes occasionally is like totally okay. I don’t know. What do you think?
Courtney: I think it’s okay to share your music. Like obviously you’re going to get music from your exes. It’s just gonna happen, right? They’re gonna play stuff for you, and it may or may not have meaning within the context of your relationship. Might just be like, oh, this is the ex that played me Bright Eyes for the first time, or whatever. Maybe it doesn’t connect because you are, I don’t know, 15. And then that means more to you when you’re 25. It could be anything.
Avery: Exactly. Exactly.
Courtney: I’m not done yet. I’m not done.
Avery: Okay.
Courtney: There is an element of it’s not okay. I think when it is like a song that becomes… like takes on a specific meaning, either a shared meeting or a meeting for you within that relationship, you cannot then like teleport it onto other relationships. It has to stick within the confines of that, that relationship.
Melissa: Yeah. If something becomes like your song or a song that becomes like the soundtrack to your relationship, and it’s something that is really meaningful to both of you — if you like, try and play it with somebody else, no. You can’t. That’s cheating. It’s totally emotionally uncool.
Courtney: Well, also, you can’t force that moment. Like you cannot force a song on someone and make it into your song. That is like a serendipitous thing, you know? It’s very intimate and I think it should happen naturally, and if you’re out here dropping the same song over and over to make it a thing that’s not cool at all.
Melissa: But you know that some of these playlists that people will send you? You know they’re recycling.
Courtney: Not cool. Not okay.
Melissa: No. And but yeah, you know, some of the playlists, they’re like mix tapes that you’d get back in the day? They were not using… this wasn’t really handcrafted just for you. They’re just like, “I’m gonna put ‘I Want Your Sex’ on every single mix tape.”
Courtney: Also, that’s way too aggressive. What is this Tinder? Calm down.
Avery: Okay. Serving the question back to you two: what is like a sexy song that’s like, makes you blush when you hear it? Like a per— not just a generally sexy song, like for you, a personally sexy song.
Courtney: Uh, okay. I have a story. It was sexy and now it’s not. This is definitely a… not just song, but entire album one ex ruined. Um, there was this guy in the mid 2000s that I was, I will, uh, copy you Avery and say, not necessarily dating, but sleeping with. And it was, it had gone on and on, it had been going on for a couple of years, and I don’t know why this was happening. But we had mutual friends. We would run into each other at concerts and then if we were at 3:00 AM drunk, we would leave together. And it’s just how life was in my 20s. What can you do? So one night he, instead of our usual concert meetup scenario, he texted me or maybe even called me because it would’ve been like 2005. So who knows if we were texting, um, and was like, “Come over. Um, I, I think that we should hang out tonight.” And I was like, “No thanks.” And he’s like, “What do you mean?” So this went on for a little while and finally I was like, “Okay, fine. If you send a car for me, then I’ll come over.” Cause he lived in Brooklyn. I lived in Chelsea.
Avery: Nice.
Courtney: And I did, but I still felt kind of meh about it. It just like… I, I don’t know. There was our, our soup was missing. You know, our, like the primordial ooze that made our relationship attractive was missing for me because the scenario wasn’t the same. And I go over and he puts on the National’s Alligator.
Melissa: Yeah.
Courtney: And we’re making out. I don’t know. I just felt so whatever about the whole situation that I could never really get into it. And then we fell asleep and I woke up a few hours later and the album was on repeat because this, these were the days before Spotify. Oh, we had a few albums and you played them. I think that the whole album had been soundtracking my dream, and I just felt blah about being there, and I kind of wanted to go home. I’m like, “I’m just gonna go turn this off now.” And I think about that every time I hear any of the songs from that album. Now that feeling comes back over me of like, I think I’d rather not be here. And also I think I’ve been having a nightmare.
Melissa: Oh no.
Courtney: We really ruined a great album and a great band. Well, not the whole band, but that album’s burnt for me.
Melissa: I have exactly the same experience, but with “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise.”
Courtney: I’m sorry, what?
Avery: That was a make out song?
Melissa: It was… just happened to be on, I don’t know. And now… it was especially weird because it was like my little brother really liked “Weird Al,” like really liked “Weird Al.”
Courtney: Oh no.
Melissa: And then somehow it was like on a, I don’t know, this guy had like blank CDs like that, they were just like mixes. But you just had to pick one and randomly put it on and somehow it was like you end up making out to “Weird Al” and you’re like, “This is wrong. This is so wrong.” So then, then it was like… had that extra weirdness of being my brother’s, like one of my brother’s favorites and I was like, I don’t like anything about this scenario. And yeah, so every time I hear “Amish Paradise,” I just am cringing.
Courtney: Conversations like this are I’m why I’m so glad we’ve started to have, um, like big discourse about consent because now if “Weird Al” came on, I would just be like, “Nope, this is over.”
Avery: Yeah, yeah.
Melissa: I know. And sometimes when you think about that New Yorker cat story, which I know had so many different layers of problems in it, but the, um, I think you do end up in those situations where you’re like, especially when you’re younger and don’t…
Courtney: Oh yes.
Melissa: …feel like confident, and you end up in those situations where you’re just like, “I’m just gonna go with this cause it seems easier than having an argument, frankly.”
Courtney: Yes, absolutely. Like you keep calling or you keep texting or you keep harassing me. Or, yeah, this is easier than having an argument or I’m kind of curious about what this experience will be like, but I don’t know if I wanna experience it with you.
Melissa: Right.
Courtney: Maybe I’ll just get it over with.
Melissa: I’m just gonna sit here and make out to “Weird Al” and it’s gonna be okay.
Avery: It’s “Amish Paradise.” It wasn’t even like a, you know, “Dare to Be Stupid.” It wasn’t even a “Weird Al” original.
Courtney: It’s no “Like a Surgeon.”
Melissa: Yeah. Yeah.
Courtney: You think about, Well, these have all been really traumatic stories. I feel like a, a huge amount of emotion about your story, Avery. And I feel like I want to go back in time and protect you from your stories, Melissa.
Melissa: Oh.
Avery: Have you ever been to a place where they were playing “Weird Al”?
Melissa: Yeah, I feel like recently he’s had sort of like a resurgence as, maybe it’s cause Daniel Radcliffe is playing him in a biopic. And I feel like he’s a big sort of everything and every time I see it I just sort of crack up laughing. So I’m just like… cause that’s the thing, is like I really can just laugh about it. I’m not like injured or anything. It was just, “Wow, this guy has truly terrible taste of music.”
Avery: Totally.
Melissa: Or just no sense of irony. I don’t know. I was listening ironically, and I don’t think he was.
Courtney: There are people that I’ve found don’t listen to whatever’s on while they’re making out, or like it doesn’t matter to them. And I find those people very creepy and suspect.
Avery: I admire their sense of presence.
Melissa: Focused! But, um, wow.
Courtney: Well, Avery, thanks for doing the pilot episode with us.
Avery: Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. This is so fun. I’m, I’m sorry for your, your musical losses. I mourn them.
Courtney: As we mourn yours, but I promise you Ed Droste is an extremely online person and will probably hear this, so…
Avery: Oh no!
Courtney: Look for feedback on Instagram.
Avery: His music means so much to me. I hope, I hope he takes it as a sign of appreciation.
Melissa: Oh, he probably will, yeah. I mean, he and I have a ton of mutual friends, so if you want, we can reach out and let him know.
Avery: Oh god. I feel that he won’t mind my saying he was kind of sad that night, but like whatever we were all sad.
Courtney: He was kind of sad a lot of nights. I wouldn’t worry about it.
Avery: That’s fair.
Melissa: I think that’s exactly what is at the heart of Grizzly Bear, frankly.
Avery: Pretty much. Can you have him on and like ask him if he meant the song to sound like an orgasm? Could you…
Courtney: Yes, we can, we can do a follow-up, actually. We can do a follow-up report on that.
Avery: Perfect.
Melissa: I’m also gonna track down “Weird Al.”
Courtney: Just… I’ll, I’ll just reach out for comment.
Melissa: Yes.
Melissa: Songs My Ex Ruined is a production of Nevermind Media. Executive producers are Melissa Locker and Courtney E. Smith. Produced and edited by Stephanie Aguilar. Sound design and theme song by Madeline McCormick. Additional production support from Casey, Steve, Archer, Beemo, and Newton, and all the other good dogs and cats.
