Gratitude #1: White Denim

This is the first in a life-long series of gratitude posts. I’m excited to write them.

Writing gratitudes is also easy. Here you really do just write from your heart. You don’t need confidence boosters, input from others, or vocabulary changes. You just need to say why you’re happy.

White Denim is melodic happy light indie rock. Their Wikipedia also mentions “home-based recording, jamming approach, intense looping work and unusual song structures”, but I have never thought about any of this. I love their melodies, positive energy and a kind of recursive nostalgia I feel by consistently listening to them since about age 19, so I can choose to be nostalgic for age 19, 23, 28, whatever.

I’ve always found it odd to go to a White Denim show in the evening, and in a dark indoor venue, because they are my ultimate daytime-sunshine-road trip-morning work band. White Denim is 8 AM to 4 PM. They will be one of the main through-lines of my daytime life, as I understand the world, push against it and see how that goes, evolve, play with my kids, so on.

I don’t know if we can be more or less proud of our various preferences, but I feel particularly happy that my brain is drawn to White Denim, that they are my most-listened artist, that I’ve seen them live four times. It feels like a good place to be. If something moodier or sillier was my clear #1, that would feel worse.

When I’m 50, enjoying White Denim will clearly be a “50-year-old thing to do”, though it’s possible that younger people will keep discovering them. Either way, it will be fun to have them as a touchstone, a totally subjective young-adulthood love that I will defend when people tell me about some new melodic happy light indie rock band.

Every time I see White Denim live, around half of the men look basically exactly the same; I’m in that group. This is at once funny, dispiriting (do we have *any* control over our preferences?), and connective.

I pick Backseat Driver as their very best song and D as their very best album.