#365songs (184 / 365)

Solitude Standing is one of those albums from which I could probably pick seven or eight songs to write about. But everyone knows "Tom's Diner" and "Luka" so I'm picking a deep cut.

One of the strangest stories from my own personal mythology is that I taught myself to read at a young age, in part using liner notes. I don't remember doing this. But I do remember, when I was in middle or high school, cracking open the Solitude Standing jewel case and seeing horizontal indentations over every line in the lyric book where, years ago, I'd traced over them with something pointy while listening along. That one of the songs I apparently listened to was "In the Eye" kind of makes me wonder why I didn't grow up more disturbed than I did, but maybe instead it just seeded a lifelong preference for darker music.

Anyway, the things I remember about "Language" in particular are the time I was cuddling in silence with my junior-year high-school girlfriend outside after the after-prom party and sang a verse of this song to her, though I was then as now very self-conscious about my own singing. And then I remember, many years later, hearing it sampled in a Black Milk track and being absolutely dumbfounded by it. But here and now in 2026, with large language models smothering everything in a thick, oppressive layer of language-without-meaning, a 1987 song about the limits of language to capture and convey sounds pretty prescient.