Growing to Such Great Heights

On February 19th, the 15th year anniversary of the Postal Service’s first and only album Give Up (2003), I sat on my couch and went through all the old playlists I had made since the inception of Spotify, a couple deeper cuts e-scribbled in the body of old emails to myself. It was kind of like going through old photos, how I was somehow able to relive every moment and feeling I must have been thinking at the time; I think I learned more about myself that day than I had in the past 20 years.

The first recorded incident of me hearing the Postal Service was sometime in 2010, in my sister’s falling apart black Oldsmobile. It was “District,” I can remember that clearly, and from then on I’ve always subtly associated it with rainy Atlanta mornings. For a year, I only heard them in that setting: on repeat and interspersed between the other CDs she had bought, but still in small doses. In 2011 the vehicle changed to my mom’s old laptop and my newly made Spotify account, where, for probably the first time, I really started exploring the music world on my own.

That’s not to say I was totally shunned from that universe before; definitely the opposite. I had my first concert experience when I was 4 and a half, at a Jethro Tull show believe or not. More in the sense that this was my first real time going in alone. Up until that point, all the songs sitting on my iPod touch varied based on what my friends, my sister, my parents listened to. It was Fall Out Boy next to ABBA next to the Backstreet Boys, a cycle of songs I’d hear through the people around me.

It’s not like I was upset about it though, or felt like any of this was forced on me. I loved Fall Out Boy, who didn’t? But I never really knew what to do past that. Do you just keep loving Fall Out Boy for the rest of your life?

I didn’t think I wanted to, and so I set out onto a journey of what I then called “Intense Self-Exploration,” where I hoped to figure out everything about myself in the short three month span in between leaving those rainy Atlanta mornings and finding myself starting over in the only place worse than hell, high school. I didn’t know where to start; the only glimpse I had allowed myself into this so far was the few Regina Spektor songs I’d heard on the Sirius Coffee House radio and thought “okay yeah I like that.” So I backtracked, and landed once again, this time serendipitously, on the first track of Give Up: “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.” Whether I realized it or not at the time, it became the entire foundation of my newly budding music taste, one that shaped my entire identity.

And I’m not the only one who’s found inspiration in the Postal Service; even with just releasing one album (and then a re-release of the same album 10 years late), they’ve been covered by bands and artists like The Shins, Iron & Wine, Ben Folds – the list goes on. And their indie-rock-synthpop-whatever-genre-you-want-to-classify-them-as sound, influenced not only other artists, but the time period of the early turn of the century as well: Garden State, Grey’s Anatomy, even the almost shot-for-shot remake of their “Such Great Heights” video in an Apple commercial (which, turns out, they didn’t even receive compensation for, save for a little bump they got in the iTunes store). It’s critically acclaimed, hit platinum, and the reissue of the album 10 years later even hit 45 on the Billboard charts. Not bad for a side project, not bad for a group that only ever created one album.

It’s hard to hold dear a band that will never create new music past the twenty something tracks that have already been around for the past 15 years. It’s hard to hold dear a band that did their quick reunion back in 2013 that is probably their last. It’s hard to hold dear a band that came as fast as they went. It’s not like any of the members have totally shunned music from their lives (see, obviously, Death Cab, Rilo Kiley, DNTEL, etc), it’s just that Give Up served its purpose, one that it seems to continue to serve 15 years later.

The trademark of a timeless album is one that you can listen to at any point in the future and still think “this is relevant, this is necessary, this makes sense right now.” It feels sometimes that music stays so stagnant in the time period it was created, that after a few years (or, god forbid, months) it fizzles, fades out, to the point where you can only associate it with a specific year or specific time. It might still be good, it probably is, but is it timeless? And yet, with the Postal Service, a group that could be seen as the soundtrack of the early 2000s, they created the most timeless piece of work of all time. At any moment someone can pick up the album and experience something that still fits almost perfectly to their right then; for how many albums can you say that? And even though it will always remind me of those rainy Atlanta mornings, Give Up will forever be everlasting and endless.