with all my heart

Valentine's Day is my favorite holiday. 

featuring a vintage Valentine from '53

I love Courtney Love with all of my heart (so much, in fact, that I wear a locket around my neck with a picture of her stuffed in it at all times). 

Anyone with common sense is aware of my love for The Strokes. 

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen was—and still is—my favorite movie when I was younger. I don't think I ever realized how undoubtedly relatable the film would end up being as I got older. I believe wholeheartedly that Lola Step is a virgo.

These are the first two people I thought about when I started drafting this project. It's kind of creepy to be doing this without them knowing, but they're two people that I'd always admired from afar. My poem for Monyka is probably my favorite out of all of them. 
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I created a Valentine's playlist that is primarily comprised of 80's synth pop (I wanted to add my favorite sappy songs—Laura by Girls, Unfucktheworld by Angel Olsen, any song off of Crush Songs or Six Feet Beneath the Moon)—but I decided to stick with songs that I felt perfectly embodied my strange love for the holiday), but here are two songs that my brain sonically connects with these collages. 

Sleater-Kinney — No Cities To Love

Sleater-Kinney and The Virgins are two bands that I fall in and out of love with every six months or so. My love for either band is intervaled; when I'm not rediscovering The Virgins's later discography (I am a staunch believer that their first album is truly their magnum opus, but their later album seems to get better every time that I listen to it), I'm redownloading all of the old Sleater-Kinney tracks that I loved in the tenth grade and singing them loudly in my bedroom. 

Joanna Newsom — Only Skin

There is no physical way to formulate my love for this song into words or sentences or phrases or coherent syntax. The "Be a Woman" excerpt (around 4:30-8:00) is one of the most beautiful moments in modern music. 

Angel Olsen — Hi-Five

I think this song encapsulates the absurdity of love/passion/desire/any related abstract noun. The beginning of the song sets up this lonely, luring narrative; our narrator clearly desires another lonely person she has spotted and entices them by pitting their lonesomeness together (something along the lines of "we don't have to be lonely together..."). The ending of the first verse is the breaking point of the song:

Are you lonely too?/Are you lonely too?/Hi-five!/So am I! 

Olsen's voice is alluring (and gently seductive) when she delivers the beginning of the line, which adds to the greater effect—the shrill, abrupt ringing of HI-FIVE! interrupts her mesmerizing tone and forces an element of ridiculousness into the song. Both characters are in a perpetual state of loneliness, but why the hell should they try to get rid/out of it as quickly as possible? Loneliness can be a good thing...a fascinating state of mind.