Filipa was a friend of mine, or how I got to love The National

Some time ago I alluded to the eventual existence of this post, maybe on the Patrick Wolf post I did some months ago. Here and there I might have also mentioned just how difficult - not to mention impossible, for me - it is to dissociate someone from a song or a band. And so it is here, with The National, a band that will always make me think of Filipa, an ex-girlfriend of mine. Now, to be honest, it wasn't through her that I got to know the band, no. That happened years prior, but for some reason they sort of flew under my radar until maybe 'Alligator', and even then I'd not take to them immediately. 'Boxer', the follow-up to that, though, was much more agreeable with my own sensibilities, and I enjoyed it much more than anything I'd listened of them before. But the problem with not really following a band, is like you know they exist, but they're always at the edge of your perception and eventually their output will be something you may not be aware of. In this instance, I wasn't aware that in the meantime they'd released an album in 2010 at all - that was a rough, rough year for me.

So by early 2011 I'm ending the relationship where I'd been trying and failing miserably to make work since 2006, and sometime in early summer, or somewhere close to that, I went out and met up with an old friend, Elaine. She was with some friends of hers, Filipa included. It's not a story I want to tell in full detail, but things did start happening that night. Unfortunately, the circumstances of those events led to a lot of pain and anguish for another person, and it's something to this day I wish didn't happen the way it did.
But me and Filipa, we ended up being together for less than an year, ultimately after that initial bout of wild passion things fizzled out, and we decided to call it quits. I only saw her the once after that, and boy oh boy, the same thing that would come to happen as consequence of our first meeting almost happened again that time. What I do have though, are very fond memories of being with Filipa getting very drunk and listening to a lot of music - she had quite the voracious apettite, that one did. It's funny how clearly I can recall some things so well, while others just fade from memory altogether. I can hear her voice still, I can picture her in full detail, but I can no longer remember things like her birthday or her full name. And I can remember being inside her car, nigh on a decade ago, and she was playing 'High Violet' to me - it was my first time listening to it, and that bit where 'Terrible Love' hits right at the start, that was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the band. I'm not entirely sure why it happened then and not in any of the times before I'd been exposed to the band. I mean, the things that I already liked about the band - Matt's voice, the rhythm session, the melody - were already there, only now maybe even more prevalent. Maybe it was because it was through her, and these songs sort of became testament to our being so in love at the time. Or maybe it was a phrase from 'Terrible Love' that I came to recognize from something that was written to me only months before, in the throes of my dying previous relationship - 'It takes an ocean not to break'. Whatever the reason, I gravitated toward this album, like a fly does to honey, and it became a fixture of my songlist on my phone. It's still an album that I return to with immense pleasure, though I will confess to having enjoyed their next album even more, 'Trouble will find me', which includes my favourite song of theirs, 'Pink Rabbits'. When this special anniversary edition was announced I knew I had to buy it because a) it comes in a groovy marbled pattern and b) it includes the content found on the CD expanded edition, which boasts the greatest version of 'Terrible Love', the alternate version, where the drumming absolutely elevates this song. Speaking of it, check it out below.