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It’s All Happening
A love letter to ‘Almost Famous’ on its 20th anniversary
There are songs that attach themselves to us with a sticky, uncomfortable permanence. They stick to us like splotches of chewing gum along a sidewalk we vandalized with chalk. They play on repeat like ballads we slow-danced to. They haunt us like memories stuck in a purgatorial divide between who we are and who we once were.
For a generation aimlessly searching for meaning in the early 2000s, Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” was that song. Correction: “Tiny Dancer” was one of those songs. There were others, like the ghostly tambourine from The Shins’ “New Slang” transferring from Natalie Portman’s headphones into our ears in Garden State (2004). Most of us don’t want to be ambushed by those songs, especially in public places. They make us homesick for a home that no longer exists. They provide the auditory equivalent of peeling back the sticky pages of a crackling leather-bound photo album. They conjure reflections of reading a letter you wrote during a summer that “seemed to last forever.”
“Tiny Dancer” is that song for me. It would not be that song had it not been for the girl who made me watch Almost Famous.
