Almost five years ago, during the expectant week between Christmas and New Year’s, I drove cross country from New York to Los Angeles with my friend Allison1. On the second day of the trip, somewhere between Roanoke, VA and Nashville, TN, we decided on a “game” to pass the time. Whoever was sitting in the passenger seat would DJ, selecting only artists from or based in the state we were driving through. There wasn’t a lot of scenery on I-40 but this gave us a sense of space. We never named the game, but I guess you could call it “local radio” or “geography lessons.” Playing it is how I learned The Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma and remembered that the “curse for this town” named in The Shins’ “New Slang” is for Albuquerque. (Did James Mercer spend enough time looking out at the Sandias though?)
I’ll never forget that cinematic feeling I had pulling onto the highway outside of Oklahoma City. The Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize?” turned up to full volume, triumphant bells filling all of that midwestern wide open space. Music anchors us all to a sense of place and time, doesn’t it? I hear certain songs and am instantly transported back to the environment where I first listened or the era where I played it on repeat. I hear “Four Winds” by Bright Eyes or “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups and time travel back to the Summer of 2007—feeling the clean, damp suburban air on my face, driving with the rolly windows down in a base model Toyota Corolla. Both songs were on a mix CD my friend made for me after high school graduation that I played over and over and over again all summer long on late night drives.
But it isn’t just nostalgia that anchors us to place and time with music, is it? I don’t think so. Playing that local radio game made clear what I’d long known: you can’t separate an artist’s geography from their songs. Both where they come from and where they’ve landed. You can hear where a song is from. Whenever I listen to music by artists who also grew up in Northern Westchester County, I can’t help but hear the influence of all that natural beauty we grew up surrounded by, the undeniable influence of all those holy trees.
Rains
Clear clutter
Make rivers
Down gutters
These are the lyrics that open “Rains” by The Antlers. The band’s frontman Peter Silberman is from my hometown,2 and it’s not just the lyrics about rains making rivers flow down gutters (yes, we obvi grew up in suburbia) that makes me feel at home. It’s the sound. I feel that same cleen, damp air from my 2007 flashbacks, sense a rhythm that matches that pace of life.
There’s a Porches song called “Country” (Aaron Maine is from Pleasantville, NY—about 15 miles south of my hometown) that opens with the lyrics When the air hit my face and it felt like the truth. Again, I know exactly what air he’s talking about. Ira Kaplan from Yo La Tengo grew up in Croton-on-Hudson (about 15 miles west of my hometown), and has said in interviews, “I'm sure Croton affected the air that the songs come out of…but I don't have to, and choose not to, think about how."3 But for me, it’s impossible to hear the crickets that open “Green Arrow” and the guitar slides that feel like winding roads and not be transported to the Hudson Valley.
“The air that the songs come out of” indeed.
We don’t just stay in our hometown with music of course (even though the nostalgia demons among us would love to do just that). We travel with songs too. Lana Del Rey is almost too good at capturing her chosen home of Los Angeles, and every Jenny Lewis song is set deep in the San Fernando Valley. Find an artist that shares your hometown and I promise you will find some kind of haunting. Place is always pulsing in a song, but what about time?
We tend to associate albums with the season in which they were released. After the monocultural media experience of 2020, who that listens to pop music doesn’t associate Taylor Swift’s folklore with late summer and her companion album evermore with the holiday season? Beyond just when we “first listened” though, every album has its own birth chart and therefore holds its own astrological archetypes and signatures. A baby’s birth chart is a transit to their mother’s, and an album’s birth chart is a transit to its artist’s.
In the Spring of 2017, while navigating through a heartbreak, New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies was a repetitive balm. Sure, I’d heard “Age of Consent” plenty of times (I worked in a Bushwick dive bar for years, ok?), but I was not familiar with the full album until that Taurus Season deep dive/ crush dissolving prayer. Of course (because music holds place and time) Power, Corruption and Lies is a Taurus. It was released on May 2, 1983. This is made obvious through the album cover artwork (by Peter Saville) which features a reproduction of a 19th century French painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, “A Basket of Roses.” Taurus season literally is flowers dying in a woven basket: a promise that spring won’t last. But it’s also told through the lyrics “our love is like the flowers” and the pulsing, impatient sound; the steady dance beats. This album, like the bull, wants what it wants.
Another band with a thing for Taurus season is The National. Four of their nine albums have been released during the season of the bull: High Violet (2010), Trouble Will Find Me (2013), I Am Easy to Find (2019) and now First Two Pages of Frankenstein (2023). Three of these albums (including their two best, IMO, High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me) also have Venus in Gemini.
The National is known for its lush instrumentation (Taurus) and heady, melancholy lyrics (Aquarius). Band members Aaron and Bryce Dessner (who are twin brothers) write the bulk of the music and have Taurus stelliums in their birth charts while Matt Berninger—the lead singer who writes all of the lyrics—is an Aquarius. It’s not uncommon for artists to release albums around the same time of the year because of the way the album cycle and music industry works, but it’s interesting that they have so many Taurus babies. Somehow despite having lyrics written by an Aquarius Sun and Mercury, songs like “I Should Live in Salt” (don’t make me read your mind/you should know me better than that) still reveal that fixed Venusian stubbornness. On an Instagram post about the making of First Two Pages of Frankenstein, a fan writes in the comments, “thanks for the sad songs, they are always my safe place <3.” Taurus wants security, wants a safe place.
Doing a survey of my favorite albums, I keep finding synchronicities between their birth charts and my own. Feist’s The Reminder has the North Node on my Sun, Beach House’s Bloom released on my second Jupiter return in Taurus, The Shins’ Oh, Inverted World! with Pluto squaring my Sun and the nodes on my MC/IC axis. I know some of what I’m writing here is heading in the direction of pure jargon, but the point is: I can trace my connection with my favorite albums and songs in the same way I can surf through my compatibility with past and present and potential lovers. I can see how The Reminder carried me through a turbulent time in my social life, how Bloom heralded in a season of rapid growth in my immediate environment, how Oh, Inverted World! actually “changed my life” (-Natalie Portman, Garden State).
It’s sweet that—as of July 2015—we always get new music on Friday. Venus Day. Previously in the US, we had new releases on Tuesday. Mars Day. (Though technically with midnight releases, everything was coming out on Venus night—Venus rules the hours after sunset on Monday until sunrise on Tuesday) Tuesday was implemented for very Marsian purposes: shipping deadlines and Billboard competitions. I think Friday was implemented for Venusian purposes: to make sure we have some good tunes going into the weekend.
I want less people to ask me about their crush’s chart and more people to ask me about their favorite record’s chart.
The survey shows that music has a sense of time and place. Undeniable seasonality. Horoscopes are songs so music is divination. We put the playlist on Shuffle and see what it spits out (shuffle-mancy, if you will). We look for meaning in the song playing at the bodega at 1 am. The most normie couples choose a song for their wedding “first dance.” Ritual is always hidden in plain sight. But what if we take it a step further and admit that the divination in music isn’t simply about ritual or leaving things to chance. That sense of time and place in a song from the past allows us to make predictions about the future. The moment we find a song that sticks with us over time will always resonate, coming and going in cycles. My Venus line goes through the midwest and I love bands from there—so is that where I’m meant to find love? Why are so many of my favorite artist born around Christmas? With the Sun in Capricorn conjunct my IC4? What home have I found in “the work” that isn’t as clear yet in a physical form? What records in my collection tell the story of my life? At least the one I want to tell in this moment.
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. But there’s for sure some guidance to be found in the stars, or the music, and there certainly is something "in the air the songs came out of.”
Allison and I were born about two weeks apart and this trip was bookended by our respective Saturn Returns. We both have Saturn conjunct Neptune in Capricorn, a placement that can definitely speak to intuitive geography or feeling time.
famously, we both starred in Somers High School’s 2004 production of Into the Woods lol
IC stands for Immum Coeli, Latin for “lowest heaven” — it’s the part of a birth chart that represents home, family, ancestry and roots. It’s both where one comes from and the end of all matters. Anything that touches the IC strikes a foundational chord.