2004: Garden State, Music from the Major Motion Picture
BY Imogen BERGIN
Chris, you opened this for us, so I want to open this with you. A communion, of sorts. Beginnings – though they may not always be where everything starts – are where we get to choose to undertake the learning. You provided the prelude to this arrangement of vignettes, the entrance to this exhibition. Thank you for being the first door, of thirteen doors.
It starts with a belief. Somewhere deep in my body, I believed that if I loved a song, I should try to listen to it forever. So, I would soundtrack my sleep, from the moment I owned a CD player in elementary school through high school, rummaging through hand-me-down CD wallets for the right song to soothe me. Sometimes the whole CD would work, but I always preferred a single song on repeat. No surprises. Just a song becoming a heartbeat. I learned about mix CDs around the same time. About the dignity of sequencing. A smooth transition makes a crushed velvet moment, all soft and shine; an abrupt shift leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Falling asleep to mix CDs became the ultimate test. Could I evoke a mood that spoke to many moods, all under the same title? Can twelve songs all sing one tune in harmony? Who was I making these CDs for: my friends and lovers, or my dreams?
This type of musing tends to make me tired. I stopped falling asleep with headphones on when I started falling asleep with other people in my bed. I wish I could be more nostalgic, but I always get so sleepy when I moon over my memories.
Sam, I was always fast asleep by the time you started plucking your strings, but you showed me what it meant to take a song that was not yours and build a new world in it. When I started playing your version at open mics (we both know I’d never attempt Ben’s version) I could never play your riff as well as you and I never really wanted to; that’s never been the point for me. I wanted to show people a door: to Iron & Wine, to The Postal Service. A door revealing a roomful of doors.
In 2004, I was 10 years old. In 2022, I’m 27 years old and I’m reading Lou Sullivan’s diaries and wishing I had kept such careful records of my childhood, because I end up twisting my memories into my imagination. Tying knots over knots in the silk of my stories. I wish I knew how I felt about my house on the lake, where I moved to as a young kid and then moved from as a less-young kid. Or what I was thinking when I got home from church every Sunday, or which friends I got to see every other weekend when I would go to my grandma’s house with my dad. I don’t remember their names. I only have the languid memory of loneliness to hang on to, and the feeling that I was somebody that had to be conceived again. A baptism of the queerest variety; a renovation. The way we are reborn as our vocabulary expands. There’s so much we know about ourselves when we’re young, whether we have the words for our knowing or not. For me, songs fill in those gaps. My mix CDs composed the most fulfilled sequences of emotional and physical moments when my words weren’t enough. I built roads between songs that did not share any common ground, cemented them deep, deep into my psyche, and shared them.
What I am hoping to prove is that songs can be doorways and that means mix CDs, without a doubt, must be apartment buildings. They are the shared noise of a space that is both yours and theirs and ours, a terracotta pot of romance and transition with a glaze of context left to cure on the balcony. They are an elevator filled with neighbor, lover, friend, relative, and you, all waiting for your turn to speak. To be fair, I’m romanticizing a thing I’ve never had – a life lived in an apartment building – so let me step out of this metaphor and into another, a little more atmospheric, a little less tangible. Perhaps if you’ve never grown up in an apartment building either, you might be more sympathetic to the stars.
If you put my family in the stars, my mom and dad are twin suns. My brothers are the first two planets in their orbit, massive and mountainous. Gas giants; smoke, but no fire. My sisters follow, songful and sanguine. I am the last planet in our particular solar system. Most of the time, I feel like a moon. Not quite cold, but not particularly sure of where my own energy comes from. A reflection in colorless ellipse. When I was young, most of the colors I used to fill myself in were borrowed from my sisters. These colors were clothing brands, cherished book series, TV shows, and most of all, music. When they discovered a new artist, so did I, and we shared their words and their songs and their sentiments in the car together - Yellowcard’s Ocean Avenue, Ben Folds Live, Guster’s Keep It Together, Dashboard Confessional’s The Swiss Army Romance, Regina Spektor’s Soviet Kitsch. Tucked away for me to find in the stiff sleeve of a CD wallet covered in duct tape, waiting for me in the constellation-filled sky of songs that I see at night, was a burned CD titled Garden State: Music from the Motion Picture.
Why, Zach? It feels almost trivial to ask, but these days I am trying to be more compassionate toward all of my trivialities. I left my childhood hastily to live a life ashamed of my inexperience. You made thirteen doors for us and invited us to walk through them, to sit in rooms with strangers singing their songs to me when previously I was sitting in rooms by myself. Your doors opened into worlds that would influence everything I listened to, everything I still find myself seeking out and discovering today. If we are indeed the architects of our own lives, you provided foundational materials to the design of my emotional interiors. A hymnal disguised as a mix CD packaged as a soundtrack made for a movie I’ve never seen.
The press surrounding Garden State’s soundtrack, released on August 10th, 2004, used this quote from Zach Braff: “Essentially, I made a mix CD with all of the music that I felt was scoring my life at the time I was writing the screenplay.” The next year, Zach’s mix CD was awarded a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, and was certified as platinum by the RIAA for surpassing 1 million sales. Garden State: Music from the Motion Picture is part of a legacy of soundtracks-as-mixtapes that redefined the landscape of audiovisual media. TV shows like Felicity, Gilmore Girls, Scrubs, The O.C. and One Tree Hill and films like Romeo+Juliet [dir. Baz Lurhmann] and Reality Bites [dir. Ben Stiller] foreshadowed Garden State with their hands-on, artist-breaking approach to music supervision. Felicity and Scrubs even had their own soundtrack compilation CDs released in 1999 and 2002, respectively. Garden State was one of the first movies to put the tracks to wax (...digitally speaking), release the soundtrack as its own product immediately after the movie hit the box office, and enjoy critical success separate from the film’s achievements.
This movie/soundtrack duo ushered in an era of thematically comparable movies and of independent artists hoping for the same chance to be heard on the big or small screen. Juno in 2007, with Kimya Dawson playing an integral role in supplying her own songs and songs from her bands, The Moldy Peaches and Antsy Pants; Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist in 2008 with director Peter Sollett saying, “we just wanted to try to find the best music you haven’t heard yet;” 500 Days of Summer in 2009 with runaway hits from The Temper Trap and Regina Spektor. TV shows at the time were also following suit; belated CD versions for the soundtracks from The O.C, One Tree Hill, and Dawson’s Creek were released in 2006 and 2007. Musically speaking, Garden State was a blueprint for what was possible for bands that hadn’t yet made an appearance on commercial radio stations or MTV, platforming artists like Iron & Wine, Cary Brothers, and Frou Frou.
Imogen, I scratched my CD copy of Garden State so badly listening to your song on repeat in the summer of 2006 and I don’t have any regrets. I had dropped my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s copy of Ender’s Game in the water and was reading it as it dried on the porch banister, turning each sopping page ever so carefully so the pages would peel apart like onion skin, holding my breath so I wouldn’t rip the paper, the back of my neck sizzling from the sun, ears ringing with your sounds. I couldn’t read it without listening to you. Years later, I can’t hear that song without yielding to my imagination, returning to the world I built in Orson Scott Card’s writing, the place I escaped to that summer and am escaping to again as I write this. I am always escaping through song.
In an interview shortly after Garden State premiered, Zach says, “I think sharing music is a very romantic thing to do.” He’s making reference to the movie’s central romance, with an iconic scene of Natalie Portman showing him The Shins for the first time, but I’m more interested in what’s outside of the movie, and how this romance doesn’t end when the credits roll. What he shared with us will last. The doors that he configured don’t disappear; Coldplay will always open into The Shins, Thievery Corporation will always fade into Simon & Garfunkel. The CDs become playlists; easier to carry, easier to romance with. You don’t have to tuck the CD player into your pillowcase to make sure it won’t fall out anymore. Things haven’t really changed. And, things have changed completely. Either way, it feels okay to be put to sleep by something familiar. I hope it’s something you believe in.
Imogen Bergin (they/them) is an artist based on Erie land in so-called Cleveland, OH. In addition to writing, they are a self-taught film photographer, a songwriter, a classical violinist, and bassist in the bands Sasha and the Valentines, Spirit Ghost, and Calico Blue. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter @mercibeauyou.