#subiza

During freshman year, I had to walk every day from my dorm to class to the dining halls and I hadn’t brought any real rain gear. (Oregon is fucking wet, if you haven’t heard.) Every single evening I’d come home with damp jeans and soaked shoes and dripping hair and I’d feel cold for hours.

I started making playlists that distracted me from the rain and the chills, but they also distracted me from the stress that I began to feel around the first winter at school, when the “new” had worn off and the “oh shit this is my life now” had set in. I listened to music that sounded like I was on a beach somewhere; I listened to music that feels better with a margarita in hand, even though I was more likely to be carrying a black coffee to the library.

Delorean was the centerpiece of this experience. A Spanish band that made the Pacific Northwest more tolerable, their first album Subiza became the replacement Vitamin D in my life.

That spring, the rain stopped in Oregon and so did the aching in my cold hands and feet. I didn’t need the tiki/sunshine/citrus playlists anymore, so Delorean became one of those bands that encapsulates a specific time in one’s life. (At the Drive-In means early high school, Gold Panda means first boyfriend, Joanna Newsom means lonely summer evenings after freshman year and slogging through Song of Fire and Ice books.)

Last week, I saw that a friend had listened to a Delorean song on Spotify that I’d never heard before. I checked it out, and the timing could not be more perfect—the band that released an album at the beginning of my freshman year of college just released a follow-up in the last few months of my senior year. What perfect bookends, right?

After a few listens, I realized that I don’t need to import my happiness from Spain anymore. When I listen to this album, Apar, it doesn’t have the same transformative effect on me that Subiza did. I’d like to think that it’s not Delorean who changed, but me. Somewhere along the line, I figured out how to manifest those feelings for myself—through friends, through art, through finally buying some goddamn rainboots—and although I find myself listening to these new tracks and smiling, they feel more like the extra slice of pineapple in the drink instead of a mobile distillation of the entire white-sand beach and palm tree experience.

Delorean - "Stay Close"