[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

It was October 10, 2001. I had lived in New York City for just over a month and a half. It was my freshman year at NYU, but it was Felicity’s senior year at the University of New York, and that night’s season opening episode featured a song that captured me. I mean captured me. Now if you recall, the WB, at the end of episodes, would feature the album covers of the songs they used during the episode, in exchange for cheaper licensing rights obvi. And so, after the episode was over, I eagerly waited to find out the song’s title and artist: La Cienega Just Smiled by Ryan Adams. Jumping onto my computer, I wanted to find out more, wanted to hear more. The first thing I found out was that Mr. Adams had just played Irving Plaza (which I could practically see from my dorm room window at “The Palladium”) exactly one week prior. So close! But so far away! The second thing I found out was that he had recorded a song (and video) that would remain, to this day, a touchstone for me (or, if I were to get all Oprah on you, I would, in fact, call it a heartstone). Regardless, I became enraptured and diligently followed his quite voluminous output over the years, often getting into fights with haters friends over his artistic merit but defending him and fighting for him and calling him, as I still do to this day, our generation’s Bob Dylan.

And I hold you close in the back of my mind
Feels so good but damn it makes me hurt
And I’m too scared to know to how I feel about you now
La Cienega just smiles…”see ya around”

I missed out on that next-door Irving Plaza concert by just a week. Even if it was sold out months and months before hand, that week-old after-the-fact loss haunts me to this day. Over the years, I’ve missed out on several of his concerts because I wasn’t on the ball in buying tickets immediately. Until this year. Over two months ago, I bought tickets to his upcoming New York concert. Website malfunctions and work obligations be damned: I got tickets. And so this Tuesday, ten years in the making, I’ll finally hear Ryan Adams live. And at Carnegie Hall, no less. And, as I do one thing well and only one thing well (that’s obsession), I’m posting a Ryan Adams song every day until then. Songs that mean something to me, songs that I want to hear live (he’s performing acoustic), songs that I just love. I start tonight with the one that started the fire. 

You want I should break bad on you?

My relationship with Felicity is too expansive and extensive to catalogue here. But I swear that I’m the atypical late-90s teen who went to NYU for reasons other than the show. I swear. Honestly, it had more to do with Molly Shannon saying on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that she went to NYU than anything to do with Keri Russell’s locks. I swear. But I did love the show, and besides obsessing over it in high school (did we really schedule our Spanish study lessons so we could also watch Felicity? Yes. Yes, we did), I also loved it in college, even after it was regulated to rerun oblivion on the WE network. But before those dark days, I made my season one freshman year/first boyfriend B watch every episode of her senior year right along with me (and maybe, even, perhaps, an additional viewing of the video tapes I made… do I still own those? Yes. Yes, I do.) Knowing what the show meant to me, he even went as far as throwing me a Felicity-themed 19th birthday party, construction paper curly wig for me and all. (He was a great guy and I regret losing him, one of the biggest regrets of my life… last I heard he was married to a guy and working for HBO in LA.) If you still wonder the extent of my love for the show, let me tell you: this was in the very beginning of the TV on DVD stage, and so, in order to make sure I had all the episodes, I bought VHS Emmy Screeners on EBay. Yeah. That’s how much I loved it. I stayed up late in my season one freshman year college dorm room, rapidly refreshing eBay.com on my blueberry iMac to win auctions of Emmy screener videotapes. Alas, eventually, DVD won out, but I made sure to buy them all. For a few months during season four senior year of college, I lived on the couch of an apartment I had subletted the previous semester. Now, I’m someone unable to sleep without noise. I inherited (from my grandmother who used to fall asleep watching CNN Headline News) the undesirable trait of needing the television (or music, if I’m desperate) to fall asleep. My poison that month or two on the couch on East 13th Street? Felicity, of course. I’d plop in one of the DVDs, no matter how many times I had already seen it, watch an episode and drift off into sleep during episode two. It happened so frequently (every night) that my “roommates” began to joke about it and even began to tease me about it. I, of course, responded by forcing them to watch the show, knowing that they would enjoy it, even love it perhaps, for surely anything was better than the Jeopardy!/Wheel of Fortune 7PM block they were accustomed to watching. And love it they did. They particularly loved this DVD extra, an Emmy parode [sic] featured on the Season 3 DVD (but actually filmed after Season 1). The lines, especially Elena’s, became catch phrases in the house. They loved it. So much. Until I broke the DVD player by watching the show one too many times. And then they weren’t so happy. But then our season ended when they kicked me out I moved to a sublet in Washington Heights.

Don’t squeeze my shoes, Felicity.