The Shins

One year ago, I spent five weeks gallivanting from the northern coast of Colombia down to the earth's equator in Ecuador, a sprawling trip calculated in its aimlessness, spectacular, unpredictable, and often scintillatingly uncomfortable in its lack of familiarity.

The entire while, the only music I listened to was one album on repeat, the only exception being perhaps a weekly dose of Beethoven's 5th or 9th Symphony to clear the auditory palette before playing said album again. That album was Oh Inverted World by the Shins.

The combination of James Mercer's pre-pubescent alien of a voice with the otherworldly world I churned through became so sacred that I refused to listen to the album again back home in San Francisco, a year of deprivation to keep the holy holy, with loose plans to triumphantly unveil the album again one day during a full-blown LSD trip.

Here I am one year later, listening at last to Oh Inverted World as I bus from Mexico City to Oaxaca, just like I'd listened to it bussing from Medellin to Cartago, from San Agustin to Mocoa, from Otavalo to Quito.

And it is perfection. The songs unfold like auditory opium flowering into my ears, spilling like crystalline mercury into the starving crevices of my being. Caring Is Creepy. One By One All Day. Weird Divide. All creating a dazzling soundtrack to the psychedelic cinema I see out the window: maguey plants in full-on phallic flowering, amidst a sea of lazy desert trees baking in the setting sun, before a backdrop of moody clouds strewn across the sky with a spilled palette of every color in the rainbow.

By the time James is singing "when they're parking their cars on your chest, you've still got a view of the summer sky," I'm on the verge of having full-blown tears billowing out of my eyes and drenching the dulce de leche empanada I'm greedily eating. Oh the beauty.