Grizzly Bear’s songs used to just be really cute to me. I didn’t initially connect with them enough for them to be Friday I’m in Love songs.
That changed when I saw Blue Valentine. Grizzly Bear composed almost all of the music for the movie.
At the time, I was watching my own relationship fall apart in much the same way as in the movie. The girl I was dating at the time, like Michelle Williams’s character, felt like I wasn’t good enough for her. She didn’t like that I was broke (granted, I was just a sophomore in college working at a bakery and an internship) and that I was so young (I was 20-21 at the time). (She eventually left me for an older, well-off computer programmer.) And I, like Ryan Gosling’s character, tried my best to fix things but would just keep ending up a sometimes angry but mostly sad, pathetic drunk in the process… So that movie and all the music really hit home. That’s why I dusted off my external hard drive, uploaded all my Grizzly Bear songs to my laptop, hit “Repeat,” and pretty much had a good cry for a week.