Some records become indelibly associated in our minds with a particular time or place or moment, even if we haven’t listened to them for years. For me Darren Hanlon’s Little Chills will always be the sound of moving to Melbourne, when I lived for a year in the middle of Fitzroy and spent every dollar I could spare in Polyester Records; similarly Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s self-titled album is the sound of moving out of that Fitzroy house and getting the hell away from its dodgy landlord: relief and freedom and joy. Some records, though, have no such concrete associations: they can’t be pinned to anything or anywhere specific in our lives. These records, I think, are often the ones that have ingrained themselves inexorably and essentially into the very fabric of our lives: they are nowhere specific, because they are everywhere; they are associated with no particular time, because they are timeless.

The Silver Jews’ American Water is one such album for me. I can remembe—I think—where I first saw the band’s name: it would’ve been on the racks of Landspeed Records, in my home town of Canberra. It may have been when I was in high school, in which case my first awareness of the band would have predated the release of American Water in 1998. I’m certain that I must have bought that album while I was at university, before I moved to Melbourne, which would’ve been an anomaly: for the bulk of my uni years I was going through my Young Man’s Jazz Phase. I didn’t return to rock and pop until after I’d graduated.