Like a Love Song by E.P. Tuazon

The Pillows used to be a big part of my life. That sounds too small, even now, when I no longer listen to them, when the old MP3s sit buried in an external hard drive I haven’t touched in years. Back then—high school through the end of college—their music was the only thing I allowed myself to hear. It wasn’t a matter of preference, but of exclusivity, as though by limiting my choices I could become more sincere, or at least more knowable to myself.

I first heard them in FLCL, though I like to tell people otherwise. I say I discovered them earlier, through a live-action movie directed by the man who made Evangelion. I don’t remember the movie’s name anymore—just a fragment: a scene where two high school girls sit by a window, listening to “Like a Love Song (Back to Back).” The sound was thin and distant, as though it belonged to a room no one could enter. I wondered what the director had meant by that—why those girls, that song, that kind of melancholy that doesn’t quite arrive. I wanted to believe it meant something profound about youth, or longing, or maybe Japan itself. But more likely, I was projecting, searching for a reason to feel that my own listening mattered.

In 2003, in tenth grade, I had a girlfriend who was always trying to get me together with her best friend. It was a strange kind of matchmaking—her smiling insistence, my silence, and The Pillows humming through my headphones. She would nudge me, gesture toward her friend, roll her eyes when I didn’t respond. I’d nod, pretending I could hear her over the music, though really I just didn’t want to remove my headphones. The Pillows were a better language than I had, and I didn’t want to betray their fluency by saying something clumsy in English.

After school, I would rush home to download more of their songs on Kazaa. Files mislabeled, half-corrupted, but still precious. I joined a fan message board where strangers typed united, despite the barriers of distance and understanding, by a common love. I memorized lyrics in Japanese I couldn’t translate, convinced that meaning could be absorbed by feeling alone. Looking back, that might have been the kind of naivete that defined me then: wanting to define things by emotion, and mistaking that for understanding.

The Pillows formed in 1989, on September 16, exactly 3 years before I was born. That fact used to please me—a sense of order, maybe, that something I loved had existed just long enough before me to seem both ancient and waiting. I knew the details once: how Sawao Yamanaka started the band after another fell apart, how they changed their sound over time, from punk to Jazz, the angular edges of early alternative rock to something softer, more melodic, like a memory re-recorded on tape until it blurred. I read interviews, too, though I don’t remember what he said. It was always something modest, something about not wanting to be famous, just wanting to make songs that stayed small enough for people to hold. I thought I understood that: a quiet kind of ambition.

My girlfriend I had in high school came into my life the same year I began reading about the band in earnest. She had already been dating someone else when I met her. Freshman year. I don’t remember what I said to him, or even if I said anything worth a fight, only that there was one. The memory returns in gestures rather than words: his hand on my collar, a brief tilt of the world, and then the sky filling my vision. It was a single, fluid motion, something practiced. I remember laughing, maybe out of embarrassment, and her laughing too—not cruelly, just lightly, as though laughter were a way to keep everything from meaning too much.

That should have been the end of it. But time in high school didn’t move in straight lines—it circled, tangled, folded back on itself. By tenth grade, her best friend started dating the same boy who had thrown me down, as if every small humiliation had to be recycled among us. And then, as though completing some quiet equation, she asked me out. I said yes because I had never been asked before. Or maybe because saying no would have required a kind of honesty I didn’t have yet.

At the time, I was listening to Little Busters, the album that defined The Pillows for me. The songs had a strange optimism, bright chords brushing against melancholy, the way a smile can accompany a small grief. It felt like a perfect soundtrack for that period, when every emotion seemed to cancel itself out as soon as I felt it.

She would sit beside me at lunch, telling me things about her best friend’s relationship, the boy I’d fought, their arguments, their reconciliations. I listened, nodding, though my mind would drift to lyrics I half-understood: something about running, something about love being like air. If I translated them, they would lose what I thought they meant.

I told myself that loving her felt like loving a song—the kind that lingers even when you stop paying attention. But more truthfully, I think I was in love with the idea of being someone who could be loved at all.

The first time The Pillows played in Los Angeles, I couldn’t believe it. They were scheduled for Whisky a Go Go, a place I had only read about—its name sounded fictional, as though it belonged more to someone else’s adolescence. My girlfriend convinced me to go, but not with her. She said her parents wouldn’t let her, that her best friend could drive and that it would be the same, really, if I went with her instead. I nodded, though I knew it wasn’t true. She wanted me to go without her, to experience something without her in it. Maybe she wanted to see who I would be then.

Her best friend agreed easily. There was something cheerful about her acceptance, like someone joining a game they didn’t understand but wanted to play anyway. She didn’t know anything about the band. At the time, she and her boyfriend (the boy who had once thrown me down) were on uncertain terms. I didn’t ask why. I rarely asked anyone why they did what they did; it seemed impolite to demand logic from feelings.

We arrived early, long before the doors opened. The street shimmered faintly with heat, and the sun reflected off parked cars like the aftermath of applause. When we pulled into a spot across the street, I saw Sawao Yamanaka, the lead singer, walking toward the venue, a bottle of water in his hand, sunglasses hiding his expression in the way that only people accustomed to being looked at could.

My girlfriend’s best friend urged me to say something, to go and talk to him. I hesitated. I didn’t know what to say to someone who had unknowingly shaped the small architecture of my youth. When I finally did approach him, I managed a greeting, something clumsy and brief. His Japanese, my English—they circled each other politely, never meeting. A cameraman filmed us, perhaps thinking our awkwardness was endearing. Then another fan arrived, speaking in broken Japanese, and I felt myself erased in real time.

My girlfriend’s best friend touched my shoulder lightly, as if to console me. I tried to laugh. I didn’t know what I wanted from the encounter. Maybe I wanted to be recognized, or at least to have said something meaningful. But I realized then that I had never considered what a listener owed to the music that saved him.

We wandered afterward, waiting for the doors to open. The crowd was beginning to form: a mix of Japanese expats, anime fans, and people like me, who believed that music could be a kind of faith. We found a small burger place nearby, a dim booth by the window. When the band walked in a few minutes later, sitting not far from us, I froze again. My girlfriend’s best friend kept talking, steady and kind, as though to draw attention away from my silence.

She told me about a story she’d read in her honors English class. A man and a woman waiting at a train station, talking without talking. She said she didn’t quite understand it but liked how it felt—how something heavy could hide under so few words. I nodded. Later, I would recognize it as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” But at that time, I could only think of a Pillows song, one I had probably misinterpreted, about two people standing in the same place, pretending not to wait for each other.

I smiled at her, unsure if she noticed how much of myself I had poured into that silence. When the band took the stage later that night, I tried to sing along, but the words I had memorized in another language only sounded foreign in my mouth.

E. P. Tuazon is a Filipino American writer from Los Angeles. His latest book, A PROFESSIONAL LOLA, came out in 2024 with RED HEN PRESS and was selected as the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Fiction. His Forthcoming collection, KAIN TAYO! (LET’S EAT!) OR FOREVER HOLD OUR PIECE, comes out 2027 (RED HEN PRESS). In his spare time, he likes to go to Seafood City and gossip with the crabs.

18 December 2025