I’ve got a visual obsession with music. I sometimes hear a song and imagine it could be perfect as the “credits song” of a movie or tv show. Or maybe for a trailer. I had a list somewhere in my house and maybe one day I’ll write about that. I certainly don’t plan to work as a musical director for an editing house.

Zip-lock always felt like “trailer” song for a romantic comedy. Even for a teen gross out humour flick like American Pie, Road Trip, or Euro Trip. I have this false memory that it was used a lot on that era of film (late 90s, early 00s), but I can only find credits for Roswell and The Replacements.

Perhaps it was that their genre and attitude was a congenial with whatever songs ended up on the soundtracks for that era. Blink 182 had a song in a crucial part of American Pie, and they cameo on the video for this track. Perhaps that’s how I relate both.

“If I could get another chance/ I’d put it in a zip-lock bag” resonated with my terminally single life back when Lit were on heavy rotation on radio and MTV. So I wrote around the issue of unrequited love, parties, and walking on the beach. Nothing readable came out of it, though. I think my main issue as a writer when I started out is that I described too much, as if everything was a movie or a show. I’ve tried to shake that off, but I still fall into that trap.

It’s an issue for any person aspiring to write: finding their own voice. So many years on, I’m still searching.

-Sam J. Valdés López