When I met my new neighbor, Wayne, he told me he doesn’t wear sandals that were made in China because of the poison that seeps into your feet, presumably by osmosis. He and his wife (whose name I forget) have a lightbox of the Virgin Mary in their backyard that stays lit all night long. Our other neighbor, Shannon, is a wine mom, in that she is a mother who sells her own brand of wine out of her house. I get the feeling her husband (whose name I forget) doesn’t like me, but all the niceties and welcome-wagoning that we’d secretly wished to have had with our new neighbors were stymied by the pandemic, which—I’m sure—prevented them from inviting us over for a drink or bringing us some cookies when my wife and I moved into our first house in July, on the hottest day of 2020.
Both neighbors (whose names I remember) are old enough to have sired me, as is pretty much everyone who lives in Verplanck, New York, a small hamlet just south of Peekskill. Our town is so small we don’t have a mail truck, so every day I walk down to the post office to get my mail from the p.o. box, auspiciously numbered 808. To round out the hamlet: The post office shares a wall with a hair salon, there’s Angela’s Deli run by the namesake’s son Tony, a bodega (only up here you call it a “store”), a seemingly fine Italian restaurant, and a marina with more than a few Trump flags hanging off the masts. That’s about it. “This is our life now,” we often find ourselves saying to each other, always with varying degrees of bemusement, relief, and resignation.
The first five months of the pandemic, the final five months we spent in our apartment in Crown Heights, is a blur. There were a lot of lines and sirens and fireworks. We barely left our place at all. I don’t think I have anything novel or unique to say about that time yet, though I was lucky enough to have been a runner and used running as an emotional crutch. One day in late March, I ran a big loop around the city, 18 miles with a mask over my face, over empty bridges through a deserted Manhattan, and back again. The only other people out were skaters gliding roughshod over empty streets and a few other runners, all masked up. I made a bunch of running mixes during this time, and put “Kim & Jessie” by M83 on all of them. That’s the only song I remember really having an effect on me during our Brooklyn quarantine, I must have listened to it 30 times. I kept waiting for it to make me cry; it never did, but the thought of crying always occurred to me. That’s the best way I could describe quarantine.
My favorite album of the year is the Microphones’ The Microphones in 2020. It’s an album, but it’s also a song, and arguably a podcast. Phil Elverum, who performs under the name the Microphones and Mount Eerie, wrote this uninterrupted 45-minute piece of music that asks a lot of the questions I asked myself this year: Why do I do this? What is the meaning of this? A self-referential dialogue with oneself and the past to uncover some deeper truth to life: The Microphones in 2020 appeals to that weepy, beardy, Knausgaardian heart of mine. And now here I am futilely chasing after this album, fumbling to find the words and make something of my own in the dim of its enormous shadow.
I realize I have a lot bottled up in me from this year of inertia. I was unable to express myself quickly and with alacrity. I have perhaps even spent an entire year lying through my teeth. So forgive me, please, and indulge me, please, because it feels good to sit here and type without censorship or feeling the need to wrap things up with a button or joke, or to chat cautiously among co-workers so as not to unsettle or burden them. It feels good to dig under my skin and look around and apply pressure to every question I ignored this year. This indulgence has been afforded to me by Phil Elverum, who also gazed deep into his navel for the better part of an hour and returned with an album about the creative process, the vocation of music, self-mythology, spirituality, eternity, vulnerability, bottling some unnamed emotion and studying it intimately. He went back to the well and returned with some semblance of what his work meant and what his time on this earth has been about. (This kind of indulgence has also been afforded to me because is a personal blog.)
These big themes of art and music remain so interesting and so mysterious to me. Perhaps because they are some of the worst, most unadvisable themes to write about: Gather round let’s talk about what art means, why we’re here, what feeds great wellspring of creativity. Everything becomes wispy and cirrus, prone to sweeping generalities without much care for ideology and wit and pizazz. No, none of that, let’s just languish in some Proustian temporal mood evoked by, like, the cold rubber smell of a bike tire or a cloud obscuring the peak of a Pacific Northwest mountain. I still connect with the normal, tactile emotions in music: heartbreak, love, sex, death, identity, drugs, money, agency, anger, indiscretion, all those things that pop music and humans need to feel seen. Pop music exists to make people feel comfortable in their bodies. Someone put a melody to exactly what you are feeling, and, well, isn’t that pretty neat?
But I often find myself listening to new music and I think: Why are you making this? What are you doing here? What do you want? These are things I overlook because I’m afraid to be seen as someone who takes music too seriously. Most pop music is for children and most music is not that serious, yes, but if it’s not, then why have I dedicated this era of my life to it? To be dipped so fully into that question by Phil is such a generous gift during a year where I sat at length with my own thoughts, kneading my brain like so many balls of sourdough. Phil’s project helped me to refocus and recenter what I love about music, what I find so powerful about it: it is always something unspeakable and unknowable. It’s the search for the divine, a glimpse at something bigger, “the true state of all things” and it’s a journey I felt so compelled to go along with because it is the one thing I feel music can actually seek to answer. Moral instruction, political efficacy, self-pity, self-aggrandizement, self-discovery—ok, sure—but what about the stuff you can’t simply apply to this version yourself? What happens at the end? Someone put a melody to exactly what I was feeling.
This has become my predicament as a listener and music writer over a certain age: How do you be rigorously honest with the life you’ve accumulated while connecting with popular music that is being created now? In some sense, I wish I could do The Microphones in 2020 in reverse: instead of tracing a history that led me here, I’d just simply erase every memory, every song, every note I’ve ever heard and just begin again. Empty it all out to feel what a young person feels. No longer would I be on this path toward ambient jazz, psych-folk jam music, loop revival, prog-hardcore, 45-minute folk soliloquies about music itself—just let me be reborn into Jack Harlow, TikTok challenges, and shitty bedroom pop, into a world where there is no linear connection to the past just a rapid-fire, iterative present.
Konstantin Stanislavski, the great fin de siècle Russian theater man, coined the phrase The Magic If. The idea is that as an actor you have to approach your role with this underlying thought: What would I do if I were this character. That’s the mindset I have at work when listening to music. What would I think if this music was made for me? It’s a byproduct of my job and needing to have a handle on a wide array of genres, to have a baseline of empathy for its creators and listeners, and to be able to give feedback to writers as they move organically through their own discovery. It is the single best part about being a music editor: Learning how to listen to music through the lens of a younger writer. But for me personally, for my own path, it’s exhausting. (I feel guilty for thinking that.)
On election night, I couldn’t bear to watch live coverage of the returns, having defamiliarized myself with the toothless, improvisatory, “In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts” cadence of cable news. So I laid down on my bed, put on headphones, and listened to The Microphones in 2020. Twice. It was the most comforting thing I could think of doing, to just be swept away in this foggy story of how this music that means so much to me and so much to Phil came to be. I understood finally: the acoustic strumming panned in the left and right channels during the initial seven-minute invocation is an act of hypnosis. The syncopation mirrors this tumbling backward through time, bumping against dates, people, memories, feelings, until Phil begins the story.
The two moments that stand out to me are these: One, when Phil recalls a lyric from “Freezing Moon” by Mayhem: “the cemetery lights up again, eternity opens.” I’ve started keeping a list of lyrics that I enjoy every year, just scraps and bits that stuck with me. One constant that I cherish among all types of music being created now is the transparency by which artists share their influences. Music is, above all, about other music. (I always think it’s funny when someone describes a film as “a love letter to the movies” as if all movies aren’t a love letter to the movies, as if all art is not here to serve at the feet of the art that came before it.) But especially now, music is chiefly about other music: the mimesis of social media and the exponential sorting of song data and playlisting relies on its relation with other music. To this end, I’m always charmed when an artist just mentions how much they love another artist in a song, baldly, whether they were listening to a certain song on the radio, or sampling a lyric, or like Phil, saying he “saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for 15 minutes. Something in me shifted. I brought back home belief I could create eternity.” It made me feel that in our ecosystem without live music is still this one great interconnected superorganism that speaks secretly to each other through the soil
The second moment that will stay with me always is at the conclusion, this line: “I hope the absurdity that permeates everything joyfully rushes out and floods the room like water from the ceiling, undermining all of our delicate stabilities, admitting that each moment is a new collapsing building. Nothing is true but this trembling, laughing in the wind.” No single moment of music gave me more comfort than this, this ridiculousness, this joy, this laughter at the world. My terrible habit of “gaming everything out”—until I reach the conclusion that the earth is irreparably damaged by capitalist industry and our democracy is incapable of mitigating the destruction and every human is now born into loss, steeped irrevocably in the sins of their fathers, sent into a life angled at a precipitous decline that may be tipped up a pathetic few degrees by various legislative measures but always will be slanted toward total global destabilization—is “not very healthy,” many would say. But I look at this line and I smile. It reminds me of another song: If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. This line, this album, it really meant something to me this year. I hope you found something similar during this fucken year. And I really hope I learn the names of my neighbors, somehow. Dicey at this point.
The Microphones - The Microphones in 2020
Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Waxahatchee - St. Cloud
Nubya Garcia - Source
H.C. McEntire - Eno Axis
Dogleg - Melee
Destroyer - Have We Met
Moses Sumney - grae
Special Interest - The Passion Of
KMRU - Peel
Beatrice Dillon - Workaround
Alabaster DePlume - To Cy & Lee - Instrumentals, Vol. 1
Rio Da Yung OG - City On My Back
Bartees Strange - Live Forever
Kate NV - Room for the Moon
Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown
The Soft Pink Truth - Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?
Soul Glo - Songs To Yeet At The Sun
Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brotherhood - LIVE
Roc Marciano - Mt. Marci
Lomelda - Hannah
The Killers - Imploding the Mirage
Chris Forsyth / Dave Harrington / Ryan Jewell / Spencer Zahn - First Flight
Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher
Oneohtrix Point Never - Magic Oneohtrix Point Never
Country Westerns - Country Westerns