What I've been listening to.

Songs and music-videos over the last couple years.

My life feels like I can divide it up into pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. Like many people, the pandemic was a wormhole I entered, and when I exited my past life was altered. One month I was living in Seattle with my wife. Then a year or so of lockdown later, living with my parents, and buying a home, we came out on the other side living in a suburb and with a baby on the way.

These songs aren’t all related to the pandemic, but I’ve come to associate these songs, and the videos below, with the musical vibe I was feeling over the last couple years.

Phoebe Bridgers - I Know the End

This was the first ‘covid’ song I listened to. This video was uploaded April, 2020. It was when artists were doing their live-recordings, everyone was baking bread, and we didn’t know how bad things were going to get.

(As an aside, it’s easy to forget, but at the time I was terrified covid was going to be far, far worse than reality, and would disrupt critical supply-chain functions.)

The song starts as a relatively calm, sad, indie song. It ramps up, as Phoebe describes an apocalyptic scenario of approaching ‘the end.’ I listened to this on a lot of long runs I took to maintain my sanity, as matched the mood of the times.

Phoebe Bridgers talent is so remarkable that this low-quality instagram live-stream retains all her most excellent qualities, while gaining a hauntingly beautiful lo-fi shape as she croons into the outro.

No, I'm not afraid to disappear
The billboard said, "The end is near"
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here

Grimes - Delete Forever

Delete Forever is a song about opioid addiction. Not from a users perspective, but from Grime’s perspective watching so many of her friends die. It’s not in Grime’s normal hyper-pop and heavily produced style. The song has elements of country in it, while retaining that distinct Grimes sci-fi aesthetic. Her lyrics are poetic, but also plainspoken on the subject matter. “Flowing to the sun, fucking heroin”.

The songs about heroin of the past generation often seemed to focus more on the trials and tribulations of rock-star addiction, with Heroin by The Velvet Underground and Hurt by Nine Inch Nails being the ones which I’m most familiar. Widespread fentanyl addiction killing nearly 100,000 Americans a year wasn’t their reality.

Delete Forever is a song for our modern heroin epidemic. It’s a poetic song for the pointlessly dead.

Funny how they think, us not even on the brink
Innocence was fleeting like a season
Cannot comprehend, lost so many men
Lately, all the ghosts turned into reasons and excuses

Carly Rae Jepsen - Me And The Boys In The Band

Carly Rae Jepsen’s music has this almost caricature like presence of feminine high-energy, hyper-optimistism. Only I think this is actually who she is. This song came out August 2020 — so we had had some time to digest the pandemic by then, but we still weren’t thrilled by it. It’s an optimistic, happy, pop-song. It’s about her, her band-mates, and it features them and their kids dancing. It has a catchy melody as well.

What’s also super interesting, and took me a decade to learn, is that if you’re sad or upset, instead of listening to sad music. You can listen to happy music. There is this perception that sad music is somehow more intellectual or in touch with reality. This is an incredible cope. It’s true that there is a depth of emotion that sad music is unique in approaching.

But there is also a wisdom and understanding of life in singing happily and optimistically, and spreading energetic goodwill. Particularly during more difficult times.

And I got a little me last night
I danced in the street last night
With the boys in the band

Japanese Breakfast - Road head

Road Head is a sparse song, but tells a Lydia Davis like short-story of youthful mistake and misdirection. Although I didn’t appreciate the terse prose until I had already listened to the song hundreds of times. As it was the repetitive trance in the song’s melody that I fell in love with.

Unlike the other songs, this one I didn’t relate to any experiences outside of my own. It has this wayward feeling that reminds me of my own adolescence. A feeling which we often relate to the solitude and brightness of a night-time highway.

So dreaming baby
Took that corkscrewed highway
Lightless miles
Of big rigs
Lightless miles, miles and miles

Taylor Swift - Willow

I never listened to Taylor Swift until about a year ago. I had a close friend at work who told me her two new albums, Folklore and Evermore, were surprisingly good, and more like indie folk. Probably when I was younger I would have felt I was too cool to listen to Taylor Swift, or something. In any event, her new music grew on me.

Willow was my favorite song from her new albums. I listened to it leading up to the birth of my daughter, and I had the song stuck in my head while I was in the hospital with my wife. I’ll always associate it with that period in my life.

The music video also has a brief scene of choreographed pagan winter dancing. I’ve always found these portrayals of pagan celebration fascinating since I first saw it in this incredible scene from a 1966 Russian film called Andrei Rublev. Despite the aesthetic of Christianity becoming dominant, we still hold this appreciation for masked winter festivities.

Wait for the signal and I'll meet you after dark
Show me the places where the others gave you scars
Now this is an open-shut case
Guess I should've known from the look on your face
Every bait and switch was a work of art