From the Archive: 415 distance

on romanticizing the pandemic

I saw a Twitter thread recently in which a music journalist was asking people if there were albums they couldn’t listen to anymore because it reminded them too much of the pandemic. There were some that I expected—Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher (2020), Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Boltcutters (2020)—but there was also a lot of random music from other years that people had simply become fixated on in that time.

I started thinking a lot about the inverse of that statement: music I listened to when I was feeling overwhelmed with the demands of real life and wishing I was twenty one again without a single thing to do. I listened to a lot of music that year, read forty something books, biked everyday, and became friends with my older neighbors, to whom I could shout from my balcony. The pandemic was obviously bad for the reasons it was bad, but it also allowed people time and space to be free from the societally accepted demands of life which take up so much of their time.

I have a tendency to romanticize the past (my friends call it my “grass was greener” problem) but I actually do think that I had a nice pandemic. I was lucky; a lot of my friends were around for the first bit, and I had a job at the farmers market where I got to interact with high volumes of people, which kept me from going insane. I am also an only child, and very adept at entertaining myself; I love to knit, write, watch movies, and otherwise sit inside my house for hours at a time. I also live in California, which was temperate and also relatively new to me, and I got to experience a lot of it for the first time in a state of renewal, when the world was quiet.

Now, I often find myself wishing I had more time, which has been a theme in my entire life excluding the pandemic. I was telling a friend last week that my brain feels like a browser with too many open tabs, loose threads that I’m trailing all over, unable to tie off. It’s been no secret to readers of this newsletter that this year I’ve struggled to find myself in music and writing, mostly because I haven’t had the unstructured time that begets inspiration.

I’ve been listening to a lot of my playlists from this era, trying to remember what it felt like to be so intensely immersed in music and music discovery. I remember making this one in my apartment kitchen, sipping my coffee and doing nothing besides browsing for playlist tracks. I found some of my favorite artists in this period—Squirrel Flower, Madeline Kenney, Madison Cunningham, Christian Lee Hutson—and I have attempted to retap that kind of curiosity and focus recently. I remember being so moved by music everyday, riding my bike or sitting on my balcony, watching my neighbors’ garden move in the breeze.

As of late, I’ve been feeling like where I used to be porous, I’m now slick and flat, art sliding off without really reaching me. This change has caused a bit of a crisis for me, as I stake a lot of my identity in my appreciation of art, especially music, but I’ve come to think of it as an exercise in attention. There’s so much noise now, that even still I’m becoming reaccustomed to, and I’m learning how to listen again, really listen and not just hear. I’m also becoming more appreciative of my own time, and trying not to edge out my more still, solitary hobbies.

Music will always be a part of me, and I’m trying to trust that the ebbs will become flows again soon. In the meantime, please share what you’ve been listening to, how you’re finding out about new art, and what’s inspiring you to feel deeply in these neon times.