In June, I took a backpack, some supplies, and camped under a grove of hemlock trees. Find a hemlock grove and you will have great comfort through the night: Their fallen needles decompose and acidify the soil so that the ground is soft and free of understory, their twigs are coated with a wax that acts as a natural lighter fluid for starting a campfire, the dense composition of the branches and needles in their canopy creates a natural umbrella from the rain. After a few-hours hike into the southwest corner of the Catskill Forest, having bushwhacked a mile off a hunting trail near the bend of a river, where tiny wild strawberries bloomed in sunlit patches, I slept under a tarpaulin suspended between two trees and staked into the pillowy forest floor.
The owls had stopped hooting and it was still dark when I woke to the pouring rain breaking through the evergreens’ shelter and pelting my own. A stream of runoff from the tarp had begun to soak my feet in the sleeping bag. When I moved away from the puddle and readjusted my position under the shelter, I laid back on my sweatshirt-pillow and listened to the click-clack of rain for a while. A smile grew on my face like a time-lapse shot from a nature documentary. I felt apart, miles away, yet so full and surrounded, running on the richest calm that sent joy through down my legs and through my fingers. I chased the feeling all year.
It was a struggle, though, knowing that if I always indulged in this nature escape, I would be abdicating some kind of civic responsibility and exercising some immense privilege. There was that New York Times article about Erik Hagerman who, after the 2016 election, decided to ignore the news, extricate himself from society, and be really obnoxious about it. While everyone was channeling their rage and newly sprung activism into yelling at him for his extreme opt-out, I felt this shameful knot in my gut. What’s so wrong with leaving? I would do that. I would absolutely do that. The data, the chatter, the static, the invective, the unreality of a day spent on the internet, it all just churns beneath my work life like a white noise machine that, instead of helping you sleep, keeps you awake.
While my relationship to music is stronger than ever, my relationship to media has become…bad. This recursion, the memification of all input, the rote familiarity, the “psychological lubricant” that just glides everything into its place has made me want to occupy my free time with something more natural. It’s no wonder I spent more time running than writing the year. I can’t write my way out this stultifying time in my life, so instead, I run. Or I dream of becoming cliché just to be apart of something else: moving to the forest to hear nothing but the wind through the pines the rain on the window and my records every day.
The music that meant the most to me in 2019 was defined by the call to leave, the pull to stay, and the risk of changing. Big Thief’s first album of the year, U.F.O.F., was the idyll, the grassy space where any thought can live or die without worry. It was the dream of leaving the pavement for the farm or whatever, something like that night out in the wilderness under the tarp. Real magic glows in the margins of U.F.O.F. with its little production flourishes, a runic musical language from a forgotten age whispered behind every song. Before I published my review, I asked Big Thief’s publicist if they’d tell me what sound that was, exactly, that opens “From.” It was mesmerizing to me, it sounded like a marble stuck in a broken Rube Goldberg machine. The band declined to tell me what it is, and I’m all the happier for not knowing.
What pulled me back to the city was David Berman. His first and final album as Purple Mountains, released just before he killed himself earlier this year, is all about writing through it. To not run away, but to sit a little while within it and make something out of the fire that surrounds you. Sink into the flame. Let it swallow you. Become it. This album is so inspiring to me as a writer, listener, critic, and as a person who struggles with expressing the low dysthymia that lives in me at all times but goes unsaid because I do not want to seem like I am not grateful for the life I live and would rather perform the more valuable, fun, joke idea of myself. The warm turn at the end of “Snow Is Falling In Manhattan” makes me dizzy and teary every time I hear it. The detail, the humor, the hatred, the love; under God there is no greater knowledge of one’s life than Berman.
His songs sometimes look like a rough draft: A thought, then a clarification, then a conclusion. But they are carefully arranged, every word painted into the frame with generational patience. His command of meter and language is so vast and exceptional that he oscillates from the assonant and lyrical “icy bike chain rain” and “salts the stoop and scoops the cat in” to these Strindberg-meets-Wilde limericks like “how we stand the standard distance distant strangers stand apart” and “if no one’s fond of fucking me maybe no one’s fucking fond of me.”
I found myself walking around in both these albums even when I wasn’t listening to them. One a dream of who I could be, one a reminder to be myself right now, no matter how much I may not like it. In Quinn Moreland’s terrific review of the new Beat Happening box set, she opens with a quote from Calvin Johnson that has stuck in my craw since I read it: “I know the secret: rock‘n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35.” Since I was young, it was instilled in me that I was to be an adult. Being a teenager is something you will soon grow out of, and then you will finally become something true and worthwhile. Would enlightenment arrive, finally, if I simply sat in a Barcalounger astride a book of crosswords and a John Irving hardcover while listening to The Diane Rehm Show?
This is obviously absurd, but it is coded into my brain. I have a difficult time being young and giving credence to the feelings of youth. Not out of jealousy or fear—honestly!—but out of a hierarchical, chronological notion that you grow up and outward. Time makes you a pioneer. You take risks, fail, become someone greater and more complex the more you gather and shed the simplicity of youth, the oxygen of the best rock’n’roll, like Beat Happening. I fell newly in love with Beat Happening this year after years of dogging them for “not having a drum set” or something unfounded. I’m lucky to be surrounded by Calvin Johnsons in music writing, forever-youngs playing the sport of teenager while I try to be a good coach.
This is probably why it took me so long to come around to Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride, breaking wild new ground for a band I have loved my whole life. I foolishly, fearfully was lukewarm about the record when it came out. I thought it lost some of the elegance, whimsy, and transportive specificity of MVotC, but I kept being drawn back to it because I trust Ezra Koenig as a songwriter. I am wise enough to know now that sometimes it’s not the band’s fault, it’s my own fault as a critic. Over the year, I came to know the language of the album more, the backmasked drums, the twang, the whole mood as if Prada made a rope sandal, the tactile songs about old power and new love, studying the uncool sectors of jam bands and classic rock to move forward, to age gracefully and stay young at the same time. Vampire Weekend, four albums, in stores now.
The idea of getting out of patterns, willfully changing behavior to claim some new ground has overtaken my mind. The other records that really meant something to me were more “out” than years past: black midi’s teenage inhibition, Aldous Harding’s wild pen, Tyshawn Sorey & Marilyn Crispell’s hypnotic game for drums and piano. For anything that did not rattle my soul or float into my post-punk wheelhouse or sound as expensively ornate as Ariana Grande or Lana Del Rey, I was moved by music that fought, really fought against patterns. I was drawn to records that bucked an increasingly programmatic world, something that had the touch of chaotic human thought or, in a horseshoe-theory way, by A.I., as in Holly Herndon’s case.
Maybe I am making my fourth album, trying not to rest on the laurels of past success while still trying to be truthful to who I am at 34, even if it doesn’t “play well” to an audience. Here I am, in the abyss of my own critically maligned mid-career, anchored by age, too focused on my side-projects (running marathons, fucking around on twitter) but willing to untie old knots to become someone new. I might move to the country or stay in the city. I might get older or try to get younger. The ceiling is unlimited and it’s paralyzing but here I am, frozen, writing through it, thawing, little bit little.
Big Thief - U.F.O.F.
Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride
FKA twigs - MAGDALENE
Aldous Harding - Designer
Mannequin Pussy - Patience
Bon Iver - i,i
Kim Gordon - No Home Record
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
The Comet is Coming - Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery
Brittany Howard - Jaime
Holly Herndon - PROTO
Billy Woods - Hiding Places
Fontaines D.C. - Dogrel
black midi - Schlagenheim
Inter Arma - Sulphur English
Polo G - Die A Legend
Fennesz - Agora
Ariana Grande - thank u, next
Junius Paul - Ism
Thom Yorke - ANIMA
Richard Dawson - 2020
75 Dollar Bill - 75 Dollar Bill
Squid - Town Centre EP
Tyshawn Sorey & Marilyn Crispell - The Adornment of Time