There are three songs I love that have nothing to do with each other. But I’ve always imagined them as three viewpoints on the same tragic story about a woman who dies in a hit-and-run car accident.

Dreaming While You Sleep by Genesis tells the story of the driver, and their struggles dealing with the shame and guilt:

I can never understand what went through my mind
I didn’t stop to see what I had done
I had to keep on driving deep into the night
The miles between would somehow put it right

[…]

I will never be free all my life
Trapped in her memory all my life
Till the day that you open your eyes
Please open your eyes

On Every Street by Dire Straits tells the story of the investigator on the case, and how it haunts him:

A ladykiller, regulation tattoo
Silver spurs on his heels
Says, What can I tell you, as I’m standing next to you
She threw herself under my wheels
Oh, it’s a dangerous road and a hazardous load
And the fireworks over liberty explode in the heat

And it’s your face I’m a looking for
On every street

And then Hazard by Richard Marx is from the perspective of the boyfriend who got wrongly accused:

No one understood what I felt for Mary
No one cared until the night she went out walking all alone
And never came home
Man with a badge came knocking next morning
Here was I surrounded by a thousand fingers suddenly
Pointed right at me

If you want to listen to the story and imagine it with me, here’s a quick playlist of it:

Rafael Anton Irisarri is a bit of a legend in the world of “dark ambient” music. I return to his album Solastalgia (Bandcamp link, streaming links) often because it so perfectly describes the 2020s vibe for me:

Solastalgia is a neologism, formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief), that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change.

More on the origins of the word:

The word was coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht in his 2005 article Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity. He describes it as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home” and your home environment is changing in ways you find distressing.

And if you want to know what it sounds like without listening to it first, the album cover art will give you a pretty good idea:

The Last.fm bot for Discord (yes, Last.fm is still around and it’s still awesome!) just added a new AI feature where it takes a look at your music taste and then either compliments you or roasts you. I chose “roast” because why not. It was mildly funny (“Coldplay, or as they’re better known, the band for people who don’t actually like music”), but it ended with this sentence that was a little too on the nose for me:

So there you have it folks, the music taste of someone who clearly never left the 80s and is still desperately holding on to the past.

Harsh but fair, I guess. I’m going to go put on my The Midnight playlist and sulk in the corner.

Deep into the new Disney+ documentary Bono & The Edge: A Sort of Homecoming, with Dave Letterman Bono says those words in the title in that impossibly sincere voice of his. “Songs are what we carry, even when we have nothing else,” he croaks.

I think it’s in that moment that the entire Songs Of Surrender project started to make sense for me. U2 are on their way out, and they finally realized it and are coming to grips with that fact. The AllMusic review of the album seems to come to the same conclusion:

Six years after Songs of Experience—and nearly a decade after Songs of Innocence—U2 delivered Songs of Surrender, an album whose title suggests it’s either part of a trilogy or the album where the band decided to finally succumb to the forces attempting to pull it down to the ground. Given that a collection of remakes inherently feels like a retreat, the latter interpretation seems more likely.

Even as an unapologetic U2 fan my first listen of the album was a disappointment. I didn’t get what they were trying to do. An album of “remakes” instinctively feels like a band that has run out of ideas and wants to milk whatever popularity they have left. But after reading The Edge’s liner notes in the CD I started to get a slightly better understanding of what they were getting at:

It’s not a stretch to read that, in a deeply cynical way, as a clever way to rebrand the boredom of a bunch of old rockers as something “new” and “innovative.” But I don’t know, after watching that documentary with Letterman I just can’t get myself to take that view. Yes, this answer to the question Why is U2 so popular? still feels true:

Even the political statements go down smooth: “Democracy!” “Fight AIDS!” How could you possibly disagree? You’re not only dancing and reminiscing—you’re spreading freedom and reasonably-priced medicines to distant lands!

And yet. Watching Bono and The Edge walk through Dublin and talk about their past with Letterman, and hearing their old voices—still strong and proud—sing along with their fans in a hometown pub, I simply have to put the critic away on this one.

I’m listening to the album again as I write this, and now that I’ve managed to open my ears fully to what I’m hearing, I think I understand. I can hear the gratitude, the distance, the time, the finality, and yes, the surrender. It’s the sound of a band that has been together for close to 50 years starting to wind things down the only way they know how: they sing the songs they carry, even when they don’t have a whole lot left.

Yesterday I ventured out to my local record store (they still exist) to pick up a copy of the new 5CD compilation of Genesis BBC Radio Broadcasts. My undying, irrationally extravagant devotion to all things Phil Collins gives me a clear bias, but also man, I love stuff like this so much. It’s 55 tracks of live Genesis concerts from 1970 all the way through 1998. It’s fascinating to listen through how their performances changed over the years.

The most interesting section to me are the recordings of a show at Lyceum Theatre in London on 7 May 1980 as part of the Duke tour. The backstory here is that after a bunch of festival and stadium performances in the late 1970s, Phil promised the band they would tour England properly. They ended up playing a whole slew of small venues all across the UK for the Duke tour, including towns that usually don’t get visits from big acts like them.

This was also the last time in their career that Genesis would play small venues. In total about 50,000 people saw them on this extensive tour. Subsequent tours would often see that many people (and more) each night. Why does this matter? By 1980 Genesis were already huge international stars, well known for their live shows. Seeing and hearing a band like that perform in small, intimate venues—close to each other on smaller stages—is pretty rare. And when you listen to it, the show has a very different atmosphere. You can feel them play off each other, you can sense the intense energy that only smaller venues can provide (years later, Phil would lament about those giant stadium shows, saying something to effect of “When you play for 50,000 people, 10,000 of them are always moving around and not listening to you.”)

Anyway, it’s been a blast to listen to this, finally released officially. If you have a few minutes and want a good example of what I mean, below I link to the the final couple minutes of In The Cage, into an amazing rendition of Afterglow.

Don’t get me wrong—I love “big venue” Genesis and saw them twice in stadiums. But the intensity of this performance is just so so good.

Here’s Ted Gioia on what happened with the “vinyl revival”:

On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.

And why it happened:

If [the music industry] had followed the standard playbook for growth industries, they could have brought vinyl back as a mass market option. They might have easily convinced 40-50 million consumers to buy a dozen vinyl albums per year. That would create a total market more than 10 times as large as the current one.

I still have a sizable vinyl collection and purchase most of the Blue Note Classics and Tone Poet releases. But I recently canceled my Vinyl Me, Please subscription after yet another price hike (even though I’ve been a customer for a long time, and wrote a blog post about them).

The magic is gone from vinyl because I feel like the love of music for its own sake is gone. We’re at the point where Taylor Swift releases 4 vinyl versions of her album because every version counts as a “sale,” and she knows that her fans are “variant collectors” who will buy all four, so, that’s a surefire way to get to the top of the charts.

I’m just not sure that’s the hobby I want to be part of any more.

This is such a great idea and I can’t believe it’s been going since 2008 and I’ve never heard of it. Shame on me.

If you love music so much that the mere sonority of muso chitchat registers in your brain as its own type of song, allow me to point you toward the greatest thing on all of YouTube. It’s called “What’s In My Bag?,” a long-running video series hosted at Amoeba Music, the legendary California record store in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley. The show’s general concept is straightforward enough. Touring musicians drop by one of the store’s three cavernous locations, prowl the labyrinthine sales floor, grab up records by the armful for an hour or so, then blab about their purchases on camera.

That simplicity makes “What’s In My Bag?” a humble, handy tool for encountering new and unfamiliar music - whether you’re a fan of the artist rifling through their bag or not. But if you really dive into this thing, you’ll begin to learn how musicians hear, how they think, how they remember, how they forget, how they emulate, how they worship, how they fortify and defy their own tastes, how they communicate with one another, and, ultimately, how they experience the world.

Every Sunday morning I get up early and have some coffee and reading time before the rest of the family wakes up. I usually put on some quiet music in the background, and as I was listening to today’s choice I realized that it’s an album that will forever remind me of Pandemic Times.

I started thinking about the albums I listened to a lot during those lockdown months in 2020 and 2021, and how they served different purposes. Sometimes I was looking for comfort, sometimes for distraction, sometimes for the sound of what that time felt like. So I thought I’d share the 3 albums that will, for me, forever be inextricably linked to the pandemic.

Future Predictions by Celer

Celer’s music would fit into the ambient/drone genre, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but this album really captures the feeling of those first few months of the pandemic. It came out just as things were starting to get bad, and apart from the eery ominousness of that title, the album perfectly represents the exhausting, endless repetitiveness of the lockdowns and home schooling. From the Bandcamp page:

Future Predictions is a set of ensemble pieces made with tape loops, from digital and acoustic instruments, field recordings and foley sounds. With a focus on introspection and imagination, each piece begins with all layers playing, with minimal additional long-term structural development in order to maintain a state.

The first few listens were mostly disturbing to me… but over time, the purpose of “maintaining a state” became incredibly calming. I now return to this one often (it’s what I put on this morning) to help center myself if I am having a particularly tumultuous day.

Double Negative by Low

This came out in 2018 but I only started to listen to it on repeat when the pandemic started. No other album comes close to being the sound of 2020/2021. It is chaotic and distorted, but there’s a weird beauty in it if you can look past all of that. The Bandcamp description is pretty spot on here as well:

Double Negative is, indeed, a record perfectly and painfully suited for our time. Loud and contentious and commanding, Low fights for the world by fighting against it. It begins in pure bedlam, with a beat built from a loop of ruptured noise waging war against the paired voices of Sparhawk and Parker the moment they begin to sing during the massive “Quorum.” For forty minutes, they indulge the battle, trying to be heard amid the noisy grain, sometimes winning and sometimes being tossed toward oblivion. In spite of the mounting noise, Sparhawk and Parker still sing. Or maybe they sing because of the noise.

Best paired with headphones and darkness, for when you want to feel despair—and in that, somehow, come out the other side feeling better.

Ultra Mono by IDLES

IDLES is a completely bonkers band and I have no business liking this album. It is so far outside of what I usually listen to that I can’t even remember how it first ended up in my ears. But again, it somehow struck a huge chord during the pandemic and there were a few weeks where I listened to nothing else.

If you need the feeling of being completely, utterly out of control, while realizing all you can do is laugh about it and keep going… this album is for you.

This is the part where I’d love to hear your picks. What albums will always remind you of the pandemic, and why?