Praise Be, I Can Feel
Plus an unreleased song for the ride or dies
I thought this would be the year I got old. I began feeling it coming on last year. My bones ached. I cared less about recycling. My taste for pop music was non-existent. I hadn’t yet begun screaming into comment sections or distributing hot takes, but I felt the grip of cynicism every morning as I woke, reaching its hand out from under my bed and threatening to yank me down into a pit of self-loathing.
But I found an escape hatch. Or rather, it found me. And thank God, because it’d been so long since I’d been saved by a record. I thought it may never happen again. I’d even resorted to trying to elevate the listening experience by romanticizing it—walking through the rain while listening to new finds, but nothing was hitting. I was numb, which is the worst of all the non-feelings.
The problem is that I’m algorithm-proof. Those things do not work on me. There’s too much intangibility to the stuff that I like. I say that with zero arrogance. I just don’t want anything else that sounds like Erykah Badu. She’s one of a kind. And I don’t need any other bands that sound like Turnstile. I’m good. The way my brain works…there’s more in common between Turnstile and Badu than any sound-alikes an algorithm will feed me. Anyway, I digress.
As I mentioned, it found me, rather than the other way around. I rediscovered Waxahatchee in a YouTube sidebar. She did a song with MJ Lenderman, which was a name I saw everywhere and never acquainted myself with. Maybe it’s time, I thought. His Tiny Desk popped up the next day. A sign.
I would share with you how I’ve been feeling, but I’ve committed this post to shining light on the positive. Daisy Cashin wrote a really beautiful post about gratitude, and I felt myself needing to live there for this one. So here I am. I’m bathing in it. Even if the whole reason I connected with MJ Lenderman is due to some nondescript loneliness, we’re not focusing on that. We’re here to celebrate the existence of the record and the smile that forms on my face every time he sings about a wristwatch. We’re here to celebrate that I’m not old yet. I’m not old yet, says the middle aged man with his new indie record obsession.
I got a beach home up in Buffalo
and a wristwatch that's a compass and a cell phone
and a wristwatch that tells me you're all alone.
And for the ride or die folks on here, an unreleased song from that violent joy LP that never came out and maybe/probably never will (my apologies, don’t kill the messenger) due to reasons I’m not at liberty to share. But I loved this song. So, now you can have it…