These last few months have been difficult to say the least. The whole world came face to face with a crisis beyond our capacity to ignore. And, somewhat amazingly, billions of people accepted the responsibility and radically changed their behavior. It doesn’t present as a political act – because we’re trained to think of politics as connected to voting and policy – but this mass act of collective solidarity is genuinely one of the most impressive moments in the political history of our species. To help save one another, we all withdrew into cocoons. Even our governments, for all their many catastrophic flaws, took unprecedented action to sustain those who could no longer work.
Of course, the evil continues to trudge along with the good, and our society has plenty of evil to go around. That’s true everywhere on earth, but it’s been especially stark here in America, where we are taking on one of the great crises of the last half-century with an incoherent ball of white ressentiment occupying the White House. And with a society still so beholden to the siren call of white nationalism that simply saying ‘black lives matter’ is somehow a radical political act.
It’s exhausting. The weight of all this bears down on me every day, to the point when it can sometimes feel like a literal physical presence on my chest.
And I have been incredibly lucky. My job remains intact. And while the transition to online teaching wasn’t seamless, it wasn’t terribly hard. I’ve spent this time in isolation with my partner–who would otherwise have been thousands of miles away in California for much of the spring. We got a dog – and he’s a good dog, Brent.
And yet it all still bears down on me. I can only imagine how much harder it’s been for those who have lost loved ones, who have feared for their paychecks, who have feared for their lives as their states opened too soon, who have been stuck in isolation with abusers, who have seen the racial inequalities multiplying and recognized this pandemic as one more example of the ways that racism infiltrates every facet of our world.
It’s exhausting.
And like many others, I have been searching for things to provide some form of comfort. Fortunately, there’s always music. It can’t erase everything else, but it can at least shift your perspective. For the most part, I’ve been seeking out songs that bring me joy, the emotional salves in a dark time. There’s also something to be said for those that dive straight into the madness, the fear, the sense of being trapped. But for the most part, this playlist reflects the former impulse. Sometimes you do need something that helps you to truly dwell with the madness in this moment, but for me this is a time that calls more for connection and comfort.
There’s no song that better exemplifies that ideal than “Sounds are Fine” by Sophie Moon. It’s a duet between Dan Adriano of Alkaline Trio and his daughter, written by Mike Park of Asian Man Records–one of my favorite labels going all the way back to my ska-obsessed youth. Here’s Park’s description of the song:
Earlier this year my friend Dan Andriano sent me a recording that he had done with his 12 year old daughter Sophie Moon and I was taken aback by how good it was.
FF and we’re in the middle of this pandemic and both my daughter and Dan’s daughter are dealing with a whole new world of home school/video school and being away from their friends.
I started writing a song about my experience through the eyes of my daughter and then I thought how much I would like to hear this song sung by Dan’s daughter. So I sent over a track to Dan of me playing a lo fi version on guitar asking if Sophie would be interested in singing this.
And then the next day Dan sent me a wav file and said what do you think? Wow, it gave it me chills to be honest. And most importantly it brought a smile to my face and emphasized to me the power that music has on human emotion.
MUSIC RULES!!
It really does.