Episode 1 of Rearranged will be up in a few hours. It just struck me that I began this project before the pandemic. During the pandemic’s onset, I had trouble listening to music. Thinking about music as frequently as I do (often at the expense, for sure, of something more important in the given moment), it's not that hard for me to choose a piece of music to cue up. I quickly diagnose the moment, often a common one, and choose something to accompany it. Nestor Aparicio and I were talking on his radio show earlier today about this. He offered that he most often chooses the music he liked when he was 17. I've said the same thing many times. How nice, too: it's always 1992. (1986 for Nestor. I think he won: he got the rawk, I got the sad bastards.) If I am being lazy in matching the moment to the sound, I reach for, what, Teenage Fanclub? Robyn Hitchcock? R.E.M.? What predisposes a 17-year-old so fiercely to jangle? But sometimes I choose less impulsively, find something that sets the mood rather than matches it.
This choice paralyzed me when the pandemic hit.
No music matched the moment. Or maybe I should say equaled it. Pop music didn't bother suggesting itself to me on March 12, 13, 14, etc., 2020. Spotify didn't have a "Everything You Understand No Longer Matters Mix." My first thought was Wagner. Music that burst forth, actual wailing, railing at the gods. Even at that point, though, Wagner = too much. I needed something less active, something that suggested the metamorphosis we had entered, like it or not. I chose Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
It equaled the moment. It did not surpass it, it did not blanch before it.
The pandemic derailed the last thing I put this much work into: my book, The Lines Between Us. I do not feel sorry for myself about that. I know people who published books right after Covid hit and did not get to meet their readers. I got to do that for ten months and the gratitude it generated still propels me. Nonetheless, it was a hard stop, and I needed something to do. I had already pulled string on this project for two years. And it was string. iPhone notes, e-mails to myself, fractions of notions. The pandemic scrambled my brain, as it did yours. The fractions of notions refused to cohere.
But I had music.
I started a performance livestream in my basement. Each week I rehearsed six or seven songs, set my phone in front of me, logged on, and performed them. And some of my friends watched. Some reacted. We connected. More gratitude. It kept my head screwed on straight. Straight-ish. My kids were just five and seven. I had to make sense of this and make sense of it for them, too? I had to keep them learning? Yes, I had to keep them learning. And keep my head screwed on straight. And although the pandemic killed and killed and exposed this country's weaknesses for the most craven to exploit, it did do one thing that was nice.
It made me more creative.
I had to keep my kids engaged with learning. I had to find a new way to work. I had to keep making music. Something's sucking the air out of the room? Music blows it back in. I took my kids outside with chopsticks and taught them to turn a tree into a guiro. They whacked a stop sign, and I got out my tuner and hummed the note the vibrating stop sign produced and told the kids how many hertz the vibrating stop sign’s note registered. At night I learned songs, I developed themes for the livestream. After two weeks of random originals and covers, I taught myself songs to match the themes. Ballads one week. Crooners the next. Songs my friends wrote. "Assholes, Losers, and Sad Bastards." Eventually my brain did what everyone's brain did: invented some cel sheet resembling order and superimposed it on the chaos. It worked! I perceived order.
It enabled me to once again choose music to match the moment, even if the moment wasn't real.
Five years later (these five episodes will air exactly five years after that ineffable monthlong passage from "could this happen to us" to "here it is" that, oddly enough, accompanied the passage from winter to spring), I have managed to encapsulate years of pondering the meaning we take from sound into three-and-a-half hours of audio. I was clawing the whole time. The podcast doesn't reflect thoughts I'd long had about music; it documented the years that followed a choice to listen to songs for their arrangements, something I had not thought much about. Lots of times I looked at the inchoate mess in Scrivener and Pro Tools and thought I wouldn’t finish, but all I had to do was convince myself the finish line would emerge in sight at some point and just keep listening and wondering. The songs had always drawn me to their writers and their meanings. But what about the sounds that drew me to the songs in the first place? Wouldn't I find meaning there, too? If I kept listening?
I did. Tune in and find some for yourself, too!
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Huge thanks to RJ Bee at Osiris Media for believing in this.