Music for the apocalypse: the albums of 2021

I was thinking recently about the albums that have touched my life over the past year and I realized that 2021 has been an incredibly strong year for new music. I count a whopping four different albums this year that, had they been released in 2020, would have been my favorite album of that year. It's been a long time since there was a year with so many albums that I loved so much. I think the pandemic that had many of us staying home for much of 2020 and that put live music on hold for more than a year is a big reason why so much great new music came into the world. With no touring, many musicians seem to have focused extra hard on honing their craft at home and in the studio. And the distressing reality of the modern world - with not only a still raging global pandemic, but also an ever worsening climate catastrophe, and the growing threat of American democracy collapsing - has certainly provided plenty of inspiration for great music. I don't know if it's appropriate to say this is a "good thing" that came from the awful pandemic era, but I'm definitely grateful for all that music.

This isn't an attempt to make a "best albums" list for 2021, because there are lots of undoubtedly great albums that I didn't get around to listening to. Rather, it's just a list of my personal favorite albums of the year. I'll give a little blurb for each of those four albums that stood out the most to me, counting down to my most favorite. Also, honorable mentions to Lucy Dacus's Home Video (incredible songwriting and so evocative of high school nostalgia) and Olivia Rodrigo's SOUR (if I had to name a favorite song of the year, the ridiculously infectious "good 4 u" would be a contender).

And now my favorite albums of 2021.

Weakened Friends - Quitter

This is a late addition, coming out just last month, but it quickly zoomed up my list. I realized recently that Quitter brings to mind for me Piebald's 2002 classic We Are the Only Friends We Have, which coming from me is incredibly high praise. I'm not saying the two bands sound alike, just that both albums are packed from front to back with incredibly fun to listen to emotional rock songs full of crunchy guitars, catchy hooks, and memorable lyrics, and the high quality of the songs is so consistent that I'd be hard pressed to name a weak track. Also that both albums feature noticeably higher production values over their respective bands' also excellent previous albums. And hey, both albums also feature horn parts on the closing tracks!

As usual with Weakened Friends, a trio from Portland, Maine, there's great musicianship all around, but Sonia Sturino's distinctive vocals are what really set them apart from the crowd. I think she speaks for most of us with the caustic way she spits out lines like "World's a fucking mess, spin me round, I feel nauseous now" on "Tunnels."

Essential tracks: "Everything is Better," "Tunnels," "Spew," "Haunted House"

(Note for other Weakened Friends fans: I also got really into Sturino's old band The Box Tiger this year and I highly recommend them as well; a distinctly different sound but arguably just as great or close to it.)

Typhoon - Sympathetic Magic

We cross the country to the other Portland (Oregon) for the next entry on my list. The release of the digital version of Sympathetic Magic in January came totally by surprise and it was a wonderful surprise at a time I really needed it. Typhoon's music has touched me personally in a way that very few artists have. After grappling with mortality in such a beautiful way on 2013's White Lighter, a contender for my favorite album of all time, Kyle Morton began to move toward themes more inspired by events of the modern world in certain tracks on 2018's Offerings and has moved further in that direction on the band's latest brilliant release. The band's orchestral indie folk rock sound is somewhat understated here compared to previous releases, fitting for the subject matter.

Second track "Empire Builder," a narrative centered around a cross country train ride, begins with the lines, "The apocalypse is incoming, only moving slow and unevenly" and that really does capture this moment in time. I do also really like the not-totally-giving-up-on-hope closing lines: "Everybody's angry/Everybody's lonely/Maybe it's hopeless/And maybe love is not enough/But let's not rule out the possibility." And some of the lyrics from subsequent track "Motion and Thought" are so evocative to me of the strange feeling of the early pandemic days: "Told you you could call me/Anytime you want/It's not as if I've got anything going on."

Essential tracks: "Empire Builder," "Motion and Thought, "We're In It," "Welcome to the Endgame"

Julien Baker - Little Oblivions

This album continues an incredible run for the amazingly accomplished young artist whose debut Sprained Ankle would be a career highlight for many musicians, but who proceeded to take her music to another level with Turn Out the Lights and has now pushed even farther with the stunning Little Oblivions. Baker toured with a full band backing her for the first time this year, and the bigger sound is evident on the album, and it works really, really well. Listening to her first album, you might not have guessed she would make music that rocks this hard, but clearly you'd have been wrong. Baker's astonishing voice still stands out above the great textures of guitar and synth sounds.

Baker's music has always been extremely personal, her struggles with mental health so beautifully testified to in her lyrics, and it's something I think more and more of us can relate to as the world seems to come apart around us. On closing track "Ziptie," she asks, "Good God, when're you gonna call it off, climb down off the cross, and change your mind?" It's a timely question! I also have to mention that any time Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, the three members of boygenius, come together on a song, it's one that you aren't going to want to miss. Apparently, vocals for "Favor" from Little Oblivions were recorded on the same day as those for "Please Stay" on Dacus's Home Video and for "Graceland Too" on Bridgers's 2020 album Punisher, and all three tracks are among the most gorgeous you'll hear in a while.

Essential tracks: "Faith Healer," "Ringside," "Favor," "Ziptie"

The Weather Station - Ignorance

I've already written at great length about my love for this album, which has truly become one of my all time favorites. It's a staggering achievement by the Canadian band (a project of singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman) who had previously released a string of very good albums but nothing that came close to, or would have led one to anticipate, the masterpiece that is Ignorance. The propulsive, jazzy rock sound is a surprising change from the folk leanings of the band's previous releases, and it works wonderfully. Lindeman has always had a knack for piercingly insightful lyrics but she takes her lyrics game to the next level on these ten tracks pondering a human being's place in a world beset by catastrophe.

This album is, to me, a distillate of the experience of being human in 2021. The anxiety and the grief and still the wonder of it all. Marveling at the beauty of the natural world ("My god, what a sunset; blood red floods the Atlantic") while unable to escape "all this dying" in the headlines. Taking a moment to watch a bird in a parking lot. Remembering that "everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky." "Always reeling, through long midnights of feeling" but at the same time being unable to conceal love, love for this troubled world and for other people inhabiting it with us. Years from now, I'll look back on this year, and this album will be the soundtrack of my memories.

Essential tracks: "Atlantic," "Parking Lot," "Heart," "Subdivisions"

And in conclusion, thank you, musicians, for making this sucky time suck a little less. It's hard to imagine life without you.

"Everyone here has anxiety" (the boygenius concert trilogy)

After one and a half years with almost no in person live music - one and a half years that somehow felt both like an eternity and like almost no time at all had passed - suddenly it seemed like everyone and their brother had scheduled tours for September and October of 2021. When these tours were originally announced, it looked like the pandemic would be largely behind us by the time the shows happened. The delta variant changed things. The shows went on, with vaccine and sometimes mask requirements, musicians and fans adapting the best we could to this strange new reality. In a time of many difficult questions and no clear good answers, we try to choose the least bad answer and make the most of it.

For me, a magical Weather Station show on September 9 in Detroit kicked off a period more densely packed with exciting concerts than any I can ever remember, a period that has made me realize oh, how I've missed live music so, so much - and not only that, but how I've missed simply being around people so, so much.

Among the numerous shows over the past two months, Megan and I managed to catch all three members of fabulous indie rock supergroup boygenius - Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus - in separate live appearances. If you'd told me prior to COVID that I'd have an opportunity to see separate shows by each of the three in a period of less than a month, I'd have been astounded. These are very strange times indeed.

This post is about all three of the shows.

The first, by Bridgers, was on September 18 at EXPRESS LIVE! (yes, that is really the name of the venue - barf) in Columbus. Megan and I drove down from Cleveland, found unfortunately expensive garage parking (thanks to a simultaneous arena concert also in downtown Columbus that night), made our way over toward the venue, and quickly noticed there were just so many kids. So many kids.

I had not been in such a large crowd of people in a very long time. (An outdoor crowd, it's worth mentioning for COVID concerns - Bridgers scheduled all her shows on the tour at outdoor locations.) And so many of those people were so young. It was an interesting experience. I remembered attending an Arcade Fire show in 2007 at the same venue with Cara and my dad, and my dad looking around for people in his age bracket. This was almost like that for Megan and me.

It made me think about what a weird time this must be to grow up in. Especially now, because of COVID. But then, even before COVID. And I guess it's nice to see that some things stay the same. Young people find music that speaks to them and their concerns in whatever era they live in. With everything going on right now, it's not surprising that so many connect with what Bridgers is doing.

When Megan and I were waiting in a very long line to enter the venue prior to the show, someone drove up the side street along which the line stretched, stupidly in too much of a hurry, and loudly honked their horn right next to us at some people who were walking up the street to get to the end of the line that occupied most of the sidewalk. We and everyone around us flinched, startled, and shot a glance at the passing car. A young woman in front of us in line quickly let forth the best line of the night: "Everyone here has anxiety!" A witty and timely complaint directed at the already gone driver.

Megan and I laughed in agreement. Yes, the audience of a Phoebe Bridgers concert, or a Julien Baker or Lucy Dacus concert for that matter, is definitely enriched for people who "have anxiety." (Although how could anyone not have anxiety in the year 2021? If there are people who don't, although a part of me is envious, another part feels sorry for them because they must be really out of touch with reality.) The music of these amazing young women provides at least something of a balm for that anxiety.

After entering the venue, we took our places on the lawn and settled in amongst a crowd of people mostly at least fifteen years our juniors, and it struck me that for some of those kids, this must be the first big concert they'd ever attended, and some of them must have spent the last year and a half waiting for such an opportunity. What an experience it must have been for someone in that position.

Indie pop band Muna opened with a great, energetic set, but one that was marred by the extreme chattiness of numerous audience members. Megan said that being annoyed by that was a sign of getting old. I pointed out that I found it just as annoying when I was in my twenties as I do today.

The audience was more attentive during Bridgers's headline set, although still not as much as we'd have liked. But it was a great performance. And wow, it was just so good to be experiencing something like that after so much time without it!

It was a very warm day, with temperatures dropping only a little as the sun went down, and on two separate occasions the show was paused because someone in the pit had passed out. At a Phoebe Bridgers show! So there was a lot of excitement for sure.

One weird aspect of COVID is that despite us having been together for two years, this show was the first time that Megan and I got to see live performances of songs that were already meaningful to our relationship prior to the show. This included Bridgers's haunting song "Funeral," which Megan loves to point out was a hilariously dark choice for the first song I ever sent to her when we were texting and just starting to get to know each other. Lyrics excerpt:

I'm singing at a funeral tomorrow
For a kid a year older than me
And I've been talking to his dad, it makes me so sad
When I think too much about it I can't breathe

And I have this dream where I'm screaming underwater
While my friends are all waving from the shore
And I don't need you to tell me what that means
I don't believe in that stuff anymore

Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time
And that's just how I feel
Always have and I always will

After she pointed out how strange and funny it was that this was the first song I ever sent her, I obviously had to admit she was right. The thing is, "Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time" was not, like, a representation of my feelings about life. Okay, sometimes things seem like that, but not most of the time. I just really connect to music that gets at that sort of emotional state, that leans into the sorrow that's an inherent part of life. It's also just a beautiful song, and was a definite highlight of the concert.

An even bigger highlight was a solo performance of boygenius track "Me & My Dog," one that I was not expecting, another song meaningful to Megan and me and just an astonishingly good song. (Indeed, we "cried at [the] show with the teenagers.")

The great music was accompanied by striking visuals, something that was true of all three shows in this trilogy, the Bridgers show on a larger scale than the other two. During most of the songs, a large screen behind the stage displayed beautiful artwork matching the content of the song.

Bridgers's band was great, with the trumpet player in particular earning appreciative chants from the audience on more than one occasion. And watching those musicians on that big stage, I thought, wow, they're all so young. I thought that too at the Baker and Dacus shows. And another thing I thought, they all just seem like such good people. Not that you can know for sure. But I think you can kind of tell when you watch them interact with each other and with the audiences. It's really nice to see. The kids are all right, you know?

It was a great show. But it was just the beginning of a trilogy that would get even better.

At last year's Grammy awards, Phoebe Bridgers was nominated for four awards, including Best Alternative Music Album for Punisher. It's an excellent album, so I'm not criticizing it at all but rather praising the works of her boygenius bandmates when I say that among the most recent albums by all three, Punisher would come in third place in my rankings.

I'm glad that Phoebe Bridgers has achieved such well earned success and that so many people have connected with her music. Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus have also achieved a lot of success, but as of now, at least, don't draw nearly as large crowds, and honestly? That results in a better experience from the perspective of an audience member. Megan and I got to see both Baker and Dacus up close in two of my very favorite venues and with audiences that were totally there for the music and not to chat with their friends!

The Julien Baker show was the second of the trilogy and it took place on September 29 at Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh. Again, Megan and I made a late afternoon drive out of Cleveland. A nice thing about living in Cleveland is that when artists schedule tours that don't hit Cleveland, there's a good chance that they'll at least hit one of Pittsburgh, Columbus, or Detroit, all very doable drives.

Our trip to see Julien Baker was marked by a remarkable amount of serendipity. This started when we missed a highway exit and ended up taking back roads through the Conneaut area, which led to us seeing a hand-painted sign next to the road advertising the amazing website ForKin.net, which led to even more amazing discoveries that I won't go into here! We marvel at the fact that we would never have known about any of it if we hadn't missed that exit. The serendipity continued as we were waiting in line to enter the venue and heard the two people behind us, a young man and a young woman, talking about the fact that the woman had offered up what she had thought was an extra ticket to the show, then after having found a buyer in the man with her, had discovered she had actually bought just one ticket to the sold out show, not two. And was therefore planning to leave rather than attend the show herself. The serendipitous part was that Megan had accidentally purchased three tickets to the show, and thus we found someone to use that extra ticket.

This was my fourth time seeing Julien Baker live. She never fails to blow me away. It was the first time I'd seen her headline a show, and she lived up to my expectations.

She is a tiny person. As illustrated in this picture of me and her taken at the 2018 Homecoming festival in Cincinnati:

When you watch her perform live, you wonder, where does that voice come from? And that voice is something truly astounding.

During the show, Baker mentioned the first time she had performed at Mr. Smalls, opening for the band Daughter in 2016. As it happened, that show was also the first time I went to Mr. Smalls, and the first time I saw Baker live. It was an unforgettable experience. I went into that show knowing nothing about her music. I left it a big fan for life.

I remember well watching her, so petite, so young (she was twenty at the time), come out on stage by herself and then just marveling at the power of her performance. She's come a long way since then; her performances now are just as powerful but in a decidedly different way. Whereas I would describe her 2016 performance as stripped down, rawly emotional indie folk, in 2021 she's a bona fide rock star with a full band and light show. Whereas many of Phoebe Bridgers's songs felt like they would better fit a more intimate venue, in Julien Baker's show the crashing, post-rock-ish guitar chords of the live arrangements of songs like "Turn Out the Lights" and  "Ziptie" would have easily filled a much larger room. So I felt very lucky to be able to experience the performance in the beautiful intimate setting of Mr. Smalls, a building that was once a church, fitting because seeing Julien Baker live borders on a religious experience.

A mid-set solo interlude including some songs from debut album Sprained Ankle took me back to that evening in July 2016 in a wonderful way. When Baker's band returned to the stage, I quickly noticed that each member was wearing a shirt I'd appreciated at the merch table on the way in - a shirt emblazoned with a large picture of Baker's face.

It was hilarious, even more so when Baker turned to her band to introduce them to the crowd, and it dawned on her that one of them was wearing that shirt, and then she had to have it pointed out to her that they were all wearing that shirt. It was her birthday, so that was how they'd decided to honor her! And as a result of this, I had to buy the shirt for myself after the show. It's such a delightful shirt, and a delightful memory - how could I not?

2021 release Little Oblivions, almost every song of which was played in the show, is an astoundingly good album. Baker's previous effort, 2017's Turn Out the Lights, is also an astoundingly good album. Sprained Ankle is an amazing debut. She has easily become one of my very favorite artists of the last few years, and one that I will never miss seeing live when the opportunity arises. And in this particular show, there was something really special about watching her perform. There was so much joy in her performance. There were so many beaming smiles. There was so much gratitude at being able to be on that stage after the dreadful last 18 months. Gratitude at the opportunity and gratitude to all her fans who got vaccinated and wore masks and came out to appreciate her music. It was gratitude that was shared by me and by most other members of the audience, I have no doubt.

Another thing I have to mention from this trip - the next morning before heading back to Cleveland we made a stop at Attic Records and it was the most amazing record store I've ever been to with a vast collection including the most random stuff that I could have spent all day browsing! We'll have to return some day to spend more time there.

The final show in the trilogy did not involve an out of town trip. Lucy Dacus made a late addition to her tour with an October 14 Cleveland date after having had to cancel a Toronto appearance. Unfortunate for her fans in Toronto, but very lucky for us here. Of the three shows covered in this post, it was the one that Megan and I had the least expectations for, but it was also the one that easily shot past both of our expectations. Dacus has put out some great music - I'm currently in love with her recent album Home Video - but she also really elevates that music in the live setting. I'd seen her once before, three years ago, but I'd forgotten just how outstanding she is live.

There was more serendipity after our arrival to this show. I was (of course) wearing my recently acquired Julien Baker t-shirt, and after Megan and I entered the ballroom and found a spot near the stage, one of a pair of women near us complimented me on the shirt. I mentioned having seen her in Pittsburgh and it turned out they had also been at that show! They were from Pittsburgh, so whereas we had traveled from Cleveland to Pittsburgh for the Baker show, they'd traveled from Pittsburgh to Cleveland for the Dacus show. They, too, had seen Bridgers recently - in Pittsburgh, the night before her Columbus show. One of them said something like, "these shows are my only source of serotonin right now," and, yeah. Yeah.

Things are so weird and hard and overwhelming right now, for just about everyone, everyone in their own way, for some more than for others, but I think we can all say, this is not the life we ever imagined we'd be living. And in a lot of ways it sucks. A lot. Thank goodness for live music. It's one of the best kinds of medicine there is. And thank goodness for vaccines for making these shows possible.

The Beachland Ballroom is one of my favorite places in the whole world. I've seen so many amazing shows there. Prior to the Lucy Dacus show, I hadn't been there in more than twenty months. That had definitely never happened before, and it was so good to be back. It felt like a homecoming of sorts. We took our place toward the front of the room on the left side and I remembered previous memorable shows I'd experienced from roughly the same spot, like Nada Surf in October 2005 (one of the very best shows of my early concert going days) and Sufjan Stevens in December 2012 (a truly magical holiday extravaganza). In a lot of ways I think this most recent show will go down as being just as memorable for me.

Bartees Strange opened the night with a great set. He originally gained recognition for an album of National covers, a couple of which he included in his live set, and which he introduced by asking the audience, "Does anyone here like the National?"

I laughed and looked over at Megan, who gave an enthusiastic "woo!" I laughed because, you see, Megan is obsessed with the National, and in fact one of the main reasons I originally swiped on her Bumble profile was that it included the fact that she listens to the National a lot. I asked her whether she had ever before been somewhere where someone asked if anyone liked the National, and she, not surprisingly, said no.

Lucy Dacus completed our boygenius concert trilogy in a perfect way. She played most of the songs from her fantastic new album, one I think I'm especially connecting to right now because it leans heavily on memories of high school and I recently attended my twenty year high school reunion, and also sprinkled in a few older songs, new unreleased songs, and covers. Like at the Phoebe Bridgers show, a (smaller) screen at the back of the stage displayed some lovely artwork matching the content of certain songs, like this for "Christine":

Dacus has an incredibly charming stage presence. She's also very adept at going between quieter songs that tug at the emotions of everyone in the room ("Please Stay" might be the most heartbreaking song I've ever heard) and louder songs that get the crowd moving. The last three songs of the main set demonstrated this nicely. From the devastating "Thumbs," with Dacus's voice over understated backing music just captivating the whole room, she then introduced the next song as a cover and launched into Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," which I was just as thrilled to hear as Megan had been for Bartees Strange's National covers. Strange then came out on stage to play guitar on "Night Shift" and that song in particular was one of those sublime experiences that can only happen when a musician is in a room full of their devoted fans.

As the song reached its climax, the whole crowd bellowing out the words to the chorus, perhaps even louder than usual to get past our masks, I got chills. It felt like a release of all the emotions of the last year and a half. It was such a great communal experience. It was easily the best singalong I've experienced since before COVID. It was what live music is all about. I think most people in that room felt similarly.

It's a feeling I'll try to hold on to as we enter another dark winter.

Watching superstitions and rituals emerge in real time

Do you ever stop and think about the things that people do in their day-to-day lives because it's taken for granted that doing the thing will serve a certain purpose, but the reality is there's no connection between doing the thing and the intended purpose? I've thought about that a lot this year.

I recently wrote about some false beliefs that a lot of people in society hold due to their having been propagandized to hold those beliefs. This is about a different sort of false belief. False beliefs that didn't become widespread through malicious disinformation campaigns, but rather because some people thought something was true even though evidence was inconclusive or had been misinterpreted, the belief became widespread, and then when evidence emerged to show it was wrong, it was too late - the belief had already become entrenched in society.

The COVID pandemic has really been quite the object lesson here.

I strongly suspect that, years from now, if you polled people on what were the important things to do to stay safe during the pandemic, two of the top responses would be "wash your hands" and "stay at least six feet away from other people." To be clear, these are absolutely not two of the most important ways to stay safe from COVID.

Public health messaging at the start of the pandemic was based on a misunderstanding about how respiratory viruses spread. It was thought that spread happened mainly through virus-laden droplets emitted from people's respiratory tracts, droplets that would fall to the ground in short order and travel less than six feet from the infected person. 

Graphic from a nice writeup in the journal Science about airborne spread of respiratory viruses.

This model of transmission was based on misinterpretations of data going back many years. It had already been challenged by some scientists but it wasn't until COVID that we got a really large scale and obvious demonstration that this model was wrong. Transmission in fact occurs through aerosols (blue-green in the figure) that linger in the air and can travel much farther than six feet due to air currents.

With the droplet model (gray in the figure), if you are six feet away from an infected person, no virus will directly reach you. But droplets could end up on surfaces you might touch, so washing your hands frequently and avoiding touching your face with potentially contaminated hands would be important. Frequent sanitization of commonly touched surfaces, like everyone was going crazy about early in the pandemic, would also be important.

There have been 244 million reported COVID cases worldwide, a huge underestimate of the actual number of people who have been infected, and from what I have gathered, there has never been confirmation of COVID spreading through a contaminated surface. This doesn't prove that it's completely impossible for COVID to spread through a contaminated surface, but it does very strongly suggest that it's extraordinarily unlikely to happen. Frequent sanitization of surfaces to protect against COVID? It's a ritual, one that isn't actually doing anything to protect against COVID. It's also a big waste of time and resources and a distraction from effective safety measures and therefore does more harm than good when businesses and organizations promote it.

This has sunk in for a lot of people by now, although I see a depressingly large number of places still talk about how they're sanitizing surfaces to keep you safe. What seems to have sunk in less is what seems to me like the obvious next step. If COVID doesn't spread through surfaces, then washing your hands also isn't doing much of anything to protect you from COVID. (I often see people online say things like "We're still masking, distancing, and washing our hands" to show their continued commitment to pandemic safety.) I'm not saying washing your hands isn't a good idea. It is, for other reasons. But not for COVID safety. For COVID safety, it's another ritual. The ubiquitous hand sanitizer we still see everywhere? Also a ritual, and a distraction from actual effective safety measures.

How about six feet of distance? That's a little more complicated. Because virus-laden aerosols will tend to be more concentrated in the immediate vicinity of an infected person, having people be more spread out from each other rather than packed together does help reduce the chances of spread. But there's nothing special about six feet. The important factors are concentration of virus in the air and duration of exposure. Passing close by an infected person for a few seconds and then going your separate ways is not going to be as dangerous as being twenty feet away from an infected person in the same poorly ventilated room for an hour. Thinking that six feet of distance is a protective barrier is a superstition.

The aerosol model of transmission tells us that some of the most important ways to slow spread (other than vaccines, which since their widespread availability are the most important in allowing a return to normal activities) are recognition that outdoors is orders of magnitude safer than indoors, ventilation and filtration of indoor air, and use of good quality and properly worn masks indoors. A lot of people are aware of these things now, but the superstitions and rituals persist. Another one? Those plexiglass dividers that seem just as ubiquitous as hand sanitizer. Their use is also based on the droplet model and there's no evidence they protect against COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if twenty years from now, a lot of the plexiglass dividers will still be there and there will be people who won't even know why.

It strikes me that, since COVID is not going away, and other respiratory viruses also harm and kill many people, and there will be future pandemics, one of the very most important things we should be doing is a large scale effort to improve the quality of indoor air through ventilation and filtration. People want to be able to live their normal lives. Vaccines help make this a lot safer, but aren't 100% effective, and won't stop the next pandemic. Masks help enable some semblance of normal life but also aren't 100% effective, and mask wearing does have real drawbacks so we should strive to make it unnecessary. Social distancing (in the "avoid gathering with other people" sense, not the "six feet of distance" sense) definitely slows the spread but also goes against human nature and in a long-term scenario is harmful in many ways, so we should ideally get to a place where it's a last resort, not a primary pandemic control measure. To me, vaccines and improving indoor air quality are the two things that best enable safe enjoyment of normal life and should be used in tandem - improving indoor air quality could be the second most important big infrastructure program of our time (the most important is definitely tackling climate change) and could create so many jobs in addition to improving people's health and saving lives! We should do this!

But instead, so many organizations and people are sticking to the superstitions and rituals that don't do much, if anything, to protect against COVID. (And maybe, contrary to what I said at the start about these beliefs not being the product of disinformation campaigns, there is some element of bad acting here, in that organizations are incentivized to promote the easier, ineffective methods over the more difficult but actually effective steps toward improvement of indoor air quality.) It's sad, but it's also been a fascinating experience to watch in real time as these new belief structures have emerged. And it makes me wonder how many other superstitions and rituals there are that most people take for granted as serving some real function when they really don't. I'm sure there are a lot. I'm also aware that this sort of thinking, of always questioning the conventional wisdom, can be taken much too far and can lead to nonsense like the Flat Earth movement, 9/11 truthers, and most harmfully right now, anti-vaxxers. So be careful with this. But it's an interesting thing to think about! Do you have any other good examples? If you do, I wonder what their origins were.

Thoughts on sharing a country with a cult

When I was in grad school, I spent several years as a teaching assistant for my PhD advisor's class. I remember well something that he liked to say to me and the other TAs about teaching.

If a handful of students did poorly on a particular assignment, those individual students could be blamed for their poor performances. But if a large number of students did poorly on an assignment, we shouldn't blame the individual students as much as we should blame ourselves.

I think there was a lot of wisdom in that. It was our responsibility to impart to the students the information they would need to complete the assignment successfully. If so many of the students were unable to succeed in the assignment, the instructors had failed. It wasn't just a failure of individual students, it was a systemic problem within the class, and therefore the responsibility of the people in charge of the class.

Right now in the United States of America, there is a simple assignment being given to people, an assignment with very clear right and wrong answers, and millions upon millions of people are failing that assignment.

Over the course of the COVID pandemic, people have had to make a lot of difficult decisions, decisions where the right and wrong answers haven't always been clear. I think a lot of liberal discourse on COVID has failed to acknowledge some of these complexities. That's not to say there haven't been a lot of people on the clearly wrong side of certain issues - but, for example, the "stay home and save lives" mantra, although well intentioned, can come across as awfully dismissive of people who, because of their jobs, never had the option to stay home. And there are a lot of other examples.

With the arrival of the vaccines, though? Now we have a decision that, if you are operating with the correct information, should be the opposite of difficult for the vast, vast majority of people. A decision where there is a very clear right answer (get the free, safe, and effective vaccine) and a very clear wrong answer (don't get the vaccine, thereby dramatically increasing your own chances of contracting COVID and developing severe illness, hampering efforts to get the pandemic under control, contributing to devastating strain on our health care systems and workers, harming local businesses that are struggling because of the pandemic, etc., etc., etc.).

Depressingly large numbers of people are continuing to go with the wrong answer. After getting off to one of the fastest starts thanks to our early access to large supplies of vaccine doses, something for which we are incredibly privileged, vaccination efforts in the US are stalling at levels well below those in most peer nations.

Now I want to be clear, the disinformation campaigns that are the focus of this post are not the only reasons for people not getting vaccinated. There are people who, for instance, haven't gotten vaccinated because they are worried about having heavy side effects (a real thing, I can say from my own experience) and not being able to take a sick day from work. There are people who are members of communities that have long histories that continue to the present day of being mistreated by the medical establishment, and therefore have valid reasons to distrust the medical establishment which translate into vaccine hesitancy - an understandable reason for questioning whether to get the shot, even if in this particular case it's not a good reason to not get the shot. There is a lot more that could have been done and could still be done to get past such reasons for hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake.

But there's vaccine hesitancy, and then there's outright vaccine refusal.

It's become very clear that the people most likely to fall into the latter category are people with right wing political leanings. And now we see not only people refusing to take a proven effective and safe vaccine, but also trying to fight the disease that the vaccine protects against with quack "cures" that have no evidence of efficacy and are much riskier in terms of side effects than the vaccine is!

It's bewildering. Why is this happening?

I can't help but think of my PhD advisor's words. When this many people are failing an assignment, the fault doesn't lie primarily with the individual people. The problem is with the information the people are receiving. But whereas in the example at the beginning of this post, the problem was that the instructors were trying but failing to clearly convey the correct information, here the problem is that the "instructors" are succeeding in conveying bad information.

Right wing media personalities and Republican politicians are pounding into the heads of their viewers, listeners, and followers false information about the vaccines. Many of those public figures are themselves vaccinated, but continue to spew out this vile propaganda because they think it will be to their political advantage. It's basically a crime against humanity.

I came across a nice analysis recently showing the vaccination levels and COVID rates in all counties of the United States grouped by 2020 Trump voting rate. Here's the graph of county vaccination rate by Trump voting rate:

(Note that the 0-10% and 90-100% group have relatively small sample sizes here.)

And here's the graph of rates of COVID death since the end of June 2021, which is a good cutoff point because it means that very nearly all of these deaths would have been prevented if everyone who was eligible had gotten vaccinated:

The images pretty much speak for themselves. In a real sense, people are killing themselves and their relatives and neighbors in order to prove their loyalty to a political movement. A political movement, it's important to note, the leader of which did get vaccinated but refused to make any effort to promote vaccination because if more people got vaccinated it could be politically beneficial to his enemies.

I imagine most everyone who is reading this post has gotten vaccinated. And you are probably, at least to some extent, part of a community in which people encourage getting vaccinated. If you had lived your whole life in an insular bubble in which extreme right wing views are promoted and other viewpoints are shunned, would you still submit the correct answer on the "should I get vaccinated?" assignment? Can you really say?

We all, every single one of us, firmly believe in some things that aren't true. It's a fact of life. Speaking for myself, I can't say what those things are, but I know that there are some. As I wrote about not long ago, we should all be more humble about the things we "think we know." For all of us, this is to some extent related to the sources from which we gather information, something that is not entirely in our control.

At the same time, some people believe more strongly in more wrong things than other people, and some wrong beliefs are much more harmful than others.

There is a big overlap between tendency to believe falsehoods about COVID vaccines and another set of false beliefs that are also doing tremendous harm to our society.

A recent poll found that a whopping 66 percent of Republicans believe, against all evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump, with just 18 percent saying that President Biden is the rightful president. Such beliefs are, of course, being used as justification for attacks on our electoral system to try to enable Trump to steal the next election. The irony of the "rigged election" claims is that our electoral system is already effectively rigged in favor of Republicans thanks to gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the makeup of the Senate (two senators per state regardless of population) all giving disproportionate power to rural white voters, thus enabling Republicans to control the government despite having far fewer people vote for them.

Again, when so many people are failing an assignment, we can't just blame the people as individuals; we have to blame the sources of information pertinent to the assignment. Again, Fox News, talk radio, Republican politicians, etc., are all spewing constant disinformation about our elections. This is not a new problem, but it's been getting worse and worse. At this point the Republican Party has essentially abandoned the concept of representative democracy. That isn't an exaggeration.

I have an older relative who I had always considered a really lovely person. The last few years have severely strained that perception. Recently I saw him post this on Facebook:

Let's not mince words. This (especially taken in context of other things my relative has posted) is some straight up fascist shit.

But that doesn't mean the things about my relative that made me like him for all those years aren't still there. Have a conversation about something not related to politics, and he still seems like the same person he always was. These aren't fundamentally evil people we're talking about. These are ordinary people who have had their minds warped by misinformation and as a consequence support evil things.

(This particular relative is vaccinated, by the way. But has also posted anti-vax stuff. Go figure. Cult behavior obviously doesn't have to make sense.)

I have several relatives who are like this, and I think it's hard for me to really blame them that much for the way they are. It makes me really sad. But propaganda is effective. 

It's kind of a weird balancing act for me. Recognizing that the people who are doing these things are not fundamentally horrible people, they're just very misguided, but simultaneously recognizing that by doing these things they're threatening the very foundations of our society and this has to be stopped in any way possible.

The people who I feel real animosity toward are the people who are creating and spreading the propaganda. The politicians and media figures who have filled people's heads with so much garbage that we now, literally, have people dying of a deadly virus to own the libs, and we have a still ongoing attempted insurrection trying to topple our form of elected government and replace it with white nationalist authoritarianism.

So that's the problem, as I see it. Millions upon millions of our fellow Americans have been so inundated with misinformation that they are constantly and horrifically failing the assignment of being a decent citizen of this country in multiple devastating ways. It's a cult. It really is. That's the problem.

What should we do about the problem? That's the hard part. I wish I knew. I'm largely at a loss. But I have a few thoughts, hopeless as it all sometimes seems.

People who are in a cult are never going to listen to someone trying to tell them that they're in a cult, with a possible exception if they have a close personal connection with the other person. Getting in arguments with hardcore Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers is not going to be effective.

People who do have close personal connections to cult members might sometimes be able to appeal to their better natures. Sometimes. I'd imagine the closer the connection, the more likely. And I'd imagine it also depends on how deeply someone is into the cult. But I'm definitely not an expert on the psychology of cult members so I'm not going to try to go into how to do this.

I think what's paramount in importance is the rest of us recognizing the threat and the urgency of acting to stop it.. Perhaps close to one-third of the people in this country are members of a cult that, if it gets its way, will destroy most of the things we love about this imperfect but still in so many ways amazing nation. But as depressingly large as the cult is, it's really not close to being a majority of the country. It can only succeed (with help, unfortunately, from the aforementioned biased-toward-rural-white-people electoral system) if enough of the non-cult-members keep their heads in the sand about what's going on.

We're all influenced by the information spheres we inhabit. And I think an important thing to realize about the information people in the United States receive is that, taken as a whole, the media today are incredibly biased in favor of Republicans.

"But, but, the liberal media..." you might be saying. Which if you had that reaction, is a good example of the pro-Republican bias.

We have, as I mentioned, right wing media outlets that have become just straight up propaganda factories. They aren't even attempting to accurately report what's going on. They're just trying to spin everything in whatever way is most favorable to the political right wing.

Then you have the rest of the mainstream media. They, for the most part, aren't trying to propagandize. They're trying to report the news. It's impossible to do this with no bias, and different sources have different biases. But the overriding bias of the mainstream, non-right-wing media is a bias toward trying to be unbiased - which manifests as a bias toward "both sides" reporting and "the truth is in the middle."

If you have two political parties, and both political parties are basically normal political parties that are both sincerely trying to engage with reality and the problems of the real world in different ways, then maybe this sort of "truth is in the middle" approach makes some sense. What we have instead is two political parties, and one of them is a basically normal political party, but the other one is an authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy.

Thanks to all the "liberal media" accusations over the years, mainstream media outlets are terrified of being excessively friendly to Democrats and unfriendly to Republicans, so most of the time they try to be equally critical toward both parties. They portray disagreements between the two parties as normal partisan squabbling, just politics as usual. When one of the parties is an authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy, and you treat this as all just politics as usual, you're doing a huge favor to the authoritarian white nationalist cult that is trying to overthrow democracy!

Most people don't really think about this. And I don't blame them; they have plenty of problems to worry about in their own day-to-day lives. But I think it's an important thing to recognize when considering why voters make the decisions they do.

As I mentioned, we all believe in things that aren't true. One such mistaken belief that I think is common for people who fall toward the middle of the political spectrum to hold is the belief that bipartisanship is, in and of itself, an important goal in the political process, rather than something that is sometimes a means toward achieving other worthy goals.

When the other party is actively trying to overthrow democracy, trying to work with that party is definitely not an important goal.

But people are set in their ways. So you have, for example, the situation in Maine where Joe Biden won the presidential vote but Republican Susan Collins was reelected to the Senate. A bunch of voters in Maine decided that although they didn't want the authoritarian white nationalist president to be reelected, they were cool with potentially giving the party led by an authoritarian white nationalist control of the Senate. That's not what their thought process was, of course, but that's the reality of their voting choices. And then you also have centrist Democrats in Congress who are putting President Biden's agenda in jeopardy and threatening to help the Republican plot to overthrow democracy, because they still seem to naively think that bipartisanship is a worthy goal.

Those are some of the obstacles we face.

We all have to think about what we can do to save American democracy. We have to engage the people around us, the people who aren't in the cult but also aren't as tuned in to politics, to make sure they aren't going to sit on the sidelines. We also have to be aware that a lot of people will just tune all this talk about fascism out. This is partly because people have an understandable need to just want to focus on their own issues, partly because of the impressions they get from the lazy "both sides" media, but regardless, those people have to be reached by other means. There should be reasons that just about any non cult member would not relish the chance of returning to the non-stop horror show of a Trumpist government. Find the reasons that are important to people around you and make sure they remember those reasons.

The election of 2020 was the most important of our lifetimes, but it unfortunately looks like every election for the foreseeable future could also be the most important of our lifetimes. What gives me hope? The Republican brand has been poisoned forever for a large majority of people my age and younger. Eventually, it's the people of these younger generations who will have the most say in our democracy.

If democracy survives that long.

So we have to do everything we can to make sure it does.

This is what the songs are for

I'm just going to gush about one of my current favorite musicians here for a bit. Is that okay? Because I would really like to do that.

I've been thinking about writing more about this artist for a while. After being extraordinarily blessed to have gotten to see them live the other day, I went from "thinking about" to "feeling compelled toward." More on that show in a bit, but first...

The album

It's a very exciting thing to me when I have the realization, after listening more and more to a newly obtained album that I really like, that said album is in fact becoming one of my favorites of all time. This has happened this year with Ignorance by The Weather Station.

It seems that every eight years now, an album enters my life that has lyrics that just really speak to my soul in a profound way. This is something I realized recently. It's one of those weird things that I notice because I have a weirdly heightened tendency to notice patterns. I'm really weird. Whatever, I enjoy it. Anyway, I was thinking about it, after thinking about how much I love the lyrics of Ignorance and pondering what other albums had lyrics that I had loved that much, and there are two other albums that were on that level.

In 2005 (not this album's release year, but the year I started listening), it was Ozma's Rock and Roll Part Three. Its lyrics spoke to me because I was a really shy, nerdy young adult who was into things like video games, Star Wars (there's a song about having a crush on Natalie Portman!) and punny wordplay ("an apple pie, the number pi, I studied you in math class" from the song "Apple Trees"? Classic!). Also, the lyrics lean heavily on nostalgia, something that speaks to me even more today, even as I've to some extent outgrown certain other aspects.

In 2013, eight years later, the album was Typhoon's White Lighter. Its lyrics, heavily influenced by the lead singer's near-death experience from Lyme disease and consequent pondering of mortality, spoke to me because I got into the band shortly after my wife was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The album was in fact released the same week she was admitted to the hospital.

In 2021, another eight years on, it's Ignorance. (What will be the album of 2029, I wonder?) And as for why this album's lyrics speak to me so much? I'd say they speak to me because, well, I'm a human being living in this strange and distressing era of history.

There are reasons why the lyrics speak to me personally more than they might to the average person, but in comparison to the other two albums I cited, I think the appeal and the relatability are broader, because it's not about a specific aspect of my life, it's about human (and non-human!) life in general. Given that, I've decided that if I had to pick one album that I would subjectively assess as having "the best lyrics" of any album I know, this is the one.

The music is great too. Tamara Lindeman has really evolved the sound of her music from the folk stylings of her early records, which were quite good too, but this is even better. The jazzy indie rock on Ignorance has this consistently propulsive feel from the rhythm section and piano that just lends this sense of urgency that goes so well with the subject matter of the lyrics. And Lindeman has a wonderfully expressive voice. It all comes together in a great package, but to me the lyrics are just next level so I want to talk about why I love the lyrics so much.

I'm going to go through the songs of the album in order and pick out a favorite line or two and explain why they're favorites. I hope this post can properly convey the brilliance contained on this album. I think these lyrics are by far best experienced reading along with the liner notes while listening to the album front to back. But I want to talk about it, so, here goes.

1. Robber

"You never believed in the robber.  You thought a robber must hate you to wanna take from you.  The robber don’t hate you, you never believed in the robber but the robber never believed in you."

Okay, this song is about how the heartless capitalistic system we live in robs us all of so much (uh oh, we're getting political here!). And I think this bit expresses so nicely and succinctly how people don't even think about how so much harm is done by just a system, a mindless thing, that has no intent, good or bad, it's just the way things are. It doesn't have to be the way things are. But most people don't question it.

2. Atlantic

"My god, I thought, my god, what a sunset; blood red floods the Atlantic. With a wine in my hand, laid back in the grass of some stranger’s field, while shearwaters reeled overhead, thinking; I should get all this dying off my mind, I should really know better than to read the headlines, does it matter if I see? Or really, can I not just cover my eyes?"

Just incredibly evocative imagery, which Lindeman excels at, to open this song. And then the lines about all the dying in the headlines that the first time I heard I just thought, wow, this pretty much sums up how it feels to be in the world right now. (The album was released in early February of this year, when COVID deaths in the US and many other countries had just recently reached their very peak. Not that this song is specifically about COVID - I would read it as more about the ongoing and worsening climate catastrophes that heavily inform Lindeman's songwriting.)

3. Tried to Tell You

"But some days there might be nothing you encounter, to stand behind the fragile idea that anything matters."

Don't we all feel this way sometimes? The idea that "anything matters" can be a fragile idea, but it's important to remind ourselves of the things we encounter that do reinforce this idea. Also, this is the song from which the line "This is what the songs are for" that I used to title this post came from, and for me, great songs, such as those on this album, are some of the most important things to help me feel there are things that matter.

4. Parking Lot

"Waiting outside the club in a parking lot, I watched some bird fly up and land on the rooftop, then up again into the sky, in and out of sight, flying down again to land on the pavement.  It felt intimate to watch it; its small chest rising and falling, as it sang the same song, over and over again, over the traffic and the noise.  Is it alright if I don’t wanna sing tonight?  I know you are tired of seeing tears in my eyes.  But are there not good reasons to cry?"

The image of the bird, and the description of how it feels intimate to watch it - so, so good. And then the connection from the bird to how the observer - the human singer - is feeling. I'm honestly envious of Lindeman's way with words. Also from this song:

"But everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky."

Something about this line blows me away in a way that's hard to articulate. But it just really makes me think about our place in the world.

Okay, and I have to mention one other line from this truly incredible song:

"I confess I don’t wanna undress this feeling, I am not poet enough to express this peeling."

I disagree with this statement. I would contend that Tamara Lindeman absolutely is "poet enough."

5. Loss

"You lay in bed, the sun streamed through the blinds.  Sweat soaked through your shirt.  You lay a hand across your eyes, every other part of you hurt.  From inside the confines of the story that everything would be alright, it was only so wide you could open your eyes, you could only let in so much light.  But you knew the story had never been true - loss is loss, is loss, is loss."

I think anyone who has experienced great personal loss can relate to the idea of the "story that everything would be alright" - the story that "had never been true." And again, the imagery here stuns me.

6. Separated

A few months ago, I wrote a whole post that was largely inspired by lyrics from this song. Here's another good excerpt:

"You try again your arguments out on me, I try and tell you again; but if you wanted to understand me you could, if you wanted to hold my hand you would, but you don’t want to, you’ve committed to this wall we sleep against."

I think this is such a great description of two people in a relationship that is no longer working.

7. Wear the World

"It does not matter to the world if I embody it.  It could not matter less that I wanted to be a part of it."

A very poetically stated reflection on our ultimate significance, or lack thereof.

8. Trust

"In the throes of this divorce, in this court proceedings; for some reason my mind was filled with all my softest feelings."

To me this is about how when a relationship has stopped working and it's ending or ended, at times you can still have very sentimental feelings about that person and the relationship, which I'm sure is a familiar concept but one that people often don't seem to talk about.

9. Heart

Okay, I love the lyrics of this song so much (I'd say this and "Parking Lot" are my top favorites of the album), I'm going to go through them all.

"I don’t have the heart to conceal my love, when I know it is the best of me.  If I should offend you, I will show myself out, you can bury me in doubt if you need to."

Being in love, and not knowing if the other person feels the same way, and not being able to keep it inside any longer. Or it can also work if this is about, rather than love for another person, love for the world - being passionate about important things, and the way some people recoil at this passion. I think it works on both levels.

"I can walk out in the street, no-one need look at me, it is with my eyes I see.  I guess that I am soft, but I am also angry, but I will feel all my loss, I will hold my heart inside me."

The idea of being soft but also angry is so striking and so relevant at this moment in time. I also like the "loss" callback.

"My dumb eyes turn toward beauty; turn towards sky, renewing.  My dumb touch is always reaching; for green for soft for yielding."

This, to me, hearkens back to earlier songs on the album like "Atlantic" and "Parking Lot." There's this deep appreciation for the beauty of the world we inhabit. And there's doubt over whether it's worth caring so much with all the ongoing tragedy. In a way I think this song brings all the themes of the album together. I guess you could say it's the "Heart" of the album. Heh. (Still like corny wordplay!) Sorry, moving on...

"In the pale dim light, I am always reeling, through long midnights of feeling."

This is a staggeringly poignant and poetic description of an experience that is no doubt familiar to many.

 "Of all the many things that you may ask of me, don’t ask me for indifference, don’t come to me for distance."

An excellent statement of the importance of caring - which again, could be about a specific other person, or about the world as a whole.

"No, I don’t have the heart to conceal my love, if it is too hard to look at me, I will show myself out, walk out in the city.  You can bury me in doubt if you feel it necessary."

And returning to the opening lines, restated but slightly altered with a different final rhyme which I like because I guess it just sounds more interesting that way!

10. Subdivisions

"Got in the car, and the cold metallic scent of snow caught in my throat as I reached out to turn on the radio; the unfamiliar songs, the voices sing of love, and of wanting to dance and to sing in the rhythm of.  The road was overwhelmed with snow piled high in all the ditches, I drove as though I did not understand all the divisions, the yellow signs and the painted lines, and the order they envisioned was so clear.  I joined the steady line of cars on the highway, as though I was going home, but I drove the wrong way.  Past the looming walls of subdivisions, out past the strip malls, white fields and gray gas stations."

There is even more incredibly vivid imagery here. Again, I'm envious. And the divisions/subdivisions thing, without even really saying it, I think so much is being said here about the way that modern society has been structured and how it divides us and all the harm it causes. I'll spare you the rant about car culture that I could easily go on here.

And that's not even close to all that the song is about. It dips back to the personal relationship themes from earlier in the album: "I left you back at home because I simply could not do it, tell you I could be with you when I could see right through it; our whole life.  But what if I misjudged; in the wildest of emotion, I took this way too far?" (I enjoy the "took this way too far" double meaning here.) So the album is simultaneously about struggling with one's place in a relationship and struggling with one's place in a world that is being devastated by humanity's callous actions. And speaks beautifully on both themes.

So that's it. Check out Ignorance. I implore you!

Next up...

The show

I caught The Weather Station live at the Magic Bag in Ferndale, Michigan (a Detroit suburb) on Thursday, September 9. I made the drive up from Cleveland late in the afternoon, grabbed some dinner (takeout I'd ordered ahead of time), and headed over to the venue.

It struck me as I was waiting outside that it was really nice just to be doing this. To have driven to another city for the purpose of seeing a band I really love. That's something I do all the time, normally, because music is such a huge part of my life, but it had been almost two years since the last time I'd made such a trip.

It was not the first show I've attended this year (there were some others earlier this summer in Cleveland), but it was the first at which I had to show my vaccine card to get in. I'm very glad that venues have enacted this requirement. Additionally, at the request of the artist, attendees were required to be masked at all times except when actively eating or drinking. I support this as well, due to the current situation with the delta variant - in fact I recently bought a pack of KN95 masks specifically for wearing at shows - but going into it I thought it might feel a little weird to be wearing a mask at a show.

It turned out, which I had not thought much about ahead of time, that having a show with both vaccine and mask requirements for attendees seemed to select for an audience of people who all really wanted to be there to experience the music. The crowd wasn't huge, but it was one of the best audiences I've ever shared a concert experience with, because everyone had their full attention on what was happening on stage, and there was none of the annoying audience chatter that often irritates me at shows.

If requiring masks at shows leads to people in the audience not talking during the performances, then I say let's have masks at shows forever! (I mean, I don't think this will really happen, but if it actually does cut down on audience chatter I would genuinely be glad of the change.)

I didn't realize it ahead of time, but this was the first club show The Weather Station had played since before COVID, as well as the first time since before COVID that the Canadian band had crossed the border. I felt very lucky to be there for such an occasion.

It was truly a magical experience, something that I've missed so much in this last year and a half. The band played almost all the songs from Ignorance as well as a few older cuts, including standout track "Thirty" from 2017's self-titled album. The band's keyboard player was not present due to a border crossing snafu, so Lindeman took on extra keyboard duties while singing, which she handled well. All the band members' performances were on point - guitar, bass, drums, and nice clarinet and saxophone flourishes from the wind musician adding some great texture to the songs.

It was easy to tell that it was a really emotional occasion for everyone, the people on stage and the people in the audience. We've all missed this. Going a year with almost no person live music has made me realize that I really do think live music is a nigh essential part of the experience of being human. Sure, that's more true for me than for the average person, but I think it applies broadly.

After a great main set, Lindeman returned to the stage alone to begin the encore, sat at the keyboard, and played a beautiful song I'd never heard before but hope to hear again. It contained a lot of her usual evocative imagery as she described looking at the stars in the night sky as a child and then connected that to looking at the night sky as an adult and seeing fireworks on New Year's Eve as the year 2020 approached.

2020, man. Wow.

This was followed by a full band performance of "Subdivisions," a fitting closer. After the band left the stage a second time, the audience applauded enthusiastically, and some of us, me included, just kept clapping. I think we just really didn't want it to be over. In a way that is often true when you see a really excellent show, but now even more so than usual. I don't know whether Lindeman was anticipating doing a second encore, but she came out again, and treated us to a performance of "Traveler" from 2011 album All of It Was Mine. I've listened to that album many times, but I had never truly listened to the lyrics of that song in a way that their meaning sunk in the way all the lyrics of Ignorance have. And I found myself sitting there just stunned once more at the beautiful and emotional pictures Lindeman paints with her songs.

Most of the way through the song, though, at an instrumental part, she stopped playing and said one of the strings of her guitar was out of tune and she had to tune it. So then, while tuning, she kept talking to the audience, and kind of started rambling. And then laughed and said that before going out on tour again after all this time, she had thought about how she wanted to present herself on stage, and had decided she wanted to go out and just be serious and play the songs and not spend much time on banter. And here she was at the first show out on tour and already getting away from doing that.

I, for one, really enjoy hearing the interesting things musicians talk about on stage, so I welcomed this.

Eventually she said that the end of the song was sad and after getting sidetracked on amusing banter she couldn't get back into that place so she wasn't going to finish the song. Instead she'd play a different song that was more upbeat. She started playing the song, got about one line in, then stopped and confessed she had forgotten the words to the song and broke down laughing.

That was the end of the show! Lindeman said she owed us one and promised that they'd be back, thanked the audience again, and left the stage. It was a very unusual ending but I have no complaints at all. It was such a, well, human moment. A moment of that special connection that happens between a musician and their audience. When musicians get in a room with people who really love their music, magic happens, magic that can't truly be replicated in any other way. It happened throughout that evening at the Magic Bag.

There was just so much joy in that room! I had almost forgotten what it felt like.

There was another thing that Lindeman said during the show that really struck me, in a sad way. She said that it was good to be back in America. She noted that the news from here is "intense" (no kidding!), but whenever she actually comes here, it's really nice. It's a nice place, she said, "and it always will be."

The way she said "and it always will be"... it was one of those things where you say something and the words you use express certainty, but you don't actually feel certain, you actually are just hoping that it will be true.

These really are scary times. And as I drove home, I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I was told all this stuff about the USA being the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it was BS, but I do think that back then, it was at least generally the case that this country was admired by people in other countries. Nowadays, people in other countries feel bad for us. And for very good reasons! I've been aware of this before, but Lindeman's words really drove it home for me. And it did make me feel sad.

To quote a favorite tweet from Julien Baker (who I'm very much looking forward to seeing live in a couple weeks), though, "at least there's music am i right." The Weather Station's show on Thursday was the best reminder of that that I've had since my trip to California to see Ozma in December 2019. And it was all the more poignant now, in a way I never could have imagined back then. This truly is "what the songs are for."

That wraps up what I have to say about The Weather Station, but I also have some thoughts about...

Going to concerts during COVID

This was not the first show I've been to this year, but it was the first show I've been to since the delta surge in the US got bad (although it's currently not that bad in Michigan, at least). There was a part of me, and I know this stems to some part just from me being a generally anxious person, that was worrying, am I doing something wrong by going to a concert now?

I know that, rationally, when you look at the way most people are living their lives at this stage of the pandemic (see, for example, crowded indoor restaurants at which people are talking and eating and obviously not wearing masks while doing so), the relative added risk of COVID spread from a concert at which both vaccines and masks are required is tiny. (Especially a concert that was not crowded, as was the case here.) I know that musicians and venues have been put in a horrible place by this pandemic, and additional economic assistance from the government is not coming, and I think that if these events can happen in a way that does a good job minimizing risk, it's a good thing to support those musicians and venues. I also think that having events with vaccine requirements will likely help increase vaccination rates, even if by a small amount, in a way that not having events at all, or having events without vaccine requirements, would not do, and therefore could very well be a net positive in the fight to end the pandemic.

Still, it was hard to shake the feeling, what if it was wrong to do this? I've seen some people on Twitter say things like, "There shouldn't be concerts right now!" Which gets to my anxious brain.

It got me thinking about how people have talked about COVID risk in general, and I realized even more something that I had already been realizing. I think that the way a lot of liberals (myself included, when I think back to earlier in the pandemic), have talked about COVID risk has been very sanctimonious, and has come across (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), as basically trying to paint people as morally wrong for simply having normal human wants and needs.

I realized how essential a part of life live music is to me. And I'm sure to a lot of other people. Now, I'm fairly introverted, and although I definitely missed getting to spend time with my family, to be honest I could just as well do without social gatherings of more than, say, five or six people. (With the exception of concerts! Which are a different sort of social gathering, I suppose.) So other than the lack of concerts, the restrictions on gatherings of large groups of people weren't so much a problem for me. But I'm sure there are other people who find going to parties just as essential a part of life as I find going to concerts.

Now, look, I totally do think that the restrictions on indoor gatherings were well justified prior to vaccines being widely available. (Now, I think vaccine requirements are a better option.) But I also think it's pretty messed up that people have been shamed so much for just wanting to do things that humans, as social animals, have a natural want and need to do.

I remember seeing someone tweet something that was like, "If people had just done the little things like get vaccinated, wear a mask, and social distance, we wouldn't be in this mess." (I think an emerging theme here is that I spend too much time on Twitter...)

And yeah, getting vaccinated, that absolutely should be a little thing for the vast, vast majority of eligible people. It's a huge problem that a lot of those people aren't getting vaccinated, which is a topic for another post. Wearing masks? Yeah, not that big a thing generally speaking. But at the same time, it's pretty privileged for someone who is working from home and only has to wear a mask at the grocery store to say that about people who are toiling in hot kitchens all day.

But social distancing? Calling social distancing a "little thing" when this has been going on for a year and a half, to me, just betrays a fundamental misunderstanding and/or denial of human nature.

(I'm sure the counterargument would be that if everyone had just done what they were supposed to, it would have all ended a long time ago, but when you look at what has happened in numerous other countries around the world, I just don't think it's realistic that that could have ever happened in the US. Especially with the emergence of the delta variant. Yes, things did not have to be nearly as bad as they have been, but it wasn't going to just go away in any realistic scenario.)

Now, I find it very understandable why people have talked about COVID risk in this way. It's been a horrible time that has been hard on everyone in different ways. I'm not trying to shame people for shaming people, which would be hypocritical. I just don't think it's been productive.

I wonder how much difference it could have made if the moralizing about COVID could have been avoided and instead there had just been a focus on giving accurate information on what the risks were and what were the best ways to mitigate those risks. Of course, the bigger problem all along was all the misinformation and politicization of the pandemic coming from those on the right politically, but I think those of us on the left could have done a lot better too.

Ultimately, I think all the moralizing likely led people to react in one of three general ways. First, there are those people who were never going to take this seriously. Nothing could have ever reached them, but I think the moralizing might have made them even more eager to flout restrictions, "to trigger the libs."

Then there are the people who did want to take it seriously, but I think those people fall on a spectrum of risk tolerance. Many of those who fall more toward the "want to live as close to normal life as possible while mitigating risks" side would be likely to eventually get annoyed by the moralizing and then start tuning out all the rules and restrictions. Those who fall more toward the "want to avoid risk as much as possible" side have probably gotten complexes where we now experience unhealthy levels of stress and anxiety about doing even low risk activities. And none of this is helpful to the overall health of individual people or of society.

That was pretty rambling, but I think there's a point in there somewhere.

Anyway, major kudos to artists and venues for requiring vaccines and masks for concerts (although I still think we need more attention to ventilation and filtration of indoor air!). Please, let's all make sure everyone around us is getting vaccinated so we can all go back to enjoying in person live music and all the other things that are essential for us to fully live our lives as the social animals we are.

Public speaking and funerals

Twenty years ago, in 2001, I graduated high school. As part of the graduation ceremony I had to give a speech. Believe me, I was far from thrilled to be given this assignment. I strongly disliked, and in fact had a dreadful fear of, public speaking when I was younger. I still vividly remember the heightened pulse and sweatiness of the morning before I had to give an oral presentation on the novel 1984 in freshman English class. A few years later, I had made little progress against this fear.

Despite this fear, by all reports I did a respectable job with the graduation speech. I've thought back to that speech from time to time over the years. It's struck me that the subject matter of the speech was, in retrospect, eerie.

On May 11, 2001, a few weeks before I graduated high school, Douglas Adams, the author of classic sci-fi farce The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, suddenly and unexpectedly passed away from a heart attack at the age of 49. I adored Hitchhiker's Guide and its sequels and was shocked and saddened by this news. Not having much idea what to talk about in my speech, I eventually keyed in on Adams's life and tragic death as a theme.

This is eerie, in retrospect, because by giving a speech about someone who had recently died, I was in a way previewing my future life.

When I graduated high school, I had never experienced the death of someone close to me. The subject of my speech, the transitory nature of life and how we should therefore make the most of it, was thus something of an abstract concept. I reread the speech for the first time in many years before writing this post, and although at some points clumsily written, parts of it certainly resonate with me to this day.

"Although this could not compare to losing a close personal friend, I was deeply saddened when I heard the news.  I soon realized, however, that this event reinforces a valuable lesson.  Adams may have died at just 49, but I would wager that he did more of worth in his years on this Earth than many an octogenarian.  He touched millions with his special talents.  And this is the lesson I would like to take from him, one that is very important on this graduation day: we should all strive to make the most of our lives, however long or short they might last," I spoke to the audience in the auditorium. I went on:

"I do not suggest that we must all become famous.  There are many ways that one can make the most of his life.  Earning a high school diploma is a significant part of doing just that.  Work toward goals, to better yourselves and those around you.  Nourish your talents, whether they are in writing, music, science, athletics, or any other area.  Never dwell too long on the negative aspects of life.  Most importantly, enjoy yourselves, and try to bring happiness to others.

"With these things in mind, we can go out into the world and leave a positive mark on it.  Make the most of our brief stays on this planet, and whenever our time comes we will, perhaps, be able to have the “tremendous feeling of peace” that Arthur Dent, protagonist of the Hitchhiker’s series, does at his own end.  This feeling can only come from the knowledge that our lives have been worthwhile."

I mean, it's really quite eerie in retrospect, because as I said, these were abstract concepts to me at the time, but have since become defining themes of my life in a way that I think is not very common for someone my age. Although I did suffer a few personal losses in years to come, most notably one of my grandmothers during my senior year of college, to be honest there was never a death that really hit me on a deep personal level... until at the age of just 31, I lost the very closest person to me in the whole world, my wife Cara, to lung cancer.

By that point in time, thanks to my very lengthy experience obtaining a PhD, I had become far more experienced and confident about public speaking than I was as a high school, or even undergrad, student. I know some people, upon losing a spouse, find it too difficult to speak themselves at the funeral, which I find very understandable, but for me there was no question that I should eulogize my beloved wife.

It was a strange thing. Because I could still remember very well my younger days of being terrified of public speaking. And here I was, giving a speech about the death of my wife, the most painful loss imaginable, and after finishing I had the realization, Wow, I've gotten pretty good at this whole public speaking thing. And that realization felt pretty good! In spite of the horrific circumstances. So it was a strange thing to feel.

The funeral officiant, and my parents, and I, spoke heartfelt and meaningful words about Cara. And then the officiant asked if anyone else among those gathered for the ceremony would like to share their memories or thoughts about Cara.

No one did.

I understood how awkward and difficult it could be to get up in front of a roomful of people and give a speech. And plenty of people had shared beautiful tributes to Cara online, or to me in person. So I knew very well how much Cara had meant to people. And I wasn't mad at people for not volunteering to speak. But honestly, it did make me sad. I did wish that someone else would have gotten up and spoken a few words about what an amazing person she was. And if one person had broken the ice, more might have followed.

In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a huge deal. But it was something I always remembered. And I think it was because of that memory that ever since, when there has been a funeral for someone about whom I've had any meaningful thoughts to share, I've taken the opportunity to do so.

In the first 31 years of my life I spoke at zero funerals. In the last 7 years, by my count, I've spoken at six. Sometimes as part of the program, sometimes at that "if anyone else would like to share their memories" moment. Either way, it's just... felt like the right thing to do? Because I know how much it can mean, as someone who has lost a loved one, to hear someone else talk about what that person meant.

Most recently, my Aunt Ellen passed away unexpectedly earlier this year. My dad, probably having noticed that speaking at funerals had kind of become my "thing," asked if I would deliver some words during the memorial service, and of course I did, along with my dad, some of my other aunts, and one of Ellen's coworkers. It was a beautiful ceremony. I spoke about all the things Ellen (an ER pediatrician) had done for me, for her other nieces and nephews, and for all the children who entered her life.

Sometimes when someone close to you dies, you already know they were an amazing person, but the things that people say about them after they die make you realize that they were even more amazing than you ever knew. The two people I've known for whom that was most true were Cara and Ellen.

After the memorial service, one of my aunts who spoke, who is about 70 years in age, told me that it was the first time she had ever done public speaking in her life, and that she had been incredibly nervous about it. I thought she had done a great job! And I was so struck by her words about feeling nervous. Because I could remember very well that feeling myself, from when I was a teenager. When you're a teenager, it's hard to imagine that someone who has lived so many more years on this Earth might be similarly nervous about public speaking. But thinking about it now, somewhat older and wiser - why not? It makes perfect sense that people of any age could be that nervous. It's interesting that speaking in public is one of those things that so commonly inspires such fear, and I wonder why that is. Like any skill, though, public speaking is one that improves and becomes more comfortable with practice. And that's something that can happen at any age.

Losing someone really close to you is one of the hardest things in the world, and hearing other people who knew that person speak about the impact they had is a good salve for the wound. It helps give, as I alluded to in my high school graduation speech, the knowledge that their lives have been worthwhile - an important thing. So I hope people can overcome their fears, and get up there, and speak those vital words. Take it from me, it's a very worthwhile thing to do.

And there are people like Ellen and Cara, who are so amazing and impact so many other people's lives, who probably never realize just what a tremendous impact they have on all the people around them. So in addition to speaking about them after they've passed - when someone has a big impact you, don't wait; let them know about it while they're still here.