The light comes back on

2024 was a remarkable year. It was remarkable for a lot of reasons, many of them bad. But in regards to my own life, the ways in which it was remarkable for good reasons easily surpassed any previous year I'd lived.

During 2024, there were four different experiences I had that made me feel, truthfully, like I'd ascended to some higher plane of existence or been transported to a magical realm, where I was in touch with the universe and the essence of what it is to be alive in a way that the events of normal day-to-day life don't even approach. This might sound like a description of some crazy psychedelic drug experience (I can't speak to that personally), but it isn't. It's just that I got to do some really, really amazing things. And I've had other such experiences in my life, but never so many in a single year.

One was the honeymoon Erin and I took to Spain in early March, perhaps a topic for another as yet unwritten post. Another was witnessing a total solar eclipse in person. It goes without saying that a third was becoming a father - really not just the birth experience (although that was the most profound) but also many little moments since that I've shared with Erin and W.

The fourth was the most cathartic and emotionally powerful concert that I've attended in my life, which if you know me you know is really saying something. The concert took place on March 22, 2024, at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, and was played by one of my top two (with Okkervil River) favorite bands ever, Typhoon, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of their album White Lighter.

 

The concert not only marked the tenth anniversary of one of my favorite albums, it also, I realized during it, marked a closing of the door on the most tumultuous ten year period of my life.

The short run of White Lighter tenth anniversary shows that Typhoon did in March of 2024 was actually a bit belated, as the album was released in August 2013. So let's jump back in time to August 2013.

Typhoon had come up on my radar earlier that summer, when I saw them listed among upcoming shows at the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern in Cleveland and thought they sounded interesting. I hadn't yet listened to any of their music. I didn't know that the band's lyrics were largely inspired by lead singer Kyle Morton having nearly died from complications stemming from Lyme disease, and were thus about grappling with mortality and the fragility of the human body in both dark and hopeful ways.

White Lighter was released on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Three days later, on Friday, August 23, my first wife Cara was admitted to the hospital after it was discovered that she had a blood clot in her calf, and it was subsequently discovered that her lungs were full of blood clots. Early the next week, she was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Needless to say, my whole world was turned upside down.

A couple weeks after the initial hospitalization, I listened to Typhoon for the first time. I had no idea what I was getting into. No idea how relatable the music would be. No idea that the music of Typhoon would become one of the most important things that would help carry me through the next few years of my life, first living with a spouse who had what was almost certainly terminal cancer, and then living as a young widowed person and struggling through physical and mental health problems of my own.

It's funny that the album with which I would form a stronger emotional connection than any other in my life was released within days of the event that would lead to it having that emotional resonance. If I'd listened to White Lighter on its release date, I'd have liked it a lot, but it would likely have just been one of many albums that I liked a lot. A week later, everything had changed.

And because White Lighter is the single most emotionally meaningful album to me, and I already knew very well that anniversary concerts of favorite albums could rank among the best things I'd ever experienced, when I saw that there would be tenth anniversary shows I knew there was no way I could miss out on attending.

I took a long weekend and flew to Portland the day before the concert. My whole visit was great. Non-concert highlights included several really fantastic meals, a visit to Powell's, the world's largest bookstore, and a round of disc golf at Pier Park, a very highly rated course that quickly became my favorite that I've played.

A very exciting birdie!

I also did a huge amount of walking. It's well known that "getting your steps in" is good for one's physical health. It's becoming more well known, but is still underrated, how beneficial long walks can be for mental health and emotional state. Between the honeymoon in Spain and the Portland trip, I'm pretty sure March 2024 is the month in which I've walked the most in my whole life, with several different days of over 20,000 steps each. Is it a coincidence that this happened during what was easily one of the best months of my life?

A lot of the walking I did was in the lush, sprawling expanse of Forest Park, one of the nation's largest urban forest areas. Being able to spend time in nature that's readily accessible from a city is a great thing, something I love about my home of Cleveland Heights, and Forest Park is probably the best such place that I've encountered in my travels.

 

Repping another favorite Portland band, Joseph. 

It's a pretty magical place, but the magic of walking through those lush woods didn't compare to the magic that took place in Revolution Hall on the night of March 22.

This was, in fact, the second time I'd seen Typhoon play a show in Revolution Hall. The second time, in fact, that I'd seen Typhoon play a tenth anniversary show in Revolution Hall - the prior, on November 5, 2017, was for the tenth anniversary of their record label.

Both shows came at very momentous times in my life. Just as my introduction to Typhoon, and first time seeing them live, had also come at a very momentous time in my life. All for very different reasons.

I got to the venue early to make sure I could get a good spot near the stage. There were two openers - the second, the Fourth Wall, I had seen open for Typhoon once before, in 2018, and it was great to see them again. Anyway, between waiting for the show to start and waiting in between acts, I had plenty of time to think about the band I was there to see and how their music had woven itself into those ten years of my life going back to White Lighter's release.

I even took the time to read my previous blog entries about Typhoon. I felt grateful to my past self for having written all those entries. It was a good reminder of why I write. It was a good reminder of what all I had been through to get to the remarkable place I had reached.

One of those entries was called Wait for the light to come back on. I wrote it after that previous Revolution Hall show in 2017. The title comes from the lyrics of "Artificial Light," the opening track of White Lighter and a song that had often moved me to tears when I saw it performed live.

On that November 2017 visit to Portland, I was still reeling and emotionally devastated from what had happened the month before - an out of nowhere (to me) breakup that was the most traumatic thing I had ever experienced.

Which, considering I had previously been widowed at the age of 31, is obviously saying something.

Taking a very long walk around Portland and then seeing an amazing Typhoon concert had provided a major respite from the pain I was experiencing. I think it was really the beginning of my healing process, although that process took a long time.

In 2024, once again, the combination of a long walk around Portland and an amazing Typhoon concert had a profound effect on me.

I realized something as I stood there in the crowded concert hall and thought about all my past experiences with Typhoon and the words I had written. All those concerts and the things that had been going on in my life when they happened. September 2013. March 2014. September 2014. November 2017. January 2018. June 2018. April 2022.

What I realized was that, ever since August 2013 - the release month of the album whose tenth anniversary this show was celebrating - I'd carried with me an inescapable feeling that the life I had was not the life I was supposed to have. There was just something wrong about it.

Turning 30 and then a couple months later learning that your wife has stage IV lung cancer will do that to you, I guess.

But I also realized that there had been one short-lived period of time within those ten years when that feeling had gone away. When it had felt like everything had fallen into place and my life made sense again.

It was an illusory feeling. Now that I have a child of my own, I can see even more clearly how absolutely insane it was that my (also widowed) girlfriend of April through October 2017 had pushed me into a stepfather role for her four-year-old daughter within a month of us meeting in person. But I didn't realize that at the time.

I can see clearly now something that I was aware of at the time but then, I think, didn't want to admit was true after it ended. Those months in the summer of 2017 actually had been the happiest time in my life. (Had been! But that's no longer true.) It didn't seem right when I had been happily married to someone with whom I shared nine years of my life to say that the happiest time in my life was instead a short-lived relationship with someone else, but honestly, it was true, and it was because being a parent (for all intents and purposes, albeit not in a formal or legal sense) was the most magical thing I had ever experienced. And thus, suddenly having that parental role and that relationship with that child stripped away from me was the worst trauma I'd had to endure.

I realized something else. When I thought back on my life, there was a clear line of demarcation, almost as if I had lived two different lives. There was the period of my life that felt immediate and familiar and real. And there was the time before that, a time that almost felt like a past life.

That line of demarcation was August 2013. The month in which White Lighter was released. The month in which everything in my life changed.

When I think back on the events of August 2013, there's an immediacy to them, as if they didn't happen all that long ago, even though it's now been over 12 years. And that's also true of all the important events that have happened between then and now.

But go back a little farther in time, and I find that events of even, say, July 2013 feel like they happened in a different lifetime. It's an uncanny feeling, although it's one that makes sense when you consider what happened.

So this concert celebrating the tenth anniversary of an album by one of my favorite bands was also much more than that.

The first time that I saw Typhoon live, it was amazing to witness the 11 members of the band all cram onto the tiny stage of the Beachland Tavern. I'd never seen anything like it.

I was too close to to fit the whole band in one picture, but you can see how crowded the stage was.

In the years since, various members of the band had had to move on to various other responsibilities in life. The size of the band had shrunken considerably. The most recent time I'd seen them, April 24, 2022 - the day after my second date with Erin, and a significant date for other reasons - a version of the band about half the size of the original had taken the stage at El Club in Detroit.

They'd played a great show, but it couldn't quite compare to what had once been.

On March 22, 2024, the full Typhoon lineup whose music had taken hold of my soul ten years previously once more took the stage at Revolution Hall. I had always thought, when I saw them, that the band seemed like a family. And this was like the best kind of family reunion. It felt like things were once more the way they were supposed to be. It felt euphoric.

And the music hadn't even started.

It's hard to put into words what I felt when the oh so familiar opening notes of "Artificial Light" filled the room, and what I continued to feel for the rest of Typhoon's set that night. But I'll try. As I remember it, a powerful physical sensation washed over my body and I somehow felt both intensely excited and remarkably calm, and at peace, and most of all just blissful.

 

I joined in with much of the rest of the crowd in heartily singing along to many of the words. That sort of communal experience with a concert crowd that is so passionate and so there for the music is a wonderful thing whenever it happens. Here it was extra wonderful, both because of what the music meant to me, and also because the feeling I had of the band being like a family somehow extended to the entire audience. It felt like, in that room for that one night, we were all one big family.

Many of the words that I sang most enthusiastically were words I had quoted in one of those old blog posts: Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara, posted a week after my first wife's death, a post that marked my transformation away from being someone who never shared his innermost feelings with, well, just about anyone. The emotions I experienced seeing those songs performed live at this tenth anniversary celebration, singing along, and thinking about everything those words meant to me and everything that had happened over those ten years, well... it was just a transcendent experience in the unique way that live music can transcend normal human experience, but even more transcendent than any other live music experience I've had before or since.

Although so many of those lyrics had meant so much to me going back to 2013 and through the ensuing years, there was one set that now took on a greatly heightened significance. From "Young Fathers":

Now I'm as old as you were when you had me
Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?

In 2015, I explained, "The above is not really so much related to Cara, but sticks out to me because I am in fact now as old (31 years) as my mother was when she had me."

It was a weird feeling at the time, thinking about how at the age my mother was when she became a parent, I instead became widowed.

Kyle Morton, speaking between songs at the anniversary concert, provided additional context to these lines. When he was at the age his parents were when he was born, he thought he was going to die. He wrote those words thinking that he would never get to be a parent himself.

He introduced album closer "Post Script," an absolutely heartbreaking song, by saying that he had written the song for Danielle, his wife; it envisions her life after his death. It had been ten years since that song was released into the world. Ten years since I had listened to it and the rest of the songs on White Lighter over and over while pondering my suddenly uncertain future.

I've talked to both Kyle and Danielle (frontwoman of now defunct band Wild Ones) multiple times at previous shows, by the way, and they're both just absolutely lovely people.

So here we were, ten years later. Kyle had not died. He was very much still alive, and as he explained in what was news to me, he and Danielle had been able to start a family. They had a baby girl!

During the show, it had already been very much on my mind that the crazy journey my life had taken over those ten years had all led up to me meeting Erin and now to Erin, back home in Cleveland, being pregnant with our child. At the revelation that Kyle and Danielle's journey had also led to them having a child - ten years after I had listened to those words, "Should I be afraid? Should I start a family?" and had wondered whether I, too, would ever have that experience - I felt this sense of... I guess I might call it cosmic connection. Sometimes it just feels like everything is as it's meant to be. This was one of those times.

All along, what I had really wanted in life was to meet someone with whom I would like to start a family, and then start a family with that person. Now it was happening. 

After the astonishingly beautiful performance of "Post Script," a song that sticks out in my memories of the first ever Typhoon concert I attended when those 11 musicians crammed themselves onto the tiny Beachland Tavern stage in September 2013, the band left the stage to thunderous applause. They returned to play an encore featuring several songs from their other albums and culminating in a rousing performance of "Reed Rd.," a fan favorite live song that never made it to an album (until it was included as a bonus track on the White Lighter 10th anniversary release) but that I fondly remember closing out the show at my second Typhoon concert. That show had been in March 2014, so almost exactly ten years in the past.

What a ten years it had been.

I walked out of the concert almost in a daze. It had been just so powerful, so beautiful, so overwhelming an experience. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

Although since W's birth, the list of experiences similarly or even more amazing has rapidly expanded!

I had spent ten years carrying a vague feeling that my life, in some fundamental way, was not the life I was supposed to have. And now, now I no longer felt that way. I now felt that yes, things are right with my life, this is where my life is supposed to be. I was already starting to feel this (when you've spent so long carrying that feeling of things not being right, it's not easy to shake, even when things do start to really go right), but I think that night in Revolution Hall (importantly, I think, coming on the heels of an amazing honeymoon with Erin in Spain) is when that feeling really solidified itself in my mind.

Because life has been so busy and it's taken me so long to get around to finishing writing this post, I now have the benefit of being able to look back over the two years since that night and see that yes, that's really true. I feel so much gratitude.

Looking back, it seems even more remarkable now. I truly believe that that night in that concert hall induced a permanent and beneficial change in my brain. Not just in the way that the formation of any long term memory permanently alters some neural pathways, but a much more profound and fundamental change in the function of my mind.

Music, man. It really is something.

The day after the show, I did a lot more walking around Portland, including a stop at a record store where Typhoon's music was being played over the speakers. I was not surprised at the affirmative answer when I asked the guy at checkout whether he'd been at the previous night's show. That night, I caught a red-eye flight home with a brief layover in Chicago.

But then my flight from Chicago to Cleveland was cancelled.

While in the airport in Chicago, I joined a video call with Erin and our realtor as they viewed a house. We were still in the midst of a lengthy house search. It would be almost a month later when we finally found our home. We closed on it, incidentally, on the two year anniversary of our first date.

It turned out that the best way for me to get home from Chicago was to take a flight to the Akron-Canton airport, an hour's drive from home. Erin drove there to pick me up (the original plan would have had me taking a train from the Cleveland airport to our side of town). It's always a crazy journey for us!

I was extra happy to see Erin when I walked out the doors of the airport. On the way home, we stopped at a GBH (great blue heron) rookery that Erin had spotted from the highway on a previous drive we'd taken. A love of GBHs has been a significant feature of our relationship from early on. We parked, got out of our car, and looked at all those majestic birds tending to their nests.

I stood there with my wife and thought of the nesting that we would be doing in the near future.

I paid 25 cents to light a little white candle

For the last few months, I've felt like I've been seeing the number 424 unusually often. The number 424, or the time 4:24, or the date 4/24, or a 4 and a 24 next to each other. Some of you reading this already know why that number would have meaning to me. For anyone reading who doesn't know, it's because my wife Cara passed away on 4/24 - April 24, 2015. I was already feeling like I was seeing this combination of digits with uncanny frequency prior to the events I'll describe in this post. That's important background for the events I'll describe.

This year, on April 24, I traveled to Detroit to see a concert by one of my all time favorite bands, Typhoon. They're a band whose music, with lyrics grappling with mortality, was my own personal soundtrack to Cara's battle with lung cancer, so the date of the show was eerily fitting. It was even more weird to consider that the most recent previous Typhoon concert I attended had taken place on June 12, 2018 - that is, my and Cara's wedding anniversary. Significant concerts taking place on significant dates - a long running theme of my life and my blog!

It was really great to see Typhoon again for the first time in years. The band's lead singer Kyle Morton is an amazing person who I've befriended through conversations at previous Typhoon shows; unfortunately, I did not get a chance to catch up with him this time due to the band's very understandable COVID precautions. During the show he talked about how weird it was to be back out on the road playing in front of people but also how important it was, how there's such a big essential part of life that was missing when we couldn't have those in person gatherings. He also thanked people for wearing masks during the show - he has had some very serious health issues and is a kidney transplant recipient, so trying to avoid COVID is more important for him than for most people in our age bracket.

The show, along with visiting some very close friends in Ann Arbor earlier the same day, was a great way to mark an April 24. It was also not the first time I saw an important concert on April 24.

On April 24, 2018, I saw the Decemberists at Cleveland's Agora. They were a band Cara and I both loved and whose music had had some significance to our relationship. One of the highlights of that show was the performance of "Grace Cathedral Hill," a beautiful song from the Decemberists' debut album Castaways and Cutouts. I remember muttering "wow" upon my recognition that they were playing the song, because I was so happily surprised.

This has all been a prelude to what happened to me last week. I traveled to San Francisco last Wednesday to attend a meeting on Thursday and Friday where I'd discuss my research into asthma with other asthma researchers. That was what was supposed to happen, anyway. But then, on Wednesday, I realized I was feeling sick, with a sore throat and other symptoms of a respiratory infection. I took a COVID test and it was negative. On Thursday I took another COVID test and it was again negative. But I was still feeling sick. Apparently I'd come down with a cold. My symptoms had definitely made me wonder if I had COVID, even though I'm triple vaccinated and had an omicron infection at Christmas. It wouldn't be impossible. Despite apparently not having COVID this time, I still didn't want to expose all the other people at the meeting to my illness, especially considering that if they caught it, not only would they get sick, but they would have the added stress of wondering if they had COVID.

So I told the conference organizers what was going on, and then ended up with a bunch of time to kill in San Francisco, while feeling sick enough to not want to attend a meeting but not sick enough to be utterly incapacitated. I ate a lot of takeout meals. I watched a lot of playoff basketball on TV. I wandered around a lot on Wednesday, at first not realizing quite how sick I was feeling. I wore a KN95 mask whenever I was in an indoor space and tried to keep close contact with other people to a minimum. Thursday I mostly spent relaxing at my hotel, hoping I'd feel no longer sick by Friday morning, but this didn't happen. On Friday I again wandered around a lot, since at that point I was clearly missing all of the meeting and there was nothing else to do. The weather, thankfully, was beautiful the whole time I was there.

It was very disappointing to have traveled out there for the meeting and not get to participate in it, but on Friday I really managed to take advantage of my free time, and by the end of the day I came away from it thinking, oddly, that perhaps my illness had been... fortuitous?

I noticed that the famous "Painted Ladies" houses that are across the street from Alamo Square Park, as seen in the opening credits of Full House, were a couple miles' walk from my hotel, so I went there, and it was really nice just hanging out in that park for a while and taking in the sights and sounds and sun.

Heading back, I picked up some food, ate it in the park across from city hall, and then was looking at my phone trying to see if there was anything else interesting that wouldn't be a huge amount of extra walking, and I saw this:

Oh! Grace Cathedral, like in the Decemberists song! Well, I pretty much have to go, was my thought process, and then I scrolled through the music on my iPod, selected Castaways and Cutouts, hit play, and set out toward the cathedral.

I've always had a thing for cathedrals. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. is one of my favorite buildings anywhere. Grace Cathedral is another really nice one.

There's a line in the song that goes, "I paid 25 cents to light a little white candle," and because I'm a huge freaking nerd I of course decided, I should pay 25 cents to light a little white candle while in Grace Cathedral. (This was in addition to a $12 admission fee for visitors that I did not realize I'd have to pay until I was inside, but I decided, why not.) I first did some wandering around the inside of the cathedral, admiring the beautiful architecture and artwork and stained glass.

The whole time I was there, I was thinking of the song and of that Decemberists show that had taken place on 4/24. Eventually I decided I was ready to go and pay 25 cents to light a little white candle. I headed over toward a candle lighting station. While doing so I glanced at my watch.

The time was 4:24.

Long time readers of my blog might remember that I have a thing for noticing and pointing out weird coincidences. By now it's happened so much that things I would have once viewed as astounding coincidences, like the Typhoon show being on 4/24, I now kind of shrug my shoulders and laugh about. But this, especially in light of my already feeling like I was seeing those digits strangely often - this was a special one.

So I went, and I put a quarter in a donation box, and I lit a little white candle.

And then I stood there for a minute and talked to Cara. It's not something I do often, at least not in a direct way. But in this moment it felt like I was supposed to. I'm glad that I did.

After leaving the cathedral, I resumed my wandering, and resumed listening to the Decemberists on my iPod. The song "Grace Cathedral Hill" had not yet come up prior to my arrival at the cathedral but came on shortly after my departure. I stopped walking while listening to the song and just admired this view:

It gave me a very peaceful feeling, something I haven't had a whole lot of recently.

That night I caught a red eye flight from San Francisco to Washington DC before connecting back to Cleveland. I managed to sleep for most of the flight. Upon landing in DC, I was dismayed to receive a text message that my flight to Cleveland was cancelled and I'd have to select another flight. But this turned out to not be a problem because the flight had been replaced by another flight at the identical time. So the cancellation turned out to have no effect on my day, except for one thing, which is that I was issued a new boarding pass with an interesting combination of numbers on it:

Then, after I arrived in Cleveland, got to my car, and started driving home, I laughed when I noticed that the first gas station sign I saw showed a price of, you guessed it, $4.24.

Signs from Cara? Who knows, but it's nice to think that maybe they could be.

I listen to a lot of music from Canada (and other exciting observations about my music listening history)

If you know me well you know that I like numbers and graphs. You may have seen me post a lot of graphs and interpretation that I made about COVID. Here are some numbers and graphs about a more fun topic.

Every year at the beginning of December I see lots of people post their "Spotify Wrapped" on social media. It's always interesting to me to see what music other people listened to the most in the year. But for me personally, I want more than that. So this is kind of like a much nerdier and more detailed version of a Spotify Wrapped. And not just for a year, but for most of my adult life.

Since 2005, I've used the website last.fm to keep track of all the music I listen to (on a computer or iPod, at least; it can also track music you listen to on streaming services on your phone but I very rarely stream music on my phone). The popularity of Spotify Wrapped makes it clear that a lot of people enjoy being able to see stats about the music they listen to, so I recommend the website if you want more of that! If you go to my profile and scroll down, you can see my top eight artists (all time) displayed, kind of like a Spotify Wrapped:

Definitely a big lead for Okkervil River in first place. If you click around you can see breakdowns by artist, by song, by album, over different periods of time. But because I'm such a data nerd, that wasn't enough for me. Luckily, a kind person made a website that exports your entire listening history as a CSV file you can download. So after doing this, I used the programming language R (running under RStudio) to play around with the data.

Here are some of the results I found interesting. Will anyone else find them interesting? Maybe? But lots of people post their Spotify Wrapped every year, so I'm going to post this.

Top artists by year

Here's a scatter plot of my top five artists for each year by year and number of plays. There's a lot of information here so apologies for the small text. Click to open and zoom in if you care to.

Observations:

-For 2005 the data only cover the last five months of the year, hence the second through fifth place artists having low numbers. Still, I listened to songs by Ozma over 1400 times. I was super obsessed with Ozma when I started using last.fm.

-Okkervil River has by far the most appearances in my yearly top five with ten. Next is Typhoon with six. 

-The top seven yearly totals are all either Ozma, Okkervil River, or Woodpigeon.

-The highest yearly totals are all in the earlier years. In more recent years my music listening has become more spread out over a larger number of artists.

-The Weather Station in 2021 recorded my highest yearly total for one artist in nearly ten years.

Top single months for artists

These are the top fifteen totals recorded by artists for single months:

Woodpigeon comes in with three of the top five. Like Ozma, I was also super obsessed with Woodpigeon for a time. I like the story of how I discovered Woodpigeon. When Cara and I saw A Northern Chorus's farewell show in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2008, the next day we went to a music store there and each picked out one used CD to buy (knowing nothing about the music except for what we could see in the artwork and liner notes; it was a thing we often enjoyed doing). Woodpigeon's Songbook was Cara's pick. If you're an indie pop fan, I highly recommend checking out that album and even more so their subsequent album Treasury Library Canada. Sadly, Woodpigeon is the only artist in my top twenty overall artists that I've never seen live.

The way that my music has become more spread out over a larger number of artists and less concentrated on single artists is also evident here as the National's October 2019 tally is the only one on this list more recent than 2013.

Looking at this list, it's fun to think back on what was happening in my life and why I was listening to those particular bands so much in those years and months. Which is a good segue into...

I listen to an awful lot of Sufjan Stevens in December

Sufjan Stevens came in fourth on the above list with his December 2012 tally. That was the month after the release of his second five-disc box set of Christmas music. Yes, he has released ten discs' worth of Christmas music (a mix of traditional and original songs). And I love all of it. To me, Sufjan Stevens' music basically is the Christmas season. December 2012 was also when Cara and I saw Sufjan's spectacular Christmas show at the Beachland Ballroom. Definitely one of the best shows I've ever attended. So December 2012 stands out the most, but every single December, I'm putting all that Sufjan Christmas music in heavy rotation. And so if you take each of my top nine artists overall and sum up how much I've listened to them by month of the year for the entire 2005-2021 period, you get this:

There's one month for one artist that is a really huge outlier here! Everything else is fairly random, although I enjoy the nice oscillatory pattern on the Okkervil River graph.

Now let's move on to...

My music listening habits by geography (or, I listen to a lot of music from Canada)

I took every artist for whom I've recorded at least 100 total plays and manually annotated their nations of origin (as well as state or province for American and Canadian bands). First, here's a graph showing all the nations that appeared in my history, with the total number of listens for each:

The USA has the most by far, which is obviously not surprising. But the USA also has a much larger population than any of the other countries on here. What happens if we adjust the numbers to make them a ratio of the number of plays to the national population? Then we get this:

Canada surges into the lead! Interestingly, Iceland is second. Iceland's population of 366,000 is slightly smaller than the city proper population of Cleveland, Ohio. The USA is now third. I've noticed for quite a while that there's a disproportionate amount of music that I listen to from Canada considering how much smaller a population it has than the US. There's just something about those Canadians, man.

And here's a similar analysis but in list form for the top states and provinces of my music listening history. First ranked by raw number of plays:

No surprise that California comes in first considering its huge population and sizeable music scene, but it just barely edges out Ontario. Now to reorder the list by the population-adjusted numbers:

I think the fact that the top eight states and provinces on this list consist of four Canadian provinces along with the states of Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Ohio is easily the most "on brand" thing for me in this post.

And last, what I consider by far the most interesting result from the analysis I did:

Trends in my music listening by vocalist gender

Similar to the geographical annotation, I also manually annotated by lead vocals: male, female, both, or none (none meaning music without vocals or with extremely minimal vocals). I didn't really have strictly defined criteria for the categorization but just went with what felt right, so Arcade Fire counted as "male" because Win Butler does lead on a large majority of the songs with just the occasional Régine Chassagne song, whereas the New Pornographers counted as "both" because even though most of the songs do have male lead vocals, there are a substantial number of songs throughout their catalog with Neko Case or occasionally another female vocalist taking lead.

I then excluded the "both" and "none" artists (a small fraction of the total), calculated the fraction of what remained that fell under "male" vs. "female" for each year, and got this graph:

It's just such a striking trend! When I first started using last.fm in 2005, I listened to almost no music with female lead vocals. This had been true for as long as I listened to mostly music of my own choosing, going back to adolescence. 2005 was when I first started to really expand my taste in music. And going forward, there was a steady increase in how much music with female lead vocals I listened to. Finally, in 2020 and 2021, I reached very close to a 50/50 balance. It's just such an interesting trend to me. If you're a stats nerd, you might appreciate that a linear regression of fraction (either female or male) against year has a whopping 0.86 R-squared value (p = 5.1 x 10^-8).

I think it says something about how boys are socialized to avoid "girly" things. I don't remember ever having an active dislike for music with female vocals. But I still tended not to choose to listen to it. Then, as an adult, as I explored more and more music, and started to just listen to whatever I enjoyed listening to, this eventually led to a near perfect balance of vocals by gender. Funny how that worked out.

So that includes my super nerdy analysis of my music listening history. I hope someone else found it entertaining, but at the very least I did! It's a more cheery topic for graphs than how many people have died from COVID, so at least there's that.

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.

Memory/The way it was before

It's not often that you get the chance to see your two favorite bands in concert on consecutive days. It's certainly never happened to me before. Last week not only did it happen, but it happened coincident with my and Cara's wedding anniversary.

June 12, the seventh anniversary of our wedding, brought Typhoon to the Beachland Ballroom, my favorite music venue and one where I have so many wonderful memories. It was another amazing show by Typhoon, a band that I have written so much about recently that there's no need to really review the show itself. But I did want to mention some things that lead singer Kyle Morton said both during the show and during our conversation after it.

At one point in between songs, Kyle talked about how new album Offerings (which I just blogged about) is centered around the theme of memory. He said the album describes a worst case scenario of total memory loss, but also that Kyle had become interested in exploring the topic in part due to things he sees happening in society. We seem to be losing our memories, he said. Although he did not directly mention Donald Trump, his remarks made it clear he was alluding to the horrifying way that events in this country today are echoing events from the past and how we as a culture seem to have learned nothing from that past.

He also brought up how (in a not unrelated way) people today seem to have such short attention spans, and tied this to the omnipresent phone screens that we often seem unable to go more than a few minutes without looking at. This is something I've thought a lot about myself. Just as one example, when I was a kid, when I watched sports on TV I didn't feel a need to have something else besides the game on TV to hold my attention. Now when I watch sports on TV I'm often constantly glancing back and forth between my phone screen and the TV screen because my brain rebels at just focusing on one thing for an extended period of time. Of course the TV is just another "screen" and in the past TVs were cited as a cause for shortened attention spans, so these issues aren't novel to the smartphone era. But I do think there has been a major acceleration over the course of my lifetime and the effects, both on individual people's minds and on society's collective consciousness, are in many ways alarming.

Kyle encouraged us not to get too caught up in the digital world of phones and the Internet and to be sure to give attention to real connections with real people and with the real world. Now, I know as well as anyone that the Internet, when used in certain ways, can greatly bolster those real connections - after all, not only did I meet Cara via an online game, but online messaging was the primary way we got to know each other, as we lived in different cities. So context matters, and I'm certainly not saying that online interactions should be completely shunned. But at the same time, it's important to not get trapped in that online world, many aspects of which are designed to give our brains instant gratification but not genuine long term fulfillment. There are so many things in the real physical world - a beautiful day outside, a friend with whom we're conversing, a concert we're attending, a delicious meal we're consuming - that merit our full attention and are cheapened if that attention is constantly split with that little screen in our hand.

The topic of memory and memory loss also hits close to home because I've become increasingly aware of changes in my own cognitive function and ability to remember things since last fall. My brain doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to. This has multiple aspects, I've noticed. When I think back over my life going back to October, especially the first few months of that period, there's a certain haziness to the memories, a sort of mental fog. As well, I feel I've become somewhat absentminded about everyday tasks and things I'm doing and should be doing. There's a well known phenomenon that can be referred to as "widow brain" - but the interesting thing is I don't feel like these effects happened nearly as much after Cara's death as they did after the breakup last fall. So perhaps that breakup triggered a sort of delayed onset widow brain by compounding on my previous trauma. I don't want to overstate this - I don't feel like I'm losing my mind or anything like that, and overall I think my brain still works well. And I also think things have improved compared to a few months ago. But still, this has all been very noticeable to me.

Trauma affects our ability to remember things. And not remembering things (see: the parallels between Trump and the rises of past fascist dictators that so many seem willfully ignorant of) can help bring on more traumas. Not a good feedback loop.

On a happier note now, the show, as I said, was excellent, and I again got to talk to Kyle afterwards, and he (like his wife Danielle, of the band Wild Ones, in Toronto) was so genuinely pleased to get to see me and talk with me again. I'm very moved by that. I told Kyle about how it was my wedding anniversary, and he, like me, was startled by the odd coincidence. I also mentioned having gotten to see the Decemberists on the anniversary of Cara's death this year. Kyle said something that I really liked, something along the lines of, "We're all mortal. We're all going to go sooner or later. But when someone you love dies, I think a part of that person does live on in the people who loved them. And I think you can especially see that when those sorts of coincidences happen." I like that attitude!

The Typhoon show was a perfect way to mark my and Cara's anniversary. The day after found me driving to Detroit, having decided I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see Okkervil River - especially considering that back on that wonderful weekend in June 2011, on the day before the wedding, Cara and I attended an Okkervil River concert in Columbus. So there was a nice parallelism there, and it was one I unintentionally added to. The concert in Detroit was at El Club in Mexicantown, and given that I was in Mexicantown I naturally decided to go to an authentic taqueria for dinner - and as my tacos were served to me, it suddenly struck me that Cara and I had had a taco truck cater our wedding rehearsal dinner. So not only was I replicating the night before our wedding by going to an Okkervil River concert, I was replicating it by having tacos for dinner and then going to an Okkervil River concert! I laughed at the realization. (Oh, and the tacos, at Taqueria El Rey, were delicious.)

El Club is a cool little venue that I'd been to once previously. It was in January of this year, and it was to see Typhoon (obsesssed much?). In retrospect I'm so glad that I went to that show, because on the same trip I visited my great friends Adam and Jackie in Ann Arbor, and then in April Jackie's mother Carol, a wonderful person who had lived with MS for decades, passed away. So that Typhoon show resulted in me getting to see Carol one last time, and I'm grateful for that. There's another interesting parallel there. In January 2015 Cara and I visited Adam and Jackie (and their two young boys and Carol), and then Cara passed away in April 2015, and I became especially glad we had made that trip, just as I became especially glad I made the January 2018 trip after the April 2018 passing of Carol.

The show this week was my eleventh time seeing Okkervil River in concert. It was my fourth time since Cara's death. Each of the three previous post-Cara's death concerts, I realized, had been unusual in some way, distinctly different from a "normal" Okkervil River show. The show in 2015 was for the tenth anniversary of the album Black Sheep Boy and featured (rather than a normal setlist) that album and the accompanying EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix played in their entireties. The show in 2016 was in support of the album Away, and after it I blogged about what a totally different experience that show was. The setlist largely consisted of songs from Away, which is a very different album from any other by the band, and on top of that, "every single non-Away song in the main set was a very heavily reworked version of the original song." And the show in 2017 featured a stripped down, three person, acoustic version of the band, playing an all requests setlist (and that show included probably the most emotional moment for me at any show ever when Will Sheff said "This is a very special request for Jeff McManus" and played a song I had described in my request as being linked to a special memory of my late wife).

So all three of those shows had been major divergences from what I'd think of as a "normal" Okkervil River concert. At the 2016 Away tour show, I wondered if the approach Will was taking to his music at that show would become the new norm going forward, and if perhaps I'd never again experience a "normal" Okkervil River show. I keyed in on a lyric from the last song played at that show, "Black": "It'll never be the way it was before," and I wrote these words:

Perhaps Okkervil River shows will never be the way they were before. Very certainly, my life will never be the way it was before. Before Cara got lung cancer and then died of it. But I will always carry that past with me. And the future? It can still be pretty great.

It's eerie now, looking back, that just weeks later another "It'll never be the way it was before" moment happened and at the time I wasn't even a bit concerned about it because I just didn't think it was going to happen. I'm referring, of course, to Donald Trump's election to the presidency. I realize that I keep going back to Trump even in posts that are mainly about non-political topics, but it's hard to overstate just how much the ongoing crisis in this country has affected me and my view of the world. And I'm a privileged white guy who hasn't even been directly affected by it in any significant way. There are so many people who unfortunately can't say that. It's a collective trauma that's happening to all of us and even if we do turn things back around, there are going to be scars that will remain for as long as this country exists. And there's a part of me that fears our country, as we know it, won't exist anymore in the not so distant future. Trump clearly wants to be a dictator, and although he isn't one at this point in time, our Republican elected officials have so far collectively shown basically no willingness to meaningfully stand up to his corruption and abuses. So what if he just refuses to leave office, and the Republicans just go along with it? I don't see that as the most likely outcome, but I can't discount the possibility. So this is probably another appropriate time to say: make sure everyone you know gets out and votes in November.

This blog entry that is centered around two concerts at which I had fantastic times sure has some unhappy little asides in it!

Anyway, it turned out that my idea that Okkervil River shows might never be the way they were before did not actually come to pass. This show, finally, for the first time for me in almost five years, was an Okkervil River show the way it was before. The band played a set full of songs both from excellent new album In the Rainbow Rain and from most of the other albums in their catalog, and while there were some interesting variations thrown in on the older songs they were generally much more faithful interpretations of the original versions, and the band had so much energy, and for 90 minutes it really did feel like old times again and it was so great and I had so much fun and I kind of just wanted that show to never end! Seriously, it was magical!

Will Sheff is the sole songwriter for Okkervil River and he's actually been for a while now the only original member still in the band; he's gone through a lot of lineup changes over the years, and while the shows have always been fantastic, at times they've felt more like a group of musicians performing Will Sheff's music rather than a performance by a band, if that makes sense. But the current lineup is just clicking in an incredible way and at times I felt like I was transported back to, say, the Pepper Jack Cafe in Hamilton, Ontario on Cara's birthday in 2007. And it's really special how music can do that. Life as a whole is never going to be "the way it was before," but it's nice, for a little while, to be able to recapture that feeling. I think the fact that it had been so long since I had seen a "normal" Okkervil River show made this one all the more special. The last previous "normal" show was also the last time I saw Okkervil River with Cara - at the Beachland in 2013 just about a month after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. At that show she sat right in front of the stage in a wheelchair and she reveled in the fact that she had enough lung capacity to sing along with those familiar songs. After the show she was handed from the stage a setlist from the show, written on a paper plate, and that plate remains on display in my living room. At the show the other day I was able to obtain another such souvenir.

I drove home from Detroit after the show and, although I did not get home until about 3 am, I was so amped up and giddy from the show that I had not the least bit of trouble staying awake - I didn't even feel the need to stop for a caffeinated beverage, as I typically would on such a late night trip. And then, just as I was pulling into the garage, what band's music came onto the college radio station I had playing?

Yep, Okkervil River. Naturally I sat in my car and listened to (and sang along with) the whole song ("The Latest Toughs" from 2005 masterpiece Black Sheep Boy). Another one of those funny, weird little coincidences and a perfect way to cap off a thrilling and emotional two days.

Typhoon - Offerings

One week after Cara died, I published a post on my blog called Typhoon lyrics that make me think of Cara. It ended a long hiatus; I hadn't posted anything on my blog in over one and a half years, covering most of the time since Cara's diagnosis with lung cancer. That post was a pivotal moment in my life. Prior to that, I was a person who did little sharing of my innermost thoughts and feelings. My blog posts were largely descriptive, usually about concerts I went to or other adventures Cara and I went on together, and while I did describe the feelings those experiences evoked in me, I avoided (both in my blog and in my conversations with friends and family) any truly in depth discussions of my life and the challenges contained therein. After Cara died, that all changed.

Now, as a concert approaches on my and Cara's wedding anniversary by the band whose music has most helped carry me through my wife's sickness and death and my own life in the aftermath of all that, I find it a good time to share some thoughts on the spectacular album Typhoon released earlier this year.

Typhoon's 2013 album White Lighter, released on August 20, 2013 - that is, the same week Cara was hospitalized leading to her lung cancer diagnosis - wormed its way into my heart and soul like no other album ever had with its gorgeous songs about life and death and pain and striving to "be good" in the face of all that pain. I realized a long time ago that the lyrical content of a song or album does not have to appeal to me in order for me to greatly enjoy that piece of music, but when both the music itself and the words accompanying it really speak to me, that's usually what elevates music to a truly special place in my heart. Kyle Morton's lyrics spoke to me in a way no one else's ever had. Typhoon's music is so personal to me now that there's no way I could even attempt to write something that approached an unbiased review of a Typhoon album. If you haven't experienced the things I have, the music won't have the same meaning to you. There's nothing wrong with that. At the same time, there's definitely something universal in Kyle's writing.

The long-awaited followup to White Lighter, a 70 minute double LP entitled Offerings, arrived this January.

The album, fourteen tracks in length, is made up of three "movements" - Floodplains, Flood, and Reckoning, along with the one song coda dubbed Afterparty. The first movement, Floodplains, was released by Typhoon as a preview of the upcoming album on October 25 of last year. Floodplains, and therefore Offerings as a whole, begins with an ominous spoken word intro:

"Listen. Of all the things you are about to lose, this will be the most painful."

When I first heard those words, I was in the wake of another extraordinarily painful loss. As White Lighter had before it, Offerings immediately began to worm its way into my heart and soul.

At the Typhoon show I attended in Detroit earlier this year, Kyle remarked at one point, "We're a rock band now." The new album does tend more to the rock side of the "indie folk-rock" that is probably the best summary of Typhoon's genre. The orchestral flourishes are a little pared down (although lovely string parts still accent a number of the songs); there's a little more emphasis on electric guitar. There are still delicate moments interspersed with stirring crescendos. It's a fitting evolution of Typhoon's sound but not an extreme departure. What makes Offerings more ambitious is its symphonic nature – multiple self-contained movements together making up a larger cohesive album, with little motifs, both musical and lyrical, that show up repeatedly and help tie the whole thing together. I love Typhoon's sound, but again, it's the lyrics that really elevate the work for me, so let's once more talk about some of the lyrics that stand out.

The new album continues the theme of reckoning with one's mortality, but now with a special emphasis on the concept of memory, and how we try to hold on to memory in the terrifying face of inevitable death. In Kyle Morton's own words from the email newsletter announcement of the album:

It's a record from the perspective of a mind losing its memory at precisely the same time the world is willfully forgetting its history. The urgent question becomes: without casualty, without structures of meaning, without essential features of rational thought, is there anything that can save us from violence / oblivion?

With no past and no future, there is only suffocating, annihilating present, looping on and on ad infinitum (to me, one plausible definition of hell) and the best you can hope for is that somewhere in the void there exists some small, irreducible certainty—a fragment, a kernel, something—that you may have the good future to stumble upon before it's all over.

As you may have noticed if you know me well, I am a person who places enormous value on staying in touch with and keeping alive significant past events from my own history. Coupled with my own intimate experience with death and loss, this again is an album that seems like it could have been written specifically for me.

The first song on Offerings, “Wake,” poses a question: “My life one brief unbroken loop – goes round and round with nothing left to hold onto. But if there's nothing, if there's nothing, then what's that song that keeps hounding me?” And over the course of the album this topic is explored from multiple angles. How do we find something, something of real value, something of enduring meaning, onto which we can hold?

The subject matter is often very dark and unsettling. From “Rorschach” (track two): “And I'm trying to stay sane – meanwhile, the river of forgetfulness starts spilling the banks.” From “Empiricist” (track three): “Empty room. Cast about for a familiar object. Because my body needs coordinates to move. In the dark. Range of motion shrivels all around me. All my nightmares I am slowly being cocooned.”

The song that follows, “Algernon,” is one of the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful things I think I've ever encountered, so I want to give it special attention. Whereas much of the album's lyrical content is more abstract in nature, "Algernon" clearly and vividly portrays a little scene from the point of view of a person who has lost much of his essential memory. Having seen this happen to my grandmother, I can relate to the song, and can only imagine that it would be even more moving for someone who has seen it happen to a closer loved one, a parent or spouse or sibling. The picture Morton paints with his lyrics, without ever directly saying what's going on in the song (because the narrator, losing his mind, doesn't know what's going on), is so vivid and captivating and sad. The song begins:

A woman leans in her chair.
Holds her face close to mine.
She's curious, am I comfortable?
Would I care to give it one more try?
She holds the picture up
while she studies my eyes.
I'm trying hard to recall the routine,
but I can't and so I improvise.

The narrator attempts to describe the contents of the picture, and at his attempt, the woman is clearly saddened, but probably not surprised:

A woman shrinks in her chair.
She says the picture's of you.
I have no idea what she's talking about
but I nod my head as if I do.

She goes on, until he interrupts:

I say enough is enough.
You have found me out.
You have called my bluff.
I don't know anything
about this stuff.
I'm just tired
and I'm waiting
for my wife to pick me up.

And the reaction to this:

A woman slouched in her chair
disrupts the silence to say.
The part of you that I love is still in there
even if it doesn't know my name.

Is the woman, slouched in her chair, the narrator's wife for whom he's waiting, but doesn't recognize? That's the obvious reading. And the way that we the listeners know that, and the woman knows that, but the narrator of the song has lost the ability to know that because of his declining cognitive faculties is tremendously powerful to me. (The title of the song “Algernon” is of course a reference to the Daniel Keyes short story “Flowers for Algernon,” another incredibly powerful work with similar themes. I definitely cried when I read the story a couple of years ago in a way that had definitely not happened when I first read it in middle school.)

"Unusual" is another song with lyrics that especially stand out to me, but in a different way from the rest of the album. Whereas most of the rest of the album is more timeless in nature, this song seems to directly describe the horrifyingly strange Trump-as-president reality we now all inhabit.

This brave new world—
It's gonna take some getting used to
The cretin's lips are curled
He swings a wrecking ball around the court room

The song opens, and I immediately think of Trump as the cretin with his lips curled, trying to destroy the rule of law in our country.

It's unusual
Except now it happens all the time

I think of the constant refrains of "this is not normal" from people sharing stories about the crisis that continues to envelop our country, and of how we seem to be growing numb to those refrains, because it now is all happening all the time.

Now the truth is immaterial:
Every teller's got an axe to grind

And here I think of how we seem to be entering a "post-truth" society, in which Donald Trump labels any news he dislikes as "fake," and his followers readily gobble it up, having been conditioned for years by talking heads with axes to grind in preparation for this horrifying moment. And most of those talking heads were probably not intending to create this monster, but now they go along with it, because what else can they do, and because perhaps after so many years of pretending the truth as immaterial, it's become immaterial to them too.

The song could also, I suppose, be interpreted as being simply about an individual person losing his mind and facing the "brave new world" that comes with that loss, and have nothing to do with Donald Trump. That's also striking to me - the world in which we live, with a buffoonish reality TV star playing the role of most powerful man on Earth, is so strange and so wrong and so stupid that just living in that world and being keenly aware of the reality of it is enough to make one question one's sanity. Being sane in an insane world is like, well, being insane. Perhaps we are all collectively losing our minds.

Fun stuff, huh?

It's a very dark album, with moments of hope occasionally shining through (from "Bergeron": "You gotta learn how to live/On an ever shorter tether/But if you're good – even for once/It's written: you'll be good forever"), and then the last song, "Sleep," depicts the last moments of a human life, and the narrator passing into death. "We can all agree it's a mixed bag for the living/Full of sorrow, full of grief" the song begins, and I, listening, nod my head knowingly. But in those last moments the narrator finds the answer to that question posed in the first song, finds something onto which he can hold. "A single thought that could comfort me. Something small, something sweet."

That single thought: "It was once in the spring, you were on the porch, I heard you singing/From inside, sat and listened through the screen."

This is the thought that comforts the narrator as he prepares to leave the world. And then he asks (presumably his wife) to stay, put her "gnarled hands" in his, and then repeats the refrain "Don't let me go to sleep."

Repeats it until it fades away. Until everything fades away. As this happens, little distorted snippets from various moments in the album play, in the familiar way that as we fall asleep, we lose control of our thoughts, and random phrases pop into our heads that we didn't consciously summon, and I can only assume that a dying person might experience something similar in their last moments. Sleep comes to the narrator, and with it, death. And that's the end of the album.

Except that it's actually not quite the end of the album. After a silence, a raucous and joyful hidden track begins, and it clearly depicts the narrator now entering the afterlife, with those who passed before him greeting him and encouraging him to "shed your clothes," "jump the boat," and "join us in the river." It's an interesting decision to include this hidden track. After over an hour of very intense and haunting music that, although occasionally sprinkled with moments of hope and lightness, is largely just overwhelmingly dark, here's this joyous and carefree number that seems almost out of place after everything that came before. The album, I think, would be equally effective with or without the hidden track, but would leave the listener in a different state after the music stopped playing. Perhaps the album ending with the narrator's death would just be too much of a downer.

Either way, though, the overall message I take from Offerings could be summed up as: life is short, uncertain, and in many ways horrifying, and in the face of all that we have to find what comforts we can, and some of the best sources of those comforts are our loved ones and our memories of our loved ones - oh, and also music.

I highly recommend this album and all of Typhoon's music. At the same time I recognize that the circumstances of my life have conspired to give Typhoon's music so much personal meaning to me that most people could never be impacted by it in the same way. Perhaps you have something else that fills a similar role in your life. I'm very grateful to have Typhoon.