#4 2021 in Review
or, learning to live in the uncertainty thanks to friendship and music
I have been creating “Best of” lists for as long as I have seriously listened to music. I keep lists through out the year of every new record I listen to, which thanks to streaming services just grows each year. December is then spent listening to my favorites, creating a list for posterity and distributions sake. I love sharing my list and reading others’, seeing where we overlap and learning about records I completely missed. For me, records always seem to stick in tandem; the memories and the music become entangled. Often there is an event or a location trigger, but regularly, hearing a record for the first time or once its finally clicked becomes significant enough the moment its self becomes memorable.
This year, I decided to create my year end review list chronologically, as a way of creating a soundtrack for reflection of another year that the regular markings of the passing of time seem out of reach. The moments of irony are not lost on me; they are rather comforting actually. Or possibly I’m just a pathetic romantic in constant search of poetic nostalgia via pop music.
A Mixtape Left Behind #4: 2021 in Review
Listen on Spotify or Youtube Music (there are LOTS of cool music videos in this playlist if you are in to that, but the flow may be less smooth over all)
Artist - Track
Typhoon - Empire Builder
Wild Pink - Bigger Than Christmas
Wild Pink - The Shining but Tropical
The Weather Station - Tried to Tell You
Flock of Dimes - Two
serpentwithfeet - Fellowship
For Those I Love - To Have You
Katy Kirby - Cool Dry Place
Cassandra Jenkins - Ambiguous Norway
Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, Jon Randall - The Winds Just Gonna Blow
CHAI - Wish Upon a Star
Rostam - From The Back Of A Cab
Japanese Breakfast - Posing In Bondage
Fiddlehead - Get My Mind Right
Illuminati Hotties - Pool Hopping
Hiss Golden Messenger - Sanctuary
Squirrel Flower - Iowa 146
John Mayer - Last Train Home
Quivers - When It Breaks
Ducks Ltd. - How Lonely Are You?
Laura Mvula - Church Girl
A Great Big Pile of Leaves - Water Cycle
Steve Gunn - Other You
Madi Diaz - Man In Me
Saint Etienne - Broad River
Men I Trust - Sugar
Cold Beat - Year Without A Shadow
audiobooks - The Doll
Strand of Oaks - Somewhere in Chicago
Hovvdy - True Love
Black Marble - Say It First
Hand Habits - Graves
Far Caspian - I’m Not Where I Need
Kacy Hill - Caterpillars
Lala Lala - DIVER
Big Red Machine - Mimi
Munya - Tonight Tonight
Angel Du$t - Dancing On The Radio
Billy Bragg - Mid Century Modern
Generationals - I Was A Tunnel
Unwed Sailor - Voodoo Roux
**If you’d prefer to go straight to my playlist of my top 20 favorite records instead of tread thru this 2.5 hour narrative, you can get that playlist right here.**
[As you likely know, I live in the Bay Area. I know the last year looked very different for us here than in much of the rest of the country. Our reality regarding Covid caused our lives to sometimes be more conservative and sometimes more normal than how others may have moved through the world this last year. This may mean we’ve lived at times more conservatively and at others more comfortably than your experience of the last year. ]
I began 2021 quite possibly the most depressed I have ever been, I’m assuming a state many of you can relate to. I’ve been more exhausted and sad than I found myself after the last holiday season, but this was easily the most I’ve ever felt… nothing. The loneliness and the nothingness had broken me. Over the summer I completed a book where I discussed how in this period I regularly would think about how maybe just not existing would be better, because thats kind of what life felt like anyways. The only relief, inexplicably, seemed to be being outside as far away from other people as possible
I thankfully am no longer in this place mentally, but this was the backdrop for learning that two of our dear friends, Faith & Paul, would be moving to Portland. To live in the Bay Area is to go through perpetual waves of friend exodus. The cost of living and lack of opportunity if you exist outside of a few select fields is admittedly untenable. I must have known subconsciously that 2021 was going to be a year full of departures. I took this news incredibly hard and was more upset with them than was fair, as of course, being upset with a friend for making the right choice for their lives is never fair. I attempted to remedy the situation by offering to help them move. I drove up to Sacramento on a rainy Friday morning to pick up their car, the same day Typhoon’s Sympathetic Magic came out. Empire Builder felt like a wake up call, and I think I listened to this record on repeat for the full three days I was in town. I drove out to a school I was applying to teach at, I met with friends I saw on the last trip I took in the Before Times, I got to see Alyson Provax’s show and remember how it felt to see art in person. In short, I was reminded of what living was like, and how little of that I was doing.
One of the ways I coped with the loneliness of Covid was to pick up fly fishing. Driving to remote places to stand in rivers was an entirely appropriate activity for our socially distant times. I walked around regional reservoirs listening to music and watching the water. Shortly after my return from Portland, my wife hit her breaking point. She is a pediatric intensive care nurse practitioner, and while she had not yet seen very much covid in the previous year due to working with children, she had to take care of the tertiary problems that were the result of lock down on kids. I looked for the most remote river with the least fishing regulations I could find in February, a time most fishing is off limits for spawning. We drove 4 hours north to the Trinity Alps ending up in a town where the deer outnumbered the people. I put on Wild Pink’s A Billion Little Lights for the first time the next morning as I set out early through fog and light snowfall. The sun broke through at the exact moment the transition between Bigger Than Christmas and The Shining but Tropical occurred and I felt it in my whole body. This is hands down my favorite record of the year, and continues to do something to me in that way a song can rework the chemistry of your brain in inexplicable ways. I caught no fish and spent the majority of our time working on teaching applications — which for those of you unfamiliar with academia hiring, it is an incredibly exhaustive nightmare — but we returned home from that trip feeling something resembling an optimism we hadn’t in awhile.
As Spring began to emerge in the bay area, society slowly began to thaw as well. I was vaccinated in mid March and activity in the art world started to return. Friendship felt like it had the possibility of becoming physical again, and working on Faith’s book about our friend circles coping mechanisms felt less masochistic. I was listening to a lot of music I can only describe as “contemporary takes on 90s mom music” (The Weather Station, Flock of Dimes) mainlining Gen X feigned optimism. This was also the period when rejections from those teaching applications began to return along with a general feeling of “what are we doing here?” as another friend, Anna Rotty, announced she would be leaving town for grad school in New Mexico. Fully vax’ed we decided we needed to get out of town for a minute and use the vacation time Melissa had been pushing back for over a year. Still unsure of what life was like in the rest of the country, we decided on a town in southwest Colorado located 9,000 feet in the air with world famous fishing rivers and a single paved road. The week before our trip, we arrived home to a for sale sign on the house we had been renting for the last 5 years and a heightened existential crisis.
Melissa flew to Texas and I loaded up my fishing gear and a collection of Anna’s most fragile belongings towards Albuquerque via the least direct route possible with a list of records I had been saving. I began my first trip down the Eastern Sierras via hwy 395 with For Those I Love, while Katy Kirby’s Cool Dry Place served as the background music for descending on to Mono Lake. Cassandra Jenkin’s An Overview of Phenomenal Nature would play on repeat as I drove through Death Valley, pit stopped in Las Vegas for what would be the first of somehow three trips to Vegas in 2021, and headed towards New Mexico. Even with multiple listens, I don’t think I really HEARD Ambiguous Norway until rolling through Petrified Forest National Park on an incredibly windy Mother’s Day just before the park closed. This moment specifically lives in the complex memory palace thats nearly impossible to describe to those who haven’t lost parents.
Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram, & Jon Randall’s The Marfa Tapes would come out the first few days we were in Silverton, CO and the field recording country record felt like the perfect backdrop for a week in what is essentially an abandoned gold rush town turned ATV playground. We would decide to try to buy our house on the drive back from Colorado, which itself seems like a fitting speculative analog.
We returned from our trip to a Bay Area that suddenly felt… normal? Going out and meeting friends and staying in their homes was ok again. We had parties in a backyard we now owned. We essentially got the summer we hoped for. This may be why there is no single soundtrack for the time period, beyond my nonstop playing of Illuminati Hotties’ Pool Hopping. We succumbed to my dad’s requests for us to come to Arizona and see him for the first time in two years, which conveniently included a pool for me to hop into myself. Monsoon season had other ideas, so our second desert road trip of the year was accompanied more appropriately by Squirrel Flower and John Mayer as we meandered towards the Grand Canyon and another solo trip with my fishing pole from Las Vegas via 395.
By mid Summer, it was clear I needed out of the house on a regular basis and the world was close enough to normal it seemed safe enough to do so. I began bartending at a brewery part time. This shifted my listening habits in a way I don’t know I fully appreciated at the time, leaning more into jangly indie rock like Quivers and Ducks Ltd and pop like Laura Mvula. The studio continued to be active and publications which had been put on hold were being produced again. But as 2021 continued to provide, more friends (Cristina & Johann, and Hannah Mode) announced their departure from California at the same time my unshakable internal clock that craves the structure of academia in the Fall began to squeak. Madi Diaz would release History of a Feeling right on time for my emotional need for a record to accompany my desire to dwell in sadness. I listened to this record 4 times in a row the first day I heard it.
The main theme of the second half of 2021 for me has been coming to terms with what it means to commit to a place, to buy a house, a duplex at that. We have been in California for over 10 years, but it never felt permanent. Every friend exodus is a reminder we could be next. I had spent the winter applying to teaching jobs all across the country, and now through a series of uniquely pandemic related coincidences, we found ourselves not only home owners, but landlords in a city we thought we could never stay in. To be clear: we are incredibly fortunate to be in this position, but there is still a bit of a door closing in making this decision I had not prepared for.
I can’t help but feel this influenced my listening habits. I vividly remember listening to Saint Etienne’s I’ve Been Trying To Tell You in bed at exactly midnight the day it was released. I sent it to numerous friends who did not understand the yearning distant feeling it gave me, but I still hear it. I listened to alot of music with “wave” in the genre tag, of which the connecting thread is some form of despondence that inspires body movement. For the entire month of October while trying to right decades of absent landlords and property management wrongs in the apartment that would now be out rental unit, I listened to Strand of Oaks on repeat between audiobooks, the band, and actual audiobooks about the pitfalls of capitalism and consumption.
However, Fall did as it always does, and provided a season of collaborations and celebrations; just this year instead of traveling around the country for book fairs, those things came to me and helped make here feel more like my home. We had the opportunity to serve as hosts, something my soul deeply needs but the pandemic largely took away from us. We celebrated our birthdays in grand fashion as we did in the Before Times. In the studio, after multiple projects in which I created work in his studios in New Hampshire, Josh Dannin came through the bay and we created a wholly absurd book while seemingly listening to Lala Lala on repeat for a whole weekend. Just before leaving town, Hannah P Mode and I put the finishing touches on her book partially about tumors while talking about how the newest Big Red Machine took a long time to grow on both of us until we realized the second half of the record was where the hits were hidden. Kate Laster and I exchanged texts about the brilliance of Billy Bragg as we brainstormed solutions to her newest project. We organized a book fair! In person!
And then the fog returned. Speaking literally, I love the fog. If it was up to me it would be foggy and 55 every day of the year. Its the closest I’ll get to those deep dark winters of the midwest. There is a creative and sensory heightening about this atmosphere to me. As for the metaphorical fog however, this sudden return to the uncertainty of whats next, whats safe, I just hope I’m more prepared for it this time. The world started to feel like it was shutting down in fast forward during the week Rebecca Ackermann and I spent making NFT commentary posters on a bucolic horse farm turned artist residency. The trip to Chicago for the holidays that immediately followed and was ultimately cut short felt like a game of dodge ball. And now writing all of this and reflecting on the year, that all too familiar feeling cocktail of anxiety, gratitude, and second guessing returns.
I had thought things were looking up for 2022, but reserved the right to be wrong. Atleast this time around we have the benefit of nearly two years living through this, a reminder that even tho life felt like it stopped, we kept living and making and growing, if maybe in waves. Which, I think gets to why I go through this exercise every year of making these lists and intentionally spending time with records from the past 12 months. Music provides me a ticket to revisit moments again and again, sometimes to process and others for refuge. Through others’ art, I’m able to find perspective, which is really the best we can hope for.