Art as Survival
Rediscovering art as survival, and a new single release. | music | tree
I have been a musician in some form for the past 15 years. In high school, it was the way I connected with people. I made my best friends playing music together, going to shows, listening to records.
I formed a band with some buds. We were called Fever Blanket, and we played absurdly pop-laden, reverb-soaked tunes about the throws of high school love. It was good fun.
Eventually we all moved away to go to college. I got married. Moved to London for a few years. Got another degree.
The whole time, I wrote songs here and there, buried in notebooks and unfinished voice memos on my phone. Music was still important to me, but more and more it felt like an activity of isolation.
A year after I moved back to the US, the pandemic hit. Where I live, in a town just outside of Cambridge, MA, isolation became commonplace. People stayed apart, wore masks, stayed inside. They still are. I still am.
In this time I have turned more to art than anything else to quiet my mind. A few weeks ago, I visited this wonderful museum in North Adams, MA called Mass MOCA. The pieces were beautiful, but what stuck with me even more was a single phrase used in the introduction of a sculpture exhibition by the artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
She described her work as a process of finding harmony between elements, but also within herself. Her art was not a preoccupation; it was a spiritual practice.
She called it "art as survival".
North End
We're all doing our best to survive these days. Music is part of my survival. Sharing music, however, is a very different thing than writing it.
Over the past year many things have shaken loose in my mind. One of them is the attachment to perfection. This song isn't perfect, but it exists. I've decided to care more about the latter.
This song began when I was living in London and ended with many nights hunched over my laptop trying to pull out its final form. It's a bedroom-produced, labor of restlessness. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm still working on some other songs, but hope to share more as they surface. Until then, don't be a stranger.
Listen now to North End.
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New release - Falling