Music and Memory

Sometimes a moment in my life gets stuck in an album, like a mosquito in amber. From then on, hearing that piece of music reminds me strongly of being in another place at another time.

Just after I moved to Bordeaux, Monsters of Folk released their eponymous record and I walked around the streets listening to it on my iPod repeatedly, relentlessly. Our washing machine was broken from the moment we moved in, and the repair process took an agonizingly long time. The sound of that album is the dryer spinning in the laundromat down the road from my house. It's the automated voice announcing stops on the tram on the way to the Université Bordeaux III for my linguistics classes. It's the long walk home from the guitar store where I bought the Cort electric-acoustic guitar I played that year (and which I recently gave away to a friend, to downsize my belongings before moving to Australia).

This musical fossilization doesn't always happen and I can't always tell in real time which moments and which albums are going to do this. But recently, I have a pretty good hunch.

Last week, at the end of an unprecedented, monthlong shutdown of the US federal government, two of my favorite musicians teamed up to release a surprise record. If you're reading this, it won't surprise you to learn that Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers are two of my favorite songwriters, and their brand new Better Oblivion Community Center project is full of catchy melodies and lyrical gutpunches, just like you would expect. It's a perfect record: nine tracks of perfect writing collaborations plus a Taylor Hollingsworth song, all performed as duets.

During the shutdown, I haven't been able to draw my salary or my research funding. It's a terrible surprise to have received a prestigious fellowship from the federal government, which one would think was about as stable as jobs could get in the cutthroat postdoc world, only to find that you can't actually get paid or do your job. I get angry every time I think about the election in 2016, and how many people claimed the results would not directly impact anyone's life.

In general, being an American abroad right now is a little awkward. I had hoped that moving to the literal opposite side of the planet would be a well-timed escape, but it hasn't really turned out that way. Whatever new atrocity Donald Trump has committed is, to my horror, one of the first things anyone brings up in conversation with me. People seem utterly mystified by what's going on in American politics, which is understandable, but I wish they wouldn't ask me to explain it
as if it made sense.

I can't stop listening to this brilliant record. But I'm concerned the uncertainty, helplessness, and simmering rage I feel about this government, its shutdown, and somehow being its face abroad is going to be crystallized forever in these ten tracks.