Hello dear Music Clubbers!
I’m writing from pandemically wrecked Nashville, at the moment I put fingers to keyboard the epicenter of the worldwide pandemic. Which, as you can imagine, has me cringing in a corner when I’m not lashing out, virtually, about the deep cultural crises that have pushed America, and particularly its various heartlands, here. (I recommend the two trenchant albums the Drive-By Truckers released this year if you want to know more about that.) Yet as I place my latest order for curbside-pickup groceries and anticipate my daily dog-led three-mile walk—virtually my only venturing forth since March—I’m seized with the perverse desire to not mourn but to celebrate one aspect of this hellish year. Inspired in part, Lindsay, by your generous reading of Bob, Bruce, and Tay’s polishings of their own iconic facades, I’d like to declare 2020 the Year of Archival Awakenings: a time when, despite or maybe even in dialectical tension with the politically motivated blinderism that destroyed so much, many artists and thinkers took care in looking back and learning.