Music Club, my letter to you:
I’ll begin with a riddle that might rile up a few of those Eric Clapton fans who got mad online at Phoebe Bridgers: In 2020, what did Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift have in common?
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If you answered, “They both released stripped-down but moodily photographed black-and-white performance films exclusive to popular streaming services that featured them playing their latest material in cozy, cabinlike recording studios”—well, technically you would have been
correct, but that’s not what I was thinking. (Carl, you’re so right that so much of our listening this year also had a visual, screen-based component.) The connection I had in mind was actually that both Springsteen and Swift spent some time this year in their own vaults, rerecording music they’d written many years and several artistic iterations ago.