[Photo by: Peter Ash Lee]
Michelle Zauner knows a thing or two about grief. After a few years in Philly indie-emo band Little Big League, the Seoul, South Korea-born Zauner moved back to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to care for her mother, then diagnosed with stage 4 gastrointestinal cancer. She died six months later.
In the wake of that unimaginable agony, Zauner wrote her first two albums as a soloist under the name
Psychopomp, a gorgeous, shimmering rumination on loss, and in 2017,
Soft Sounds From Another Planet, loosely inspired by an obsession with the Mars One project (a privately owned operation with the goal of establishing a human colony on Mars). Of course, her planetary ambition was more of a metaphor disassociating from her matriarchal trauma to preserve her sanity, looking beyond Earth to establish the most distance between herself and her pain.
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At the start of the pandemic, Jenn Wasner found herself contending with a solitude she hadnât expected. The self-described workaholic had long participated in the capitalistic churn that equates productivity with worth: In the years since her debut album as Flock of Dimes, 2016âs
If You See Me, Say Yes, sheâd recorded and released two albums with her band Wye Oak; toured as part of Bon Iver; and written a solo EP, 2020âs
, among other pursuits.
Absent any tour or project to distract her, and still processing a recent heartbreak, her choices felt hollow. The end of her most recent relationship had set off questions sheâd begun asking on