My dearest Music Clubbers,
What a treat it’s been to read you all unpack this year so eloquently. I feel incredibly honored to have been a part of this.
The final stretch of posts has had me thinking and rethinking the music that defined my year that I haven’t yet touched upon for this panel. What was left evoked the same emotions I spent a lot of the year feeling but avoiding: anger and sadness. As I mentioned in my second entry, when I was at my angriest and saddest this year, I couldn’t bear to listen to
Season’s greetings, fellow Clubbers,
It’s so great to be here with all of you again. At the end of this year of suddenly doing everything at a distance, at least getting to hang out with all of you in this virtual space feels familiar.
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Figuring out what to write about at the end of this year has made me realize how deeply my relationship with music is entwined with sociality, something that’s been so absent these past 9½ months. On the evening of Tuesday, March 10, I got together with some friends at a rehearsal space to practice for a gig that was supposed to happen a couple of weeks later. (Ha, ha.) The following day, my employer sent an email telling all faculty that we should prepare to move our classes online until at least April 5. I’ve yet to set foot in a classroom since.
Brittany, I found your recap of 2020 as the year of Stevie Nicks incredibly refreshing a real relief from the relentless drumbeat of the new that so often drives music coverage. It brought up tons of thoughts, so strap in, this is going to be a long last letter to you all.
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When I consider veterans who made a difference over the past 12 months, an obvious candidate is Dolly Parton. As with Nicks, Parton’s star has been ascendant among new generations of listeners for several years now, but she had a lot of highlights this year, including the petition to replace Confederate statues in Tennessee with monuments to her, the revelation that in the spring she made a million-dollar donation that assisted the development of the Moderna vaccine, and most recently reports that she’d literally saved the life of her 9-year-old co-star on the set of her new Netflix Xmas musical (which pairs with her crackerjack new Xmas album,
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