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.