Last year I listened to 59,284 minutes of music on Spotify. That’s more than double 2019’s total of 23,015, and it doesn’t take into account, of course, the hours of listening to things on YouTube or on vinyl. It’s a lot.
Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve become acutely aware not just of how much time I spend with music, but also of how much I ask it to do, and of exactly what I ask it to do. I ask it to make me move. I ask it to see me. I ask it to tell me how I feel. About a year ago, I made two playlists which, upon recent review, I realize expressed feelings of which, at the time, I was barely conscious. I ask music to dislodge things in me that I know are there, stuck: grief, anger, frustration. When I feel bad, I ask it to make me feel worse, and when I feel good, I ask it to make me feel better. It feels satisfying to turn control over in that way, even if I have some sense of what’s coming (I will feel sad, I will feel glad, I will feel soothed, I will feel exalted). It feels good to ask for something and to have that thing delivered, every time.
I spend a lot of time with music I’ve already heard. I revisit albums I like and playlists I’ve made — they number in the hundreds now — and walk around in whatever reality I happened to be in at the time. Sometimes I recognize as myself the person I was then and sometimes she is entirely someone else. I wonder how I’ll feel when I look back on what I’ve listened to over the last year, which music I’ve asked to do what, and when, and how, and whether and how it pulled it off.
Since about February of last year I’ve carried around an incredibly manic energy constantly in need of an outlet, so I’ve been listening to things where people scream (“Timebomb,” Old 97s) or things that make me thrash about (“Don’t Take the Money,” Bleachers) or things that make me feel like I’m on a dance floor (“If It Wasn’t for the Nights,” ABBA). These songs are predictable — they start one way, and you know where they’re going, and they take you to that place, and it feels good and satisfying when you get there, and you can count on it every time.
The thing I never ask music to do, not in this way, not in the way you call up a song and know where it’ll take you, is surprise me. I’m relatively easily awed and amused, but it’s hard to surprise me. When anything, when anyone, manages this, I pay attention, and I grab on, which is the reason that for the last year I have almost obsessively been listening to, like I wrote about last week, Perfume Genius’s 2020 album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.
There’s this meme format going around on Twitter that’s a diagram of something bracketed into multiple and contrasting parts. You’ve probably seen it. I think it started because someone posted a photo of a joint where the very tip is labeled something like “thanks i love to smoke drugs” and then the remaining 90% of it is like “i need to go home immediately.”
I don’t have a mind for image-based memes so I usually don’t make them, but I made one for Set My Heart.
Set My Heart is one surprise after another. And superlatives make me deeply uncomfortable, but I think “Some Dream” might be the best song on it, because it’s basically a microcosm of the whole album, with four distinct turns inside as many minutes.
Hadreas starts off singing in an elongated, silky falsetto that glides through the air around a plinky, creeping piano, his voice getting breathier and deeper as guitars start to hint at their presence. Then they crash in, a repetitive rock riff ripping the song open as someone beats down on that piano over and over. Hadreas comes in again, his voice deeper this time — he’s not screaming but it feels like he is; the sound coming out of his mouth is that forceful.
I KNOW YOU CALLED ME
AND I DIDN’T PICK UP
I WAS BUSY FREAKING OUT
The guitars go on and on and just when you’re getting in the groove of them, right as you’re starting to ride their waves, they crash down again, this time hinting at their exit. Hadreas’s voice — all I meant to love is gone to the ground — stretches alongside some woodwinds. We’ve been pulled deep into Hadreas’s world, and then, for the song’s final movement, we’re yanked out: “all this for a song?” he asks, hyper-self-aware. All this drama, all this muchness, all this artifice, just for a song? Maybe it’s self-consciousness, or maybe he’s letting us in on his secret: he knows exactly what he’s doing. And it’s a lot.
I listen to Perfume Genius because it does everything I ask music to do and then much more, because it surprises me literally every time, because I surprise myself when I spend time with it, because the feeling of met expectations is second only to that of surpassed expectations.
Last week, while jumping up and down to the second movement of “Some Dream” in my office, I heard a crash. For a split second I thought, what could that be, did my dog knock something over? But no, it had been me, shaking the furniture so much that a glass vase fell off the top of my bookshelf onto a clay flower pot, chipping a chunk off its side like a loose tooth. I swept the pieces of teal glass up off the floor while I talked on the phone with a friend. I was sure I’d feel badly about the vase breaking — I’d bought it six years earlier for the first apartment I lived in alone, the one non-essential thing for the first place that felt like I had finally chosen something for me. But I didn’t feel badly. It was just gone now, and that was fine. Off the phone, I put on “Some Dream” again while I fished in the pot for shards of glass, too thick to be sharp, their white interiors carving little crescent-moons into the soil. As Hadreas sang “all I meant to love is gone to the ground” directly into my ears, I held the pieces in my fingers and thought: what a beautiful thing this was.
This is one of several pieces on Perfume Genius. You can read the other ones here, here, here, and here.