Well, hello, strangers! It's been a good bit since I've stomped on these home grounds, and a ton of stuff has happened. I wrote a book, we had a pandemic, you know... stuff.
But I assure you, my love for our genre has never flickered for second. I spent a ton of lockdown staring at a computer, doomscrolling--but I'm sure none of you did anything like that--and listening to bands who had never crossed over my transom before, or if they did, I didn't register it. But if there was any joy there, it was that I had little to do except listen to music.
Which brings me to Sloan.
My friend Bill insists we caught the tail end of a set in early 2000, opening for GBV. Maybe? I had a newborn; I'm pretty sure I missed that show. My sister-in-law insists that she had spent literally years in the 90s trying to turn me on to them. Maybe? She wasn't someone I looked to for new bands, I guess, so I probably nodded politely.
A heartbreaking waste of time, if either of these things are true. Because when I fell, I fell HARD.
You all will understand what I mean when I say this: Sloan pierced the fog of my lockdown haze. Everything was gray and dangerous and lonely, and these, I dunno, tendrils? of music kept reaching out to me from my computer. It was words at first, odd little phrasings.
What's so bad about dying anyway?
I guess you caught me lying to myself.
You get rough, attack my self-esteem /It's not much, but it's the best I've got.
We've all been in one situation or another we regret.
She don't know what it means, she just knows that it's not what it seems.
Every now and then, I'm reminded that you /could say goodbye and then vanish from view.
They all struck me as profound and beautiful and just, you know TRUE. And they spanned almost 30 years, because I received Sloan in a tsunami, all at once.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be unpacking this weird journey I've been on, which gave me structure and kept me sane. I hope you'll enjoy it.
5 comments:
Reflecting now that I actually started this blog--Jesus Christ, 18 years ago--because power pop had literally saved my life. True story. Between 1997 and 2003, I lost three members of my immediate family (my sister in 97, my mom in 00, and one of my brothers in 03) and had 4 miscarriages. I felt like death was stalking me. I stopped eating and talking, and scared the living shit out of my spouse. I was, at the time. commuting to Ithaca daily, an hour each way. And I had been listening to books, but as I floundered and sank, I lost my attention span and turned to music. And when I started listening to power pop, it helped me find my footing and I started to find my way back. One day, not too long after I started this admittedly eccentric course of treatment, the spouse looked at me and said, "Hey! You're back!" And I was.
Hey! You’re back!
❤️
Is Steve ok?
Thanks for the reminder about Sloan - playing their COmmonwealth album now. They should be bigger!
Sloan have a new album (Steady) coming out in the next few weeks and what’s been released is as good as anything they’ve done which is saying a lot. We love them in Canada (seeing them in March woohoo!)
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