TUNES // Eve Owen – So Still For You
Post by Misha
My partner has started cutting my hair during the COVID quarantine. Or rather, he has started buzzing my undercut. It’s unexpectedly very intimate, allowing someone to shave your head, trusting them to remake you a little bit.
I think about this as I watch the last three weeks of hair fall to the bathroom floor in clumps. I moved in with my partner during the first week of mandated isolation in New York. The first time he buzzed my hair I was nervous, but he was very careful and I kept my head very still and by the end I found myself sort of meditating to the hum of the clippers and the feeling of newness.
Eve Owen talks about her heart as if it is a wild animal that lives inside her chest. Some furtive, tender creature that lives by instinct. When I first heard this song I stopped everything that I was doing and sat down in front of the speakers. I had been feeling pent up and powerless all day, but something about the sympathetic pulse of “So Still For You” cut the legs out from under the slow madness that had been building. I sat without moving and listened to the whole thing, then I listened to it again.
Everyone told us that moving in together during this pandemic would be trying, and parts of it have been, I suppose. But mostly it’s been an exercise in stillness. Moving through discomfort and finding that we still want to be in the same place together. Giving and being given opportunities to hold things in ourselves that we usually carry off to tend to behind closed doors.
It’s become especially urgent to find the things and people that keep us still, even if they only last the length of a good song, or the amount of time it takes to shave part of a head.
In any case, I hope ‘So Still For You’ finds a place to anchor itself in your body the way it did mine. Its rhythm is concave somehow, each drumbeat a cradle. And although the production expands in every direction as the song goes on, it never loses the closeness and intimacy of a lullaby.
Buy Eve Owen’s debut album, Don’t Let The Ink Dry, here.