ALBUMS // Bess Atwell – Already, Always
Post by Misha
It’s funny how easily not doing something for a long time becomes a reason for continuing to not do it. How many times I listened to something on the subway, walking to the park, sitting at the little bookstore around the corner from my apartment and thought, I would like to write something about this moment, but didn’t because I thought that it would mean having to explain my long absence, and that would be too difficult. It’s not difficult, of course. I was doing other things, writing this blog meant interacting with Twitter, which was making me too sad and scared, I lacked inspiration. And even if it were difficult to explain, I’m certainly not delusional enough to think that anyone really cares to take me to task over it.
Maybe the real reason I stayed away was that I was becoming someone else, someone who spends their time in new ways, and I was having trouble figuring out how this new person tends to a music blog. For instance, how does a person who is no longer interested in being sucked into the downward spiral of social media engagement contribute something new to the internet? The very premise seems contradictory in a distinctly modern way. Or how to fan away the cloud of worry that had come to hang around this project – anxieties over meeting the expectations of the people in my inbox, wondering whether artists were disappointed or confounded by the nontraditional way in which I wrote about their music. I thought a lot about my favorite blogs – delightfully non sequitur, idiosyncratic, abstract publications – many of which are now defunct or sporadic, and I wondered if they stopped posting for similar reasons. I told myself that I was stepping away for a while to figure this stuff out. Maybe I was really going away so that I would have an excuse not to figure it out for a while. Regardless, it’s been more than a year now, and the uncertainties I was feeling when I left no longer seem very important, or difficult to resolve.
For the sake of a paper trail, here’s my plan, for the time being: 1) I’m going to start posting on here again. This is really the only important part. Feel free to keep reading for some less important caveats / expectations setting.
2) I’m staying off of social media. I don’t like it there. It bums me out. For years before I was on Twitter (X, whatever) I kept up with blogs by thinking about them every few weeks and typing their name into a search bar, spending an hour or two catching up on whatever they had been loving since I had last spent time with them. It was a nice ritual – intimate, communal, entirely devoid of the attention arms race that characterizes even the briefest scroll on Twitter. Maybe a few people will develop that kind of relationship with this blog.
3) I won’t be very actively responding to emails. I’m very grateful to all the people who send music to me and I will continue to go to my inbox to discover new tunes to love and write about, but I already have three other email accounts to keep up with and my correspondence capacity is, unfortunately, at its upper limit.
4) My posting schedule probably won’t be very regular. I will post when I feel inspired to, when I have energy to, and when I have something to say. I’ll take breaks.
5) The aim of this blog is to marry two of my greatest loves – music and writing. It’s an extension of my writing practice, and I try to give it only the amount of structure that is absolutely necessary to keep things on the rails. Which is to say, the writing isn’t really about anything, other than my desire to participate in a little of the poetry and wonder that makes life worth doing. This part isn’t changing really, it’s just always something I feel self-conscious about and feel the need to disclaim every so often. I imagine people showing up to the site and leaving confused and annoyed at having been lured in by a “music” blog that spends most of its time writing little love poems to its favorite songs, some more time going on long existential digressions, and whatever time it has left clumsily attempting to tie it all together, employing musical terms it doesn’t really understand and tangential, connective metaphors that are, at best, a stretch. I like to have something I could theoretically show these imaginary people, to say, See? I never claimed to be doing anything else.
Case in point, this post is already very long and I haven’t mentioned anything about its purported raison d’être – Bess Atwell’s very lovely 2021 album Already, Always. Well, except for an oblique reference way up in the first paragraph. This album soundtracked the better part of last year for me, and whenever I listened to it it made me want to start writing about music again. It is lush and timeless, forgiving, deliberate, all the things I most want to cultivate in a creative practice. Ways I listened to this album: in headphones, walking over a bridge on one of the first spring days; in the dark in my apartment, burning candles and recovering from a bad head cold; flying back to New York after attending the wedding of my oldest childhood friend. I recommend all of them. Further, I hope that however you listen to it, it inspires you to revisit whatever creative endeavor, aspiration, or long lost love you’ve put away however long ago, dust it off, make whatever excuses or explanations you need to make in order to allow yourself to hold it again, and enjoy the magical peace of coming back.
Buy Already, Always on Bess Atwell’s site, here, or at your favorite record store.