Alduous Harding // One Stop

Something I really like is when you’re binging a sitcom and all of a sudden in one episode you can tell that an actor, in real life, has a cold. It is only because their voices have become so familiar to you – like friends – that any tiny change in nasal tonality registers immediately, and triggers something poignant and visceral. I feel a real sense of tenderness when this happens. I like when you can almost see the box of kleenex waiting off camera. I like imagining the actor between takes, cradling a styrofoam cup of lukewarm peppermint tea. It reminds me of something, though I’m not exactly sure what. Life, I guess.

Last month I was in LA, hugging friends and paying eight dollars for iced coffee. Watching out-of-order episodes of Frasier on a couch in Silverlake. Frasier is a sitcom set in Seattle, the city where I live. Now I’m back home, watching out-of-order episodes of New Girl, a sitcom set in downtown LA. Wherever you go, it is always possible to be somewhere else – that is the sterling promise of the sitcom. Though of course nearly all sitcoms are filmed on the same nondescript soundstages in Burbank or Hollywood. Anyway, this trip gave me a terrible travel hangover, which is just now lifting. Real life coming back in fits and starts, in the sweet steam rising off a mug of peppermint tea, in a new album playing on the stereo, in the familiar and specific light coming in through the trees.

Buy Alduous Harding’s new album, Train on the Island, here (via 4AD).