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Soundtrack For A Quarantine

8/1/2020

Taylor Swift Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant

As the world grew quiet and countries imposed localised or national quarantines and shut down large public gatherings, music has been in a state of flux with new releases postponed, concerts cancelled and many artists describing a sense of creative malaise. For music fans, that joy of liveness became a site of palpable longing. The sweat and thrum of bodies in a pub or concert hall turned into an impossible dream and the sunshine and freshly cut grass served as a reminder of cancelled festivals and the absence of friends. Missing live music is something Rob Sheffield wrote about in a piece called Life Without Live featured in Rolling Stone magazine and I won’t repeat those sentiments here. Instead, I want to reflect on just a small sample of the music that has been produced during lockdown and the way musicians and music fans have adapted to life in lockdown.

Music Retrospective: BEGINNERS, Who Knows (2014)

4/25/2020

I didn’t know much about LA based electropop group BEGINNERS before I discovered ‘Who Knows.’ It passed me by when it was first released in 2014 on the group’s self-titled debut EP, but I stumbled upon it a couple of years later. Sometimes a song finds us at exactly the right moment and this became my summer anthem in a year when my partner and I made big changes in our lives. We left London, went on an American road trip and I curated playlists filled with upbeat, electronic pop that came to define a personal era of hope, freedom and change.

That summer I put on my headphones and soundtracked our last few months in London and the travels that followed with chart-topping hits from Sia, Calvin Harris and Rihanna, Sigala, Major Lazer, DJ Snake, Jonas Blue, MØ, Zara Larsson and countless others. Listening to those tunes will always immerse me in a city that still holds a piece of my heart, bringing back memories of London's East End and its buzzing markets, the quiet, residential streets of Chelsea and the energy and colour of the West End. I can feel the sun on my face and taste coffee from Square Mile cafés, chilled pints of cider from Soho pubs and crisp glasses of wine from bars tucked away in courtyards and on rooftops.

Music Retrospective: Pulp, Different Class (1995)

4/24/2020

In 1995 Britain was full of nationalistic hubris at the peak of the Britpop era, the musical antithesis to shoegazing and Seattle grunge that dominated the turn of the decade. Nobody cared yet about Y2K, the ‘Millennium Bug’ that threatened to cause a technological meltdown, much less Brexit. Thatcher was out, Major was in. Blair’s New Labour tapped into the sentiment of Cool Britannia, turning D:REAM’s “Things Can Only Get Better” into a campaign promise that led to a landslide election victory in 1997, ending eighteen years of Tory governance.

Pulp’s Different Class was released on the cusp of political change. The distinctively British album brimmed with sardonic wit, the mundane and the seedy, littered with tongue-in-cheek observations on everything from class in “Common People” to the rave scene in “Sorted For E’s & Wizz.” Frontman Jarvis Cocker’s bookish aesthetics and skinny blazers provided a counter to intolerant lad culture, captured in the album’s opening track “Mis-Shapes.”

Soundtrack For A Quarantine

Music Retrospective: BEGINNERS, Who Knows (2014)

Music Retrospective: Pulp, Different Class (1995)

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