Gone with all the changes in my mind
My life in writing in 2024
Every January I enjoy reading Sasha Frere-Jones’s compendium of reflections from writers and artists on the recently concluded year. My 2024 felt really unresolved (so it goes) and I decided to respond to his prompt with a poem. I sent Sasha the three shortest ones I wrote last year and was happy he selected this:
When I wrote this down last spring I was thinking in part about Gerard Malanga’s 80th birthday celebration at the Poetry Project in 2023. After Malanga screened his Film Notebooks (watching these at St. Marks Church was surely the closest I will ever get to having actually entered the Factory) and recited a series of beautiful love poems about his cats, poet Anne Waldman asked him, “Gerard, what is your prophecy?” And he said “Focus.” I thought a lot about focus in 2024. I’m sure I’m not alone. I did The Artist’s Way, I read what my friend Katy called a “dystopian beach read” about the attention economy, and I generally doubled down on trying to regain control of my mind. Through months of oscillating loss, stress, pain, beauty, lucidity, motion, stasis, I clung to this idea of honing my focus as a way forward. I did all of this in tandem with my favorite record of 2024, Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee, which is to me, like Saint Cloud, exquisitely attentive music.
OK — the purpose of this letter is to belatedly round up some of my 2024 writing. I started working on it during that late-December early-January liminal time when I am always grateful for ritual and space, but I am just now managing to send it. While pulling these links together, I was listening to Bachfest on WKCR, finishing my year-end lists, and saw my final gig of 2024, which was also my first Yo La Tengo Hanukkah show, and I attended it with a deep crew of dear friends. MJ Lenderman was the surprise opener! A holiday miracle… Like seemingly everyone (except for my deep crew of dear friends), I was fully MJ-pilled last year, an enthusiastic contributor to Lendermania, and it was so interesting to watch him play for a crowd he had to win over. By December my favorite Manning Fireworks song was “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In.” I spent half a year thinking of responses to the question in Lenderman’s lyric, “What else can you say to help a friend with a broken heart?” My current best answers:
Listen to Nina Simone’s “You’ve Got to Learn” (Newport 1966 version) every single morning. If you miss one morning, listen twice the next morning
Channel this wisdom my friend Carson once texted me: “What resonates with you is a reflection of you”
Embrace Anne Carson’s logic that heartbreak leads to knowledge, that “self forms at the edge of desire”
Remember it’s better to feel than not
Run
Turn off your phone and wait
If all else fails, try the Go-Betweens’ “I’m All Right,” Margo Guryan’s “It’s Alright Now,” P. P. Arnold’s “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,” Sandy Denny singing “You Never Wanted Me,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “When Your Dream Lovers Die”
2024 was another year where I feel like my most meaningful writing has not yet been published, but it will all see the light in due time. Here’s some of what I did publish last year:
In January I reviewed the new Sleater-Kinney album for Pitchfork. I started this piece in Brooklyn and finished it up in Beacon, where I was reading the manuscript of my sister Liz’s book for the first time (Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist OUT NOW!). It was snowing in Beacon. I was tying up the review when I learned Conde Nast had gutted Pitchfork.
I profiled Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff, which meant so much to me and I was grateful to publish it at Vulture. My grandma Alice died while I was working on this, which added a whole other layer to how I was processing The Past Is Still Alive and its theme of loss. Having the lyric “you don’t have to die, if you don’t want to die” to sing to myself during this time felt like a profound gift from the universe. Here is Alynda playing “Colossus of Roads” last January during an album-preview event at St. Mark’s Church:
In April I shadowed the Breeders as they opened for Olivia Rodrigo, a pipe-dream story pitch that occurred to me when the shows were announced. I got to stand in an empty MSG with Kim Deal and Josephine Wiggs watching Olivia soundcheck “ballad of a homeschooled girl.” Months later I reviewed Kim Deal’s solo album Nobody Loves You More — my favorite songs are “Coast,” “Are You Mine,” “Come Running,” and “Nobody Loves You More.”
For The Guardian, I finally interviewed a band I’ve loved for years, the Montreal metal trio Big Brave, whose 2024 LP A Chaos of Flowers adapted public domain poetry like Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral in my brain.” This foreshadowed a year I’d spend thinking quite a bit about Emily Dickinson, visiting her house and grave in Amherst, writing about her distant cousin. I had been looking for Susan Howe’s 1985 study My Emily Dickinson for months when I came across a copy in October at the John Giorno loft on the Bowery after the Elias Rønnenfelt show there. The space has this little makeshift bookshop in the corner with sections of books curated by different artists, and I found My Emily Dickinson on Arto Lindsay’s shelf.
Some art I saw in 2024: Pacita Abad, Em Aull, Gee Vaucher I reviewed the new Jessica Pratt record for NPR and seeing her play in Jersey City in September felt like entering another dimension that restored my soul in ways I did not see coming.
For Pitchfork I reviewed the new album by Still House Plants. Hearing their previous record Fast Edit for the first time in 2020 while walking in the snow through McCarren Park remains one of the most vivid listening experiences of my adult life. I recommend approximating the experience this winter especially if you’re looking to channel the energy of a new beginning.
I spoke with Kathleen Hanna for four hours about her memoir.
I interviewed Grace Ambrose about her amazing Kleenex book for The Baffler.
After seeing Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play a tiny bar in Northampton, I wrote about their album Woodland for NPR.
In the fall, I ventured to Ridgewood to interview inspiring new band Kassie Krut (ex-Palm members making industrial pop, very rip-it-up-and-start-again) at their apartment for i-D.
I wrote an essay about two pillars of my existence, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. I restrained myself from writing about meeting Didion when I was 17 though if you ask I might show you the photo.
My long-in-the-works essay about Eras Tour ran at Vulture when the tour ended.
An abridged version of my 2018 piece on Hayley Williams for NPR’s Turning the Tables series was included in the book How Women Made Music, and two 2024 reissues that I wrote liner notes for, Margo Guryan’s Words and Music and Tsunami’s Loud Is As, were included on the NYT’s best boxed sets of 2024 list.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for the next edition of this letter dedicated to my sister’s book Mood Machine! For those in New York, here is the flyer for a benefit show I helped organize happening next week in the East Village:
Didion photo or bust!!