Time and attention
On "Free Treasure", Diamond Jubilee, and some things we might have forgotten
On Friday, I spent the morning learning "Free Treasure" from Adrianne Lenker's recent album Bright Future. I hadn't done this in years: focusing my whole attention on correctly memorizing someone else’s lyrics and structure, or slowing my playing down to make sure I'm internalizing a guitar part properly. My mind was stretched in directions I had forgotten exist.
On Saturday, I tried and failed to listen to Cindy Lee's two-hour opus Diamond Jubilee on Spotify. ICYMI, the record has only been released as a pay-if-you-can download of CD quality WAVs on a Geocities site and a single ad-free YouTube video. It's a move that asks forcefully for a listener's time and attention. You have to put in extra effort to listen at all, and then it's much harder than usual to stop—you can't easily skip songs on YouTube, and if you went to such lengths as to burn a CD or add WAVs to an old iPod, you're not going anywhere.
Bright Future is an album made with a process referred to as AAA (Analog-Analog-Analog). Co-producer and engineer Phil Weinrobe describes AAA in detail in this post, saying "this process forces you to slow down, to do things in a more simple way, and to work from some fairly extreme limitations."
Diamond Jubilee is an album that sounds like it has both come from and was made in a time-warp. It compresses around seventy years of popular music into two radio-distorted hours, familiar and heavily nostalgic. It’s both a demand and a gift: listen to all of this!
In the chorus of "Free Treasure," Lenker sings "You give me understanding/patience and pleasure/time and attention/love without measure." When I sing the song, I choke up on the line "time and attention." It's such a simple gift to give another, and such a profoundly generous one.
Both records gave me the gift of time and attention this weekend: troubling my sense of what are reasonable, satisfying ways to use each and disrupting my current rhythms. For this week's memos, I'm sharing some of what's been coming up.
Big love,
Lucy
Reflections on time & attention
MEMO - “Do you remember how it feels to just lie around and listen to music?”
I don't mean listening to a whole record while working, or going for a walk, or futzing with other stuff on your phone. I mean putting on an album and doing nothing but actively listening to it. I found it surprisingly difficult to do this when I tried with Diamond Jubilee this weekend. Honestly, I didn't quite achieve it. I used to do it a fair amount too, alone and with friends. I remember sitting in my roommate’s bedroom listening to Chutes Too Narrow together from start to finish. No-one said a word. We all fell in love with that album.
MEMO - “Do you remember how it feels to spend long stretches of time in the company of friends?”
The "Free Treasure" lyric "we lay around for hours/talk about childhood pain" reminded me how much I value long, unstructured hangs and conversations in my current life. They are more rare than they used to be, as I've only managed to convince a handful of my grown-up friends that under-scheduling ourselves is worthwhile. When we do let our days stretch long, I find it grounding and fortifying. My nervous system seems to settle when no-one has to go anywhere fast, when my loved ones and I invite each other into more familiar rhythms.
MEMO - “Do you remember how it feels to write music totally free of distractions?”
I’m an age where I remember writing songs where I had to remember every single part of what I wrote. It seems obvious to me now I could have made cassette recordings, but I didn’t. I’d just play the song again and again until it became a song with chords, a melody, and lyrics I knew. The songs came into being more slowly. Melodies and phrases shifted. In 2024, I pull out my voice memos app within minutes of hitting on a promising line. It feels like if I don’t record it, I’ll lose it. As I’m writing this, it strikes me I might end up losing less if I just let the song be.
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Adrianne Lenker is my favorite songwriter!!! Their music is amazing!!