do what comes natural
new podcast episode for your weekend
I’ve accepted that it will always take a long time to clean the kitchen. It is never done and I will be doing it forever. I no longer resist. I rarely leave dishes to “soak” anymore. That makes more work later. Adelle has been gone more, visiting her dying mother and the last thing I want her to come home to is any sign of deterioration at home. No dereliction of duties! Though I am not the most thorough washer (she will inevitably find the smudgy glass or fork with cheese remnants) I do my best. I prod my lazy ass.
So, The other day I’m doing the endless dish (how can only an 8 year old and I make this mess?) thinking I should be listening to music to soften the task. I often forget to do that these days. Streaming has really fucked with the way I interact with music. The rituals I had with physical media have been, if not totally lost, tragically disrupted. I’m not curmudgeoning this, I’m open to new things, I’m saying that I have yet to find the ‘flow’ with streaming. In an effort to begin changing this I took a sec to link my phone to my stereo via Bluetooth (not always easy, Bluetooth is still, on the whole, inferior to just fucking plugging something in, in terms of sound quality and dependability). Having music history at my fingertips is also disorienting. Where to start? What did I want to hear besides everything? Well, Jeffrey has a new album (The Even More Freewheeling Jeffrey Lewis), check that out!
The first song and I have a real moment. “Killing me softly with his words, killing me softly, with his song, telling my whole life with his words, killing me softly..with his song”. Directly quoting Roberta Flack is the only way to describe how accurate Do What Comes Natural feels to me. It’s simultaneously shocking, depressing, painful, funny and inspiring. In it he lays out the profound mental inertia that I’ve battled as an adult. Like doing dishes, why bother (doing anything) when there will just be more to do? To further personalize it: Why put out another album when the first question people will ask is “are you gonna put out another album?” (yes, this is a legit thing).
One thing that I’ve yet to do with the podcast is tap my reserve of musical peers/heroes to interview. I’m not sure why I find this impossible but it feels like pushing against that same wall. It’s not just the physical desire to resist all movement and void out, it’s a fear of rejection. As nonsensical as it may sound to someone who is not me, I harbor deep imposter syndrome vibes. I can’t ascribe this to humility. It just sucks and I can’t quite beat it.
(the night my guitar got to hang out with his)
Jeffrey Lewis fascinates me and if I had the guts to, I’d ask him on to be the pod. Adelle asking him questions would be sublime. Her Minnesotan and his NYC/mid-Atlantic accents mingling would be heaven to my ears. Instead, I did what I can do: I recreated Do What Comes Natural. It’s part tribute and part exposure therapy. The Inertia that Jeffrey so vividly describes scares the shit out of me. When I was terrified of dying in a nuclear war as an 11 year old I read books about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Likewise, I spent 2 days tweaking the phrasing of this wonderful song to fit my voice and sang it over and over again. While I’m not confident enough to invite musicians to the pod, I can definitely continue to talk about them and crawl inside their songs. I can wake up at 4:30 in the morning and put a finishing touch of synthesizer on a lovin’ cover and frame an entire episode with it. You can hear the full version below and the episode commercial free below that!
Do What Comes Natural (Lou covers Jeffrey Lewis)
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