Saves the World
MUNA
Week 41: November 10-16, 2019
I am not a good writer. We all know this. But if I were to defend one thing about myself and my writing, it's that I've learned over time to give it my all. Writing is not worth it if you half-ass it. You gotta full-ass it, every time. Of course there are times in my life when writing is not a priority. Of course! I'm not a fucking robot! I'm not a shut-in! I have responsibilities. I have setbacks. There are meteors that shoot across my life and blind me to everything else around, including the writing, and the thing I'm supposed to be writing about. But the important distinction here is that I have found, over time, to take these distractions (be they small annoyances or huge life-altering events) and use them as an excuse to go even longer with the writing. It should NEVER be "I can't write too much right now because there's this other thing happening." It should ALWAYS be "I have this other thing happening and now here's an extra 1000 words about how it informs my writing."
My MUNA review is a great example of a time when I did what I never want to do. I half-assed it. Oh, of course there are reasons. There always are! And this reason was a fucking huge one! Martha was gonna be born any day at that point, and so I was blogging in advance, getting as much done as I could before the water broke and we rushed off to the hospital to forget about blogging for a while. She was born the day after this review published (the next couple weeks of Record Club would suffer in similar ways, as I really had blogged pretty far in advance, as a sort of nesting response, I guess... but I'll touch on that in this space when we get there). The main point of the review was, unfortunately, "I ain't got time for this shit." I regret it, but, ya know, this is all a learning process. Martha is turning five tomorrow. We are both better writers than we were in November 2019.
It's actually not that big a deal, since I had a redo opportunity a little less than three years later. When Sophie was born in October 2022, I did not complete Record Club reviews too far in advance. This was partially due to the fact that a C-section was scheduled, and so when she was born on a Thursday morning, I had plenty of time that night to get some No Doubt reviews in order, and knew that I had to write my own before the baby was due to become officially alive. But also, the following week's album presented a fascinating opportunity—what if, instead of saying "we just had a baby, I can't write much this week," I instead leaned into the event, and used it to explore an album honestly and deeply?
And so, the Melody's Echo Chamber review, published when Sophie was eight days old, was not a toss-off like my MUNA review had been three years prior. It wasn't that an album was less important to me because my life had changed. On the contrary, that album is important to me because I explored it during the time of the birth of our third child. That's what makes Emotional Eternal an album I'll always remember, because we listened to it at the hospital with a newborn who wouldn't settle down and still hasn't. That's what art is all about, man. This shouldn't feel like an obligation. Art is a conduit through which we experience the precious moments of our lives. And the blogging should reflect that. My bad, MUNA.
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