Earthstar Mountain, Joe

I've done it enough times that it's not new anymore, but working the midnight shift is definitely still fucking surreal. I stare out the window at the same patch of Center City land for the whole sixteen-hour shebang. If I'm working 8a to midnight, I get to see the city squeeze all the life out of itself and then close the curtain. If I'm working midnight to 4p, I get to see that curtain open and the world below fill with life. But I'm always just here, behind glass, observing with interest but never participating. Is this what a goldfish feels? A melancholy appreciation for the panorama on the other side, but still a longing to be part of it?

Earthstar Mountain is Hannah Cohen's ode to living in the heart of the Catskills for the past six years, and she nails the fucking mark. This is exactly what an indie-folk "ode to Catskills" sounds like in my mind. But her success cuts me deeply. I feel that longing once again. I picture myself free from all this, foraging for mushrooms with my daughters on some desolate mountainside, not just witnessing life but participating to the full extent. I'm sitting here in the dead of night, eyes fucking wrung dry from fifteen hours staring at a fucking screen, and I just can't even fucking imagine, man.

I'm trying to imagine what any of my coworkers or superiors would say if they heard this album, or cared. I am friendly with the people I work with, but we're not friends. They don't know about this blog, and really only one coworker knows generally about my writing about music, and only because he's just on the other side of the haunted cubicle and can hear me incessantly typing for eight hours straight. 

My direct supervisor, whom I like but don't respect, would probably say something like "okay, Joe!" because that's her response to anything that I do that's not within the norms of a drab 9-5 office life. Like if I ordered a pizza, or rode my bike to work, always the same: "okay, Joe!" And I think if she heard "Dusty" then she wouldn't know how to respond because she hears the same freedom I do and lacks that freedom for herself just like I lack it, shackled to my desk. Her supervisor wouldn't be able to process it. I can see her mind flit off in three different directions every time I attempt to talk to her. She's like 4'11" and I don't think she's ever made eye contact with me, not because of the height, just because there's always something else going on, some other phone call coming in, like I could play "Shoe" for her and she wouldn't hear it, she just couldn't, she just lacks the ability. Her supervisor is about as high up the chain as I can picture a hypothetical for, because he has a large presence and makes himself known and has a deep, booming voice, and is a total fucking prick. Should've seen him up there, though, in front of the rest of the department, defending the work that we do in his region, manically working the room like a preacher trying to convince the congregation that he's seen god. He's high on his own shit but it was pretty impressive. He's an asshole but he's smart, and he could hear "Draggin'" and he'd be able to make the Sly and the Family Stone connection, aurally speaking, and he'd try to turn it into some sort of lesson for me, even though I don't want to hear it, but I'm too much of a fucking scrub on the food chain here to be able to say that I don't want to hear it, and plus, like, he's not wrong. When it comes to the facts, he's rarely wrong. When it comes to dealing with people, he's wrong pretty consistently.

I don't know how they'd feel about the idea that I'm spending the majority of my time writing about music and the minority of my time writing about child abuse allegations. Like, there's a reason why none of these supervisors around here have music playing in their office. Maybe the usual reason of "I'm a fucking freak for needing music pumped into my ears basically 24/7 or else I want to die" applies here, but only slightly. I think that there's something about this place that sucks that shit right out of you. My headphones, thus, are a shield. They protect me. I already hate this place so much, I don't want to see how much further down I can go. I would without music. I don't know why Hannah Cohen is bringing these thoughts to the surface for me. Let's examine.

Beyond the general pastoral themes clashing with the brutalism of drab office figurative jail cells, I think a separate but related reason is that Earthstar Mountain seems designed to express mystery, ya know, the beauty in the mystery of it all, the mystery of nature and Mother Earth and the universe, the stars and sky and everything out there and in here, mystery and wonder and awe. And this place where I'm at right now, 10:30 PM surrounded by a moonlit urban center but partitioned apart from it, harsh fluorescent lighting beating the shit out of my eyes as I sit at a 135-degree angle on my ergonomic chair and type about the music I can hear, it doesn't give me anything that I don't already know. I can process reports sent here by the state office like I'm clipping a toenail—unthinking, unchallenged. Every phone call feels like so much static noise from the tides of the ocean. I am too good at this job. Which is not a brag, by the way. That's like saying that a monkey is too good at eating a banana. What I'm saying is that I'm too good at it and thus it lacks urgency, importance. It lacks mystery and wonder. Which is very unlike the music that I'm listening to while I'm there.

Something I think about—both while I'm here at my desk and elsewhere—is how songwriting might feel the same way, occasionally. Almost like a journalist, in the way that the songwriter is reporting on what they see and feel without actually participating in the thing that they are reporting on. Observations about life and love, these are what make the best songs. And yet it must be difficult for the songwriter to acknowledge that it is not their life and love that they are singing about, but instead a concept, something they see and then put to song.

I will say that I relate to this, in the way that I write about families who are going through difficult times, while rarely feeling like I can make a difference in their lives. That's just the nature and the limitations of this job. And so maybe that's why I feel such a strong attraction to the music of Hannah Cohen, because she seems to subvert those singer-songwriter expectations. She is not just the observer here. This is her own life she's singing about. These are her feelings and emotions, honed over the course of a prolonged period in picturesque mountainside habitats. She is singing her own truth, not just the perceived truth of others.

I have to imagine that Hannah Cohen is happy right now. That she lives her best life and then writes about that life. I have a good life but during moments like this I really don't feel it at all. I'm walking back to my car at 12:05 AM and my face is drooping onto the sidewalk and I just feel this pressure on my chest like I'm going to cry but never could, wondering how I got into this situation, why I would voluntarily enter a prison, how dire the stakes must have been to choose to be here in this place at this time of day.

I think if music is an escape, then I need that escape more than ever. I think that if Hannah Cohen is attempting to provide an escape, then she more than succeeded here.

GRADE: 4 pukes out of 5

EPILOGUE: I worked a lot this week and I got a pretty big paycheck and that helped with a lot of the feelings of imprisonment, but I wouldn't say that anything is healed, or anything is solved, or the mysteries of the universe have been revealed or any of that shit. But it is interesting that I wrote about this album and how it was weighing me down to not taste any type of freedom anymore, freedom in nature or anything like that, anything like Cohen was experiencing out there on the mountainside, picking mushrooms, coming across a genus of mushroom that she didn't recognize, pretty funny in its timing how, throughout the week, our neighbor had a huge fucking mushroom growing in his front yard. This isn't a normal occurrence here. It grew huge throughout the week, and then, by the time I started typing this epilogue, it fell over. I got a bad picture of it because I wasn't really home at all in the sunlight, so there's a bad flash and the mushroom is surprisingly reflective. But I just wanted you to know that nature found me this week. I was shackled to my employer, and I felt like shit, but nature found me anyway. I don't think that's much of a coincidence.