(Alternately titled: All I did was listen to one song on loop)
Contrasted against the dire events of the pandemic summer, music and entertainment can seem frivolous. But caught in these endless two week cycles of watching and waiting for coronavirus updates, it is precisely music’s escapist quality, how it enraptures and transports us, which makes it so vital.
I’m not about to make the claim that jazz wunderkind Jacob Collier’s collaboration with Grammy-nominated Rapsody, “He Won’t Hold You,” is a panacea or even placebo for the very real problems we face. But for a few minutes, it illuminates time, as Collier delivers a powerful elegy for a moment of loss.
The opening gospel choir is plaintive and raw, singing the refrain in equal parts pleading and adamant that “he won’t hold you/ like I do”. Any hint of bitterness in the language is eased by the warmth of the harmonies – rich, bittersweet compound (mostly) major chords punctuating every word, supported by swelling base synths and accented by dulcet trills on the harp and piano.
He pans the harmonies even wider in the verse to capture a vast sea of sound and colour. But this track is at its most moving in the bridge when the choir surges forward, insisting “I won’t be alright”, full-throated and anguished on the bass kick, then ebbing into silence with a sigh.
Collier rarely sings as a solo voice, his multitracked vocals draping mellifluous over the instrumentation. But when we do get Collier on his own, whispering “sing it again” over a lofi crackle, or when the choir frays into individual exhales, these moments create a sense of intimacy.
Collier’s previous work has been criticised for overshadowing emotion with technical gymnastics, but in this song his prodigious talents serve the sincerity of the music. “He Won’t Hold You” speaks keenly to this moment in our lives with a story of longing, heartbreak and ultimately, redemption.
Everything felt in flux as the Coronavirus crashed upon American shores, sweeping us away from Campus. Suddenly, all forms of social interaction were streamed across screens and spread six feet apart. I craved a connection untainted by the all-enveloping pandemic.
I came home to find her just as I had left her—or perhaps more beautiful. They say that distance makes the heart grow fonder. Her simple dress—a satin finish with white trim—only accentuated her natural complexion. Streaks of ochre flared across her mahogany body, flickering out at her dusky rosewood neck. But enough about looks; guitars aren’t meant to be gawked at. They’re made to be played.
I slid my hand up the strings, pressing into her and plucking her for a response. She answered me in the same reverberant tone as always. Every other conversation I had was held at a distance. Every other conversation I had operated within the context of the virus. The way we spoke, however, was unaltered. Working up the fretboard, she reciprocated every beat, bend, and break of a string with a predictable sonic response. When I reached for a fourth or a fifth, she followed. When I sought resolution, she relented.
As the world changes around us, guitars don’t. They stand stable and enduring with the same strings, the same neck, the same tunings, and the same tones that they’ve always had. Chords and notes, Rock and Blues, they all exist independent of the passage of time. Over a summer characterized by rapidly evolving social, political, and economic conditions, my guitar was a well-needed source of constancy.
The first time I could successfully say, “Practicing violin isn’t that bad!”
Art by Katherine Ku
Aided with social distancing due to the pandemic, I had ample time this summer to brush up on my scales and arpeggios, relearn Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in e minor, and learn Lalo’s Sinfonia Española. Even more valuable, however, this summer had allowed me to form a new bond with my childhood violin teacher, one with a refreshing and intellectually stimulating space of musical discussions.
This summer, I freed myself from making excuses: no interviews to stress about, no schoolwork binding me to my computer, no late-night social activities I was obligated to attend – just me and my violin. For the first time in my life, I was able to devote full energy and attention to my instrument.
I reconnected with my childhood piano teacher and became a temporary music theory tutor for her students. For the first time since elementary school, I felt enlivened walking into her house knowing exactly (more or less) what I was doing and what I had prepared to bring to the piano and to her students.
How ironic is it that in high school, I absolutely dreaded preparing a piece on my violin for our annual concerts? That when I took piano lessons, I absolutely loathed learning and practicing music theory? That now, as an adult, when there seem to be so many other life events that could spark joy for me, it is these very “childhood tasks” that make me smile? I will forever be grateful for this summer for helping me rediscover this appreciation for my instruments and musical mentors.
This summer played out in a somber minor key, adagio with seemingly no cadences. The pandemic and continuous acts of racism have brought a sense of perpetual doom to many.
After the sadness that came with going home, Cornell students were still able to experience a virtual Slope Day filled with exciting live performances. This made me realize that music can exist no matter the situation, even during a pandemic.
At Cornell, I had to desperately find time to visit the practice rooms in Lincoln Hall. But going back home was actually a blessing in disguise. It gave me the opportunity to fall back into my routine of daily piano playing. The keys under my fingertips transported me out of quarantine and into the worlds of Chopin and Debussy, swiftly evading any feeling of being trapped inside.
Not only did I get to play more, but I also listened more. My favorite artists including keshi, UMI, and Taylor Swift took advantage of this time to bless fans with new releases. I discovered emerging artists too, spending hours browsing through Spotify. I also made a playlist for every possible occasion, from a “oui oui baguette” French playlist to a “my essay is due at 11:59” one (my procrastinator self is listening to this currently). Blasting these in my room felt like my own personal concert, and my appreciation for the artists only grew for giving me this newfound vitality.
After the adagio came, the harmony modulated towards a more light-paced, cheerful tempo. Even with all the minor chords of the summer, musicians, including myself, adapted, creating and listening to more music than ever before. The barriers of masks and social distancing mean little when there is so much music to be heard.
The summer of 2020 was unconventional, but as with every summer for the past four years, by the end, I had three monthly playlists filled with songs – a compilation of old favorites intertwined with new discoveries that left a mark on me this summer. One such discovery that dominated my listening from June through August was Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me”, an energetic pop song that had somehow never crossed my path until this summer.
The song had been introduced to me through a YouTube video entitled “‘Run Away With Me’ by Carly Rae Jepsen: The Best Pop Song of the Century”, by MictheSnare, a music analysis channel. Listening to Nick, the host, go through the song to analyze what makes it creative, complex, and catchy inspired me to listen more closely to the music that I consume and encouraged me to grant Jepsen’s song the elite status of being on my June Spotify playlist.
“Run Away With Me” is a song that I could listen to in any format over the summer, whether I was blasting it while driving with my windows down on one of the few errands that allowed me to leave the house, or in my air pods as I ferociously weeded in my yard. No matter the setting, Jepsen’s energetic song fits perfectly and makes ordinary life a little bit more fun.
Though it is a pop song, “Run Away With Me” avoids the common error of being repetitive and predictable, as Jepsen plays with texture, volume, harmony, and chord resolution. While I may not agree that “Run Away With Me” is the best pop song of the century, it certainly serves as a fantastic example of what pop should be: versatile, purposeful, and never stagnant.
Spencer Nachman performs for the final time at Prohibition before NYC went into lockdown.
March 2, 2020: The pianist kicks off the intro to Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man. The drummer and bassist come in, bringing a deep, in-the-mud groove, a nice combination of the Takin’ Off (1962) and Head Hunters (1973) versions of the tune. After 16 bars of the vamp, a common chord progression in jazz, blues, and funk, it is time for me to come in with the melody.
It is a Monday night after a long school day, but that is no excuse to forget the head to the classic Hancock tune in front of a packed bar. In this moment, I feel the most disconnected from my Gibson Les Paul I have felt in my twenty gigs this year. This was my final gig sitting in with the house band at Prohibition NYC before coronavirus hit New York City, and it took a toll on my musical headspace this summer.
For days, weeks, months, that feeling of being out of control over the instrument on which I have spent 15 years working tirelessly to hone my skills continued to haunt me. If I am not content with my performance at a regular gig, I always have the next one to woodshed and look forward to. But this time it was different.
At first, I spent hours a day obsessing over little phrases that gave me trouble, but the lack of a goal to work towards tormented me. I knew I had to change my mindset: forget the stress and revisit the music that inspired me to play in the first place. I returned to 2112 by Rush that I first learned on my Cordoba classical guitar. I even dared to learn Some Skunk Funk at live version speed. These accomplishments excited me to sit down and play, making this one of the most refreshing and productive musical summers yet.
In order to dispel my insomnia, I had to craft a nightly ritual that fed and soothed my running mind. Predictably, I turned to music, my eternal plane of comfort. Each night, usually around 12am I’d turn my lamp off, allowed my purple string lights to be the sole source of illumination save my lavender candle punctuating the air with calmness. Then, I’d open my laptop and scour the internet for a new album I had not yet heard. The discoveries I made in my nighttime dream world before sleep colored the entire strange summer. I fortuitously met bands such as Animal Collective, Bully, Galaxie 500, DJ Shadow, and Dinosaur Jr, to name a few. Prior to returning home to endure the pandemic in Long Island, I felt dissonant from myself. As someone who has always been individualistic and extremely passionate about music, art, books, and anything creative, living in a sorority house demurred my vibrancy. I suppose summer in my mind began mid-March, so the timeline begins there. I realized how futile it was to care what these girls thought as I didn’t even like them in the first place, so I dove headfirst into the magic of avant-garde music as well as acquainting myself with classics I should have listened to years ago. I finally felt reacquainted with my own inner world, the magic of music propelling every bit of healing. I started writing my own songs and researched fervently each day to expand my breadth of musical knowledge. I continue to indulge in this routine of mine, ensuring creativity in each day. I also started collecting vinyl again, as I often take a hiatus from its financial burden. But the best thing about collecting vinyl is that you can hug your favorite album!
5 Cornellians. 6+ months of a global pandemic. Endless hours of brainstorming, writing, creating, and producing music.
From left to right: Nathaniel Oku’s EP Driver, Victoria Alkin’s single “Better Left Unsaid, West St.’s album VICE VERSA., rubin’s single “Still Dreaming,” soyybean’s single “refocus.”
“Effective at 5 p.m. today (March 13), we are suspending all classes on the Ithaca campus for three weeks… All undergraduate students and most professional students are strongly encouraged to return as soon as feasible to their permanent home residences.”
President Martha Pollack’s urgent plea for the evacuation of the Ithaca campus came as a surprise to many students, drastically transforming the next six months as they retreated back into the confines of their childhood bedrooms or cramped Collegetown apartments. With a three-week suspension of classes and strict lockdown restrictions, Cornellians were faced with what they always wished they had: all the time in the world. Students, normally over-scheduled with maximum-credit schedules, work commitments, and research labs, suddenly found themselves locked inside with nothing to do but rewatch The Office and bake sourdough. But for five Cornellians, quarantine has brought an unprecedented amount of time to create, produce, and polish new music.
While Cornell fosters far more famous academics and public servants than musicians, various current Cornell students have recently broken into the music scene. For example, Sean Yu ‘23, known professionally as soyybean, boasts a song with more than 61,000 Spotify plays. soyybean, along with Nathan Abel ‘21 (Nathaniel Oku), has used quarantine to redefine his style and focus on music that speaks to him in light of the pandemic. Other Cornell musicians, like Rubin Smith ‘21, better known as rubin, began producing music for the first time in quarantine. “I wanted to explore music creation and I had a lot of time,” rubin said. This surge in musical production mirrors a nationwide trend of channeling pandemic-related emotions into music — a Quarantine DIY musical renaissance, as Rolling Stone describes it.
Cornell musicians exhibit just as much diversity in the genres they span as their alma mater does in major disciplines. Victoria Alkin ‘23’s poppy musical theater-inspired melodies in songs like “Better Left Unsaid” stand in stark contrast to Phil Schofield ‘21 of West St.’s lofi EDM-rap project or soyybean’s dark R&B-hip-hop fusion album, Tomorrow Doesn’t Exist. Yet these musicians exude passion and exquisite attention to the nuanced details of their respective genres. Quarantine has also inspired them to explore new sounds and lyrical focuses as they watch the world spin into an endless positive feedback loop of chaos. rubin emphasized that his synth-heavy sound reflects “dystopian, end of the world vibes” — a sonic reflection of the heavy, uncertain days of quarantine. Oku has written quarantine-inspired lyrics, most notably in his song “Simple Times.” “[This song] is about how I feel like a lot of people feel like they were waiting for [quarantine] to be over for them to go on with their life,” Oku explained.
With social distancing regulations enforced — and the potential of singing to be a super-spreader phenomenon — singers must take extra caution when producing music with people. soyybean noted that while he had more time to write, he struggled with the lack of social interaction during the writing process. “When you’re by yourself, you don’t come up with many creative ideas,” soyybean lamented. Schofield agrees, especially since the other half of his musical duo is 225 miles away at the University of Maryland. Unable to collaborate like he does in normal summers, he has instead directed his energy into refining unfinished tracks to release on his next album, Upstate. On the other hand, although Alkin also misses the lack of human interaction for song inspiration, she has gained more opportunities to collaborate during quarantine. Normally a solo artist, she has since co-written songs with her brother while confined in their house.
Cornellians are all too familiar with feelings of imposter syndrome and expectations to perform their best in the midst of a global pandemic. That’s why music has been an important outlet. “Everything is going to shit, so I might as well express myself,” rubin said, laughing. This period has given students time to write music that resonates deep within the hearts of their peers, according to Alkin, or channel their quarantine-related boredom or anxiety into a “snapshot of the time,” as Oku describes. soyybean said that’s why he wrote his newest single, “Refocus.” Much more mellow than his usual upbeat hip-hop, the song is an open letter to himself about the frustration and loneliness of quarantine. Time seems to be at a stand-still — students joke this year has so far consisted of January, February, and 201-day March — but Cornellians once again continue to push boundaries of innovation and creativity in their personal expression.
In the past few years, concerts had become more optimized than ever. Festivals were sold as spectacle and experience, not just live music. Even though prices kept rising, I loved going to shows as often as I could, so when all live events suddenly stopped, I was nervous for how the industry would respond. They had to tear it all up and create a new show, and we would watch it unfold in real time.
A popular model quickly emerged: the Instagram live concert. One of the first shows I saw was by indie folk artist Alex G. He sat on his couch with his guitar, speeding through demo quality versions of songs I loved, looking at the chat to ask what we thought he should play next. He got through at least a dozen songs over his 40 minute show, and garnered around 2,000 listeners. The stream felt intimate, not only because it took place in his home but also the confusion on display as he figured out how to perform to a crowd he couldn’t see. When artists improvise, there’s still a feeling of control. Even if it’s a completely new song, the performance is something they’ve done before. Here the challenge was beyond the performance. It lay in attempting to create a connection.
Later that night, I was introduced to a new type of spectacle through back to back concerts over Minecraft, and Fortnite. The use of video games as venues began before the pandemic, but expanded quickly once it hit. The Minecraft production featured 20 artists who took turns performing with their avatars, while fans came together in virtual lobbies to mosh to an audio stream coming from a separate website. The show had the DIY ethos of a co-op basement, minus the sticky floors. The Fortnite concert gave the highest production value of the night. It looked expensive, with a giant Travis Scott taking form as a hundred foot tall hologram, astronaut, and literal pure energy, something he’s constantly trying to attain on stage. Flying around on screen, I was more impressed by the visual effects than the song he was debuting. Normally when a concert ends, the lights come up and the feeling of having shared an experience with others hits. Online though, you don’t get to see the faces of the millions of people you just watched a concert with, you just log off, and scroll to whatever distraction comes up next.
Summer 2020 rekindled my love for the legendary Sir Elton John, prompting the musical equivalent of bingeing an entire show in a week.
This summer I found myself listening to a lot of music by the infamous Elton John. The obsession began when I heard my parents blasting ‘Your Song’ on the speakers and I found myself feeling followed by a sudden urge to start listening to his music again. I promptly downloaded a couple of his albums and had his songs on repeat, however, I found myself gravitating towards one song specifically, this was none other than ‘Candle in the Wind’ (the rendition for the late Princess Diana). Perhaps this was due to a nostalgic element, as this was the first Elton John song I had ever listened to. Furthermore, the meaning and significance of the piece always seems to evoke some sort of emotional response. From the start of the song, the intention is clear as Elton John sings ‘Goodbye England’s rose’, referring to the passing of Princess Diana. As I learnt more about Princess Diana and her legacy, I started to connect with this song on a deeper level, which is the main reason it is so successful in evoking an emotional response.
Elton John uses a relatively simple chord progression, however, adds a lot of ornamentation and passing notes to make it much more musically interesting. His masterful ability to play the piano allows him to turn these seemingly simple chords into interesting musical motifs and ideas that are repeated throughout the song. The fact that the piece is a ballad contributes greatly to the emotion the song ultimately achieves. During these uncertain and challenging times, for some reason, I managed to find comfort in this song which is why I spent a majority of my summer listening to it on repeat.
