doves
Ok, first things first,
here are the links
doves is the second track I’m releasing from my upcoming album, my people… I wrote doves when, at the start of the period of international curfews spurred by the covid crisis, I found a family of pigeons - mum, dad, and two eggs - had decided to start a home on the peripheries of my parents' balcony. I wrote a story about that here. At the time of the song’s writing, the idea of an international pandemic taking people’s lives and livelihoods was an absurd never-before-experienced event, not just an absurd reality, part of the ‘new normal’. Against the backdrop of death, the idea of life starting one ft. away from me was poignant.
I, like most others, have become somewhat blind to magic now. Lives and livelihoods is for me, as for most, no longer a banal platitude about some other people going through some ill-defined hardship. It’s all too real now. And with the world turning the key to the ignition of a sputtering, out-of-gas engine, I, like most others, feel helpless in the passenger’s seat.
Three months ago the idea that one must prioritise one’s physical and mental health through a period of great isolation and anxiety such as this also sounded a little like a banal platitude. For most of us, it isn’t any more. It’s safe to say, most people have seen a net negative impact on their health in the previous quarter of a year. And health will continue to be the most important, and challenging, task ahead for individuals, be it those in continued lockdown, those faced with the choice of whether to stay indoors or venture out, or those who have been forced out of their homes, much like essential workers during the first peak of the crisis.
doves is a meditation on the balance between positivity and awareness, especially in the context of isolation, anxiety, and hardship. It’s very much a song born out of the covid crisis, but attempts to negotiate with, and defeat, universal psychological demons.
Wonder what the point of music is on the sixth of March, twenty twenty two. Wonder if it serves the same purpose it served fifty, eighty, one hundred, one thousand years ago. Maybe six thousand years ago, that age’s Leonard Cohen wrote wryly of the migration patterns of wildebeest. I’ve been working on new music over the past half year. Here’s a pleasant house cover of the Cure’s Just Like Heaven.