it's the end of april and finally i feel like i can say we've reached the end of a long, cold, dark winter.

nearly every day this winter, we managed our daily walk. some days it was like pulling teeth, convincing myself to get off the couch, to layer up, to remember to experience the place i live and the place i love even when it's uncomfortable. it's always worth it. the snow pierces through the cold with its beauty, the ice on the river presents a new sculpture every day, the goose we call Lefty is always there to say hi to.

and now, the sun. could i appreciate the warmth so much without the contrast of the winter?

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I've listened to music through a lot of different means throughout my life - the iPod in middle school and high school, syncing my iPhone 5 to iTunes in college, streaming from Apple Music and Spotify after graduating, picking up vinyl for a more intentional experience... But I've got to say, streaming wasn't working for me. Since mid 2021, I’ve been back to maintaining my own digital library and syncing it to my phone and an iPod Classic. The modern Music.app on the mac isn’t great, but it still works surprisingly well as a media manager. I’m going to call it iTunes for the rest of this post, because it basically is, and to make it less ambiguous with Apple’s streaming service of the same name.

The vinyl stuck around, too.

Listening wise, I mostly put on whole albums start to finish. This is what has always killed Spotify for me, with it being one of the apps that’s fought my workflow the hardest of any I’ve tried. Their CEO investing in genocide definitely killed any remaining desire to go back to them. Apple Music handles albums better, but just lacks sufficient control over metadata among other reasons.

Music discovery is the main thing that the algorithm promises, but I can’t say that music I’m the most likely to like is always what I want recommended. I’m out here asking friends to recommend albums, following artists I like on Muspy to stay up on new releases, and seeing who inspired artists I already like. At work we spin vinyl all day, and it’s been a treat as a way to start a conversation about music with the folks who are coming through. There’s a record store up the street, and people stopping in with their new finds for a bite to eat are almost always happy to pitch you on the artists they’re seeking out. Acquisition has been a lot of ripping CDs, and purchases on Bandcamp. I do like to have the physical media if I can.

My workflow is probably more complicated than it needs to be. My source-of-truth library is actually a Beets library, with everything as close to 16/44 FLAC as I can get it. I sure can’t tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit FLAC files, so why waste the space?

I’m really particular about tagging genre. I have Beets set to tag anything I don’t specify a genre for as ‘New’, which nicely creates a section on the iPod for music I’m evaluating until I decide if I’m keeping it and where it lives. If someone recommends me something, I’ll set the genre to their name. Everything else, I use my own small list of genres I can give things. My genres don’t always overlap with how most people might name them. They’re really just how I categorize and group my music, so boygenius lives in the sadgirl genre and John Prine is in Country but Good. Other highlights include beeps’n’boops and SampleThat (where Us3 and Digable Planets live). When I’m categorizing by genre, I’m basically trying to create a pile that if shuffled together will maintain a vibe. Beets gets the album art and uses musicbrainz to help ensure the metadata is correct, formatted consistently, and of high quality. musicbrains I’d say hits 95% of the things I throw at it, which feels pretty good for my mix of small, local artists and bandcamp finds.

I use the Beets Convert plugin to handle my various portable MP3 player compatibilities. I mostly use my iPod Classic, but I’ve also picked up a Tangara. Under the hood, it’s using ffmpeg to make m4as for my iTunes library, which I then import the music into. I have wrapper scripts, ipod-convert and tangara-convert, which both grab the right config for the respective device and write the files to the right location. If anyone wants my config files or scripts for beets, reach out and I can package those up and post them.

Maybe I’m weird, but I like the list of artists in my music library to be sorted alphabetically by first name. It’s how I sort my vinyl, too. No need to make a choice between charli xcx and xcx, charli. It just matches how I try to find artists when I go to put something on, and you’ll be happy to know that my contacts remain sorted by surname. Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ve found to clear the various artist-sort id3 tags (a total of 4, which different softwares choose from: artist-sort, artists-sort, albumartist-sort, and albumartists_sort) during the import to my Beets library, and iTunes doesn’t have any general setting to ignore the sort field. The solution is a bit brute force: when I import, I select the album(s), “Get Info”, and clear the field on the Sorting page. ‌(Suggestions to improve this workflow are welcome at izzy at stardust.fm. I’m considering writing a beets plugin for it.)

From there I sync iTunes to both my iPod and my iPhone mini. I’d been using a 3rd gen blue nano, but it doesn’t fit the whole library. I’m surprised at how often I grab the iPod. It lives in a dock by the amp in the living room, so it’s always fully charged and ready to go. I would probably just use the Music app on the phone except for how much Apple’s hobbled it over the years to push their streaming service. You used to be able to set every tab in the tab bar to whatever page you wanted, and none of the options were ads. The iPod doesn’t randomly stop playing because a web page loaded an audio clip, it doesn’t have any notifications waiting for you while you go to change the music, and it doesn’t have any illegible “glass” putting white text on a blurred white background. Do I recommend it? Probably not, due to cost, but mp3 players as a whole are a quite uninspired category of late and iPods are surprisingly maintainable.

Recommendations

Some albums you should check out, if your taste is similar to mine:

• Us3 – Hand on the Torch – (1993, SampleThat) We did a puzzle this January, which inspired me to look into the album featured in the art, and it’s great.
• Fea – No Novelties – (2019, Punk) Fea were relatively local to me when I was in Austin, and they made a pair of really fun punk albums with great energy.
• Allie X – Girl With No Face – (2024, Pop) This album exudes gender.
• Lucy Dacus – Forever is a Feeling – (2024, sadgirl) An album that was immediately iconic in the genre.

The Heavy Rotation

• Sam Cooke, in general.
• Nils Frahm
• Mitski
• Snail Mail, especially Valentine.
• John Prine
• Phoebe Bridgers
• Julien Baker
• Lucy Dacus
• do i need to list boygenius?
• Us3 (and, relatedly, Madlib)

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The rain came that day
to meet the thirsty ground
a drop at first, a drizzle, a pour
a crack of thunder lets out a roar
streaming rain runs through the grass
and swollen streams overflow their banks
until the heavyclouds begin to clear away
the sun breaks through to let in day
plants sing out to grow and play
above the sated ground

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I've been thinking a lot about what togetherness means in these lonely times. The rare times I'm with people feel illicit; a stolen moment of connection even as we try to mitigate the risk of spreading COVID-19 and do our best we can to help. I feel lonely, and I know in that I'm not alone.

Our actions, to protect ourselves and to protect each other, become symbolic. We wear our masks to protect others, for they do far more to prevent the wearer from spreading the disease than to protect the wearer, and the mask becomes a symbol of caring. We wash our hands and know that millions of other people are doing the same, us all counting and singing to ourselves as we lather the soap. We stay home as much as we can, lonely together.

There are a lot of reasons for pessimism now. I don't want to write about them now; I'm already spending far too much time thinking about them. Looking for the helpers, per Fred Roger's famous advice, is active: it requires you to think to do it. Symbols are passive: once internalized, a symbol is something we feel without having to think about it.

When we look, we find helpers everywhere: spontaneously organized mutual aid groups getting supplies to people who cannot risk or afford a trip to the store, groups like Food Not Bombs that have adapted to keep doing what they can to feed people nationwide, the sewists across the world who have made and donated hundreds of thousands of masks to medical professionals and communities in need.

We can't look all the time. But everywhere I go, I see people in masks. People who care, people who are trying, people who are taking on a small inconvenience to help. I see masks hanging from rear-view windows in cars as I walk to get the mail. I see parents helping their children put on masks outside the grocery store. And when I see a mask, I don't have to look. Their mask serves the same purposes as the mask I wear any time I go out: both to protect each other, and as a symbol of that protection.

We wear our masks together
and wash our hands as one
We stay apart in all but heart
Apart but not undone

We feel alone together
as we move out each o'ers way
A gesture of us caring,
our silent words do say

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she floats between the islands
high up in the air
landing briefly on them
just for them to disappear

and so lightly she leaps again
the clouds are floating by
and they are full of color
from the mind behind her eye

from below she hears her friends
they call her name to her
a moment she just listens
a decision to defer

then with a sigh she lets herself
come gently floating down
and safely home she knows
there are islands all around

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Why am I wrong

Wrong is vague and specific.

Wrong is everything that is wrong with me.
Wrong is my dysphoria and my body and the way the world sees me.
Wrong is every time I have to put effort in to the perception of strangers.
and every time I perceive myself through the lens of them.

Wrong is every time someone tells me
how brave I am
and wrong is every time I don’t correct them

The wrong is the tension that crawls over my skin
like I should be smaller
so I can fit in my self

Wrong is every day I say I will do work
and don’t
And is it wrong that I don’t care?

Wrong is when I’m awake at four in the morning
reading about surgeons
because my bones are wrong
and knowing they will see me
naked
and having to trust them

Wrong is the pain I still feel
from having the skin on my face
peeled away
to shape the bone

And wrong is the pain I feel
as I touch my new jaw
and wonder if the shape is right
or look in a mirror
and ask
what’s the point

Until I lie in bed
and ask myself
why am I wrong.

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