How To Take It All In Alone, Together
Learning to toggle between solitude and company, all with the sound of a crisp amp in the background.
Published
Personal Record is a subjective, critical chronicle of uneasy listening. Tune into Personal Record for everything from Music for Airports to music for dissociating in the back of the club, delivered with anxious panache.
To be alone with yourself, your psyche must be a tolerable place. It’s a room a lot of people don’t enter unless they have to, an attic of anxieties draped in dust cloths. Everyone I know has some form of trauma or mental illness, so this is my working theory for people’s reticence to go to shows without a friend in tow, among the other, more widely acknowledged risks (safety concerns, sexism, racism, PTSD, fear of seeing your ex).
Generally, we’re socialized to embrace the buddy system, and it’s reinforced by social mores. You don’t want to be seen in the high school cafeteria with your 500-page Jack Kerouac biography and no tablemates; you don’t want to be on the receiving end of stares at a house show where everyone’s dated or dating each other, coupled and throupled up. Solitude can come across as a mystery (hot) or a liability (unloved, pariah).
I learned how to be alone in public in college when I edited the music section at my college’s paper (the Pacemaker Award-winning Daily Tar Heel, naturally). I’d stand at shows at the Local 506 or Cat’s Cradle with an X on my hand before I turned 21 and, sometimes, a camera I could barely use around my neck. Before smartphones were particularly smart, when unlimited data plans were the province of the out-of-state wealthy, I fiddled with the aperture and ISO and wished I could melt into the floor. I was running on FOMO and fumes, but if the set was good enough, I could forget my own awkwardness.
I began hitting three shows a week, then four. My grades dipped. The musicians working the door remembered my name. I got invited to house shows and house parties, and I memorized the local lore—the Superchunks and Archers of Loafs that put the scene on the map, the Squirrel Nut Zippers’ national popularity, the ebb and flow of notoriety in the Triangle’s indie rock cosmology. I loved the scene and it loved me back; I showed up weird and it only encouraged me to get weirder.
I don’t know if I believe in unconditional relationships, but I believe in the kind where you can still be loved with a shitty DIY haircut or a protracted William Faulkner prose-styling phase. If I’m self-actualized, it’s in some part because I moved in with one of my best friends (a beloved NC musician with a Cancer sun) and made Twin Peaks my entire personality during the summer when I was at shows every night of the week.
I was triangulating myself against any culture I could consume, trying on whatever fit. I spent a few vulnerable months swimming further out from the shore of my collegiate community—a pastel-blue sea of athletics, frat houses, and gender normativity—and I was given a gift in exchange for my vulnerability. I learned how to be alone with art, alone with myself, and in return, I rarely had to be. I could toggle between solitude and a crowded room at will, and in that sea, I was ebullient.