Changes; Tune-Jam Editors Return from Hiatus
- Jan 1, 2018
- 4 min read
Happy new year! Tune-Jam is finally out of its hiatus!
Read about why each of us decided to go on a hiatus through the defining tracks of our last few months while learning a little bit about the people who make up Tune-Jam.
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Victoria
Mythological Beauty - Big Thief
I’ve spent the past five months in Grinnell, IA alongside fellow writer Brendan. It’s hard to believe that this has been the best period of my life when you consider that I spent a week reliving my worst experiences, thinking about leaving and never coming back. It’s the kind of trauma that has managed to destabilize me almost every year, freezing my entire being as it hits full force. But, so many friends and mentors have entered my life that have made healing possible. I eat lunch during the week now. The newspaper wrote about me and I love playing music. I call my parents because I want to. And I think I’m going to be okay.
I selected “Mythological Beauty” by Big Thief to remember my first semester because of how it honors memory and pain in such a poignant way. Adrienne Lenker’s poetry evokes the uncertainty and strength of her young mother (“There is a child in you who’s trying to raise a child in me”), but later reveals how she nearly lost both of her children. Lenker’s calm and controlled voice show that in spite of the pain these memories have caused, they have started to heal, and I, too, can recover from my past that reaches outside of my control.
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Rina
Changes - Charles Bradley
I'm going to write a bit more than the other editors because I'm sentimental and have a lot to say. Originally a song by Black Sabbath, “Changes” covered by Charles Bradley (RIP :( ) is delivered with all of the pain, passion, and relief that comes with, well, changes. And even if you're not transitioning into college, so long as you turn on the news, you know 2017 was wrought with strange cultural and political deviations. (“The World is Going Up in Flames” by Charles Bradley was a close second pick, but that's another article.)
I can't say I've had an incredible first semester, but I can say I'm grateful for the opportunities I've been offered and the changes I saw in myself. I joined a wonderful music club that is definitely the highlight of my experience, I have the sweetest roommates, and I'm loving the freedom. Still, my school is notorious for being stressful and hard. Our whole culture is pinned down into a meme page about suffering and our laughably difficult classes. My grades kinda reflect that. But honestly, taking the hardest class in my life and surviving, learning to navigate things on my own, transitioning through friend groups, sometimes feeling incredibly small but learning to take comfort in my own being, all make me feel more resilient. If any one word sums up my first semester, it's resilience.
I didn't lose “the best friend I ever had”, but I lost the comfort of a set routine, the proximity of my closest friends. I started the year off already burdened with regrets, wishing “I could go back/And change these years”, looking at my high school experience with dissatisfaction. But looking back at it all in my winter break bubble, distanced from my first semester, I'm happy -- relieved -- with the changes.
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Tania
This is the Day - The The
I spent the last few months in a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, thousands of miles and an ocean away from home. I was excited to strike out on my own and did my best to embrace the newness of my surroundings and every opportunity presented to me. Any day could be the day I had been waiting for. Sometimes that has paid off in beautiful and unexpected ways, sometimes less so. Throughout the semester, I’ve learned a lot about burn-out and pacing myself. Some days, the best thing you can do is take care of yourself.
“This is the Day” is ultimately open ended — the verses narrate stagnation and vacillation, while the chorus and melody suggest a quiet optimism. Things can change, any day. The way you feel isn’t forever.
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Brendan
Get Warmer - Bomb The Music Industry!
Bomb The Music Industry!'s “Get Warmer" teems with the same ennui that has pervaded the first semester of my (and, I assume, countless other students’) college experience. Its emphasis on a series of deeply relatable frustrations and anxieties compose, in my eyes, a sort of transcendental coldness that seeped into every thought or feeling that I had. As Jeff Rosenstock, frontman of BTMI! forlornly mutters on the track “it never seems to get warmer/No matter how far south you go.”
Though I haven’t literally ventured south in an attempt to escape the coldness of Grinnell, Iowa, Rosenstock's right that “getting too carried away/With the bullshit of leaving today” isn’t helpful. Though there’s definitely a homesickness that I carry with me whenever I’m not, home isn’t paradise and the way that Jeff “miss[es] the G Train with a passion” is certainly relatable. It’s frequently the things you barely noticed at home that you miss the most when you’re a thousand miles from them. That being sung, the assumption that the inner strife my (college?) experience has been dominated by will fade or even wean from leaving school is faulty at best. Being “bored with myself” and “self conscious and awkward” won’t shift with location. And yet, the sonically explosive finale of the track feels jam-packed of something just short of optimism, at the very least a rambunctious battle cry against the coldness of both our circumstances and ourselves. The fact that we can rage or even embrace the individual coldnesses that plague us is a respite in itself. Maybe we can even get warmer.
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