Things were lost in lockdown
How Lockdown Lullaby saved my relationship with music.
Somewhere in 2020 music stopped meaning anything at all to me. It wasn’t a conscious choice, but it wasn’t something that could be helped either. I can’t tell you why or what happened; prior to covid a big part of my life and my identity was wrapped up in writing and recording songs, and as late as February 2020 I was working on the finishing touches for the Me & Louise record. Then the global pandemic swept through my life and carried away my give a fuck on the wind.
In early March I had guessed how much of a drag living in the city was going to be in the coming months and had the fortune and foresight to rent us a house on the mesa in Bolinas, California. We threw a panicked mix of possessions into the car in San Francisco and checked in at 2am on the day before Marin County banned short-term lets. Bolinas was a pretty nice place to spend those first, relatively fearless days of 2020. There were some goats to feed down the road and I took up running a bit. We baked and phoned and drank. I planned to spend the time writing, maybe. But as time went on, it became clear to me that despite the world burning down around us, I had nothing to say. It seemed somehow absurd, tasteless, to even bother commenting on the world. The record itself was (is) fairly dark, there’s some school shootings and a drunkard’s apology and a bit of abstract dark menace, and all of a sudden the entire world also seemed lost in darkness. Did some subconscious part of me think “my god Osheroff, what’s the point? You’re not helping anything at all by putting out all this glowering shit, just give it up”. There’s probably a lot more that happened, but my desire to play music just left, out the back door, in the middle of the night. I could still see the value in fun little ditties, maybe a beach boys tune, something to ease the pain, but nothing more. No serious songs needed, and certainly the world had no need for the collection of songs I had just spent so long making.
We named all the goats we fed because, you know, nothing else to do. This was spider.
We spent a few months on the mesa before returning back to San Francisco around June. According to my voice memos, sometime in summer 2020 I wandered over to the piano and wrote out the first rudimentary lines that would become Lockdown Lullaby. I left it alone and didn’t complete a song after that for nearly three years.
I wish I knew what exceedingly minor miracle made me pick up the fragment of the idea in December of 2022, or what suddenly rushed back into my life, but I do know this; this song was a major part of my healing from the pandemic. I sat down at the piano and suddenly found there was something there, some little story that wanted to be told again. Does confession heal? By admitting how lost I was, was I found? What on earth was any of it even about? (I’m so lost for any real conclusion here I asked AI to do it for me. It started speaking in French) Where is the meaning switch in our minds? Do we have any control over it? Can we will faith in and out of existence?
After finishing Lockdown Lullaby my desire to write and record ebbed back into me. I tinkered with a friend in New York. I spent a little while free-form improvising at the piano. Still, it was hard to dedicate myself to anything; something was lost, and what was lost was the faith that it meant anything. Writing is weird like that for me, there’s an internal binary toggle switch that is either sure I’m writing a giant hit song (hah, I know, but seriously, I’m sure), or is utterly disillusioned and ready to quit music for good — and that switch had gotten stuck mostly in the off position. I think I still carry some of that loss, although it’s hard to be fully sure. The desire to do this silly thing really shifts and changes all the time, and I can’t tell you if today the idea of making music is the same as it was in 2019. I suspect it isn’t, and I suspect I’ll need to be OK with that.
“Something got lost in lockdown, babe. Something still don’t feel right.”