The noise starts promptly at 7 a.m., stops briefly around noon, and then resumes again until 5 p.m. The crews working on the apartment building next door take advantage of every working minute allowed by city ordinance.
Nothing gets built without noise, of course. But it's also true that it's stressful to live and work next to a construction site. The worst is the excavator, which sends tremors through the ground—and into our house—when the operator drops the bucket to the earth. Then there's the rattle it makes as he shakes loose all the dirt. Add on chainsaws and idling concrete trucks and a generator, and all the noise just gets to be too much sometimes.
I've started getting up at 5:15 for a brief quiet period before everything gets loud. But after a desperate week where I faced three different deadlines in quick succession, under increasingly loud conditions, Chris surprised me with noise-cancelling headphones.
Until I started using them, I didn't realize how attentive I am to the sound around me, perhaps overly so. I am an alert, curious person, and I can see now how all that background listening pulls me away from tasks at hand. But with the noise-cancelling headphones on, I'm capable of quickly accessing the deep focus required for writing. The headphones are by far one of the best gifts I've ever received. I wish I'd had them years ago!
And yet even with them on, I sometimes need to get away from the noise next door, especially if it's accompanied by tremors. You cannot cancel out with a switch the unsettling feeling of a minor earthquake. I also don't want to live entirely without sound my entire working day. We are not meant to live entirely in silence.
So the other morning, I was at my favorite coffee shop early—without any headphones. On came a song from 2003 that I hadn't heard in forever: "She Sends Kisses" by the New Jersey-based band the Wrens.
The song stopped me in my tracks, and not just because I once loved it and the band. It's a deep cut, not a song that would randomly show up on a Spotify playlist. The music choices at this coffee shop are deliberate and moody, depending on who’s working. It's one of the reasons I love it—you never know what you'll hear. So whoever put “She Sends Kisses” on their playlist for the day did so deliberately. They probably knew the story of the Wrens, too.
I've liked the Wrens ever since I saw them live in Tallahassee, Florida with my friend Jenn Peltz, who was already a fan. (I think it was 2004, but I can't verify this.) There were only a handful of people at the show, but it was a great set. Jenn and I chatted with the band as they packed up their gear. I bought a CD of their album, "The Meadowlands," and I signed up for their email list.
Meeting artists in person can create a powerful and lasting connection to their work, and I followed the Wrens' progress. I was hopeful of another album as great as "The Meadowlands." So were rock critics—the Wrens always had their ear. But in subsequent years, the band famously struggled to put out another album or to take off in a way that the quality of their 2003 work suggested they could. (One of the comments on YouTube about "The Meadowlands" sums up how the Wrens never truly launched despite their talent: "Just a perfect album by a band that should have been enormous...")
I stuck with them for 15 years or so, but eventually I unsubscribed to the band emails—mostly because they were such bummers! Each missive was about how things weren't coming together for them. It was obvious they had only themselves to blame for their creative stall, a realization that hit a little close to home for me. Unmet potential became their defining characteristic, down to the tagline on their website: "Keeping Folks Waiting Since 1989."
Here in the present day, a few hours after hearing "She Sends Kisses," I got an email from a local venue about upcoming shows. Many of these go unopened, but I clicked on this one because the subject line mentioned an upcoming performance by another singer whose work I like.
The first lines of the email stopped me in my tracks as well: "Aeon Station is in the house tonight. Kevin Whelan (also of Wrens) has put together a really special album in “Observatory,” one full of big rock feels but also real emotion."
Whoa, I thought, the Wrens twice in one day! After all that time!
I couldn't ignore the coincidence. We didn't have any plans that night, so I bought tickets for the show—even though it started at 9 p.m., which let's be honest, is late for a fan base in its 40s and early 50s.
Turns out, there's been a lot of drama with the Wrens since I saw them last. The individual members of the band have mostly moved on to other things. They all live successful lives outside of their music, but they also never quite gave up on it. Last year, the band—minus one of the frontmen, Charles Bissell—released a long-awaited new album under the name Aeon Station. The music is still great, if bittersweet for what could have been. I listened to the album all day Friday before the show, on my new noise-cancelling headphones.
And at the concert on Friday night, I wore earplugs, because rock and roll is loud and I value my hearing. There were maybe 30 people there? But it was clear that Kevin Whelan was grateful for every single fan who showed up. He told the audience they'd last played in Portland in 1996 "and every one of you was here." Left mostly unsaid was that they were unlikely to ever return as a band. Nonetheless, Whelan and his brother Greg Whelan and high school friend Jerry MacDonald and supporting musicians were onstage at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, playing the music they loved. "Go out and start a band and have fun with your friends and enjoy it," Whelan said between songs.
I listened carefully to the lyrics of one of the last songs in their set, from their new album. No one playing in the band seemed bitter, not at all. Yet the line from "Alpine Drive" seemed to sum up all that had happened since I saw them in Tallahassee nearly two decades ago: "Evеrything can be replaced, еxcept for your time."
Thanks, as always, for spending your time here.
Love,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
A dishy listen In another coincidence involving rock and roll drama, I just listened to Daisy Jones & The Six, a novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It's the story of a band (inspired in part by Fleetwood Mac) that implodes after its spectacular success in the 1970s. The book itself is a fictional oral history of the band, collected by the daughter of the lead singer. The audiobook embraces the multiple characters by using different actors—making for a great listen.
Recorded history For Stateline, I wrote about how oral histories collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s from thousands of Indigenous people are being returned to tribes.
The sound of boredom "Every episode of boredom creates an opportunity for making a positive change instead of reactively looking for the fastest, easiest escape. We just need to pay attention."
Movie sound Why dialogue sounds so terrible in films lately. (H/T to the Culture Study newsletter for this read.)
How silence changes our brain "Noises cause stress, especially if we have little or no control over them." Yep.
Noise and gentrification I'm not sure this essay quite lands its point—it fails to consider the crucial difference between sound and noise. But this space has room for everyone to sound off.