It’s been a week. I haven’t shaved. I’ve been surviving on coffee and cheap brie cheese. Books and papers are piled on my desk. A fragile slope of cryptic, scribbled notes covers every square inch. My browser is an impenetrable forest of open tabs. Spotify is begging me to just give it up man, please, god.
But I have to find this album. I made such a big deal about it at a dinner last week. It’s a classical thing, an ambient thing, a neo-downbeat-low rez-spoken word-Scottish thing. I took over the conversation, owned the table. I pontificated like a goddam impassioned crazy person on the sheer beauty of this album. Finally Murphy, at the other end of the table, asked “Cool, what’s it called?” and I didn’t know.
I mean, I’ve listened to it so many times. I’ve put it on loop. I should be able to remember…it ought to…surely I can…
Look, dude, it’s Scottish, ok? It’s a classical album, right? It has a blue cover. It’s got this poet, right? This narrator—Look, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I know….
And then I realized what had happened. It was suddenly blazingly clear what was going on here. I’m old. I have traversed the Rubicon. My mind is rejecting new memories. I have 60 years of them stacked up. If my inner library is anything like my outer life, it’s a chaotic riot of spent candy wrappers and old coffee cups. I don’t know if I can clean it up. I don’t have much hope in that department, which is sad.
Because I am making new memories even now. I know a lot of people get into their sexagenarian period and they look for a nice soft place to land. As if hitting 60 is when you ought to pack it in but I’m not feeling it. I have the exact same strident curiosity and drive I had when I was seventeen. I’m not going to pretend I’m the same kid I was back in the 80s, that would be stupid and sad and Peter Pan Syndromesque. So, no. But I sure as fuck don’t feel like the ship needs to dock. I don’t feel like the roof is peeling off the house.
But it is. It’s what happens in your autumn years. You forget things. You leave your car keys in the refrigerator. You try to recall the word pluviophile, but it won’t come. So you sit there at your desk staring into your neighbor’s yard refusing to go on. Defiant. Punk as Fuck. Immovable until that word appears in your frontal cortex so you can go on. But that album, goddam.
And here’s what it is. It’s a matter of attention as much as anything. Perhaps the curiosity is still there but that laser-like attention has flared out. Diffused. Without proper attention, the words in your life you love won’t stay there. You lose the name of an album because you did not purchase its permanence with scrutiny and–
FOLDED LANDSCAPES! Fuck. Yes! That’s the album. Hell yes. Folded Landscapes featuring Erland Cooper and the Scottish Ensemble. And the album cover is blue. Dig this:
The finished album thaws over 7-movements and features UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and other special guests and samples, including activist Greta Thunberg, visual artist Norman Ackroyd and multi-award-winning author, naturalist and conservationist Dara McAnulty leading a murmuration of familiar voices. Field recordings include the California wildfires and crashing glaciers. Yet, out of the doom and gloom, beauty, and hope bloom on Folded Landscapes.
What whiskey should I drink after finding this beautiful, haunting, extraordinary piece of work? I’m not going to lie; it deserves a whiskey that matches its level of accomplishment. Something beautiful. Something sublime. Something extraordinary.
I’m filling my favorite crystal rocks glass with Lost Lantern’s Single Cask #16 from Breukelen Distilling. It’s an eight-year-old New York malted, wheat whiskey and my god. My god. Put this album on and drink this whiskey. Try, try as hard as you can, to accept that like good whiskey, though some of the spirit may be lost to the angels, the best part remains. The best part gets better.
