In spring 2020, lockdown changed the way I listened, on both a physical and psychological level. I was doing the occasional album review for a popular music site. One of the edits I received was to “avoid explicit references to the pandemic or social distancing,” lest every review left an imprint of the global event on music that was made long before Covid hit.

I got it, but I didn’t get it. Music is a meeting place between musician and listener. It is impossible to listen in a vacuum. In Judith Becker’s book Deep Listeners (2004), she argues that our perceptions of music are shaped by the place, time, and cultural contexts we exist within, as much as the specifics of our personal life experiences.

Or as Jack Halberstam wrote in the forward to The Undercommons (2013) by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: “When we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”