Sunturns are “a Norwegian super-group devoted to Christmas”. This song is their offering for 2022; it looks back upon the past few pandemic years, lonely and awful as they were, and then, hopeful and fragile, turns towards the next few. I think it’s beautiful.
I’ve been hitting these blue notes
Now there’s puke in the new snow
I’ve been feeling so down low
These past few years.
A friend said he was starting to understand the bawdy triviality of the jazz age decadence. After the first world war killed around 1% of the allied and 5% of the central powers, and then the 1918 influenza pandemic swept in to kill another 1-2% of everyone? "Oh, god, they all just wanted to forget".
I’ve been going through these phases
Where everything changes
And we've felt like strangers
These past few years
Am I forgetting these past few years? It’s hard to conjure up feeling illicit just for resting my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder during a meandering walk through the blocks between our apartments. I know I hosted farewell parties over video calls. I know that, after years of living thousands of kilometres away from my family, I only saw my mum on her porch for a weekly morning coffee, my dad for walks along Queen Street, my brother, occasionally, in the playground at Christie Pits. I know I cried watching a video of trucks departing a vaccine factory. I can picture my roommate holding a bee made of bright yellow construction paper up to her webcam, trying to coax her two-dimensional kindergarteners into crafting. But it all seems a bit indistinct and flattened, not unlike nearly every face I saw in those laptop-glow months.
I’m full of heartache, but that’s only partially true:
That’s a rhetoric I’ve been feeding you
I can’t say I had a particularly bad time of it. I didn't have to attend any funerals over Zoom. I wasn't trying to complete a degree while locked down in a dorm room, only knowing my classmates through my screen. I didn't lose my job, nor was I supervising small children in iPad school while expected to work remotely. I was lucky, but it was lonely all the same.
Erased it all with a few strokes,
Hopeful footprints in new snow,
I’ve been getting so down low
These past few years
I like many things about this song, the soft drums and sentimental violins and twisty little key changes, but it’s the lyrical shift in the last verse that really gets me:
Moving on through the ages
We’ll be up on stages
Singing everything changes
These next few years.
The song repeats that last line― These next few years… These next few years― without further elaboration. You can look forward on the basis of how everything changes without knowing what, exactly, it will change into. My grandmother insists that there is something to enjoy in every phase of life. I’m climbing out of my grieving pandemic years and finding myself aged into a somewhat different phase of life; I read stories and notice that now I analogize myself more to the parent characters than to their children. I don’t want to forget these past few years, but I’m ready for something new.
Making hopeful footprints in new snow,
- Tessa