She would not settle into a demise defined by hospital visits instead, she made enough drawings to totally redecorate the chemotherapy ward. * To the Nashville music community that treasured her, she became a symbol of resistance: not political resistance, though she was a fighter in that field, too, but the spiritual kind. In her last year on earth, she became astoundingly prolific, not only as a musician (Those Darlins broke up shortly before her diagnosis, but she completed enough songs for a solo album before her death in September) but as a visual artist, writer, and activist. Time revealed that Jessi would not win her mortal battle. Mann captured this dulled experience of grief perfectly, though in fact she’d written the song “about” a friend’s cat. Yet somehow, after my mother died, I was living in it: a spherical, blurred, glassed-in psychic environment. “Every look is a truce, and it’s written in stone.” When I heard this song for the first time, I didn’t know what a goose snow cone could possibly be. “Should be shaking it loose, but you do it alone,” Mann sang in her measured, tremulous way, her tone offering comfort while acknowledging the obvious: Comfort can only go so far. When the kind doctor at Evergreen Hospital told her she wouldn’t be making it through what had, a day earlier, seemed like a normal winter bout, she kept repeating, “I’m so surprised.”) As my visit to a sickbed turned into a funeral trip, I wandered around the wet Seattle streets, listening over and over to Aimee Mann’s song “ Goose Snow Cone.” With its circular chord progression and plaintive stair-step melody, this little song mirrored the gray wash of my emotions. Still, the virus that claimed her came fast, and we were inevitably unprepared for her exit. She was 93 and had been slipping into twilight for a while. I want to use the rest of my time with you to talk about a few songs that served that fundamental, precious function for me this year. That’s the thing that doesn’t change about recorded music, whether it comes to us via a playlist or a 180-gram vinyl special edition. She was just happy, she said, that others might have the chance for it to touch them, too. “That album was everything to me,” Gaby Moreno, who stole the show singing Roberta Flack’s “ Angelitos Negros” at our launch, said of the elder singer’s First Take. Many people have thanked me for the list, specifically because an album they hold as dear as a diary is on it. They yearned for their idol, but it was clear that even more than that, they wanted to claim his easy confidence as their own.) Turning the Tables simply sought to remind people that albums by women were as central to those ch-ch-ch-changes as the men’s masterpieces generally acknowledged as cultural milestones. (I saw 2,000 teenage girls lose themselves in the rock ’n’ roll fantasies of Harry Styles at his Ryman show this year. Deep listening works against essentialist gender divisions-sound seeps in, and like a hallucinogen, alters the listener’s sense of inner space, dissolving habitual boundaries around the self. The wild tales Kate Bush etched into vinyl on albums like Hounds of Love shaped my youthful bravado, just as the Clash’s London Calling did for so many punk boys I knew. Carole King’s Tapestry had been to the teenage Jill what Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited was to the mostly-male rock criterati. Our canon-shaking challenge was motivated most deeply by the knowledge that women making music had changed our own lives.
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