I’ve been listening to less music than I used to. Gone are the days of constantly blasting through endless playlists and several albums a day. I’ve been trying to cut down my Spotify usage, instead opting for music I’ve downloaded on my phone. But I only have so many songs on there, and sometimes I’m missing the song that’s so deeply engrained into my brain that I can’t listen to anything else.

Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite writers — he’s a poet and essayist who brings his passion for music into his work and loves to talk about the subject. He recently started a music podcast and spoke at length with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco about covers! In their conversation, they had this inherent reverence for the cover format — a way for an artist to show their own fandom and appreciation for the work of another artist.

For most of 2021, I’ve felt like I was in some sort of writing rut. I didn’t write an essay for my newsletter on January 21, the first time I skipped a newsletter since September. The ideas just failed to come to me, I wondered if the well of writing had run dry — that I’d exhausted all of the things that I could possibly say with my limited range of experience.