sentiment

"Sometimes I am just grateful that I can still cry. Because being numb is an even worse reality, and very few people seem to return from that."

I did not cry the first time I heard those words spoken by Theodore Cale Schafer on "4pm," the opening track of claire rousay's sentiment. Embarrassingly, I also did not recognize the voice as Theodore's. I had probably heard it a dozen times before I read his name in the liner notes. Theodore is a friend, kind of. He's the kind of person I'd refer to as "a friend" if I was talking to someone else and they mentioned his name. I'm not sure if he would do the same for me, though it's difficult to imagine anyone talking about me when I'm not there. We've met in person a few times, we played one or two shows together, and he let me release some music he made on a netlabel I used to run. We might have been in the same group chat for a while. He will always be, for the purpose of casual conversations with certain peers, the kind that I have in my imagination far more often than in real life, "a friend." These days, most of my friends are like that.

For a long time, I didn't understand why some people struggle with solitude. I still don't really empathize when people talk about being alone like it's something to be endured or overcome. I'm good at being alone. I've been doing it constantly for several years. I used to think it made me stronger: a better artist, a better thinker. Maybe it did at one point. But I've come kicking and screaming to the realization that I need connection in order to live well; that solitude has made my world small, stale, and disenchanted. I feel an immediate kinship with claire rousay's music, becauase it expresses both this smallness and the magical intuition of something bigger, something realer.

sentiment's cover art is a photo of rousay in her bedroom. She's lying in bed with a guitar, hand resting on her pillow, looking over it at the camera; on the side table in front of her are two discarded Dale's Pale Ale beer cans, a pack of cigarettes, some notebooks and electronics. rousay recreated "the sentiment bedroom" as a stage design for her 2024 tour dates, and as an interactive installation in Toronto commissioned by Porsche. It reminded me of my first and only artwork shown in an institutional setting: a recreation of my childhood bedroom that I made for Miami Art Basel in 2011, when I was briefly an art world microcelebrity. At fourteen I wasn't very reflective about what it "meant" to do this. Like most teenagers, I treasured my private space and possessions. At the time, a reviewer of the show compared my installation to "My Bed" by Tracey Emin. But unlike Emin and rousay, I didn't show my unmade bed, my clutter, my trash. I carefully staged a scene with objects I liked, trinkets I thought would tell an interesting story about me. There was some youthful pride involved. But there's some adolescence to sentiment too.

I never really got into emo music. I was a member of the Polyvinyl Record Club as a preteen and got a couple Owen CDs in the mail, and my first girlfriend in high school was into American Football and Joyce Manor. I think what I found repellent about it was the directness, the diaristic honesty and lack of self-conscious abstraction. I've always been too thoughtful, too eager to reinterpret and represent things to be properly in touch with my emotions. I'm easily embarrassed. By the time you're reading this I've edited every intuition into something less intuitive, every clarity into something more obscure.

I was familiar with rousay's music, mainly through her collaborations with More Eaze (who released two great albums this year). I loved their 2022 album Never Stop Texting Me, probably the most obvious precursor to sentiment. Formally it leans more pop punk or hyperpop, but with a kind of bedroom sensibility that reminded me of the blog era. It doesn't use autotune as an ironic or referential thing, but in the old fashioned way, as an aid to expression. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for the gentle directness with which rousay uses the tool across sentiment, beginning with "head". It's kind of startling, and I wouldn't really blame someone for being turned off by it. But I am moved by it over and over again.

rousay has been very modestly open about being in recovery: she posted in September that she was 100 days sober, and I'm pretty sure a recent post about a "little list of resentments" refers to the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was immensely gratifying to learn this after I had become so close to her music in the early stages of my own recovery. (I've been in rehab three times this year; sentiment came out in between stays one and two.) Even without knowing anything about rousay's life, I felt that sentiment very plainly spoke to what I was feeling in the blurred transition from addiction to recovery, a haze from which I've yet to fully emerge.

I cry a lot now. The first big one came in detox, when I read Virgina Woolf's The Waves while heavily sedated. Since then it has been all kinds of things: sad, joyful, both, often neither. It's been books, commercials, dreams, conversations, walks, intrusive thoughts, mild discomforts, silences. Last night it was a line Patricia Arquette says to Nicolas Cage in Bringing out the Dead: "No one asked you to suffer. That was your idea." Today, it was my friend Theodore's voice.