The Million Dollar Way (The Bakken Oil Blog): Covid-19 -- November 8, 2022

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Covid-19 -- November 8, 2022

Pfizer, "long-haul" disease, link here:

Weyes Blood: The New Yorker, October 31, 2022 -- six-page essay -- leads this issue.

Her previously recorded vocals for a new song, “Grapevine,” filled the control room.

Mering has a warm, pure alto voice that has often been compared with Karen Carpenter’s—though it’s less sugary than Carpenter’s sometimes sounded. I’d never heard “Grapevine” before, but it exerted a curious effect that I’d noticed with other Weyes Blood songs, all of which Mering writes.

The first time you hear them, you feel the swell of bittersweet emotion that usually comes from songs that you already know and have overlaid with memories and associations. “If a man can’t see his shadow / he can block your sun all day,” went the opening lines of “Grapevine.”

Mering told me later that the song was about breaking up with a “narcissistic” musician she’d been “madly in love with” during the pandemic. She had been sick with long covid, though she hadn’t known at the time what was afflicting her, and he kept telling her that she was depressed, or just had to get outdoors or exercise more. “I basically needed to leave him to go be sick on my own with my mysterious illness that nobody understood yet,” she said. “And it was heartbreaking.”