Hello again ♡ I abandoned this longer than I intended 2. I've been meaning to get back into blogging, so here is an honest attempt. No promises re: frequency.
I was inspired to return today after spending the morning stalking my past self on plague.town. It has been 5 years since my first record of the same name came out. On days like today, I get the urge to revisit the private/public diary I kept the year I wrote those songs, a time I didn't think could get any stranger, but of course then we went into 2020 and it did. 5 years. I know I'm not the only one who felt them bend and stretch and twist at their own will.
When I look back at my old blog, I remember how desperately I spent that time clawing for some kind of meaning in my small existence, a place frozen in time in a world changing too fast for me to keep up. I felt so lost for meaning that I looked for it in the religious delusions of strangers and the vague promises of technology I didn't understand or trust. After I stopped updating, I chased my hopes for meaning across the border, away from the only home I knew and into the cold arms of a beautiful and disappointing machine.
I have more to show on that, but for now, looking down from 5 turns up the spiral, what strikes me most is a certain irony. Through eyes as human as they can be in the year 2026, a room of my own filling their periphery, a life of connection and fulfilment and agency and love framing the 14-inch screen where I visit that lonely snapshot, I still feel at times as if it is the most meaningful thing I have.
There was a lot of doubt re: releasing plague town as the first official 8485 project. I wrote it alone at first, as a person I'd spend the next few years convincing myself I needed to leave behind if I wanted to be of interest to anyone as an artist. In my mind, supported by most of the voices I listened to then, my own voice was secondary to the progress I represented. It was less valuable than the better me we could create, the better you that you'd want to be when you heard what we could do. But something unexpected happened. Those five songs that I brought with me to the first sessions, that lived before I plugged in, made more sense to share with you than anything months of research and optimization had managed to spit out. I didn't know how much they'd mean to me now, only that they were the best I had.
I always kept my eye on the next thing. I thought I was yet to create what I was really meant to create. (I still do, btw, just not in the same way.) I thought that once I did, you'd forget, but you haven't.
I still read your messages almost every day about hangar, purgatory, seer, pure, southview. There is nothing that being Eighty has given me that I am more grateful for. I know a little about what they mean to so many of you and it helps me to let go. They're more yours than mine now; I remember that every time I get to see somebody singing "I'll still be here in 5 years" back to me at the shows. You are, and so am I, and I am so glad.
To plague town, and to everything I haven't put into words yet ♪
all my luv
8485
