by Feiyi

Olivia Laing’s words resonate with me. Arthur Russell’s music is magical because of the way it describes feelings that are not easily translated into words.

Wednesday nights, choir night, I feel lucky to share feelings of loss and love, and so many feelings at once, in song. Jack was always trying to get us to break out of reading the music into what we feel.

“That’s us,” Arthur once sang, before we got there. He’s telling a story about a kid driving to the lake before dawn to swim. Then the beat kicks in, and now it’s love he’s singing about, or maybe just how it feels to be awake in the world on a summer morning. It’s a wild combination all right, and so was he: a firework on the 4th of July, everything all at once, in a flash, and gone before you could grasp what you'd seen. 

Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency