New Week, New Hope

Greetings, Reader!

Last week I talked a lot about our current border and immigration issues here in the US, and that is important, but you know what else is important?  The Internet!

Not only does the internet allow you to do super awesome things like read this blog or CRASHING THE FCC Website – TWICE – in order to defend Net Neutrality, but the internet also allows you to discover up and coming artists like the inimitably talented Jana Pochop.

This past weekend, I had the pleasure of listening to Jana Pochop's newest EP Throats Are Quarries. (Take the 18 minutes to listen to all 5 songs, you'll be glad you did).  Besides featuring songs that have a raw minimalism to them and haunting minor-key vocals, the songs are also immaculately well written.  Pochop pulls out the stops in her poetry.  The use of enjambment in "Adore You," "the spin on the needle, making love-/ly, lovely sounds..." Adds a visceral sense of yearning while the song discusses love and seemingly inevitable loss.

Throats Are Quarries EP Cover, JanaPochop.com

Perhaps my favorite song on Throats Are Quarries is "Deepest Fear."  Jana Pochop writes from a place of extreme vulnerability.  But her vulnerability is her strength and reveals the truth about our shared human existence.  "My deepest fear is that my fears aren't all that deep."  We live in a time of constant inundation about the atrocities across the globe: over 170,000 dead in the Syrian civil war, mass hangings in Iran.  In the face of all of that, how can we even begin to feel that our own lives, our own suffering, our own fears can even matter?  The answer to the question of our individual importance actually lays in the title of the EP itself.  If our Throats Are Quarries, then what we say lasts forever.  Time and circumstance may wear away the edges of our words, may scrape off the author, but in the end, the shape of our words remains.

In the end, we matter.

Thanks for reading.