2020 Indie Music Highlight: Loving’s “If I Am Only My Thoughts”
Timeless indie-folk ambience was the antidote to a chaotic year
by Katie Ingegneri
Some albums are easily tied to a particular time or place. Whether it’s the year or season they came out, the era in pop culture, or simply the sound, you can pinpoint when and where they came from.
Canadian indie band Loving’s If I Am Only My Thoughts both is, and is not, that kind of record. As soon as you put it on, you’re plunged into another, more timeless world — an atmospheric, cinematic, aural landscape of comfort, longing, melancholy, and contemplation. Perhaps it’s significant that it arrived at the beginning of 2020, a cosmic balm for the year that would be coming.
This special gem of a record, clocking in around 40 minutes, has become my favorite album of the year, a year that will be inexorably marked by tragedy and chaos in our collective memory, but buoyed, as always, by art and creativity — because what is more vital and life-affirming than that? So maybe someday I’ll forget that it came out in 2020, but I doubt it. Music is a magical companion when you’re stuck at home by yourself — something I learned as an only child music geek growing up, and affirmed ever more so now. I am so grateful I had this album to keep me company through the horror, anger, pain, and confusion on both the personal and global levels this year, and I know it’s an album I’ll be coming back to again and again.
I hadn’t heard much about Loving prior to the release of the EP teasing this album at the end of 2019, but, like the DIY indie bands this magazine was founded on in Chicago in 2015, they prove that some of the best music is being made in the quiet, overlooked corners of the music world. Their 2016 self-titled, seven-song album was an appropriate precursor to this year’s release, showing that Loving has really honed their unique sound (and also certainly worth a listen, or ten, or a hundred!)
If I Am Only My Thoughts was released the day I moved into my new apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 31. While I ended up listening to this album all year, it’s hard not to tie this nostalgic sound to the weather at the time — the gray skies, the melting snow, the clouds and bare trees, which is the case once again as I write this.
The album is absolutely full of atmosphere — from jingling bells and piano off in the distance to layers of acoustic and electric guitars, and track titles like “A Mirror For Two Voices,” “Lately In Another Time,” “Nihilist Kite Flyer,” “Growing Flowers by Candlelight,” the appropriately timed “January,” and the stunning title track; the result is a magic collage of sounds and lyrics that evoke feeling in little waves, like those warm spring breezes we get out of nowhere in New England, that smell like melting snow and earth, and remind us that better days are coming.
If you listen to one album from 2020, let it be If I Am Only My Thoughts. Here’s to better days, live music, and Loving concerts in 2021.
