Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder
I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain
Welcome back y’all, here’s edition 36 of Laughing Stock. This week, Rich Walker pines for absent artists, whilst also craving the thrill of the chase.
‘I know I’ve been gone a long time
I’m back and I want what is mine’
Last week, Fleet Foxes played what was seemingly a pretty normal show at the Belasco in Los Angeles. The only hint that something out of the ordinary might happen was the night was promoted as a ‘spring recital’ and the running order included a ‘special guest’. Not too unusual, plenty of gigs have ‘special guests’ billed when the support hasn’t been quite locked in, it usually means a local band, and Fleet Foxes songs are intrinsically linked with nature, so that accounted for the ‘spring recital’ part. What occurred though, was something that sparked a lightning bolt of excitement in me. When the curtain fell at the Belasco, the 1200 people assembled were presented with a stage thronged with flowers, and an auspicious harp in the centre. Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold came on stage and announced “without further ado, I present the high priestess of acoustic music, Joanna Newsom”. The reaction, according to Pitchfork, was fervent.
Why such a reaction? Well, Newsom hasn’t released any new music since her 2015 album Divers, and eight years in the music world is A Long Time. Whole careers have come and gone in that time. And Newsom is loved. Properly stan-level of adoration from her fans. Her music, particularly her lyrics, are poured over for meaning, and so an out-of-the-blue performance featuring five new songs is A Big Deal. There are Reddits aplenty about the new songs, one of which is apparently a 15 min song about a canary trapped in a coal mine (because of course it is). I can’t get enough of it. Every scrap of info, every poorly shot video, every news article about The Event has been poured into my brain since the evening of the 22nd March, a day that will now be known as ‘return of the high priestess’.
There’s something about an absent artist that inspires dedicated fandom. Never has ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ been more relevant than when it comes to some of the more elusive musicians. Take Frank Ocean for example (or ‘Get a Move On Frank’ as I tend to refer to him now). Post his masterpiece Blond, he’s just been in the ether, kinda here, but ungraspable. He’s drip fed a few one off singles (including the all-timer ‘Chanel’), threatened to perform at Coachella, put out a run of singles that felt like he was leading up to that ill-fated 2020 Coachella booking with a new album, started a radio show on Apple Music, started a very expensive jewellery line, and shown up at many a fashion week show looking fresh. And yet…no proper new music has been released. No statement made. Barely an interview given. He’s once again booked to headline Coachella in a matter of weeks, as yet with no new songs to play. Fans have recently been receiving merch they bought over a year ago, and with it a cryptic message on the reverse of a poster pointing to a new musical project:
The end sentence ‘The Recording Artist has since changed his mind about the singles model, and is again interested in more durational bodies of work’ has set the Frank Ocean New Music Investigators (commonly known as ‘people on Reddit’) on the trail of this ethereal thread, in search of more clues to when something might drop. So far they have uncovered very little, but with three weeks to go to that Coachella performance, hope runs eternal. Once again, I will hoover up any and all crumbs of info that the intrepid investigators turn up, and my heart will skip a beat when I wake up in the morning and see ‘Frank Ocean’ trending on Twitter, only to find out he’s brought out a $25k cock ring. Such is the life of someone who gets giddy at the prospect of a favourite missing in action musician potentially returning to the fray.
The myths that are created around these AWOL artists is part of the allure. Shockwaves rippled through the internet when Jai Paul’s name appeared on the Coachella poster. Paul has never performed live, has never released a ‘proper’ album, and last put out a pair of singles in 2019. His disappearance after his demos were leaked on Bandcamp in 2013 is the stuff of legend. No one knew where he’d gone. He was silent, leaving behind him some of the greatest tracks of the new millennium. No amount of investigative internetting could turn up much about him. Then, out of the blue, he returned in June 2019 with two astonishing new songs, the ‘Paul Institute’ set up to nurture new talent, an official release of the leaked 2013 tracks that happened to be the best album released that year, and a heartbreaking statement explaining his absence. It was promising, were we finally going to get new music from this mysterious, generational talent? I was flying at the news, the statement, the new tracks. It was definitely happening. And lo, he was gone again, back on to the same inaccessible plane that Frank Ocean resides on. But wait! The Coachella poster! The Return of Jai! It’s definitely happening this time isn’t it? And once again, I’ll gobble up every last morsel of info about him.
(Stererogum very amusingly said of the prospect of Frank and Jai playing on the same day at Coachella ‘it seems absolutely insane that you could potentially see Frank Ocean and Jai Paul on the same day. They might as well put DB Cooper on the lineup. They might as well have “a unicorn” on there’)
This phenomenon of longing for absent artists is at an epidemic level. Rihanna continues to troll us all, showing up at the Super Bowl to deliver a thrilling half time show and saying, once again, an album is on the way (the still-running Popjustice counter since her last album currently stands at 7 years and 2 months). LCD Soundsystem broke up with a spectacular Madison Square Garden show in 2011, only to reappear in 2015 for new shows and a new album released in 2017, with nothing since but some festivals and one off singles for films. My heart skips a beat every time I see a snap of an Aphex Twin logo on some billboard in Bristol or London or Glasgow, only to find out he’s just headlining a festival somewhere instead of following up his (actually really very good) 2014 album Syro.
However, I can’t resent these artists for their absence. If anything, it makes me love them even more, and the existence of the Reddit Investigators shows I’m not alone. There’s something exciting about an AWOL artist, in that you know that at any point in time you might log on to Instagram and find they have deleted their entire history and replaced it with a single blank square that definitely means their new era is on the way. Someone might report that they’ve seen one of them coming out of the back door of a studio in New York only to find out they’ve just tossed off a single for a film score and nothing more. I almost don’t want Rihanna to release anything new, as it would be kinda funny and very on brand. But when it happens for real, when that sweet, sweet new music drops and the first album in eight years is on the way, oh boy, there’s nothing like the stomach flutter that comes with it.
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