Dear friends,

welcome back to Song Post and the beginning of a new year. Thanks for sticking with me.

This coming month, I was supposed to go straight from England to Italy and be on the road for two months, scavenging for inspiration. So when I left Berlin, I sublet my room and packed away all my newly-unpacked things. But the pandemic has come in the way of my travel plans, and so I’m casting around for half-solutions until my room is free again in March.

Appropriately, the song that’s ready for you this month is Apartment. It’s about building a pedestal for someone else while trampling on yourself. While I was dwelling on that feeling, I quite spontaneously sung, “how d’you like the apartment?” and suddenly that story found its setting in a half unpacked room with “all these boxes piling high”. Living like that brings a melancholy of its very own, one I know very well, having relocated more than a dozen times in the last three years.

I don’t know why it feels right to join the two themes together. I’m trying to concretise a thought about being a settler or settling down, and feeling unsettled. But I can’t make it neat, and anyway I don’t want to pre-digest the song for you. You tell me: what is this song? what does it do? As ever, these are questions I am poorly placed to answer.

Yours unsettlingly,

 JEM