music moots with midnight dive (“when bambi found her mother” by Mieke)

We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask someone to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.

Today we have midnight dive! This is the musical persona of Cheyanne Sawyer, a singer-songwriter in Los Angeles who is doing a delightful Clark Kent / Superman kind of thing—law student by day, musician by night. She recently self-produced and released "the graduate," an otherworldly single about the pains of transitioning between stages of life.

One of the unexpected delights of living in L.A. come in the form of "May Gray" and "June Gloom"; the mornings of these presumably brilliant months are actually drab as hell, all clouds and fog and granite-colored skies until the early afternoon hours arrive. As a moody lady, I love this time of year. It's like a little freebie of introspection time before everything turns into Let's Have Fun At the Pool. A couple days ago, it even thunderstormed. My cat ran to his tower to stare out at the rain while arranging his body in the shape of a lumpy pancake. That vibe—let's pause for a second to let ourselves luxuriate in feeling some type of way—is the vibe I get from "the graduate."

Cheyanne recommended me a song to listen to: "when bambi found her mother” by New Zealand artist Mieke.

Haha this song made me cry. It has pretty harmonies and a haunted lullaby aura that tug on my heartstrings, but more importantly the lyrics are making me think about moms and animals. I'm having a baby at the end of the summer, and also adopted a stray cat about three months ago, and so my emotions about caring for little critters that rely on you completely to survive (well, the cat was surviving before but I think he was doing a decent amount of dumpster diving) are ABUNDANT.

Last weekend we went to see our friend Pierce do a comedy show and there was an extended bit where he's trying to make himself cry with different sad stimuli. One attempt at tears involved playing a clip from Annabelle's Wish, a 1997 direct-to-video animated movie about a little baby cow who wants to be one of Santa's reindeer. The attempt failed—Pierce ultimately ended up having to rub his eyes with two halves of an onion—but I found myself tearing up at the damn cow movie.

I don't even know what to say, this is probably just what happens to a Cancer moon who is seven months pregnant. "She asked them / 'Could I hold her when she was younger?'" You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. Endemic to nature is the concept of holding your young: sheltering them from predators, carrying them from place to place when they're too tiny and clumsy to move efficiently on their own. Reversing time is not part of nature, and so time gives life meaning. This was expressed in the most recent season of The White Lotus, as well as the 2014 movie Lucy, where biological superintelligence turns Scarlett Johansson into a USB stick.

I often ask my cat where he was born. "Where were you born, Magellan?" I ask, while stroking his white fur and staring into his green eyes. He can never tell me, I will never know. I imagine him as a teeny weeny kitten, somewhere outside in my neighborhood, which makes me so sad, but then I think about how he's destined to come in eventually.

Thank you midnight dive! Listen to her music and check out her link aggregation.

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