Music Moots with Georgia Coley
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 Georgia Coley! Georgia is a multi-hyphenate artist (writer, editor, documentary filmmaker) living in Nashville; she writes a column for the Christian social justice publication Sojourners, and has a Substack about, in her words, "the intersection of trans experience and theology." I came across her work after the midterm elections, when Alysa Liu's gold medal-winning skate made the rounds on social media again. ("this caused the blue wave" was the initial Twitter commentary that revived it, I think.) Coley called the performance "one of the most profound and deeply spiritual works of art from the 2020s" and linked her essay, "The Radical Cosmic Apocalypse of Alysa Liu," which is exactly the kind of exuberant title I can get behind.
Georgia Coley
When Liu performed that long program*, it took a couple of days for its impact to truly smack me. I'm a late '80s baby who spent the '90s watching young phenoms like Tara Lipinski and Michelle Kwan skate for the United States, and I remember the figure skating viewing experience to be really...tense. No shade to these wonderful athletes, but at the time, every complicated element they attempted to pull off felt like an enormous risk, with the lead-up to various jumps always juiced with palpable nervous energy. Skating was beautiful and exciting, but it never looked fun to me.
Then you have Liu skating to the sublime disco version of "MacArthur Park," slicing up the ice to Georgio Moroder's pew-pews, each jump looking breezy, if not simply inevitable. I thought I'd seen it all in this field, and Liu did something new: she somehow managed to skate like no one was watching, when in fact the entire world was watching. And Georgia captured exactly how I felt about that performance in her essay, honing in on creativity for creativity's sake as a source of spiritual fulfillment:
"This purposed creative zeal reigning over obligation—doing something for the sake of itself and not because of what it gives you in status or victory or success—feels inherently generative to me, in a profound spiritual sense. It is a product of abundance rather than scarcity, of delight in the world God has made and the bodies and interests He has given us as good gifts on their own terms."
Now if we are talking personal spirituality, I would describe myself as 'on a likely lifelong journey of figuring out the whole God thing after spending the first sixteen years of my life with a very specific definition of God with which I wasn't fully vibing'...so I really appreciate reading perspectives on art that explicitly connect them with religion, because it gets my own thoughts flowing on the subject. And to bring it back to creative zeal over obligation, you can clearly see that principle enacted in Georgia's writing! And you know I'm all about that at I Enjoy Music!
Georgia recommended I listen to "Lego Bricks" by Ella Molsee. "As a Nashvillian, I would say that 80% of my day-to-day music is written by my friends, and Ella is one of my best friends," she wrote. "Ella is always saying something deeply felt and cosmically whimsical, and 'Lego Bricks' has such a nice mix of tender verse and punk rock. Ella's most recent EP called Unsaid Truths really helps me tap into my inner angsty middle-school girl feels, and I've had some unspoken crushes recently, so it's really felt more resonant because of that."
What can I say? This song rips. Perfectly pretty, perfectly harsh, a nice build in tension—pleasant + fun tension, not 1990s figure skating tension—followed by one of my favorite things that can occur in a song, which is an Unexpected Detonation. You think "Lego Bricks" might explode on the chorus, but Molsee waits until the second verse to pull the pin. A nice trick, keeping me on my toes, just like the uncertainty of unfulfilled frisson.
"Let's play frisbee Wednesday" ooooo to be so down bad you're making frisbee plans!! Or is that my personal anti-frisbee bias talking? Here is something I suck at: frisbee. Every time I merely look at the word, I can hear the thunk of a frisbee hitting my forehead. I think I've taken a frisbee to the dome upwards of five times in my life. The things you will do for a crush...trying to think of what I have done in order to stoke the flames of a crush: ✓ go see an improv comedy show ✓audition for middle school 'district band' (that one actually ruled, crush be damned...we played a kinda bonkers medley of Civil War songs??) ✓ visit the city of Boston.
This is the kind of song that makes me want to listen to the rest of Ella Molsee's EP Unsaid Truths, so I will go do that now...hell yeah...
*Also, must shout out her short program, set to Laufey...one of the most beautiful pieces of choreography I have ever seen...that shit makes me CRY. okay bye
Thank you Georgia! You can find her Substack here and her website here.
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