Resonance and If Even One
“A musical tone makes physical objects vibrate at its frequency, the phenomenon of sympathetic reverberation. A soprano breaks a wineglass with the right note as she makes unbending glass quiver along with her voice. Emotional tones in the brain establish a living harmony with the past in a similar way. When an emotional chord is struck, it stirs to life past memories of the same feeling.”
A General Theory of Love, Lewis, T.; Amini, F.; Lannon, R. (2007)
The resonance I felt in first hearing If Even One wasn’t stoked by any prior knowledge of the artists who made it, a calling to reckon with the great questions of our time, or even a desire to feel closer to others. The album centered my attention on an emotional complexity that my life has only seemed to gather with time. Like an instrument picking up the vibrations of the sounds nearby, humans can detect the emotional tones of others. Rich with the cadence and beauty of the human voice in its spectrum of tones, If Even One is a sonic quilt of stories that orients us towards the idea that channeling our bad feelings up and out is worth it, even if we reach only one other person.
Creating for an audience of one could feel narrow-minded or insufficient in our current cultural climate, obsessed with amassing followers and measuring reach. Lia Mead and Nanni Narayanan imbue a spirit amplified between them that makes them seem like they’ve known each other for a long, long time. The lead collaborators are best friends who met in college and made the album If Even One for each other to help listeners hold tight to the duality that humans are both boundless and insignificantly tiny in the story of this universe. Nanni poignantly expresses the story behind their friendship: “The essence of art is social.” How the album is put together fights collective overwhelm by fostering spiritual stamina and interpersonal empathy.
In the microstructure of each story on the album, there is something Shakespearean about the way we are dropped right into tell-alls or diary entries, evoking action that feels “impossibly different, yet still the same” (to quote the track “100 More Times”) as our own lives. We are asked to see the story, see beyond it, fill in pieces with what only we can imagine, and contribute. It feels like a collision of past and present. Outside of that, you would never know how heavily inspired the album was by Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral. Simple intersections of sound and the stories’ directness help us pull ourselves back from the brink of oblivion.
“Opus Lullaby” is the track that best exemplifies this, followed next in the cycle of songs by “Strong In Her Love.” This couplet of songs enacts a framework seen across the album where one storytelling track will offer a notable phrase or bit of wisdom and be followed by an instrumental track named for the phrase or evoking it, giving a sonic embellishment of the noteworthy feeling. Asking Lia and Nanni the same question asked on the album, ‘What does it mean to be strong in your love,’ answered how the recording process was shaped.
“Asking if you need help, then being compelled to create something to help,” Nanni offered. A moral and spiritual foundation is shared between Lia and Nanni, which is the album’s philosophical backing. The process was not without disagreements but was entirely free of insecurities. This feels particularly necessary when the work is understood as a direct response to suicidal ideation: vivid memories of loss, unexpected deaths, and the feeling of goodbyes never said.
Many stories confront death directly: ego death, hospice care, suicide. Vacillating between triumph, conflict, and loss, I feel a vibration I rarely do from recorded albums, something airy yet simultaneously intense. The sound produced is intimate yet vast, making space… space as in another world, space as in an emptiness. Making space highlights that if something is overwhelmed or overstuffed, nothing resonates. Space makes room for the vibration.
Lewella Spencer’s all-encompassing feature, “Longest Pointed Silence,” highlights the album’s musicality, reckoning with space and time. While the stories are whole, heartbreaking, and galvanizing, the musical compositions cradle the words in their place. The trombone's pitch and slur on “Longest Pointed Silence” bring in a motion that feels out of control but very emotionally intuitive as an entirely improvised piece. Inquisitive but forlorn, echoing further away from us, the soundscape gives us space to digest the story’s impact and apply its energy to our everyday.
Lia’s community, students, artists, and musicians do not aspire to tour or have agents. “We just want what we have now: time with our friends, opportunities to play together. Our professors encourage this, and we see that they love that, too. It’s just what you would normally do anyway, not anything special.” The presentation of this album at its release party in March beautifully encapsulated this. The album and the community of makers around it are intuiting who they are, not just endlessly naming it.
Radical acceptance is necessary when you allow emotion to carry so much weight in impacting audiences who listen to more content than humans in any other period. “The connection between Lia and everyone working on this album was extraordinary,” says Maya Sequira, who the lead creators call “an unsung hero in creating the record.” Maya lends her vocal prowess to several tracks, her voice shapeshifting across a spectrum of ages and styles, but she has also seen and related to the Mbira player out in Union Square who inspired Lia to write “Mbira Player.”
“A really poignant aspect of the album comes from Lia’s interview with him… that he believed the meaning of life was inspiration. He said we are born with inspiration, which we embrace and embody as children and adults; we must dig deeper to find again.” This dedicated, unknown musician and the collective behind If Even One show us that we can fully reorient our thinking around how to live our lives with inspiration taken from this acceptance and exploration of what is out there. Lia says that life and creative practice are best lived in this sequence: “Go outside, breathe, and play.” This sort of resonance between musicians passing on the street, one so rich it can only be applied to fortify permanent shifts in how to think about life, is a resource for collective liberation.
Throughout several of the stories, the lyrics mention the sun. Our sun is radiant from every perspective, even from the other side of the universe. Though the perspectives and instruments change from story to story and track to track, the unity that imbues If Even One makes it a bright star for listeners and artists alike, resonant in it’s story and immersive in feeling.
