We’re living in year so bonkers that the “wow, I didn’t have that on my 2020 bingo card” became dated well before the halfway mark. Head to social media at any given time and the trending topic could be anything from K-Pop fans mobilizing against racism to a (false) rumor that Simon Cowell is dead. So much is happening that this writer just googled “what happened last week” to try to make a joke here and was immediately overwhelmed and gave up. In contrast, Ben Folds took that sense of the overwhelming and wrote a song about it.
The conceit of Folds’ very Foldsian piano ballad is that 2020 feels long (correct) and that part of the reason is that we’re just jamming other years inside it—1918, 1930, 1968, you get the idea. The idea gets summed up quite neatly in with this lyric:
We’re not repeating history, just the parts that sucked
2020, what the actual fuck
Folds has apparently spent his self-isolation time writing new music (and taking requests for covers), and he’s currently working on a new album. One hopes it’ll be released sometime in 2021, which will feel like a mere 14 years from now.
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