Hey JBrekkie, I think I named your album?

An ode to Bandcamp and the power of coincidence.

There are few internet relics of my past that encapsulate the year 2013 quite like my Bandcamp profile.

Before the power of algorithm, before music taste became something a series of neural networks could predict, I would quite literally type “emo” into the search bar of Bandcamp, clicking on every single band that popped up and listening to see if I liked them. This was a tedious move to find new bands, but one I had pride in: it showed that I had done the homework. Eventually, I had purchased enough music on the site to create a profile. This tomb to my DIY phase still exists, and when I look at it today, it reminisces a shrine to my 20-year-old self.

Embellished with the name of my old Tumblr moniker, an Instax picture of me holding flowers and a knife, and a banner featuring background artwork from Adventure Time, I have never left my early twenties. I can still see myself in an alt-girl prime, typing the biography on a baby pink Target bedspread: “cute but deadly.”

Save for my ex’s EP (shoutout to Davis!), the most interesting piece of this old profile remains a review of Japanese Breakfast’s early album American Sound.

It was 2016. I was in a debilitating depression due to flunking out of my last semester of college. I had no job and no job prospects. I was on probation. I had just suffered a breakup and was living in an apartment I could not afford. In this liminal space, this limbo of feeling completely lost, I turned to a musician an old roommate had put me onto years earlier: Michelle Zauner, who had recently moved from her band Little Big League to the name Japanese Breakfast.

Listening to American Sound, Zauner posted earlier versions of songs she redid in later albums, but they have a fuzzier, warmer tone more associated with bedroom-style indie pop instead of the polish from an established recording booth. I would listen to this in the summer Chicago rain, watching droplets fall off my windshield going back and forth from a job interview, the tow lot after getting a boot on my car, wherever. As my tires rolled beneath my feet, the words of my favorite would put me in a trance-like state: “you should try to do as little harm as you can to the woman that loves you.”

It soothed me like a lullaby.

After downloading the album, I was so in love with the haunted guitars, the ethereal quality of Zauner’s voice, that I wrote the following review:

“soft sounds from another planet that enchant you. great music for a rainy day
favorite track: The Woman Who Loves You”

After a summer of rain and tears, I left it at that. I had completely forgotten about the profile at all.