This is How it Starts to Move Again

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #182. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.

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My 9-year-old struggles with school. There are happy days and soul-crushing ones. As his parents, we’re doing our best but it isn’t easy. Most of our answers seem to be at least half-wrong.

One of hardest parts of being a parent is reaching out for advice from your own parents – and realizing they don’t have the solution, either.

Recently, though, my dad recounted his own issues in school. To cope, he told me, he’d hide away and decompress when he got home. Escaping his classwork, his classmates, his teachers, his parents and his younger brothers, he’d find a private place, dim the lights and listen to his records.

Inspired by this, I surprised my 9-year-old by picking him up early from his afterschool program one day. I told him about his grandpa. He was comforted knowing he isn’t the first kid to face this, and, more importantly, not the first one in the family.

“Maybe,” he said, “I got it from him.”

Having just started to learn the flute in band class, he was also interested in my dad’s time-tested form of music therapy. So, I told him I’d ordered a vinyl copy of a record I’d fallen in love with. It had recently arrived in the mail but I hadn’t put it on yet. Did he want to listen to it with me?

“Sure,” he said.

The record, “How Will I Live Without a Body?” is the third – and the best, to date – by Loma, a side project of Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg, Cross Record’s Emily Cross and musician/recording engineer Dan Duszynski. It’s my 2024 Album of the Year, and it’s quiet yet complex, with field recordings of animals and oceans and voicemail, and instrumentation best categorized as rock, but with snippets of strings and jazzy horns that at times feels meticulously placed and other times improvisational.

A quarter century after Radiohead won this award by naming an album after the first cloned child, who they surmised might already be alive – “Kid A” – “How Will I Live Without a Body?” was named not by some corporeal entity but by AI. Meiburg & Co. used snippets of poetry generated from prompts they gave to a bot created by legendary artist Laurie Anderson. Among those snippets was the album’s eventual title – as enigmatic and mysterious but also as organic and deeply human as the music within.

It’s far from the radio-friendly Imagine Dragons hits my kids usually want to hear, but perfect for a close listen in the dark. I admit, it was probably an overly ambitious choice, but it seemed a fit for a first stab at this exercise.

I showed my 9-year-old the funky marbled vinyl and handed him the sleeve. He looked at the cover and the dust jacket, and matched the symbols in the artwork with the song they appeared next to on the lyrics sheet. We wondered what the connections might be, and he imagined the leafy stems of the plant on the cover tangling into the distance as it extended beyond its cardboard square.

I pressed play. He put his head on my shoulder and we listened. He identified some of the instruments we heard. A violin. A piano. Some brass. The soft, repetitive marching sound of the drums on “Arrhythmia”. He seemed to be enjoying it and sounded earnest when he soon told me he was.

“How Will I Live Without a Body?” is not a record you can fully grasp in one sitting, whether you’re nine years old or 46. Loma, like so many of my favorite bands, grows on you.

Cross’ voice is lovely, but the lyrics are dreamy and easy to let drift away. Still, listening with my son, in our decompression session, a few lines resonated more than usual. Like: “Can I trust how I feel every day? Is the world what I think it to be?” Or: “I can’t live with this feeling anymore.”

I knew he wouldn’t have the stamina for more than a few songs, but I really wanted to make it to track 5, “How It Starts.” It’s a remarkable song, and I wanted to talk to him a little about it. To note how the piano rises repetitively, how the music starts softly, stops momentarily, then kicks it up just enough of a notch to punctuate the lyric at the heart of the song – eight goosebump-raising words like a recipe for rebirth:

“This is how it starts to move again.”

By the time “How It Starts” had ended, my 9-year-old wasn’t curled up next to me anymore. Instead, he was staring out the window, restless and ready to ditch his dad for something else.

I turned the music off and watched him leave the room. I wondered if we would do it again. Had it helped at all? What could I have done differently?

I decided to just let it be. It had felt less than half-wrong in the moment, so I sat a few seconds in the silence, felt the breeze through the window, and took the win.

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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.