I still can’t seem to get the right words together for how I feel about This New Normal. Like other strange and scary times I’ve been through, I probably won’t make sense of any of my feelings until months or even years from now. In this moment, I will try to just be grateful for all the blessings I have — I’m healthy, my whole family is healthy, I’m employed, I live with a loving partner — and try not to overthink the fact that my brain feels like the static fuzz of an old TV. And let’s not dive too deep into my psyche anyway, because I cracked open this blog today to tell you about Johnnie Frierson.

Thanks to the robots at Spotify, way back in November of last year (aka The Before Times), this song popped up on my Discover Weekly playlist:

This kind of music isn’t usually my jam — it sounds unfinished and there’s some God talk — but I was drawn into his beautiful voice and the almost silly simplicity of the lyrics, not to mention the album “art” that seems to be a photocopy of a photocopy of a portrait. So of course I was like “who the hell is this guy and how did this album end up on Spotify?”

Turns out he was a gospel and soul singer from Memphis who spent much of his youth singing with R&B groups and co-writing songs for other artists, but he mostly focused on having a family, working regular old day jobs, and living an average life. But this is my favorite part (transcribed from Spotify):

In the early ‘90s he hosted a gospel show on local radio station WEVL Memphis, and sometime in the early part of the decade he became known as Khafele Ajanaku. It was under this name that he began releasing music again. Recording himself with just a simple tape recorder, he began to self-release cassettes, selling them at local festivals and corner stores around Memphis. The spare but upbeat and soulful songs were religious by nature, with Frierson accompanying himself live on electric guitar. His daugher Keesha refers to this period as one of her father’s most difficult times, as he continued to suffer from what was most likely post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by his time in Vietnam. About five years after Frierson’s death in April 2010, his homemade cassettes were discovered in a Memphis thrift store by local music aficionado Jameson Sweiger, who brought them to the attention of reissue label Light in the Attic. In 2016, they gave Frierson’s unique songs a deluxe reissue under the name Have You Been Good to Yourself, posthumously plucking him out of obscurity.

So it’s only by magical circumstance, a guy finding some cool cassettes in a thrift store, that Frierson’s homemade recordings were released, and that the song made its way to my ears. I love stories like this.

I found myself listening to this song more and more after that November discovery, and I’ve replayed it a lot recently. He’s like a gently nagging relative, checking in with me and asking me the obvious questions that I want to ignore. Despite the religious overtones, his basic message is universal: take care of yourself. Get some sleep. Eat some good food. Get some exercise. Be good to other people. And yes, live a righteous life, whatever that means to you.

I highly recommend checking out the whole album on Spotify and maybe even buying a copy from the label that reissued it. It’ll take you away to another time and place, which is a nice experience these days.

And in the meantime, it’s OK if you can’t seem to write or read or do push-ups or learn German or whatever big project you said you were going to do two months ago. This is a messed up time, and you don’t need to emerge from it with six-pack abs or a full-length screenplay. Take care of yourself now and worry about the non-essentials later. (And know that I am writing this as much to myself as I am to you.)