The Weird Girls Post #1
Greetings from Fort Pet, West Virginia + Bandcamp Day Redux
Greetings from Fort Pet, West Virginia
Welcome to the first issue of the Weird Girls Post, written by me, Mariana Timony, music writer, music person, social media producer for Bandcamp, and recent self-exile from New York City, currently surviving the apocalypse in Appalachia. This is my newsletter about all of that.
I’m typing this from the living room of a doublewide trailer on a mountain in rural West Virginia. I arrived here on Friday, March 13th, after a series of escalating panic attacks over the unchecked spread of COVID-19 in the city led me to pack a single suitcase and peace the fuck out of New York on the 6:45am train from Penn Station to Thurmond, West Virginia—an actual ghost town, you can look it up.
The train ride is 14 hours long, runs three times a week, and goes through four states. I’ve taken it before. I was picked up in Thurmond by my friend Erika, a West Virginia native who I know from several lives ago, from when we were both DIY punks in California. She’s a musician and a teacher. I visited Erika here for two weeks last November. We joked then about buying a house in the backwoods and making it cute while also preparing for societal collapse. We would have a YouTube series and a band! Now, I live with her and another cool chick on a horse farm in Fayette County, surrounded by mountains. There are three girls, three horses, three dogs, two cats, and two guns. We call it Fort Pet. I feel lucky to be here.
I’ve named this newsletter The Weird Girls Post after the title of the book I’m working on, The Book of Weird Girls. It’s a book about music writing and what it means to be a music person. You can read more about it here. West Virginia actually plays an important role in the book’s narrative as it was a crisis of conscience over the meaninglessness of modern music journalism (I know, I know) that partially inspired my first trip here last fall. Writing about mountain life + music life feels like a natural extension of what I was doing with Weird Girls so…it’s a whole thing, is what I’m saying.
The Weird Girls Post will still mostly be about music because music is my favorite thing. It will also be about life at Fort Pet i.e. pictures of horses, mountains, farm shit, backwoods adventures, etc. It will have no format and will be sent whenever I feel like it because I don’t follow rules. The state motto of West Virginia is Montani Semper Liberi, which means “Mountaineers Are Always Free,” and that’s the sort of energy I’m trying to carry through here and also in life. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll consider subscribing, if only for the lovely horse photos.
xo MT
Fort Pet, WV
Country Roads, etc.
Bandcamp Day Redux
I love music so much it’s embarrassing sometimes.
More than once I’ve found myself in a somewhat awkward situation when talking to someone about a band or anything music-related, only to realize halfway through the conversation that I am sermonizing with all the passion of a convert about something that doesn’t matter to 99% of the world.
Maybe it’s harsh to say that music doesn’t matter to the majority of people, but I think anyone who has seriously been part of the music scene (for lack of a better term) knows there is a divide between the casual listener and, well, music people. It’s the difference between enjoying music and, say, a love for music being your guiding ethos and the way you make sense of the world. For some of us, music is more than entertainment. It’s a community. It’s a place to belong in a lonely world.
That’s one major reason why Bandcamp’s COVID-19 fundraising day was such a special experience for me. It happened exactly one week after I arrived in West Virginia, and my brain was still processing the after effects of having made the instinctual snap decision to abandon New York City and my life there. I felt scared and alone and far away from anything familiar. Yet, sitting at the table at Fort Pet that Friday morning, trying my best to stay on top of the avalanche of positive messages for and about Bandcamp that were pouring in on all channels, the grip of fear began to release a bit.
While social media work can be soul-crushingly bleak, handling Bandcamp’s socials on fundraiser day was like being plugged into a good vibes machine. I felt so fortunate to witness, in real time, the overwhelming support from literally everyone ($4.3 million!!) on the timeline. From artists touched to tears at the level of support for their music, to fans enthusiastically posting purchasing recommendations, to the chorus of people cheering on the Bandcamp servers as they creaked under the weight of all the traffic, to watching the total dollar amount tick up and up and up and up on our internal counter—I loved it all. These were my people. The experience flooded me with deep sense of connection to music (and therefore humanity) and sparked a much-needed sense of optimism about the future. But it was validating in another way, too.
I often think about something Corin Tucker said to me when I was interviewing her and Tracey Sawyer on the occasion of Heavens to Betsy’s These Monsters Are Real getting a reissue that didn’t make it into the final piece. We were talking about touring in the pre-internet era, and Corin mentioned how crazy it seemed that bands once would tour the country with phone numbers written on scraps of paper, relying on the kindness of people they’d never met in places they’d never been, based on nothing but a shared love of music.
“There really was an International Pop Underground,” she said with a bit of wonder in her voice, as if speaking of something mythical. “It really did exist.”
It still does.
Here are a few Tweets from Bandcamp Day that I particularly enjoyed:
