About two months ago, I wrote about a new album by an artist I’d first heard of long ago and then somehow lost track of for years (twice, even, thanks to the weird way the internet works). This past weekend, while I was cleaning in preparation for having guests over, I finally turned away from the new album and worked my way through the band’s entire discography. I played all but one of them on heavy repeat for two whole days. I listened to so many Bug Hunter songs that the band skyrocketed to the top of my “most listened to” on Tidal and I wound up even downloading the albums so I could listen to them on the app while running my errands and without spending my entire month’s budget of cell data. A lot of the songs resonated with me, some of them catching my attention even more than the latest album did (which joined the rotation on my second day of cleaning) because of the vivid imagery. As a result of all this heavy listening and spending so much time doing manual labor that did not require much mental effort, I’ve got a lot of thoughts to share about all of Bug Hunter’s music.
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A New Favorite Artist Six Years In The Making
Years ago, (no more than six according to what I’ve been able to find, despite it feeling like much longer ago), I heard this strange song about a person on a plane watching someone beside them write an email while they waited for the plane to fill up and taxi away from the gate. It was interesting, since it was fairly long for such a light song and it felt like such an incredibly human experience to immortalize in song. It somehow walked the line between fantastical and entirely real in a way that left me wondering if the performer was drawing on a lived experience or if they’d made the whole thing up. I didn’t really keep track of the song and it faded from my consciousness until a couple years later when I found a video circulating around Imgur that was someone’s senior project, an animated music video of a cover of the song that changed the gender of some of the characters in the story. It was a lovely video and it reminded me of the song I’d first heard a couple years prior. This time I looked up the artist for the original song and learned that the song, Dear McCracken by Bug Hunter, was just one part of a larger collection of music, available via YouTube videos and various music platforms. I am pretty sure I made a note to myself to listen to more of his music, but this was the summer I separated from my family and I lost track of a lot of things that summer, this artist included.
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