The Maccabees : One Week // One Band
Five years ago, I wrote for One Week // One Band (OWOB), a music blog over at Tumblr. Their about page explains how the entire thing works:
Every week, one trusted music aficionado showcases a band or artist they feel particularly passionate about. Any artist from any country or decade will do — no rules and no canon. Some of those bands you might know very well; some of them you might have never heard of.
In either case, we hope that you follow us along to find out what music means to people, to encounter under-appreciated musical gems and to discover new angles to old favourites. We want to provide a space for an in-depth discussion of why we like the music that we like, where it places in our life and the wider web of musical references, and to chronicle the connections we feel towards it.
2016 is such a busy year. From David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, Anton Yelchin, and if that number of deaths don’t mean anything, you may include Prince in that long list. Aside from that, Trump was elected President of the USA. EJK started to feel more at your doorsteps the moment Duterte stepped in as President of the Philippines. Syria conflicts, the ISIS. Brexit. If that wasn’t enough NoKor started testing their nuclear weapons. A ton more if you ask me. But that year almost sounded like a bad one the moment it set its foot. Making 2015 a lot better of a year as compared to any years before 2020. I am not even talking about the troubles I’ve gone myself into after that year.
By 2016, one of my favourite band called it a day. Or said goodnight. Whatever that alludes to. In this same month, six years after. It felt like the final nail in that coffin for me to call that year the worst. (2020 kicked it off that list by the end of the decade)
So before the year ended, I kind of thought why not write something about the band. I stopped writing about my top ten music every year before that, which I considered my best pieces in my Tumblr. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Tumblr was a big thing around that time. It was so famous that you never need to go anywhere from finding a multitude of Lana Del Ray to sad bois club to yaoi and yes porn. It was the interweb for everything.
Personally, it also felt like I am way more hedonistic during these days. Where each commute to work is used to listen to my favourite podcasts and songs; weekends spent on getting drunk and finding a good spot to hang out. I even went to work with a pretty painful hungover just not to miss a day off work (dude, I am broke af). And I am 25, few years after that felt like a burden tbh but being 27 is for another entry.
One day, I decided to message Hendrik from OWOB asking if I can try to write about their break up and how I dearly love the band and reminisce the moments I’ve had with their songs. It honestly felt like a close friendship with the band that them puting a dot as a group felt like someone or something died in me. Before the year ended, Hendrik came back to me to schedule the entries and I had mine scheduled somewhere around March 2017. I never thought it’ll fall on the same dates I am going to be travelling Thailand and Singapore. No biggie. I can bring my laptop with me and I can still post things around. (LOL).
It was a burden, to start with. I never thought I’ll have another thing to think about right next to a backpacking trip. I mustered through, as just any other troubles are, but totally had me thinking now when I schedule something. 2017 was still a better year to travel, to be fair. Although there already were a number of ridiculous stories about travelling in the SouthEast Asia by then.
Anyway, things went well, I am able to post things about The Maccabees on OWOB and until now I am still happy of what I have done because of that blog. After being declined from almost all writing pitches I made in 2016 related to music, this one stood out to be the only thing I wrote that made me think of pushing through no matter the odds.
Five years since, I am still nowhere near where I want to. No longer writing long string of hashtags or SEO keywords, no longer concerned about the likes or the engagements, or the readership of anything I wrote, but still the same me. The same loser who once asked magazines to let me write for them since I am going to see Sigur Ros live. The same person who geeked over BadBadNotGood one summer but how dare me miss seeing them live.
I am going to post some of them I wrote over OWOB on my consecutive posts, so you may also cuss or forgive me for it. Either way, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing for one of my favourites that until now I hope they do some sort of reuinion and I hope they get to realise how they touched a number of lives outside their locality.
