A letter on Loss and Friendship

Remembering Montana Levy

Hello. I originally planned on a fun, semi-educational post about what I wish I had known or at least put into practice when I first started drumming. One of my big projects for 2022 involves learning how to play a ridiculous number of songs on drums so I figured it would be a good idea to return to the basics.

I will eventually get around to that project and that fun, semi-educational post. But right now I don’t have the mental wherewithal to write about drumming.

Bellows, L to R: Montana Levy, Jack Greenleaf, Ian Cory, Frank Meadows, Oliver Kalb. Shot by Daniel Ott.

Last week my friend Montana Levy passed away. She was 29.

Montana and I met in college in Chicago. She had befriended my friend and musical collaborator Jack Greenleaf before either of them had started classes. I don’t remember exactly how we met, but it must have been through Jack. When Jack started releasing music under the name Sharpless he asked Montana to sing and asked me to drum. We got to know each other through playing music, eating cuban sandwiches once a week for lunch when our class schedules lined up right, and partying like idiots in the way that only people in their early 20’s can.

Montana was from New Jersey and embodied the best parts of whatever conception you might have about women from the Garden State. She spoke and dressed loudly, she suffered no fool and took zero shit from anyone. She loved Bruce Springsteen in a way that made the rest of my Brooklynite friends who had started wearing jean jackets and talking up Born To Run look like absolute posers. She loved Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, and Amy Winehouse. She was an early champion of Haim and made sure that “Falling” and “The Wire” were staples on the playlist for every party our friends threw.

She was an amazing singer. While the rest of my cohort, myself included, were trying to turn our voices into lock picks, her voice kicked the door straight off its hinges.

Montana was a master of organization, planning, and communication. Not just professionally but personally. During the lockdown she quickly built up a fleet of daily rituals for our group chat. She checked in every morning, asked us to share our dinner plans or our drink of choice each night, and helped us maintain a routine trivia night each weekend. When in the wake of her passing I learned that she had been doing the same for several other group chats I wasn’t surprised but I was still awed. No one seemed to have more time to give to her friends and no one I’ve known had so many friends.

She also had time for herself. In the decade that I knew her she got really into baking, she picked up photography, she got really serious about SoulCycle, became an avid reader. One of our last one-on-one conversations was about how taking our physical health seriously did a lot for our mental health too. That night she invited me to come to a cycle class with her. I said would and then I never did.

There’s so much I wish I had done and said. I wish I had moved back to New York when she and Jack did so I could have stayed in Sharpless. I wish I had asked her more about tennis, a sport I’ve always been a casual fan of that she was an absolute freak for. I wish I had made so many plans to catch up, eat something expensive, and laugh my ass off at her bone dry sense of humor. I wish I had told her how cool I thought she was instead of being intimidated by how unsentimental and practical she seemed.

Told Slant @Felixixix666

I love you forever Montana

I’ve spent the last few days in a fog, alternating between a magnified version of the holiday season emotional numbness I’d already been experiencing, a hollow denial where my life continues mostly as per usual, and nerve wracking sadness.

I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve never lost a friend this close to me before. Death in my life has either been peripheral or of the slow-and-steady variety. I guess the consequence of being lucky is that eventually your luck runs out.

One of the many things that’s been gobsmacking me is how wide the gulf is between what I’m feeling and what the rest of world looks like. When I step out to grab lunch I keep expecting to see from strangers the look of empathy and “we’re in this together”-ness that you get in the wake of a national tragedy. In the days leading up to her funeral I felt a pang of shock every time I opened up social media and didn’t see her name as a trending topic. How can something that feels this huge and this painful not be the only thing everyone is talking about?

If I’m lucky in any other respect its that I’ve got a lot of people in my life who I can honestly say that I love and who also loved Montana. It has hurt in ways that I cannot describe to feel this loss ricochet across her social circle. But the silver lining is that I have not felt alone in my grief. This weekend when the news of her death hit the web that gulf I described before shortened just enough. Friends and strangers, in and outside of the music industry, shared their love and memories, reposted some of her best tweets, resurfaced old footage of Sharpless killing it, and more. Sharing stories, hugging hard enough to choke out a rhino, and not being the only one in the room crying counts for a lot.

So in the vague spirit of the advice offering that I intended for this week’s letter, tell the people you care about that you do in fact care about them. Maybe answer that text or email that you keep forgetting to get around to. Make someone dinner. Enjoy a beveragino. Listen to Bruce Springsteen as loudly as you physically can endure. Call your most hated enemy a bitch and a poser.

I know all of this stuff is a gazillion times more rote and cliche than even the bog-standard drumming advice I planned to write about, but just do it for me if you could.

Thanks for reading. Talk soon.