Pleasant Enough Is Not Enough: "Look Into Your Own Mind" by Julianna Barwick

Drumming Upstream 38

Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 441 songs to go!

This week I stepped away from the kit to consider “Look Into Your Own Mind” by singer and ambient composer Julianna Barwick. What did I discover when I followed the song’s instructions? Find out below!

Side A

“Look Into Your Own Mind”

By Julianna Barwick

Nepenthe

Released on August 20th, 2013

Liked on March 11th, 2016

We last saw Louisiana born singer and ambient composer Julianna Barwick in the early days of the summer of 2022 when I wrote about her song “One Half”, off of her 2013 album Nepenthe (see DU#11). The subject of today’s letter, “Look Into Your Own Mind” could not be a more appropriate follow up to that entry. Not only is “Look Into Your Own Mind” from the same album as “One Half”, it is in fact the very next track literally picking up where “One Half” trailed off. Placed this way on Nepenthe’s track order, “Look Into Your Own Mind” is something of a come down after the emotional fireworks of “One Half”. The track has even less to grab on to than its predecessor. Barwick gives us no words to contemplate, hardly even a melody to sing, and, like “One Half”, no drums to learn. Luckily the song’s title doubles as an instruction.

One benefit of writing about two songs from the same album is that I still have all of my old research, so before taking Barwick’s advice and gazing inward I decided to take one last glance outward at my old notes. One quote from an interview with The Skinny jumped out to me. “My favorite musical combination is sad and pretty.” Barwick said in 2013, “But I guess it doesn’t always have to be sad, it can just be pretty.” When I’d read this line while researching “One Half” I hadn’t made much of it, but this time around my brain couldn’t stop chewing on Barwick’s clarification. “It doesn’t always have to be sad” could have just been a statement of preference for using both major and minor keys at the time, but a decade later it felt like a personal challenge. Why is it that I have only been able to read sadness in “Look Into Your Own Mind”? What is holding me back from accepting it as just pretty?