"Copypaste", an open letter by Lydia Halloway
The three lead songs on this EP were born just before the virus hit my native New York City, and in some ways they feel a bit like memories of a different life.
On the other hand, what’s strange about this time for me is how familiar it feels. Not on a national scale, of course -- but on a personal scale. As a cancer survivor, and living with chronic illness, there have been so many stretches of my young life without dancing, without restaurants, without travel, without flirtation, without romance. I’ve been wearing a mask on the subway since long before Covid. I have practice with lying in bed for days, staying in sweatpants, and living in my own mind. I have practice with being afraid.
Still, I’ve done some of my best writing while my life was on pause. My debut single, “Dancing To You” is about watching a crush leave a party with another girl. I wrote it in the hospital.
During the current pause, I felt ready for the first time to reference my health in a song. The relationship the song “Bad” describes has been over for years, but the feelings were only just born as a song this summer. After all that time gestating, during quarantine it came down and slapped me in the face, demanding to be written. Since I couldn’t go to the studio, my boyfriend converted a basement shower stall into a vocal booth and I got straight to recording.
“Copypaste” is so much a reflection on my life leading up to the pandemic - the title refers to my habit of re-reading old texts, screenshots and unsent letters in my notes app and lifting lyrics out of them. It’s a way of keeping myself honest. At the same time, the stillness of this period, like the stillnesses I’ve faced before, allows me to step back and capture the emotional echoes of events that might otherwise be too quiet to hear.
I don’t know what is going to happen when we hit play on our lives again. I hope the songs on “copypaste” can provide the soundtrack to the city I love and the adventures it holds. But in the meantime, I hope they can act as a different kind of city guide -- a guide to the strange chambers of our own hearts. I’ve loved the time spent wandering mine.
- Lydia