I think music is as codified as emotions are codified. Sometimes I just want to listen to Townes Van Zandt, sometimes Debussy, sometimes Kendrick, sometimes you, sometimes Solange, sometimes Television… there’s this universe of potential feeling, the music that best exemplifies a given mood (or even creates a new mood entirely, like how newly coined words enable the existence of certain states of mind) is what finds an audience. I get bogged down in thinking there is a “right” music to make at a given cultural moment, thinking influenced by retroactive-revisionist teleologies of art / music history, but to me there is a always a vast expanse of feeling being explored by everyone engaged in music and it’s all valid in that it defines a feeling or creates a new one, for whatever group or groups have their ears turned on that music. Like the newest Phil Elverum song creates a feeling that didn’t exist before, even if it’s musically not innovative, by virtue of it being a direct expression of his life experience that feels honest, and that one can either relate to or recognize as true, in the same way that the spoken word and voice manipulation on “Keep Your Name” conjures something fresh, suggests and depicts a personal experience in a novel way. Like they are worlds apart musically but I’d respond to both as a listener b/c they invent a new feeling and let me feel it by proxy.