Past Penpals

I received a lovely surprise thanks to social media yesterday morning: an old email “penpal” reached out to my Facebook account to ask if I was the Michael xxxxx they used to exchange emails with. Of course, I recognized her name right away as Kate (“K8”) from around the 00s, back when the internet was both a much more friendly place, as well as being quite a bit more “wild west” in feel.

It was the era of making connections, the creeps and trolls hadn’t found a foothold in cyberspace yet, and MySpace was still the hotbed of the music scene. If I come off more as a “blogger” in the flavor of that time period, it’s because that’s where I cut my teeth on blogging, before everyone had to monetize every little thing they did, and influencers were still a daydream. We were largely an online journaling community still, the precursor to the oversharing of social media, which is why some of us learned our lessons very early on and are somewhat circumspect about what details we share online (all the while going to great lengths to sound like we aren’t being circumspect).

One of those sites I visited back then was less of an interactive community, and more of a genre-focused site for early streaming of bands seeking exposure. Think BandCamp’s granddad. This site, Auralgasms, was dedicated to female singers and ethereal-sounding music. While I enjoyed most of the snippets that I played online (after five minutes of buffering to listen to a 3-minute song without stuttering), one stood out to me as a very cool band. People who have been following my writing for a while may recall that I’ve mentioned the band in the past, called Ether Aura. After hearing their offering, All Doves Grey, I was immediately hooked by the singer’s voice combined with the shoegaze sound.

Their whole first release, an EP by the same name of five songs was available on Auralgasms, and I immediately glommed onto them like a thirsty man in a desert (music, for me, largely seemed to die at the end of the nineties).

And being the time that it was, where everything seemed permissible, I shot out an email to their contact email and let them know that their sound rocked my world. I didn’t expect a response, didn’t ask for one. I just wanted a small indie band to know that they had an instant fan.

Much to my surprise, Kate responded a few days later. She was blown away by my praise because, Well, mostly our gigs are attended by friends and coworkers and same with our EP sales coming from the same people. Are you from Detroit?

I told her that I was from Minneapolis, and she was floored by the news. They’d broken out of the Detroit bubble, if only by one poor soul (that they knew about).

We started trading emails back and forth. If I recall correctly, I was cautious, not wanting to come off as being “weird” and fanboi-ish, so it was mostly her initiating it at first. But we roughly shared 2-3 emails a week for a spell, some long and some short. She would send me early demos and a song not everyone had heard from their first EP, a cover of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me by The Smiths.

To make a long story short, we eventually slipped away in our friendship. I couldn’t put my finger on the exact cause, but I suspect it was that I was still burned out on folk-oriented music after my own episode with a complete blow-up with my former music partner (as a folk duo), and their band had changed names and migrated over to an alt-country sound. I had a hard time getting exited about their new endeavor, and it probably showed. I was more interested in the shoegaze sound than in revisiting folk/country. Kate’s voice was still stellar, but the overall sound was not where my head was at for the time.

And, I’m sure that my increasing incoherence while my alcoholism of the time became more pronounced did nothing to help the situation. I did not get sober until well after we stopped exchanging emails.

But yesterday, while doing my weekly or so check for messages on Facebook, Kate had reached out again to me and it was, awkward, but nice to hear about what she’s been up to.

Something to think about if you have such opportunities. You might make someone’s morning if you run into them after a long spell and say “Hi, I didn’t forget you existed and I am hoping you are the person I think you are.”

Of course, sometimes that bridge is also better left burned (I can think of a handful of cases where it would not serve anyone to rebuild a bridge), but this was not one of those cases. I really appreciate Kate’s message in ways that I have a hard time expressing.