On moderate irony poisoning

And its effects on my creative life, and how I'm fighting it

Hello, and happy 2024!

Lightning-fast 2023 recap: I played a lot of shows with a lot of people. (Also did some recording and teaching and whatnot, not to mention lived a rich personal life that is mostly not present in my online persona.) Thank you Aoife O’Donovan, Rosier, Kris Delmhorst, Dawn Landes, Zoe Guigueno, Darlingside, the Brother Brothers, Noah Fishman, Lissa Schneckenburger, Carolyn Kendrick, and the Mountain Goats for hiring me to play music with you! I learned an entire show or tour’s worth of repertoire for eight different artists in 2023. It was so much work!! But I love to do it!! I’ll admit, however, that I am hoping to spend less time learning other people’s music in 2024. I want to play more shows with perhaps a smaller number of artists, and — I dare say — stop being a fucking wimp and start working on my own music again.

So with that in mind, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about my own resistance to writing songs. It’s something I’ve never quite been able to crack, and I’ve written about it at length here and in my previous column for No Depression and on a website called Twitter dot com.

When I write songs, or even think about writing songs, almost immediately a part of my brain (which I’ve often referred to as “the gremlin”) starts rolling its eyes. This is stupid, this is cheesy, this is like a million other songs, this is too sincere, this is hopelessly pedestrian, this is not COOL, this is not saying anything interesting or unique or new, on and on it goes. I know that the gremlin is trying to protect me from risking vulnerability. How utterly banal! Like, that’s it? Something that stupid and obvious works on me? Humiliating.

I know I’m not alone in this, which is why I’m writing about it in a public forum and sending it to your email inbox. But I just realized that there’s another factor at work here, a powerful engine for the gremlin. And now that I’m writing it out… Well, like most epiphanies, it seems so patently obvious that I can’t believe I didn’t put it together before: It’s the fucking internet.

And by that I don’t mean that the internet, that endless vending machine of dopamine and distraction, diverts my time and attention away from writing songs (though that is of course true). It’s more insidious than that.

“Irony poisoning” is a term that entered the cultural lexicon sometime within the last decade. A 2018 NYT newsletter sums it up in this way: “Under what we might call the soft form of irony poisoning, heavy social media users become a little bit too engrossed in the ironic detachment that defines online humor and discourse.” (They contrast this with the “hard” form of irony poisoning, in which people make extremely taboo jokes for shock value — jokes about hardcore white supremacy, for example — and then the jokes go on for long enough that they start to curdle into sincere beliefs. “Hard” irony poisoning is not at all what I’m talking about here, though it is certainly a real phenomenon.)

So, yeah, I have spent the last several years slightly overdosing on “the ironic detachment that defines online humor and discourse.” My theory is that there are three main factors contributing to the existence of irony poisoning:

1. Social media is a better platform for jokes and memes than for serious discourse, and what’s more, it juxtaposes jokes and memes alongside attempts at serious discourse in a way that presents them as having equal value

2. The world is, obviously, a capitalist hellscape, and we have access to more information about the myriad ways in which it is a capitalist hellscape than any previous generation, and humor and detachment help protect us from fully confronting the depth of that hellishness

3. We, the online, are completely overloaded with information and stimuli and POSTS

More on this overload: If you spend enough time on social media, especially Twitter, you start developing a subconscious understanding that everything you could say has already been said, and every thought you could have has already been thought, so many times by so many people that it starts to feel impossible to say anything sincerely. And not only that, but you can anticipate the ways in which people might criticize or cringe at the things you say, so you preemptively phrase everything in a way that communicates that self-awareness. You start feeling the impulse to cloak everything in a layer of detachment, humor, and/or self-deprecation. You can’t say anything remotely honest or vulnerable without putting “lol” on either side of it. Your awareness starts operating on multiple levels, where everything you post starts to feel like a meta-commentary on the idea of “posting.” Everything becomes capital-A Absurd.

Those of you reading this who are less Online than me might have no clue what I’m talking about; those of you who are more Online than me might be reading this like “uh, yeah. no SHIT dude.” But I do think a lot of this operates on a subterranean level. We absorb this ironic detachment without necessarily thinking critically or even consciously about it. Or sometimes we do become conscious of it, and we know it doesn’t serve us, but we keep posting through it because we are addicted to the dopamine that social media was designed to provide.

So I was aware of the concept of irony poisoning, and that I had a moderate case. I knew I was deeply, self-destructively critical of my own songs. But until very recently, I had not drawn a direct line between those things! And now that I have drawn that line, I can never un-see it. And seeing it, naturally, is the first step to dismantling it. Second step, obviously, is to get the hell away from Twitter, which I have now done. (And I do realize that it’s not technically called Twitter anymore, but the name “X” sounds incredibly stupid and the name “Twitter” is imbued with such a rich history and Elon Musk is a clown… no, sorry, I shan’t be calling it “X.” I refuse)

Basically, irony poisoning makes me look at my own songs with the same soulless ironic detachment that seeps through online culture like toxic chemicals in soil. (And frankly, though I’m not going to talk about this here, it poisons our interpersonal relationships too.) I have a hard time shaking this feeling that if I were going to record or perform my songs, I would need to insert a caveat before and after every song saying “i know this is cringe lmaoooo”. Which, obviously, is insane. You can’t do that. It’s cowardly and narcissistic and disrespectful to, like, the entire concept of art.

I think it’s good to have high standards. I’m not going to release anything that I don’t feel genuinely, deeply proud of. But you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as my mom says. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if everything I have to say, musically or otherwise, has already been said by someone else. There are eight billion people currently on earth and approximately 105 billion who have ever lived. Of course everything has already been said. If something is true for you, you can still say it. And for the people around you, or the people who like your specific way of saying things, it will mean something because it came from you, specifically.

So, all that is to say, if all goes according to plan you WILL get a solo record from me sometime in the not-too-distant future. And if you have read all of this, you are presumably someone who is interested in that. So, big huge mega thanks. Love you. Keep reading for some other bits of news and things, including a solo show.

xo,

Isa

A portrait of the author somewhere deep in Idaho on a recent tour with old pal Laura Cortese

Other Bits of News

• SOLO SHOW ALERT, I am playing a solo show on February 9th at Prism Analog in Portland! Aisha Burns and Small Sur will be playing too, and I’m excited to hear them. Will be test driving some new songs, so please come. I cannot for the life of me find a ticket link online but please do not let that stop you from attending.

• I’ll be teaching private fiddle and guitar lessons in February and March! If you’re interested in taking a lesson with me, just reply to this email and I’ll send you more information.

• I’m doing some more touring with the Mountain Goats! As of now I’ll be on all of the “full band” dates through June.

• Immediately upon returning from Mountain Goats tour in June, I will head to Lake Winnipesaukee to teach at MILES OF MUSIC CAMP! This camp has been a beloved and formative musical space for me over the years, and I’m excited to return alongside many other talented instructors. Registration is open now!

• On a whim, I recently posted a video of myself working my way through playing my friend Sami Braman’s stunning fiddle tune “Weevils in the Grits” on electric guitar. To my shock and delight, a bunch of other people followed suit! You can see all of the electric renditions of the tune by going to Sami’s Instagram and clicking on the highlight titled “WEEVILS ON 🎸”.

I Made You A Playlist

• I make a lot of playlists, mostly just to keep track of what I’ve been listening to, and occasionally I clean them up a bit and arrange them in a pleasing order and share them with other people. Here’s my latest one, featuring (among many other things) an Avril Lavigne song whose chorus I find genuinely emotionally devastating.

• And yeah, I use Tidal!!! Once you switch to Tidal you remember that music sounds better when it’s not compressed to hell! And when artists are paid marginally more fairly for their work!

Other Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately

• Rereading Sally Rooney’s novels in order, which is feeling a bit like time traveling back to commune with my 23-year-old self and then time traveling forward through the rest of my twenties and into my early thirties where I now find myself

• My sister’s homemade Rice Krispies treats with brown butter and salt

• Rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer

• Just actually going for a stupid little non-negotiable walk every day!!!

• The Opal app, which is actually helping reduce my Instagram usage more than many other strategies I’ve tried

• This conversation between Sally Rooney and fellow novelist Isabella Hammad on the role of writers and artists in the current atrocities being perpetuated by the Israeli government against the people of Palestine, and on the clarity of language and thought that is necessary to even attempt to make sense of something this senseless. It feels absurd to even mention this in my newsletter, because everything else I say here actually is quite self-indulgent and pointless compared to genocide, but it feels worse to not mention it. One of the things I like about Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You is that it grapples quite directly with the tension many of us feel between a) being absorbed in the drama of our own lives, and b) and knowing that our lives are made possible by unimaginable violence and suffering, which we should be spending more of our time and energy on fighting, but we don’t because (again) we are too absorbed in the drama of our own lives. We have to find a way to break out of the cocoon we live in and look outward. I’m working on it. Hopefully you are too.

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