ALBUMS // Hannah Cohen – Welcome Home

Post by Misha

You can tell whether you’re home when you wake up before you even regain consciousness. In those bleary moments between worlds your body collects all the information it needs to determine if the place you fell asleep is your home. The smell and softness of the sheets. The pattern in which sunlight is scattered across the blankets, the proximity and character of the noise outside the window, the soft rhythm of life outside the bedroom door. This is how your nervous system knows whether it is allowed to leave itself unbraided a moment longer.

“What about this city do you still love? Because it’s making me crazy,” Hannah Cohen wonders on ‘What’s This All About.’ She sings dreamily about leaving for a quieter existence in the country before admitting, “but I still need that rush.” It’s possible that the song is in conversation with a person – the ‘you’ in the opening line – but I like to imagine that it is sung to the city itself, issued like a plea to let her go. “What’s it all about? What’s it all for? Because I don’t know anymore.”

You know what home is because it’s the place your mind goes to as it reads this sentence. And sometimes it’s not the place you thought it would be. Sometimes it sneaks up on you.

People don’t tend to write love letters to LA. New York or Paris, sure, but LA is the place where people go to write their love stories from, this wistful land of sunshine and oil slicks. It is senseless ennui at every turn, or else new age optimism so violent it makes you see white.

I fell asleep here almost every night since I was nineteen years old. I fell out of the habit of leaving the bed unmade, and into the habit of spending too much money on whiskey and records. Sometimes when I’m driving around at night it feels like there’s not a single intersection I haven’t cried in. I never fell in love with it, though.

It always seemed to messy to love. Too complicated, with its tangle of freeways always pumping a little too much like clogged arteries on the verge of a heart attack.

Tonight, though, as I pack up my things and drive boxes of the books and records and clothes I’ve collected over the last ten years to the Goodwill, something is different. The craggy palms tower over the PCH watchful and resolute, like spiny guardians of all the post rush hour drivers. The air is more spacious as you get closer to the water. I suddenly have the desire to get on Mulholland and drive up to a view of the city. I want to have one of those impossible LA nights you see in movies where it’s the beach then Griffith Park then the Hollywood hills and Downtown. The kind where if you’re from here you laugh because you know that no one would do the beach and Griffith Park in the same day and just sitting in the traffic between all of those places would take four hours by itself. This album would make a perfect soundtrack to that sort of night – impossibly shimmery and sad in the sort of way that catches the light before you can look right into it.

The point is, it’s sinking in that someday soon I’ll wake up and not listen for the impersonal rumble of four lanes of cars outside my window, or check for Los Angeles’ signature scent of sage and exhaust fumes. Someday soon this city will not be home anymore, and tonight I love it so much that it hurts.

Buy ‘Welcome Home’ here.