by David Wilikofsky
I didn’t listen to a lot of popular music growing up. My parents controlled the radio dial for much of my childhood, which was peppered with lots of classical music, country and NPR. It didn’t help that I was a snobby child who looked down on pop music and didn’t bother to seek it out on my own. Despite holding questionable opinions about it, pop music has managed to form a psychic landscape in my head. Listening to “Hit Me Baby One More Time” or “Oops I Did It Again” brings me back to birthday parties at the roller rink in town. “Poker Face” and “We Found Love” reminds me college parties and first loves. These weren’t the songs I was actively seeking out at the time, yet they’re indelibly tied to those experiences. They hummed in the background of my life, all our lives, completely unavoidable.
TJO (aka Tara Jane O’Neil) has been making records for nearly three decades, both as a solo artist and as part of many acclaimed bands. I was best acquainted with her work as part of Louisville post-rock legends Rodan, but nothing I’d heard before prepared me for Songs for Peacock. O’Neil began working on the album in the wake of her brother Brian’s sudden death in 2019. They shared a house together in 1983, and after moving out Brian sent O’Neil a mixtape. This project is her response, a set of covers framed as a mixtape that function as a tribute to her brother.
Songs for Peacock is preoccupied with popular music’s place in our collective subconscious. Fragments and pieces of familiar songs haunt this liminal space. The mixtape opens with droning electronics. The iconic opening notes to Madonna’s “Borderline” surface, only to sputter before abruptly stopping. The rest of the mixtape plays out like a dream sequence; the whole project has the same haunted quality as Angelo Badalamenti’s work on Twin Peaks and other David Lynch projects. Familiar songs emerge from the haze. Some are semi-faithful reconstructions (“The Crying Game”, “Everybody Knows”) while others are fragments of the originals, contorted beyond easy recognition (“Oblivious”, “The Chauffeur”).
Most songs covered on this record come from 1983, but some do not. Cher released her auto-tune magnum opus “Believe” in 1998 and Yoko Ono’s “Move on Fast” hit shelves in 1973. Rather than feeling like an anachronism, the presence of both songs here feels natural. Although O’Neil stresses that the mixtape is not a trip down memory lane, while listening to it I keep coming back to the fact that memory is fallible. We are reconstructing the past every day, forgetting some details and inventing others. This mixtape is no different. It’s a memory; many places, experiences and sounds mashed together in sonic form.
I haven’t talked much about individual tracks, although they is plenty worth discussing. A great cover should be a revelation, showing us something new about the song that we hadn’t heard before. “Believe” is a standout, slowing the song down to a glacial tempo and teasing the emotion out of the lyrics. “The Crying Game” skews closer to the original, but has a beautiful, dusky air about it. I could go on, but I think it would miss the point. Mixtapes are an act of love through music, curated and tailored specifically for the recipient; the best ones are far more than the sum of their parts. O’Neil has generously decided to share this one with the world, and it’s well worth your time to lend your ears to it.