Going Back Home
Listen at spoti.fi/2GQBP6z • Collab 5 • 13 November 2020
Notes On Notes is a monthly listening exchange series. One collaborator creates a customized playlist, and the other listens and responds with a selection of non-musical pairings. Collaborators don’t know the themes or motivations beforehand, which helps to keep the process focused on discovery and surprise.
“Going Back Home,” the November 2020 collaboration, features Notes on Notes co-founder Pranathi Diwakar as playlist curator and Eléonore Rimbault as guest respondent. Eléonore’s response features written notes and original artworks in various media. The collaboration invites us to think about home: where and what it is, as well as how we can (or cannot) go back to it.
Playlist by Pranathi
The year has been tumultuous for all of us. Maybe I wasn’t alone in feeling a sense of constant displacement and uncertainty. For months, I have felt a steady stream of mixed emotions about my relationship with where I would call “home,” and for how long. Even before the pandemic, I had been living my life between two continents for a couple of years. If home was to mean a sense of contentment and completion, then it always felt just out of reach. I missed home when I missed my family and friends, my bed, my plants. When it came time to leave one place or the other, I would feel the tugs of homecoming and homesickness all at once.
This playlist primarily draws from soul, funk, and R&B repertoires, but Allen Toussaint’s Go Back Home was the song that originally inspired this playlist. It came up on my queue as I was waiting in line at airport security in September 2020 to go back home to Chicago, leaving behind my home in Chennai. This playlist is meant to capture the joy, sadness, loneliness, and excitement that comes from journeying in search of a return to that which is familiar. In light of all the things that had changed since the last time I boarded a plane, the line that most struck a chord with me was, “Where is the world that I used to dwell?” And yet, stepping back into a place that is newly familiar once again is like taking off heavy boots and slipping into well-worn slippers at the end of a long day. In a world that seems entirely unfamiliar in the space of a few short months, this brief moment of joy in a safe return to familiarity—despite its transience—is reason enough to rejoice.
Pranathi Diwakar appreciates good tunes, good naps, and good writing. She’s also a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Listen to the playlist here.
Response by Eléonore
Pranathi’s playlist resonated with heartfelt conversations the pandemic launched between her and me, and colored a familiar path in my thoughts. It wraps the ambient mood experienced by many of us this year in warm sounds. It begins with an urge to be home in a time of standstill, to do what it takes to get there, but the impulse freezes in its course, consumed by confusion about where this home is. There’s an ocean of longing that appears the moment we are told home should be right here, right now.
Come on home, I want to feel you hold me tight.
Is home with relatives that have taken care of us and that we take care of? Is it a place where we have washed and painted walls, planted seeds, played with animals, relished the color of the sea? Is home a place, associated with habits and simple possibilities that makes solitude, or co-living, beautiful?
If home is where love dwells, where is it, when our love is scattered across people and places, in different forms, with different dreams?
I’m coming home now you know I’m overdue.
The syncopated rhythms, feverish blues, and siren songs chosen by Pranathi render well the accents of this quest, which is not actually a quest, but a fleeting thought that changes shape the moment we hope to understand it.
Just as thinking of home doesn’t conjure one clear image for me, these sounds do not evoke consistent lines in the drawings I begin while listening to the playlist. Instead, motifs and patterns come to mind pell-mell, with no easy way of blending.
I am drawn to the shape of a sea snail I found on the Atlantic coastline near my parents’ place; it sits on my desk. I have no conscious interest in the symbolism of the snail—at times, it seems symbolism flashes everywhere these days, but there is nothing tangible to hold onto behind its halo. The music takes us elsewhere. Rhythm, colors and the way they interact carry something more attractive; tones, hues, and a dream of sleep. In sleep the 80s synthesizer clap and the pulse of both uncertainty and the consuming celebration of having found home fades. As Tom Waits once bawled,
Anywhere I lay my head, I shall call my home.
The playlist contains this itinerant quality, the feeling of a homemaking that is always shifting—with the mellow Chicagoan dream of home captured by Sam Cooke’s Home (When Shadows Fall) in the background.
Through her visual works, Eléonore Rimbault explores how space, memory, and the people who surround us shape our sense of self. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
All artworks by Eléonore Rimbault. Check out more of her work on Instagram!
