My friend Eric asked me
if I wanted to go with him
to see Deep Sea Diver, and,
having never heard the band,
of course, I said yes.
In preparation, I downloaded
the most current thing, the
2016 album called Secrets.
Led by songwriter, singer, and guitar
player extraordinaire, Jessica
Dobson, the band absolutely
rocked, and from that moment
forward, I was firmly inside
the Deep Sea Diver camp.
I remember taking Impossible
Weight into my classroom during
the pandemic year, the last
third of which teachers were
reporting to the building for
morning online classes and doing
what we called hybrid sessions
in the afternoon. So most of the
day we’d spend inside empty
classrooms double or triple-prepping
for these discordant and incompatible
teaching situations, feeling all the
time this enormous pressure, this
“impossible weight” to be everything
to everybody and failing miserably.
But there was time in the classroom
to listen to music. This was a perfect
pandemic record. There is a huge
emotional weight carried by Jessica
Dobson’s songs. But always a spirited
energy that made me wanna take
dancing breaks in between grading
all those dumb papers, reading them
exclusively and painfully on screens.
Deep Sea Diver offers powerful drums,
a nice bed of vintage keyboards,
every once in a while her explosive
guitar work, and a singing style
that harkens back to the greatest
women songwriters of the 80’s,
your Aimee Manns, your Chrissie
Hyndes, your Dale Bozzios, your
Deborah Harrys. Melodically strong,
lyrically smart, inventively arranged,
punctuated by Dobson’s dynamic guitar,
in this music, during that awkward, horrifying
history, she kept singing, “Don’t be afraid,”
and I listened, kept it together as best
as I could.
Notes on the vinyl editions: Impossible Weight, High-Beam Records, 2020, orange vinyl. Billboard Heart, Sub Pop Records, 2025, translucent pink vinyl.
In case you don’t already know: I’m listening to almost everything in my vinyl collection, A to Z, and writing a long skinny poem-like-thing in response for each artist. As a poet and a student of poetry, I understand that these things look like poems, but they don’t really sound much like poetry, hence, I call them “poem-like-things.” I’ll admit that they’re just long, skinny essays that veer every now and then into the poetic or lyric.
michael jarmer 