There was a period of time in my life when I had become fixated with ‘A Gain’, the eighth song off Devendra Banhart’s eighth studio album, Mala. At the commencement of this obsession, the reasons were not wholly clear to me, or to be more exact—not wholly expressible, though I knew, at least, of one: I was obsessed by the song’s complete and colossal sense of stillness, it reminded me of the stillness of a car that had shut off its quiet engine and lay undisturbed by a dark and unfrequented curb, perhaps by a house, perhaps by the house that I once knew and grew up in, the house that now held in its few rooms sleeping strangers.

The way the song sounded in my memory, that dreamy murmur, backlit by silence—no instruments, no noise, nothing—alienated it from all of the other tracks on the album. Its quietness made it lonely and independent; the imprecision of its lyrics made me fall in love with it even more, made me think that it was more intelligent than me, that it was aware of and could express a feeling that I had no words for and had not ever known.