Damon & Naomi’s 2021 album A Sky Record^[1]Available for free download on their bandcamp page, as well as CD and vinyl. is an all-important reminder of how we felt during the pandemic lockdowns that we are already in active process of forgetting.

This matters, because Spencer W. Kimball famously said that “Remember” is the most important word in the English (or presumably any) language. From the “that they may always remember Him” of our Sacrament prayers, to the constant counsels to daily read our scriptures, say our prayers, etc., to the Book of Mormon’s own “if ye have felt to sing the song of redeeming love, I would ask, can ye feel so now?”^[2]Alma 5:26, ours is a religion of endless reminders–largely because we are aware of just how depressingly easy it is to forget things.

Recall how one of the long-standing objections against the Book of Mormon is that there is no hard archeological evidence for the existence of Lehite or Jaredite civilizations–as though complete disappearance from historical memory hasn’t been the rule, not the exception, throughout the vast majority of human existence. “Look into the Bulk of our Species, they are such as are not likely to be remembered a Moment after their Disappearance,” said the 18th-century writer Joseph Addison, “They leave behind them no Traces of Their Existence, but are forgotten as tho’ they had never been.” We have been spoiled by the piles of ruins in the moonlight left behind by, say, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the ancient Chinese–in reality, the super-majority of ancient civilizations have left behind absolutely nothing. It was disputed whether the Biblical Hittites ever even existed till well into the 20th century; the Epic of Gilgamesh was only recovered by British archeologists in the 1850s–it had disappeared from all literary record for over 2,500 years.

We don’t even have to go all the way back to antiquity for examples of how quickly memory vanishes; Nauvoo, we are repeatedly told, briefly rivaled Chicago as the largest city in Illinois less than 180 years ago–yet today only a few stray standing buildings from the 1840s, carefully preserved as museum pieces near a Temple completely rebuilt in 2002, have left any record of that illustrious past. If it wasn’t for Mormon tourism, the town would’ve already vanished back into the prairie grass long ago. I myself attended a BYU Nauvoo program in the mid-aughts, at a former Catholic nunnery converted into a school. It was torn down shortly thereafter, and is now just an empty field on the banks of the Mississippi, with nary a brick nor piece of rebar to indicate anything had ever stood there. How apt we are to forget just how quickly things can be completely erased, even within living memory.

But even the 2000s is getting to be awhile ago! How about just this last calendar year! Recall, if you can, that 2022 both opened and closed with massive COVID surges–the Omicron variant and the so-called “triple-demic” respectively–but whereas the January ones were greeted with another round of mass lockdowns, the December ones were largely ignored. Within less than 12 months, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we had somehow all collectively determined that the COVID-19 pandemic was over; in fact, despite the fact that literally over a million Americans died, tens of millions more seemed determined to behave as though the pandemic had never occurred in the first place.

This forgetting, sadly, was entirely predictable, because we entirely forgot about the last global flu pandemic, too! Indeed, in 2017, I defended my dissertation on Modernist Literature (that is, the literature of the first half of the 20th century), and was grilled by my committee on the massive influence of WWI, the surge in Irish, Egyptian, and Indian independence movements, the crack-up of the British and French empires, the inventions of cinema and mass-automation, the global rises of fascism and communism, and etc. Yet the one event I was not grilled on was the 1918 Spanish Flu–a staggering, world-changing event that wiped out somewhere between 5-10% of the human race, more than all of WWI and WWII combined.^[3]The Spanish Flu is even referenced in the opening pages of Virginia Woolf’s landmark novel Mrs Dalloway–and is why Joseph F. Smith passed away in 1918. Didn’t even occur to us to discuss. It simply didn’t come up.

And now we are following the exact same trajectory with the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic; we are actively forgetting about a world-shattering event that occurred within our own lifetimes, recently. In many a Sunday School, we have oft observed with wonder how the Nephites forgot all about the signs of Christ’s birth and returned to their vicious ways within less than three decades–but now we have witnessed a mass-forgetting happen in real life, in real time, in less than three years. Suddenly the 3 Nephi story feels far more plausible.

Hence, credit must always be given to those who actually try to remember. Perhaps the most striking feature of Ben Folds’ most recent album What Matters Most (which this site also recently reviewed), is that lead-single “Winslow Gardens” actually acknowledged that the pandemic lockdowns had happened. But there have been so vanishingly few other examples!

Enter Damon & Naomi, the Indie-Pop duo who started out as the rhythm section to the influential Alt-Rock legends Galaxie 500 in the late-’80s. After frontman Dean Wareham abruptly quit to start his own band Luna in 1991 (as we mentioned just the other day), Damon & Naomi promptly proved that one must never discount the contributions of the rhythm section, by recording an underground classic of their own in 1992’s More Sad Hits^[4]Produced by Indie-legend Mark Kramer, who incidentally also produced Low‘s first two albums, I Could Live in Hope and Long Division. -Editors..

They have never surpassed that debut, frankly; nor have they ever appeared interested in doing so. Over the course of a leisurely three decade career (far longer than Galaxie 500 was ever together), they have been content to churn out a series of pleasant, charming, yet ultimately interchangeable low-key Indie-folk albums–sometimes haunting, sometimes beautiful, but also just as often mere background music.^[5]After More Sad Hits, you frankly don’t need to check out anything else by them save the compilation albums The Sup-Pop Years (2002) and In the 21st Century (2019). They are not here to challenge or push or confront you, only briefly soothe you before blending back into the scenery.

But as is so often the case, the weaknesses of Damon & Naomis’ music are also their strengths, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic lockdowns. Their 2021 album A Sky Record–begun in 2019, recorded during quarantine, and released amidst the initial COVID vaccine roll-out–is an album custom-made for our present moment. Here there be no irony, no sarcasm, no rage, no clever-wordplay, no; over the atmospheric guitar work of frequent collaborator Michio Kurihara^[6]Originally of the Japanese prog-rock band Ghost., Damon & Naomi seek only to comfort, console, and calm your restless anxieties (remember, if you still can, how much you needed that above all else during the lockdowns). With entirely earnest song titles like “Oceans in Between,” “The Gift,” “Sailing By,” and “How I Came to Photograph Clouds,” they provide a snapshot for not only how we felt during the lockdowns, but how we wanted to feel, how we should’ve felt, amidst all the stillness of quarantine.

But theirs is never a naive peace. The track-title “Between the Wars” for example, would turn out to be prophetic, as the long-overdue end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan would promptly be replaced with the proxy war in Ukraine after the lockdowns ended. And then on the bluntly-titled finale “The Aftertime,” Naomi Yang asks sincerely, “Is the storm truly past/Is it morning at last/am I now finally free?”–her plaintive voice is ultimately hopeful, but note that she never comes around to actually answering her own question. It remains fundamentally unanswerable.

They are fully aware that peace in this world is always provisional, brief, and usually tinged with profound melancholy (I mean, we were only calm and quiet for a season because we were quarantining against a pandemic that killed off the sick and elderly by the hundreds of thousands). The peace of the world, they know too well, is ephemeral and unreliable. But then, Christ taught the same: “Peace I leave you, Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”^[7]John 14:27 Although there is scarcely a religious bone in Damon & Naomi’s bodies^[8]outside of a vague, New Age-y ethos, I mean, they express the same sentiment–and invoke that same otherworldly peace–in A Sky Record.

Is A Sky Record in some ways just a repetition of the same sort of thing they had already been doing forever? Yes; but then, so are the Sacrament prayers, wherein we seek to “always remember.” Damon & Naomi have tried to remember–and their music has been as calming as a sacrament, which in its quiet and ephemeral beauty likewise creates a space to “always have his spirit to be with them…”