To remain master of one’s four virtues: courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man, in society, it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime, common. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

In the past month we have traveled from What’s a coronavirus to I ain’t afeared o’ no coronavirus to Just drop the package on the driveway and back away without breathing on the car. The words of Nietzsche, warning of the impurity of social contact, were scribbled out on his last paper towel sometime in the middle of next week.

laughingstock’s ‘Something Lite’ describes a person who has, like us, cried A las Barricadas! in the face of a pathogen’s attack. But the invisible invader is of the phylum that includes All Things Thinking, the mental vapor lock that occurs when we worry too much and watch The Office too little.

I had something to do today
Close the driveway on the grief-eating
plagues that I’m trying to kick
And I’ll start winning,
and you’ll start getting really sick of it

‘Something Lite’ casts a mood of Isolation, Introversion, and Introspection. Folky-jazzy guitars provide a backdrop for an excellent vocal — better than we’ve come to expect in these situations — nicely pop but with plenty of power when the accelerator hits the floor. Listen for the soft keyboard figure that appears at one-minute-fifteen.

laughingstock is Aiken Muller, Josh Hughes, Alex Eaves, and Garret Riely, a collection of multi-instrumentalists and songwriters based in Bellingham, Washington. ‘Something Lite’ appears on their new ten-song album — Is This Being Vulnerable? — set for release April 17. The video for ‘Something Lite’ displays the construction and destruction of an origami effigy comprising 1792 pieces of recycled paper. Why? Why not!

laughingstock’s music is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. And be sure to follow laughingstock on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.