When I hear the story of how Land of Talk’s Elizabeth Powell lost all her work after a hard drive crash, effectively wiping out all her creativity with one fatal error message, I wonder whether we’d all be better off unplugged and offline. Powell says “Inner Lover” is a song about finding the “freedom to live and love as one chooses”; about fully owning oneself. It’s a lovely idea that everyone should aspire to, yet the reality is that many people are shackled by both the online pressures of social connectivity and real-world social expectations. For better or worse, our earthly existence has inextricably melded with our digital, hyper-connected world, each informing the way we live and move throughout the other.
I learned about a place just the other day, somewhere deep in West Virginia, where researchers have telescopes pointed heavenward in hopes of hearing the sound of galaxies exploding on the edge of the universe. To do this, they’ve established a 10 000-plus- square-mile “quiet zone” around the facility: no cell towers, no internet lines, no microwaves. I can imagine Elizabeth Powell finding herself in a similar state after losing all her working data. However instead of turning her ear towards the heavens, she’s listening for the sound of inspiration inside herself. “Inner Lover” is a new romance born in the quiet space between the imploding digital world and the new universe forming from the debris
