If my mom wasn’t my mom, I’d be convinced she spent her childhood as a character from an iconic, subtly bizarre kid’s book—like Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, though instead of zipping through space via tesseract, my mother was inventing complicated melodrama about the personal lives of the trees that lined her block.
Growing up, I heard about her various idiosyncrasies—she didn’t dare look out the window at night because what would she do if she saw an alien—woven into a more subtle, serious storyline of an intensely talented musician who briefly played flute at Juilliard before majoring in music at Barnard. While she isn’t a professional musician today (she’s a psychotherapist, obviously), her rigorous music education has been channeled into what is my current favorite quirk of hers: she’s an absolute freak for EDM.
Her interest in genre began, upsettingly, with Mike Posner, but not really Mike Posner, so hold on a second.
“I will admit there’s something a little bit off-putting about the people in heart glasses and everyone’s like loving each other.”
“I’m embarrassed to say this,” she told me on Friday when I pressured her into an interview. “I was listening to pop radio and that Mike Posner song was on, ‘I Took a Pill in Ibiza,’ and I started to think, who did that incredibly clever arranging? There’s just something about that that really works. And Joanna, I’m always a hitmaker. I could have another career as the person who calls what songs are gonna be hits. And so when that song came on, I started to think there’s something about the way they go, ‘HEY!’ I’m serious, and I thought this is big.”
Thanks to Posner, she was introduced to Norwegian producing duo (now trio) SeeB, whom she might love more than me, her daughter.“I started Googling it and I went deep into the web to find out about these then-unknown Norwegian mixers and producers, right? And that song put them on the map, and made Mike Posner, who, as we know, has done nothing else big, a star… I was following them on Insta when they had 200-some followers. I was right in there heart-ing all their stuff.”
From her discovery and light love affair with SeeB, she began watching “music festivals on YouTube.” Though, of the culture, she said, “I will admit there’s something a little bit off-putting about the people in heart glasses and everyone’s like loving each other.”
When I learned (because she told me) that SeeB would be opening for Kygo on his “Kids in Love” tour, I bought tickets for us and my sister, on May 11 at the Barclays Center. But SeeB ended up not following the tour to the US, which meant that the three of us were left with tickets to see Kygo play an arena on Mother’s Day weekend.
“I may not dance,” she deftly changed the subject, “But I may pump a fist here and there.”
As my mother, my sister, and I waited in a winding line to make it into the Barclays Center on Friday around 8:30 p.m., the scene was, if anything, expected. Juulers were juuling, men with strong chins were sexually harassing women in neoprene, my mother was thinking about how easy it’d be to shoot the place up.
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