I’m thinking about how I got what I wanted: time to make music. The circumstances are unusual, and I don’t know how much time I’ll have, but for now, I have it.
When I got what I wanted, making music began to feel like a worthless pursuit. Ambition leaked out of me in the form of crying fits. On non-depressive days, I faced the screen and narrowed my vision. There is only this room, there is only me. It’s a strategy I’ve long employed. At times, it still works. I started using it when I was sixteen and marooned in a suburban mountain village, enduring the same summer vacation we took every year. I had no friends nearby, and there was nothing to do but walk to the shop to buy something to eat. One too-hot afternoon, I lay on my bed and wrote something that felt like it might be the start of a song: I see the end before it’s begun. I set the words to a descending minor scale and sang them to myself.
For Now is the experimental pop project of London-based musician Zeina Nasr.