Music Analysis Essay: Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker

Leyland James Kirby, a music artist and deep thinker. Often known under the alias of “The Caretaker” for his work, he produced the album “Everywhere at the End of Time." He began in 2016 and finally finished the project in the middle of 2019. This created an album with 6 stages, released 6 months apart from one another. Due to internet culture and the application Tiktok, this album has been very popular recently. Though many people have not listened to the full album, many consider it to be a surreal experience. The experience The Caretaker has making music goes back all the way to 1999. Whereas he released music prior, this is the first time under “The Caretaker” Moniker. The Caretaker makes his music by taking old samples of music from the early 20th century. He uses them for the music with the distortion of the samples. This idea creates a sound that few if no artists have been able to replicate. He made this album for anyone to listen to. Depending on who you are though, it can have many varying effects on how you perceive the world around you. Younger people who listen to it like to grasp on to the ideas that it introduces, determining the meaning of it all. Older generations experience feelings of nostalgia, remorse, and dread. This is due to them either knowing a person with the disease this album depicts or expecting it in their future. The Caretaker uses his experiences with other people, research about the topic at hand, and his deep understanding of human emotion and thought to make people feel these ways, and his compassion about creating something that will make people think instead of making people listen to create this album and make an impact on the world with his music.

The Caretaker made this album to make people feel again. In a world full of pain, hurt, deception, political turmoil, he wanted to have people focus on feeling emotion. No matter what emotion that is, this album sets out to make you feel one. Stage 1 begins this quickly, by taking you to happy jazz clubs where the music is upbeat and cheerful. Stage 2 slows you down, and makes you think about what there is to come. The music start to fade in some places, like you’re forgetting parts of the song. This is intentional. The Caretaker wants to make you feel like you’re going through this experience with him. He wants you to know that even though James Leyland Kirby doesn't have dementia, The Caretaker does. He says himself, in an interview with Pitchfork, “”The Caretaker” has dementia, not me. I have given the project dementia, It's a fitting epitaph for a finite series of works which has always dealt with memory.” Going blind into this album can change people significantly. He brings you into stage 3, and this is where he wants you to feel scared the most out of anything. He keeps music simple, but you will notice overtime that he tries and successfully makes the music have dementia, and you can hear that the music has it. You can hear that the music cant remember the melody its supposed to play. You can hear the sudden changes in tone and tempo towards the end of stage 3. This brings listeners to stage 4, the first of the 3 post awareness stages. The Caretaker describes these stages as forgetting so much that you forget you have dementia. In his words, a confusion so thick you forget forgetting. Stage 4 begins with madness, thoughts jumping every few seconds not being able to cling onto a memory. You’ve lost it, you are unable to grasp anything anymore, and all is none. Through to the end of stage 4 and for a decent amount of stage 5, signs of null thought begin to form, meaning that The Caretaker isn't just forgetting anymore, he is unable to think at all. Finally, he reaches stage 6. Stage 6 is perhaps the most tormenting of the stages, as at this point, you’ll have been listening to distorted noise followed by emptiness followed by distorted noise for nearly an hour and a half. Stage 6 is described by many listeners as the saddest thing to ever experience. It is the void, simply white noise played with no thoughts left, where you have truly forgotten, and you are not even able to forget forgetting, as you already have.

Emotion is a key component in this album and he makes you know that. There are prime examples of numerous rhetorical devices that he uses in order to force certain emotions onto people. The greatest use of these techniques is repetition, but a type of repetition i like to call “amnesiac repetition” as it relates to the album, because throughout the stages, he uses similar or even the same samples of music, but distorts them. Distorts them in just such a way that you remember, but are starting to forget, and then you forget more, until eventually it is not recognizable. This makes you understand the experience. The experience of dementia, as the album is ultimately all about, and forgetting everything that you have come to be accustomed to, and that you love. He makes you know this love is fading away and that it cant last forever, but he knows this is an emotion you want to feel, he knows you will try to push it away, which is why he pushes even further as the stages proceed. Each stage progresses worse until you cant help but feel these certain ways. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. These are the stages of grief, and you will feel them yourself if you’re experiencing this album for the first time. Starting with denial in stage 2, your brain fails to notice anything has changed, your emotions pushing it away. Stage 2 is lying to itself and making you lie to yourself as well. Dropping down even further into Stage 3 makes you enraged, you finally notice the distortions, how often they happen, and that they are getting worse, you don't want it to happen, but it keeps happening. Stage 4, which is bargaining, is perhaps the most impactful stage in these stages of grief. This brings in an actual phenomenon that happens in dementia patients in stages 4-7, so it is fitting that it begins here. Terminal lucidity, the phenomenon in question, is when bad confusion starts to set it, and you want it to stop, and this is where the caretaker makes you know just how terrible this is. Terminal lucidity is when, for reasons unknown to science to this day, dementia patients regain consciousness and memory as if from nowhere. This is represented in the album and only makess the bargaining worse, by giving you just enough hope that the good memories will come back, but after those moments pass, and you realize they wont be back, we arrive at stage 5, depression. Stage 5 hits you while you’re down with this, you are not allowed anymore lucidity, nor recognizable and familiar memories of sound, but now just fog and confusion, leading to you reaching the lowest low you can reach. But once you reach the lowest low, you can only go up, and you wash up on the shores of stage 6. You finally accept that through all of the fighting, it was simply an impossible battle to win, and you forget, and you’re now ok with forgetting, but selfishly the caretaker brings back that frenemy of yours, lucidity. This time though, he’s here to stay until you’re gone. Through to the final moments of the album, before the minute absolute silence rendering the caretaker dead, you can remember, and be happy in your final state of terminal lucidity.