My favourite musician has announced that he's retiring from music to become a full-time baseball reporter, and released a 22-track album of unfinished songs and demos as a farewell.
It seems weird to describe what I'm feeling as "loss" or "grief", but Levi Weaver has had a profound impact on me in the short few years I've been aware of him. Being based in America and terminally indie, European performances were incredibly rare; I'm so glad we made the effort to get down to London last year and I got to meet him, to thank him in person. We'd had a couple of Twitter conversations and I wrote a long, personal blog post about how his lyrics made me re-examine my belief system; it sounds maybe selfish to say that I think he knew who I was when we were talking in Finsbury a year ago, but I felt like he was aware of our interactions - but I've been surprised before with "famous" people remembering individual fans.
I sing Kansas, I Decline to my son because he loves the chorus; from his changing table he ends up looking at the star-covered curtains in the nursery. We're Tornadoes When We Dance was the song for our first dance at our wedding. My hands automatically play Levi Weaver songs when I pick up my guitar; I only know how to play Spirit First because he was kind enough to show me on a livestream.
Today I'm going to be listening to a lot of Levi Weaver's songs.