Cicadas and nostalgia make for an indelible pairing. The sounds associated with cicadas easily bleed into summer memories, with their emerging thrum and husky crunch, soon after, when they she insects their shells and began looking for mates.
They also have remarkable internal clocks—not unlike people. Last year marked the emergence of Brood IX, the brood localized to the Southeast; 2021 is the year of Brood X, the Brood that proliferates as adults, every 17 years (previously: 2004 and 1987).
In Thomas Strayhorn’s “Year of the Cicada,” premiering on the INDY website today, cicadas evoke that emotional clock, alongside feelings of love, loss, and nearing change, as Strayhorn, in his confident, aching voice, croons “Been sleeping with you by my side / I’m trying, I swear that I’m trying.”
Strayhorn isn’t the first musician to find inspiration in the muggy droning of periodical cicadas: This summer, when Brood X makes landfall (or, makes air-full), they will be the fourth cycle since that generation of cicada inspired Bob Dylan’s “Year of the Locust” in 1970.
Strayhorn, who is based between Portland, Maine, and North Carolina, recorded the song with James Phillips (Bombadil) and Ford Garrard (Boy Named Banjo) in Durham in the spring of 2019. At the time, he says, he was renovating an older mill home in the area and trying to decide whether to stay or move on. Standing in the house with a cup of coffee in his home, one morning, a wave of nostalgia hit.
“I had been pouring my energy into the house I was renovating, giving a lot of time to a comfortable relationship, and was still feeling like I needed to leave North Carolina again,” Strayhorn says. “[I had the] conflicting emotions of having so many reasons to stay somewhere, but still wanting to leave.”
Watch the video for “Year of the Cicadas,” shot by Durham poet Kristi Stout, below.
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