Writing a song feels a bit like riding a bicycle: no matter how long it’s been since you did it, once you get back to it, you remember. While NQ Arbuckle never stopped (any of it), a few years of not publicly sharing music can seem like an eternity on the internet. It remembers everything.

Leaning over the rabbit hole
Surfing across the stupid internet
It's really hard to figure out where all the time went.

Even though “Love Songs for the Long Game” was written and recorded pre- 2020-pandemic, it sounds like post-pandemic philosophical conundrums. Just as, If I’m not online, do I exist at all? is the modern equivalent of the classic, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”, so too are the questions, “What are you doing, America? When will you be worthy of Ginsberg?” Since you can only listen to these songs in the present day, every time you hear them, they’ll take on a new meaning.

“We sing lullabies to the unkind, love songs to pretty girls who don’t care, drinking songs for children to put them to sleep at night. We’re swimming against the tide.” Everything about album opener “No Hands Bicycle” (even the title) feels paradoxical, a purposeful happenstance, the pairing of ironies that link everything together, like a chain that gets rattled around. But strip away clatter, the ratatat hi-hat and the controlled, booming basslines, at the core is familiar poetry everybody recites at some point in life.

I'm feeling so crazy unsure about the future
It's a wonder that we ever sleep at night
Win or lose, Oh it just feels the same

When NQ released the album’s first single, the titular track “Love Songs for the Long Game”, it was April 22, 2020. The long game hadn’t even started yet. It was still only the beginning.

But love is perseverance. Perseverance is love. And these are the songs that will get you through. Maybe that’s the thing about the long game. If we can’t let go of the past, we must stretch ourselves infinitely, for better or worse. We must hold on to pillars that are stronger than us, that are bigger than us - like community, like connection, like love. Love songs are timeless. Love songs are universal. Love songs connect us. Love songs are with us, always. Win or lose, they’ll stay the same.