Time & Perspective Quote by Keren Ann

Tour life turns the most basic human need into a stolen luxury, and Keren Ann’s plainspoken logistics quietly indict the machinery around her. The “hour and a half plane ride” is comically short in normal life; in an artist’s calendar it becomes prime real estate. Sleep isn’t restorative here, it’s opportunistic: “probably the only time” she gets “real sleep.” That word real does a lot of work, suggesting everything else is a counterfeit version of rest - fragmented, provisional, interrupted by schedules that don’t care what the body wants.

The sentence structure mirrors the mentality. Short clauses. No romance. No “the sky looked like…” Just survival choices: sleep if possible; if not, fill the gap with books or movies. That fallback matters. Reading and films aren’t presented as hobbies so much as portable interiors, ways to reclaim attention when your external environment is managed by gates, seats, and time zones. It’s self-regulation dressed up as casual banter.

As a musician, Ann is also hinting at the work of staying permeable. Touring asks you to be emotionally available onstage while living like a piece of cargo in transit. Sleep is the only reset button that isn’t mediated by screens or narrative. When she can’t get it, she reaches for other people’s stories - a quiet admission that art becomes both refuge and maintenance, even for the person who makes it.