A while back we talked about the video game Tiny Glades and how the artifice of the landscapes you could create there showed how ‘nature’ is not a faraway sequestered space free of any and all human interference. On the contrary, in our Anthropocene age every environment, every biome, and even every imaginable place on earth is directly or indirectly, largely or in part, shaped by human influence.¹ And this makes the topic I selected for this week’s blog, discussing some songs about escaping to nature, also theoretically interesting.² Because if nature is not an unequivocally uniform concept, can it even be a shared refuge where all those artists envision themselves going? And it does indeed turn out, that very distinct kinds of nature are serenaded in these songs. Moreover, there is a field we can turn to, if we want to explain these differences: ecomusicology. So let us today survey that field and those songs in order to find out what an escape to nature would actually mean in a world where forests are as much an environment shaped by humankind as your average suburb.

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