Songs I Love Lately, or "Jon, are you doing okay?"
Look it's a long story, but I'm fine.
Emily, Joanna Newsom from the album Ys
Joanna Newsom is one of the best American lyricists of the last thirty years. Her writing is entirely within the tradition of American Transcendentalist or Naturalist poetry, best exemplified in the work of someone like Walt Whitman. In terms of the music, she often gets called a folk singer -- even after all this time -- which is maybe at best half true. The songs on Ys move from folksy vocal delivery to something far more formal. The resulting combination is still intoxicatingly strange, and when combined with the album's orchestration the whole thing is genuinely magical.
“Emily” is the album opener, a twelve minute epic that moves seamlessly from the mythological to the personal. Despite the referentiality, the mentions of the Pharisees or Pharaohs are not the most memorable aspects of the song. What stands out are firstly, Newsom’s attention to the concrete details of description, and secondly, the problem of memory. From “the mountains kneeling, felten and grey/We thought our very hearts would up and melt away” to the almost intangibility of memory. The songs narrator saw Emily by the river, but dreamed “you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water/ Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror”
Emily teaches the singer about the stars, and the narrator promises to “set them to verse so I'd always remember.” If you look up the meanings of the song online, genius or one of those other websites will quite smugly tell you that the details of the song in how it describes meteors are not quite right. But rather than a mistake there is something so deeply tragic about the error, an insight into the slippages of memory and even how, when we try our very hardest to make something secure against the finitudes of time, the others that we love always remain at a distance. Look up at the stars and they seem so concrete, eternal and timeless but our own knowledge about them is passed on to us by others who are always temporally slipping away from us. Take the hand of someone you love and look at the stars together, and see the wonder of a cosmos both eternal and fleeting.
“We could stand for a century
Staring, with our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy, landlocked
In bodies that don't keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don't be”
Will Anybody Ever Love Me? Sufjan Stevens, from the album Javelin
I wrote about Javelin last year -- it was my favorite album of 2023. “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” is a great single, with Sufjan’s poetry, the gentle delivery of the lyrics, and the simple, soothing production. The song is also full of these wonderful small moments to attract your attention (just focus on how the drum kicks in juuust before the first chorus or the absolutely transcendent moment when the backing vocals drop in the final sections of the song). Much of the entire album is concerned with the questions of love -- unsurprising given the context of its production and one thing I really respect about Sufjan is the willingness to show the occasionally unpleasant aspects of love. Love is this painful opening up of the self, a combination of self discovery and often a kind of self-annihilation. Or as he sings, “Burn my body, point me to the undertow/Push me off into the void at last” I fell in love and as a result, I am not who I was, I have given away who I was to find out that I contain a kind of infinity.
Will anybody ever love me, asks Sufjan but “not for sport?” How easy it is to see the Other as an object or means to an end, and to make love a game that we either win or lose. Love is, as the song puts it, “a pledge,” given to a burning heart. Love is the struggle to make real or concrete that which was promised and brought into being through the simple act of its annunciation and this song is what that sounds like.
Sprained Ankle, Julien Baker, from the Sprained Ankle LP
I have a deep and unshakable fondness -- surprising no-one -- for sad ex-Christians. There is a pipeline I think, from church worship music to beloved indie artists (Pedro the Lion I’m looking at you). Julien Baker, best known for her later work with boygenius is one of the artists in that category. This song is one of her first big tracks off an early LP and I found it digging through the youtube music stacks one day. It’s a short song and is saturated with a deep kind of existential exhaustion: “Wish I could write songs about anything other than death.” The kind of fatigue you feel physically, a weight in the center of your chest. The song draws a contrast between the freedom of art and the absolute inability of anyone to say what they really feel, lapsing instead into the comfort of cliche and phatic noise. “Sweat on a microphone, breaking my voice/Whenever I'm alone with you, can't talk but/"Isn't this weather nice? Are you okay?"
The video is a great compliment to the song, a oner that moves through a ruined building as Baker sings, before moving up towards the lights you can see glinting through the gaps you can see in the roof. Maybe there are better things coming, but in the meantime, I’ve been feeling like this song: “A sprinter learning to wait/A marathon runner, my ankles are sprained.”
Woke Up Hurting, Frightened Rabbits from the album Painting of A Panic Attack
I miss Scott Hutchison though I never once met him. Frabbits started as a solo project and I’ve adored the band’s sound and Scott’s lyrics for at least a decade, coming across their work in university alongside a host of other incredible Scottish musicians. My partner still smailes about my fondness for “sad Scottish boys with guitars.” The thing that set Frightened Rabbits aside was that there was always something so emotionally open and vulnerable about Scott’s songs that they almost feel embarrassing to listen to - it’s like listening to someone take off their skin in front of you. So many of Frightened Rabbit's songs were rife with a kind of romantic, semi-sober melancholia. As time went on, it became clear that there was ever more biography in the lyrics and Scott’s own depression and drinking problems became ever more serious. He disappeared in 2018 and was found at Port Edgar. “Woke Up Hurting” came from the album Painting of a Panic Attack and is full of the kind of detail and realism that puts it in the company of the best literature dealing with depression, capturing the details of razor sharp self-loathing and the joy of destroying oneself. Some days you are just a carcass that starts to breathe”, waking up with “tarmac to my side, not for the first time.”
The great tragedy of the song is not that it deals with some incredible dark emotions but the ways in which the production and final lyrics of the song admit the possibility of triumph. What we want is something else - to not wake up hurting. What’s most bleak about the song - and so many of Scott’s last songs - is the degree to which it seemed that the better could only come as some kind of miracle, something which would take us away to somewhere else. The song closes with these lines, which never fail to bring a tear to my eye.
I woke up hurting
Woke up hurting
If all these southern tales are true
We should pray for abduction, pray it comes soon
If all these southern tales are true
Plan for Heaven though Hell will do
This Year, The Mountain Goats, from the album The Sunset Tree
A while ago I did one of those interaction bait things on Twitter -- I posted a picture of myself and asked what kind of music did it seem like I listened to, based on how I look? The most popular answer by a long way was The Mountain Goats. I mean, I get it, but when I posted that I had listened to them at all but this year has absolutely blown that apart. You can tell how things have been going based on how many times a day I’ve listened to this and it’s been upwards of half a dozen times a day lately. John Darnielle has such a distinctive storytelling sense, and it’s not a surprise he’s also a genuinely talented novelist. I love so many of the track's details: driving out of your broken house to spend some time with Kathy, the steady rock rhythm of the whole track and the glorious backup singing on “twin high maintenance machines.“
It’s Darnielle’s capacity to find the universal in the quotidian that elevates the material though as evidenced by the sheer catharsis of the shout-along line “I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me” sung by Darnielle who is, in the video just dripping blood from a gunshot to the temple. Sometimes it’s ok to keep going out, even if you have to do it out of sheer spite. The scene might end badly, as you can imagine but I’ve been singing the final lines of this song to myself for months. Sometimes I mean it, sometimes it’s out of sheer bloody mindedness: “there will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year. I am going to make it through this year, if it kills me.”
Masc, Chat Pile from the forthcoming album Cool World
Chat Pile fucking rule. Dudes will see a Chat Pile Video and just say “hell yeah”. The album God’s Country was a blistering combination of rage and sorrow, a Gothic examination of the violence of American capitalism that finished with a weed induced confrontation with Grimace. The latest track, off their forthcoming new album is a step forward in terms of their sound but also continues and extends their concerns and interests as a band. If you listen to the song it’s a story about social alienation, a mandated flagellation: “sorry for asking again” says the speaker, I know I’m lower than scum/I need to keep my mouth shut/ Before I look fuckin dumb” - is it a song from the point of a view of a man in society struggling to vocalise something about themself?
Is this a song written from the point of view of a woman having to endure the toxic MASCulinity of her partner? Is this a song written about the suppression violence and punishment that cis-masculinity inflicts upon itself in the name of maintaining patriarchal hegemony? Yes, yes it is. The video helps illustrate this a great deal - it’s maybe the best video the band has made. Ultimately though, the song is about the violence and horror of masculinity, haunted by the possibility of something other, an outside just out of reach. As Raygun Busch screams over the final moments of the song: “It’s your world So cut Cut me open.”
Pinking Shears, Mandy Indiana from the album i’ve seen a way
Mandy Indiana are the coolest band in the world and it’s not even close, I’m sorry. For all the tedious navel gazing about the Oasis reunion we need MI as a reminder that the bloviating sound of the long nineties is not the only score for modernity. I’ve seen a way is, just for its sheer excitement, one of the best debut albums I’ve heard in years and I love it so much that this song, THIS SONG, ended up on the latest FIFA game. It’s maybe my favorite song on the whole album, with the hip-hop beat and the music video that was shot at a warehouse gig. I’m so tired of endless culture discourse about Manchester, a city which has absolutely monetized its own self mythology into myopic self aggrandizement. Manchester is rife with this kind of reactionary nostalgia that seeks to constantly reassure a whole generation of property speculators and other fuckwits that Manchester isn’t like what it used to be, but do you remember oasis, do you remember the stone roses, do you want to buy a flat in what used to be the hacienda? And all the while, the city’s bands are still producing some of the best music in the entire country
My friends and comrades at STAT magazine are entirely right, ABOLISH MANCHESTER. Everything about this song just works from the walls of noise that are laid over a nineties style beat to Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics. Speaking of which, as Alex Niven has written about, cultural nostalgia is often a way of defanging the politics from modernist Northern culture. Mandy Indiana sound like now, and so it’s no surprise that Caulfield sings that J’suis fatiguée tu sais pas c’que j’suis fatiguée/Ce monde de merde m’a épuisée.” You know why we’re all so exhausted, and so do Mandy Indiana - at least with them we have a soundtrack to dance to at the end of the world.
Jenn’s Terrific Vacation, Danny Brown from the album Quaranta
I still listen to Scaring the Hoes, Danny’s collab with JPEGMAFIA, which is music to play when you want to feel like you can run through a wall, but I’ve really been enjoying the new solo record. Jenn’s Terrific Vacation (get it?) has some resonances with Scrap or Die from the earlier album XXX and is a good way of showing the constant de- and re-territorialization of the American city by the forces of gentrification.
Tell me what to do when the block gets slow, and the money get low, but the rent rise up
White folks popping out the blue, they done tore that down and made that to a Whole Foods
Landlords looking for a payday
Now it's rental scooters where we used to sling yay
Kassa Overall’s production gives the drums some real punch and the post-chorus lines from Danny and Kassa underscore the heartbreak of it all: “We move in, move in, move in, you movе on out.” Same as it ever was, sadly.
How Many Miles? Mk.Gee, from the album Two Star and the Dream Police
Two Star and the Dream Police is maybe my favorite album of the year so far. It’s a dreamy and haunting record that alternates between a kind of familiar bedroom pop vibes and weird flashes of electronic glitch. How Many Miles? is one of the strongest tracks on the album, a dreamy mash-up of eighties pop alongside some disconcerting production. It’s all very abstract, more focused on the immediate production of mood and texture, but I think that formally it is trying to destabilize the nostalgic sound that’s been so prevalent in a lot of pop music. So much of it feels almost like a Phil Collins single before being cut apart and disassociated with the electronic bleeps and burbles that cut away in the mix.
You don’t get to have just a pleasant evocative slice of nostalgia here, there’s something else just on the edge of hearing and it adds some necessary friction to the emotional mode and tone of the track that makes the whole thing more than an exercise in repetition or the presentation of the already familiar. Whisper it, but this is hauntological - an exercise in giving sound to something that never quite came to pass.
All of my Friends Are Going to Hell, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter from the album Saved!
Sinner Get Ready from Lingua Ignota is one of the best albums of the last five years. Screamingly, searingly angry - it is a combination of rage and sadness detailing some exceptionally dark material, detailing her abuse and crying out for some kind of messianic punishment. I’m not surprised that Kristin Hayter decided to retire the persona and songs of Lingua Ignota. There needed to be a revival of sorts - not just artistically but personally too. The album following SGR was Saved! released under the name Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter and continues the experiments in Pentecostal religious music and traditional American instrumentation that the previous album had started. All of my Friends is a song that would have been so easy to get wrong, for it to come off as contrived or patronizing but the thing about Saved! is the degree to which it takes its religion so seriously. There’s lots of comments on the youtube video that it's giving War Pigs vibes but if anything, the only thing that proves is how close Sabbath were to christian rock music.
With the context of the song, and the wider mythos of Perpetual Flame Ministries, the Reverend's traveling revival show (that included Chat Pile for a gig or two) the song carries with it a sense of dread (thanks to the deliberately lofi recording and production) but also a sense of justification. Sometimes miracles can happen. Sometimes the sky can open and it seems like wrath can just pour out of the heavens upon you.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the Reverned is there to remind us all that it is a good fucking start for us all to maybe think about what we’re due.
When you hear 'em coming, you better run
Better hold your name fast on your tongue
Better fear his wrath in all you do
Better pray what befell me won't fall upon you
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As you can probably tell, things have been complicated of late but I’d love to know what has been soundtracking your days. Let me know here, or over on Twitter or Instagram.