1) Craig Finn, “Always Been” / One of our truest rock bards joining hands with one of our great sonic visionaries (The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel)? Count me all the way in. This is the way Finn’s hard-luck poetry was meant to sound.
2) Momma, “Welcome to My Blue Sky” / On what’s easily one of the best rock records of the year to date, the L.A.-based band testifies to present-tense emotional hang-ups, Alternative Nation rock influences and the strange glories of being alive.
3) Will Johnson, “Diamond City” / To know any of Johnson’s projects—Centro-matic, Marie/Lepanto, work alongside Jason Isbell and then some—is to know how resonant and wise his work can be. His latest solo offering delivers on every previous promise with dust-colored walls of sound, soundtrack snippets of Technicolor Westerns and artful folk-rockers. A gem from start to finish.
4) Sarah Mary Chadwick, “Take Me Out to a Bar / What Am I, Gatsby?” / Sitting somewhere between Tom Waits and Tori Amos, the piano-driven epics on the Australian singer-songwriter’s latest arrive with gallows humor, self-awareness and trace elements of hope.
5) Yoko Ogawa, “Mina’s Matchbox” / While not early—or exhaustive—this passage from Ogawa’s darkly whimsical novel about a Japanese family’s life and times gives readers a foot into the world they will encounter:
If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you’d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.