1) The music of MJ Lenderman / The North Carolina singer-songwriter, who does his own thing while also staffing the likes of Wednesday and Waxahatchee, musically offers something like a 21st-century Neil Young, delivering shaggy-dog country-rock while trading in absurdist and absurdly specific lyrics.
2) Claire Rousay, “Sentiment” / The new record from LA’s Claire Rousay has been dubbed “emo ambient” and certainly the elements of both descriptors blow through this music. But more than anything, “Sentiment” forms a perfect late-night companion, capturing both the crackle and drowse of sweet eleventh hours, knowing both the night’s chill and the creeping warmth of a blanket, a cocktail, a good book or song, any just-in-time consolation.
3) The music of The Dead Tongues / After spending time with more recent Ryan Gustafson records, I devoted attention to early Dead Tongues entries and reveled in a sort of folk music that is at once familiar and wildly mystic.
4) The music of Mojave 3 / Yet another deep dive taught me to love the music of this now-bygone British band, sublime and perfectly calibrated at the intersection of divine power pop and a more atmospheric making.
5) Lexi Kent-Monning, “Prince’s Hand Warmers” for Paste / This Lexi Kent-Monning piece is a real-life fairytale, a love letter to creative community, a dispatch from a brief encounter with pop royalty—and so much more. The author documents, from inside the moment, how Prince’s appearance on the sitcom New Girl rearranged the molecules around everyone working on that show. While the Purple One was as peculiar and particular as one might imagine, the account steers around the “never meet your heroes” truism and into something weirder and more wonderful.
After the episode wrapped, I drove home as the sun rose, got in bed and took a photo of myself—because I knew my life was different now. It would be “before Prince” and “after Prince” from now on. I wanted to see if I looked as different as I felt. I think I look like a completely different person in that photo than I’ve ever been, before or since, though nobody else would see it.