1) The music of Cake / A ‘90s music podcast and my own instincts led me back into the catalog of this Sacramento band, and I just have so much affection for Cake. Few bands so perfectly fuse the sardonic and sincere, and I was glad to dive deep again and resurface with new old gems.
2) Esther Rose, “Safe to Run” / There are several perfect songs on the latest from singer-songwriter Esther Rose. Among them, “Chet Baker,” a mid-tempo country rambler about jazz, the road, and the desire to self-destruct. Rose’s latest record features a fabulous unity of substance and style, the singer selling every detail of her nuanced narratives over pitch-perfect country-rock arrangements.
3) Bruno Bavota, “Apartment Loops Vol. 1 and 2” / Continuing on in my search for enveloping atmospheric music, I found these recent efforts from Italian composer Bruno Bavota, musical manifestations of the “quarantined loop of fear, anxiety, and dread” so many of us have felt the past few years. Bavota’s music is beautiful in its anxiety, something both to burrow into and a companion for tunneling your way out.
4) Jose Olivarez, “Promises of Gold/Promesas de Oro” / There is glory and grace and, God, what a deep and familial love threaded through the latest from Chicago poet Jose Olivarez (English and Spanish translations housed in one text). “Promises of Gold” is a love letter to the poet’s Mexican-American community and, as he notes in an introduction, a recognition of American promises kept and broken.
The music of the language, the characters readers fall in love with too, the way Olivarez holds pure joy and real heartbreak together—all are a testament to a poet working at the top of his craft.
5) Michael Gonzales, “On 4th and Broadway: Remembering Tower Records” for We Are the Mutants / As someone who misses record-store culture, albeit from a slightly later generation, I dug this lyrical account of working in a New York City Tower Records in the mid-’80s. Gonzales’ work is full of soulful, specific detail and an abiding connection to what it meant to live in that distinct retail world, a “music sanctuary.”
“Fourth Street and Broadway was still an arty hood that consisted of various galleries, artist lofts, recording studios, and restaurants,” he writes. “Jean-Michel Basquiat lived a few blocks away at 57 Great Jones Street. One afternoon film director Jim Jarmusch came to the counter carrying an assortment of musical genres. I’d seen Stranger than Paradise the previous year, a flick that inspired me to take a few film classes—until I realized it was cheaper to be a writer.”