1) Jessie Murph, “Sex Hysteria” / Someone close to me described the Southern singer like a countrified Amy Winehouse and that’s about right; on her latest, Murph seeks danger and digs deep over a retro-meets-right now sound.
2) Cory Hanson, “I Love People” / Another wise, worldly set from the L.A. songwriter who creates zigs and zags in the music that sound like the most natural turns possible.
3) Folk Bitch Trio, “Now Would Be a Good Time” / The Australian trio lives somewhere between—and wholly apart from—Boygenius and I’m With Her, crafting gorgeous and harmony-coated folk numbers with deep, dark secrets to be progressively revealed.
4) Bonnie Jo Campbell, “American Salvage” / Picking up this 2008 collection at my partner’s behest, I found what I can only describe as a perfect set of short stories, with no words wasted or out of place in their collective mission to describe and understand desperate people and desperately liminal spaces.
5) Michael Farris Smith, “Lay Your Armor Down” / I will always avail myself of Smith’s newest novel. Always. Because he infuses the grittiest stories (this time, tracing the implications of petty criminals meeting vulnerable people with mysterious abilities) with passages like this one:
He returned to the front room and he picked up the wine bottle and he walked outside. The charred earth. The blackened bushes. The cloud of smoke that held the house and eased across the land and the changing light of a morning to come. It all gave him the sensation that he had crossed a border into some strange country where there were no laws and no language that he could understand and he stared out toward the road and he imagined an old man struggling along, a hunched back and the gait of the lonely and he did not need to see the old man’s face to know he was imagining himself.