1) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Live at the Fillmore” / Early in this live chronicle from 1997, the late, great Tom Petty jokes about being the house band for the iconic San Francisco venue. Often throughout the 3 1/2-hour set, Petty and Co. prove themselves the house band for American rock and roll. Light on their own hits, the album surveys the landscape of rock and blues, covering Bill Withers, Bo Diddley, the Dead and more with great dexterity; they also invite the likes of John Lee Hooker and Roger McGuinn on stage, not for cameos but meaningful collaborations.
And when the Heartbreakers dip into their own catalog, they offer thoughtfully re-contextualized takes. All killer, no filler and pure delight on this one.
2) Ben Lee, “I’m Fun” / I’ve long saved a soft spot in my heart for Australian songwriter Ben Lee. His latest, “I’m Fun,” resembles the best of his catalog: deeply, sometimes almost painfully, earnest and intimate (qualities I enjoy and resemble myself); sprinkled with pop-culture references; leavened with worldly wisdom. Lee forever offers a warm, personal listening experience.
3) Hua Hsu, “Stay True” / In what is perhaps my favorite memoir of the year, Hua Hsu sifts memories common to so many of our college years—growing into your political awareness, meeting who and what you love, learning to define yourself and others by who you are and not merely what you like.
But Hsu’s humane, layered book weaves other threads through those formative moments; among them, his internal and external motion as the son of Taiwanese immigrants and a tragedy that casts shadows forward and back on each experience. Full of fine detail and quietly sweeping themes, “Stay True” is an unassuming powerhouse.
4) Meg Conley, “This is a rant about beds at work” for Homeculture / Few writers handle the complex intersections of labor, family, culture and our unbalanced selves like my friend Meg Conley. In this, ostensibly a reflection on recent happenings at Twitter HQ, Conley examines longer trends in tech culture and asks better questions about who we become when our spaces collide.
A person who cannot rest at home is a person who cannot rest. They cannot have a private moment away from the company. They cannot cry into their pillow, or stretch in the light of the morning. They cannot have coffee at the kitchen table before deciding to walk out the door and go to work again. They cannot feel the weight of someone they love leaning against them on the couch. They cannot hold their child’s hand while they sing a lullaby.
5) Phil Christman, “Lester Bangs” for The Tourist / “Lester Bangs, the greatest rock critic of all time—let’s not shilly-shally about this—would be 74 today, if he’d lived,” Christman wrote earlier this week. “Of the writers in my personal pantheon, he is in some ways harder for me to imagine who he would be today than some of the nineteenth-century folks. I know exactly who Dostoevsky would be today, although I don’t much like thinking about it.”
Christman’s work always traces our connections and, in glancing back at Bangs’ life, acknowledges so many ways our cultural networks cohere and fray in just five long paragraphs.