1) Calexico, “El Mirador” / Tucson’s Calexico ranks among my favorite bands, a group able to recreate the midnight ride sensation from within a Cormac McCarthy novel—yet in possession of more romance and hope than that image allows. The band is back, teasing a spring album with a song it describes as “a slow cumbia about transformation and finding one’s way back home to their heart.” What a wonderful promise Calexico makes with this song, one their history suggests they will keep in multiple dimensions.
2) Ronnie Martin, “From The Womb Of The Morning, The Dew of Your Youth Will Be Yours” / I spent a not-insignificant amount of my youth entranced by the synth-pop reveries of Ronnie Martin’s Joy Electric project. How strange and wonderful then to make Martin’s acquaintance years later through his presence as a pastor and writer. On a new record, released late last month, Martin returns to the tools of Joy Electric but creates something more enveloping than that project’s (considerably) high highs ever put forth. “From the Womb …” is an absolutely gorgeous, shimmering record and a wonderful statement from someone with music in the marrow.
3) Anxious, “Little Green House” / It’s little surprise, I guess, that I’d fall for a band called Anxious. But this Connecticut outfit bottles up all the emotions their name suggests, then looses them in a cathartic sonic vision composed of punk, emo, post-hardcore and radio rock elements.
4) Jonathan Franzen, “Crossroads” / Franzen’s latest ruled my reading from the final days of 2021 into the first of this year. The tale of one church—and an associate pastor’s family—trying to define itself against the early 1970s, his work seems to understand the emotional-spiritual dynamics of Protestantism on a molecular level. As a pastor’s kid myself, the names, places and details of my life differ from the Hildebrandts, but the soul of their day-to-day interactions was all too real.
By the end of “Crossroads,” I disliked nearly every character but longed for them to find some glimmer of peace, to step into the clearing of what can be found in God and one another. In part, I suppose, because I want to believe that remains attainable for myself and everyone who grew up in the same sort of world.
5) Ojo Taiye, “Hankering” for Fare Forward / A remarkable poem marked by its duty, desire and attempt to understand the weight carried by each previous generation, Taiye’s words deserve to be luxuriated in, to be felt in the body. I knew the poem had me with this set of lines:
… you immerse yourself in the
eddy of its longing, the flutters of memories
on your cheek. your mind merging with the
stutter of the old truck going up the slope.