1) The music of Neil Young / On a late-/early-year dive through the catalog of an artist I should know better, I’ve found affection for Young’s 1970s output—and especially any records from the far or distant past recorded with Crazy Horse.
2) Teethe, “Magic of the Sale” / Thanks to a few friends’ year-end lists, I checked out the 2025 offering from this Texas band and it’s a mesmerizing union of dream-pop/indie-rock style and true substance.
3) Shallowater, “God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars” / Yet another Texas band, Shallowater brings metal’s heaviness, slowcore’s atmospherics and country’s nimbleness together to create musical documents of release.
4) Han Kang, “We Do Not Part” / The latest from the Nobel-winning novelist had me with her description and integration of snow. As I’m known to say, if you write the weather well, then I will trust you to write just about anything else. And Kang brings this nagging dream of a story to full fruition.
5) Ethan Hawke, “A Bright Ray of Darkness” / Rather than WWJD, I walk around these days asking myself HWEHA (How Would Ethan Hawke Age)? The actor-director-writer and Internet’s favorite Renaissance man engages with creativity in a way that’s open, thoughtful and dignified. In this 2021 novel, Hawke takes us behind the scenes (quite literally) of a high-profile Shakespeare production to watch the rise and fall and rise again of an actor with marriage trouble.