1) The music of Rhett Miller / Returning this week to solo joints from one of my favorite songwriters—and Old 97’s fearless leader—baptized me afresh in Miller’s seemingly effortless (but so well-crafted) union of contradictions: the bitter and sweet, the genuinely pretty and the stuff of raw aching.
2) Mogwai, “The Bad Fire” / The veteran Scottish band never fails and, on their latest, their success takes the shape of anthemic dives into the charged atoms around us.
3) The music of Blushing / Tripping through this Texas band’s catalog yields buzzy, fuzzy, dreamy delights, sure to entrance any listener who loves their indie rock on the side of shoegaze.
4) Catherine Pierce, “Danger Days” / A (blessed) re-read of the Mississippi Poet Laureate’s 2020 collection further underscores its universality—not just in ever-more-urgent themes related to our climate crisis, but in its beautiful, bending gestures toward what remains lovely, pure and pleasing in this damaged world.
5) Robbie Maakestad, “Grown adult Bill Murray purchased a box of Jojo Siwa Strawberry Bop cereal because” for Jake / Maakestad’s growing canon of Bill Murray stories are worth reveling in (I had the distinct pleasure of hearing one live last spring). This time out, Bill’s exploits lead through the annals of celebrity cereal, digestion and our very human nature.
Jojo’s gaze, grown adult Bill Murray found, manifested the same power as the sirens of olde, drawing him deeper spoonful-by-spoonful into the cereal bowl, a fate which Bill wished he could avoid altogether, but into which he found himself inexplicably compulsed.