1) Blur, “St. Charles Square” and “The Narcissist” / I’m a little obsessed with the details within two early Blur singles out ahead of their forthcoming record: Damon Albarn’s opening couplet (“I fucked up / I'm not the first to do it) and Graham Coxon’s scratchy, ascending guitar motion on “St. Charles Square”; the way Albarn glides into his falsetto when singing the phrase “on me” on “The Narcissist.” Hard to imagine this won’t be one of my most-played records of the year once it arrives.
2) The music of Josh Ritter / Maybe I’m only now reckoning with the songwriting genius of Ritter, who plays his songs in the shade of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Working through a handful of his records this week, they were all I wanted to hear because I so clearly heard myself in them.
3) Julie Byrne, “The Greater Wings” / Sad-eyed, elemental, adventurous enough to dive into the hidden depths, Julie Byrne’s latest is a masterwork that feels cool to the touch but has an eternal furnace burning within.
4) Rae Fitzgerald, “Say I Look Happy” / My friend and fellow Columbia, Missouri transplant Rae Fitzgerald prefigures a new record with a loping indie-rock track and the immediately compelling lyric “I think I’m gonna try to be a better man / I’ll be a better woman too.” Whether working in acoustic folk idioms, with electronic language, or something between, Fitzgerald always fits the right sounds to yearning and I can’t wait to hear her do it again.
5) D.T. Robbins, “Novels” for Autofocus Literary / This D.T. Robbins joint harbors an exquisite throb: of the forward-backward motion of living in a family, of empathy bent out of shape when unreturned, of everlasting repetition—which becomes the only given function in dysfunction.
A story I relate far too well to (composing, then endlessly revising a dispatch to an estranged loved one), the whole coheres with a sort of beautiful, everyday tragic logic, but also shelters some truly wonderful sensory sentences:
“The nurses make me wait for a million years before letting me into the operating room where my wife is stretched out like Jesus Christ on his cross” and
“I can see the skyline and the stars and I can feel the wind on my face and all five senses are working again.”