1) Rhett Miller, “Follow You Home” / Few songwriters have soundtracked as much of my life as Old 97s bandleader Miller. The first release from his upcoming solo album “The Misfit” shows off a softer, more compact side of Miller’s songwriting. The song feels like a lost Jackson Browne or Fleetwood Mac track, lovely and loping while finding beautiful grace notes and quiet accents.
2) The Deslondes, “Ways and Means” / The new one from this New Orleans outfit underlines the art of true collaboration; passing the mic and melody around, The Deslondes craft an Americana effort that’s ragged and tender, lining up behind musical ancestors like The Band.
3) Hembree, “It’s a Dream!” / Pure indie-pop bliss with a Kansas City stamp on it—Hembree’s latest evokes a more lighthearted TV On the Radio (and, at times, Fleet Foxes at an electronic music festival). The band’s every zig and zag delights, and they earn a few bonus points for featuring my friend and theirs, Bodye, on the tune “Operators.”
4) Annie Proulx, “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” / To my discredit, I’m only now reading the Pulitzer winner, but I’m all in. How could I not follow someone who titles a short story “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water”? Proulx writes snow and wind the way I want to experience the elements, and finds a way to say everything about desire in a short sentence like “She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”
5) Scott Cairns, “Epistle to the Ostensible Church” for Image Journal / One of our true poet-priests, Cairns baptizes us in a Christian tradition much longer and deeper than our lives and, here, does so explicitly as an antidote to our modern religious fussing. This is a worthy epistle, and a gorgeous call to a still knowledge of God we cannot muster without a cloud of witnesses:
Peace.
That we are all adopted, appallingly
co-opted into Christ’s holiness is
a simple given, and a certainty.
So relax.