1) The music of Mark Lanegan (RIP) / Sifting solo records this week from the late Screaming Trees singer brought Lanegan’s genius into greater relief: A whiskey street preacher, a voice that somehow fit next to PJ Harvey and Isobel Campbell and Kris Kristofferson, a songwriter who could craft titles such as “I Am the Wolf,” “Death Trip to Tulsa,” “Sideways in Reverse” and “Morning Glory Wine,” then both fulfill and subvert them.
2) The music of My Bloody Valentine / The noise of dreams, of interior darkness, of every desire asserting itself in chorus, creates the catalog of this influentially loud, delightfully downcast Irish band. Tripping back through their staggering melancholy, new connections form, new synapses fire from recognition.
3) Whitelands, “Night-bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day” / Speaking of out-loud dreams, this London collective creates gorgeous, hazy rock that glides in and out of the waking and stellar worlds. The songs from their latest form wondrously romantic companions.
4) Tom Snarsky, “Three Poems” for HAD / I adore all three of these pieces, as I do any Snarsky, but the final, based-on-a-true-story poem so delicately and briefly bottles the real stuff of love in a way I don’t want to forget:
I’m so glad our lives
found their cahoots in 2017, the summer of Twin Peaks &
The most brutal depression of my life. My bones didn’t have a
Reason to meet the sun.
5) Amy Barnes, “You Can Take the Girl Out of the Dirt” for Little Engines / This essay on place and language, and all the ways we forever go to and fro, lingers. Barnes’ description of moving from the Midwest to the South, then occasionally back for events like AWP—where I was fortunate to hear her read and chat a bit—will resonate with anyone who feels more than one setting settled inside their prodigal character.
Even after living in the South for decades, my flat newscaster accent wins out; there are words divulging my background. Dirt clods that I can’t swallow away. Milk. With three syllables. Wash. Warshington. Warshing machine. On the way back from AWP, my husband and I discussed my four days in Missouri and I discovered I can’t quite say the “r” in ironic, which feels like a missing Morissette chorus.