1) The music of De La Soul / Streaming isn’t the only thing, not even close. But with the recent addition of De La Soul’s catalog to music platforms, it’s heartening to know all their work is as close as a click—and that new generations will be able to trace the creative journey of a Hall of Fame-level hip-hop collective.
2) Yazmin Lacey, “Voice Notes” / The latest from the British singer-songwriter provides its own quiet book of revelation, a painterly and swirling soul sound from an artist confident enough to create a mile-wide groove, then lay her vocals down to thrive within.
3) Jen Cloher, “I Am the River, The River Is Me” / The Australian songwriter crafts folk music in the truest sense—these thoughtful, immediately resonant songs exist to commune with the land, water and people which surround them.
4) Matthew Salesses, “The Sense of Wonder” / Salesses’ latest is a supremely entertaining novel about pro basketball, Korean-American identity, love, loss and the dramatic arc which describes all our lives. Readers will immediately bind to the characters (especially K-drama producer Carrie), and the book closes in such a magical way as to invite another, deeper read.
5) Phil Christman, “The Ghosts and Jokes of Cormac McCarthy” for Commonweal / Among my favorite writers, Phil Christman more than suitably sums my feelings after recently completing Cormac McCarthy’s late-career, two-part epic (which you can read more about in previous editions of the Friday Five). Zeroing in both on McCarthy’s sense of humor and his handling of “the language, if you ask some people, of the unconscious,” Christman underlines the ways these books both stand out among and stand for the novelist’s greater catalog.
“Particles go on interacting; who knows where they stop?” he writes, in a statement that will pierce and seal the sensibilities of readers possessed of a certain knowing after spending time with the Westerns, Debussy Fields and the other curious characters of McCarthy’s recent invention.