1) Waxahatchee, “Tigers Blood” / It’s natural to write songs concerned with either soil or the stars, but it takes rare talent to show both equal reverence. Katie Crutchfield is stellar and earthy here on one of the young year’s best records, and backed by a band with like spirits.
2) Adrianne Lenker, “Bright Future” / Both with Big Thief and solo, Lenker is building one of the most sensitive and naked catalogs in recent memory. These songs call you in close and reward you with deeply humane moments.
3) Charles Lloyd, “The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow” / In the company of standout musicians Jason Moran, Larry Grenadier and Brian Blade, the 86-year-old woodwind player just keeps showing up like a jazz guru: making music that sounds as natural as breathing but born of great spiritual and creative deliberation.
4) Karen Thompson Walker, “The Dreamers” / Researching examples of sleep and dreaming in recent fiction brought me to Walker’s 2019 novel. A pandemic story written before the pandemic, Walker’s work unsettled me, heartened me and provoked more than a few thoughts regarding how and what we’re living whether awake or asleep.
5) Lore Ferguson Wilbert, “How the work of Wendell Berry formed me into who I am today” / I’m forever grateful for my friend Lore’s words. Here, I love the way she digs around the roots of her work by showing how other people prepared her for the words of Wendell Berry—and Wendell Berry’s words prepared her to live among other people.
“If Berry was the one who made sense of so many of my ideas and thoughts, this family was the tangible, the skin on the ideas and thoughts, the proof that it worked,” she writes.