1) Joy Oladokun, “Proof of Life” / A word music writers use too often, a word I use too often: soulful. But I don’t feel much shame. To me, soul is not a genre but instead a force; the thing inside music which tethers us to our humanity. I want all music to be soulful.
By that metric, the latest from Arizona native Joy Oladokun is a new soul classic. Fulfilling its name (and then some), Oladokun crafts a record that is affirming and vulnerable and all the things humans should be. Perhaps the songwriter’s soul is most evident to me on songs like “Taking Things for Granted,” where melody takes flight over a propulsive bassline—first gliding, then rising to soar. Or the song “Somebody Like Me,” where Oladokun weaves together the best folk-pop elements of the past three or four decades before reaching a gospel high. Abundant “Proof of Life” exists throughout, and works itself outside-in for listeners.
2) The music of Tim Hecker / Time spent with Hecker’s latest, the excellent “No Highs,” inspired a journey front-to-back through the Canadian artist’s catalog. A few early albums in, I feel the great, noisy, enveloping nature of Hecker’s atmospheric style. A world of emotion lives in each warm or hazy chordal movement, and the music is worth growing lost inside.
3) Dean Johnson, “Nothing for Me, Please” / The Seattle singer-songwriter sounds like a Twin Peaks sweetheart on his new set; with a gorgeous tenor, Johnson croons country songs that feel like gray skies, smell like Evergreen trees and stale coffee, and make you want to fall in love all over again with this beautiful, so-often-hard world.
4) Curtis Sittenfeld, “Romantic Comedy” / Since the writers’ strike likely means no Saturday Night Live until next season (to be crystal clear, I’m with the writers—the union forever!), I’m getting my fix via Sittenfeld’s whip-smart, ever-charming novel. Set against the life of an SNL-esque sketch show and the pandemic which halts it, Sittenfeld subverts rom-com gender tropes, creates truly likable characters whose love you root for and stokes faith in thoughtful, mutually-fulfilling adult relationships.
5) Craig Thomas, “Questionnaire” for The Iowa Review / As the dad of a special-needs kid, I don’t really need or want other people—in 3-D life, or my pop culture—to identify with every single detail of my family. What I prefer: a deeper, more elusive but more meaningful, knowing. An identification with the joys and anxieties and forever forward-casting fears I carry around.
Thomas’ short story offers that second, special sort of knowing. Best-known for co-creating the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, Thomas pens a formally-inventive piece that lives with and in the short-shelf-life hopes and wrenching emotions I am so well-acquainted with. “Questionnaire” is pitch-perfect as a sci-fi-leaning story, but it does something more. And that something more matters.