1) The music of Calexico / Any time spent with the music of Calexico is absorbing, a baptism-level return to the Arizona of my youth. This baptism around, I was impressed by the duality in this music, the ways Joey Burns, John Convertino and their cohort achieve both a swirling, dream-like quality in song and also live to face the elemental.
2) Yaya Bey, “Ten Fold” / The new one from NYC songwriter Yaya Bey arrives like a tunnel to burrow into, and the deeper you go, the closer you get to the cool core of modern R&B. This is among my favorite kinds of mood music.
3) Jim White and Marisa Anderson, “Swallowtail” / The latest collaboration between drummer Jim White and (one of my very favorite guitarists) Marisa Anderson reflects both clear intention and the intuitive playing of two artists who are tune with one another, themselves, and the wider world.
4) Sabrina Hicks, “Pick Me Girl” for Tiny Molecules / A real brilliance attends this Sabrina Hicks piece, the way the writer turns the “pick me girl” trope inside out to find its true wisdom. This piece also is gorgeous at the sentence level, making the prose a real winding journey.
She’d watch the slick mirrored sky stretch clouds until they broke, a piece made whole upon its breakage. She felt the spongy ground lead and slope to a ring of rocks circling a hidden well, endless black spiraling into a pupil, and she knew she found the eye of the forest. A place where the brutality of nature, muted and underestimated, cloaked in beauty, rich in oxygen, is both muse and warden.
5) Jane Feinsod, “Here it Is” for Phoebe / There is a visceral, soulful creatureliness to this Jane Feinsod poem that can’t be ignored and, while maintaining a sort of jarring music, grows more tender with each read.