1) Phoenix, “Alpha Zulu” / Phoenix continues expanding our collective pop vocabulary with its latest; the band’s staccato synths, buoyant grooves and dreamy melodies make for another warm, winsome listen.
2) The music of Low / I hold no right to the catalog of this Minnesota band; Low is an act I’ve always meant to get into, challenged and assuaged whenever I do listen. After the band’s beating heart, vocalist-drummer Mimi Parker, passed last week, I converted regret into action. Early, very early, into a deep dive, I find myself challenged on a very inborn spiritual level by the band’s sound, and the prayers it offers in songs like “Laser Beam” as Parker sings toward repair:
“I need your grace alone
I don't need a laser beam”
Grace abounds, and so does eternal rest.
3) Seth Avett, “Seth Avett Sings Greg Brown” / One-half of The Avett Brothers does justice to the songs of underrated yet world-shaping songwriter Greg Brown. These renditions are lovely and spare, pulling all the light out of Brown’s compositions.
4) Joy Harjo, “Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: 50 Poems for 50 Years” / The latest from the 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate is, unsurprisingly, a soulful masterclass on bringing the elements of our world into clearer, higher definition without explaining the life out of them. Gorgeously sweeping across her canon, Harjo helps us see what the heart is for (“The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage. It's a timekeeper. Music maker, or backstreet truth teller.”); acquaints our senses with New Mexico’s sacred beauty; and tastes the ingredients of grace in a truck stop breakfast. I don’t know what we would do—or who we’d be—without poets, and Harjo’s work exquisitely underlines our dependence.
5) Lore Ferguson Wilbert, “A Meander Through a Brain on November 10th” / Per usual, my friend Lore says (nearly) everything that’s on my mind, in this meditation on aging, taking up only as much space as allows us to be ourselves, and not outthinking the mystery. She writes:
I am aware of the dichotomies and lack of binaries in life in ways today that I didn’t have space for a decade ago. And yet, I’m much less precise in my own beliefs and practices than I was ten years ago when I was constantly afraid I would waste my life or miss my calling or someone would wrench it from me for themselves. Those two truths make it easier for me to disengage from the virtual world and be more engaged in my actual world.