1) The music of Leonard Cohen / I’m finally doing my long-overdue homework on Cohen. And I get it now. Boy, do I get it. The late, great songwriter accesses a unity between grit and charm, romance and danger that is so rarely heard.
2) Dave Brubeck, “Lullabies” / I’ve ended each of the past couple nights with a few tracks from the late jazz icon’s final album. Brubeck’s choices here qualify as standard fare—”Brahms Lullaby,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Danny Boy”—but the great pianist’s kind, perceptive playing makes for good dreams during and after you take a listen.
3) Josh Gondelman, “I Guess a 30-Year-Old Beastie Boys Record Is My Best Friend Now?” for Talkhouse / Known as one of our kindest, gentlest, consistently funniest comic voices, Gondelman also has a fruitful mind for pop culture. Here, he digs deep into “Paul’s Boutique,” an unqualified hip-hop classic, and holds court on the beauty of cities and the qualities we miss during COVID.
Gondelman writes:
“As someone who grew up outside of Boston, I’ve always found the Beastie Boys’ version of New York to be the most enticing artistic rendering. It’s not the aspirational Manhattan of Sex and the City or Woody Allen’s urbane, teenager-dating metropolis. The city depicted in Paul’s Boutique is more about house parties rocked at the drop of a hat. The cheap drinks and the overheard conversations. The flirting and fighting with people you’ve never met and may never see again. The hole in the wall spots that come to feel like home away from home. Density and connection and spontaneity and indiscretion.
In essence, all the stuff we can’t enjoy right now.”
4) Wade Bearden, “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You: A Masterful Exploration of Faith, Death, and Life After Death” for Christ and Pop Culture / If you know me at all, you know what a joy it’s been to dig into the latest Springsteen record. Wade Bearden does a fine job here summing what makes the Boss … well, the Boss—and combing some of the finer points of his relationship to religion.
“It doesn’t really matter what ‘The Boss’ sings about—small-town New Jersey, a woman named Rosalita, or the dissolution of the hardworking middle-class—he’s singing about faith,” Bearden writes. “Or, to be more precise, the reconciliation of faith with the ebbs and flows of a lived-in, sandpaper life.”
5) Henry Bladon, “Marvin Gaye Made Me Think” for The Daily Drunk / I absolutely loved this immersive poem on what it feels like to lose yourself in a Marvin Gaye record. Bladon’s writing is enveloping and feathery all at once, reminding us how the fleeting moments means most.
