1) Old Crow Medicine Show, “Jubilee” / Having seen the standard-bearing string band in the not-too-distant past, I can testify: Old Crow Medicine Show has achieved a level of showmanship that rivals the best early 20th-century performers from vaudeville to country through old time rock and roll.
Don’t think for a minute, though, that all this presence diminishes the band’s songcraft. On their latest, the Old Crow fellows complete one of the best 1-2 punches (in this case, tracks 2 and 3) in recent memory with the wistful “Miles Away” and delightfully askew singalong “Keel Over and Die.”
“Jubilee” features every type of song you’d expect from a band like Old Crow, but always bent into new shape and bearing an inexhaustible spirit.
2) Buck Meek, “Haunted Mountain” / For another take on wide-open Americana, the Big Thief guitarist offers something mystical and mysterious on his newest, a set of songs that seems to head straight for the wild interior territory of our country and ourselves.
3) Michael Garrigan, “River, Amen” / My friend Michael Garrigan traces liturgies the same way he traces rivers in his latest collection of poems. Garrigan writes of sacramental jewelweed and ragweed; the rites of preparing a meal you have killed; of a “faith built on headwaters and confluences.”
One of my favorite moments, deep within the poem “Penobscot Suite,” is as much a prayer as anything I’ve ever heard: “Sometimes I put on the longest version / of ‘Old Strange’ and let it fill my lungs / breathing into a trance as Gunn’s guitar / threads itself into a mysterious mantra, / a reverence of following and finding. / Hallelujah.”
Whether or not you embrace anything resembling conventional spirituality, Garrigan’s book is for those who forget to breathe when they step farther into a forest, call out the beauty and bullshit of natural rhythms and man-made caesuras, who pass the peace with other skeptics, and at least want to want to believe that “every edge is an altar / in this world of ours.”
4) Tim Grierson, “Thirty Years Later, How Well Does David Letterman’s First ‘Late Show’ Hold Up?” for Cracked / If I drafted a shortlist of people who shaped my sense of humor, for better or worse, David Letterman easily lands in the top three or four. What a delight, then, to relive his first CBS broadcast upon its 30th anniversary with my the great writer Tim Grierson.
Unlike Tim, whose relationship with Dave runs back to his NBC days, I came to Letterman once he hit the “big time,” so I’m grateful for the context threaded throughout—as well as the play-by-play of that first show (the pluses and minuses) and Tim’s ability to articulate what made Letterman feel like a personal avatar for a certain generation of viewers:
For all his strengths, Letterman never had Leno’s effortless personal touch. He didn’t have Carson’s ability to be universal. He wasn’t capable of fully connecting with the mainstream. Those who loved Letterman loved these supposed failings about him. He was always “ours” — he was never everyone’s, because the world was never smart enough to get how great he was.
5) Sarah Clarkson, “My Mind, My Enemy” for Plough / “Your mind is not your friend again,” The National and Phoebe Bridgers sing on a recent album track—and I feel it. Anxiety and depression, at their most docile, undermine me; at other moments, they seem to wage an active fight.
The beauty of Clarkson’s piece is in her ability to articulate the overcoming nature of mental illness while not fighting an equal offensive, but upholding the beauty in her mind, actively befriending it once again.
But my prayers went unanswered. You cannot heal a broken psyche by destroying it. I gradually discovered that the imagination I had loved in my youth still ached and sang even in the midst of darkness. I found that, almost against my will, God drew me back into the beauty and creativity that had illumined my childhood.
May it be so for you and me.