1) The music of The Gaslight Anthem / I came to these blue-collar rockers a few steps behind the rest, absorbing their later records and the subsequent solo efforts of frontman Brian Fallon. With The Gaslight Anthem charging toward a common future once again, I dropped the needle on their catalog from the beginning and have been captured by the band’s progression as well as the ways Fallon and Co. prove deeply, affectionately conversant with their rock forebears.
2) Ha Ha Tonka, “BloodRedMoon” / If you asked me to name the best band ever to emerge from my adopted home state of Missouri, most days I’d name Ha Ha Tonka. This new track does a great job showing off why (even as it shows the band continuing to grow): a brisk opening piano passage prefigures gorgeous harmonies, cinematic swells and fresh accent notes.
3) Marie/Lepanto, “The Fix is On” / The potent duo of Will Johnson and Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster show off their twined songwriting skills on this EP of songs that didn’t fit a previous record, but deserved “to see the light of digital day.”
4) Emma Donoghue, “Haven” / I am drawn, it seems, to two types of fictional characters. The first: those I could never become, but long to understand. The second: Those I read about so that I don’t become them. Donoghue writes the latter in this quiet depiction, both harsh and gorgeous, of three Irish monks who make a sanctuary of a wild skellig. The novel depicts one end of devotion, and fingers both the cords which bind men together and the knots which threaten to come undone.
5) Paul Pastor, “Cherry On, Lost John” for the North American Anglican / My friend Paul Pastor holds my attention in this exquisite poem with its elemental appeal to common grace (and to my infatuation with weather): “rain still rains.” Here is hope, rooted in something simple yet something greater than us.