1) The music of Tom Waits / In one of the better decisions I’ve made, I have assigned my Sunday nights to Tom Waits. For the foreseeable future, at least. Beginning again from the first notes of his catalog, I hear an American master upon arrival, a songwriter who seeks the deepest blues, longs to be the life of the party and delivers vagabond wisdom with lines like “Where the clouds are like headlines on a new front-page sky.”
2) Sparklehorse, “Bird Machine” / Thirteen years after Mark Linkous’ death, loved ones refreshed and refinished the music he left behind, providing us all with a sort of living, breathing, singing, crackling rock and roll will.
3) Slow Salvation, “Here We Lie” / This is the gauzy, shoegaze-y, beautifully melancholy record I’ve been looking to wash myself clean in all year. Thank you, Travis Trevisan and Christina Hernandez.
4) Ada Limon, “The Origin Revisited” for The Atlantic / The luminous poet shepherds us through the forests of Montana, and the wilds of our own wreaking, in this extended meditation on all we forget to revere.
How do you know you’re alive? What evidence
will you leave? So many myths
are unraveling
5) Amy Cipolla Barnes, “My mother is an abandoned Kmart” for SmokeLong / God, this Amy Barnes piece in a revelation, a quiet detonation of the notion that a person can be your home. Barnes’ narrator traces the blueprint of her mother, living like a hollowed-out big box store, as she divines what we need from one another, what we’re able to supply and how the past is or isn’t payment enough for the present.
“Obediently, I chase down her blue-light specials like I did as a child. Different each day. Different each hour. I never know what to expect. Will she send home expired canned goods or baby clothes or framed artwork with torn corners?”