a song for every season
june 2024
like a salmon running up the river—wait… didn’t i exploit the mysteries of the animal kingdom to introduce last month’s playlist? whoops.
what i’m trying to say is by some grace we reached the month of june in this fresh new year. and upon arrival, my subconscious mind craved the songs from junes gone by (and also particularly sticky songs from mays prior).
picture it: this june i’m driving around with my arm lolling out of the car window when all of a sudden i feel inclined, no, obligated, to listen to Amber Bain’s project THE JAPANESE HOUSE, whose album “IN THE END IT ALWAYS DOES” entered the world last june. songs like “INDEXICAL REMINDER OF A MORNING WELL SPENT” and “OVER THERE” plant me firmly in last summer, a strange time in my life by all accounts: a kind of hot, sad stupor. my dear friend lindsey may or may not have dropped in on me one day while i was listening to “ONE FOR SORROW, TWO FOR JONI JONES” and said “so this is what you’re listening to”.
maybe it’s the other way around. maybe the songs beget the feeling. i find it difficult hearing Bain’s lilting voice over a gauzy, shimmering piano and not conjuring a certain summer—languid to the point of invertebrate; a house with its windows flung open to the heat and flies.
SNAIL MAIL’s debut album “LUSH” came out six junes ago. when i told my wonderful friend Maddie that i’d been obsessively listening to it this june, she responded with: “Lush!!! Album of the summer always.”1 when i asked why, she went on to describe it as a “humid album” with “thick malaise”. sure, there’s also a song called “HEAT WAVE” but as a dissertation on the agony of desire, the entire album smolders like the dying fire at your friend’s backyard cookout.
speaking of women at once disaffected and deeply feeling, CHARLI XCX’s album “BRAT” is another that will surely define this and future summers. it’s funny how musically different SNAIL MAIL’s Lindsey Jordan and Charli XCX are, and yet… to listen to either artist is to join them in pendulum swinging between caring and not caring, puzzling over a slight and hurling them at the world, stage-diving into the crowd and hiding from family and friends. you’ll have to forgive me for only including the album’s clubbier songs. i have to find ways to net out the melancholy where i can. my wish for all of you this summer is to get bad tattoos on leather-tanned skin and fall in love again and again. we can compare notes in september.
have i beaten this whole summer thing into the ground? no? great. my friend Brett knows how to do summer. he sniffs out pools like a pig finds truffles, travels with a magic cooler that never runs out of ice, water, or beer, and at 10:50pm on a recent thursday, he went to see whatever iteration of LYNYRD SKYNYRD is in rotation these days. he might have been the only human to do a targeted strike on cma fest. in and out. clean.2
i didn’t go—SKYNYRD is not my bag, per se, but i can’t deny that southern rock is best deployed when the days are long and hot. so when Brett went off to revel in “THAT SMELL” i revisited an all-time favorite in BIG STAR. not really a southern rock band, but a rock band from the south (Memphis) whose musical impact can be heard, explicitly and otherwise, in acts like WILCO, WAXAHATCHEE, and WEDNESDAY to name a few projects currently bending southern music to their respective wills.3
BIG STAR for me is pure pop music that, despite coming from a bygone era, has never once sounded stale. the opening licks on their more uptempo songs (“FEEL”, “SEPTEMBER GURLS”) take you straight to the mountaintop, while their more poignant tracks (“THIRTEEN”, “GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE”, “I’M IN LOVE WITH A GIRL”) are perfect in their artlessness.
what else… songs like XTC’s “GRASS” might play during a consciousness-expanding picnic (rolling around, optional); FRANK OCEAN’s “PROVIDER” during a sultry 2am drive; “ITCH” by PORCHES before you do something naughty. or you can surrender completely to the spotify algorithm. you are free to do whatever you want.
other standout releases this month include: GOOD LOOKS’ new album “LIVED HERE FOR A WHILE”, “BOX FOR BUDDY, BOX FOR STAR” from THIS IS LORELEI4, COLA’s “THE GLOSS” and singles from MJ LENDERMAN, HORSE JUMPER OF LOVE, and ALLEGRA KRIEGER.5
SOUR WIDOWS and WILCO closed out the month with releases: debut album “REVIVAL OF A FRIEND” and EP “HOT SUN COOL SHROUD” respectively, but i’m saving those for next month.6 sue me.
as far as live shows go, it was another month in a string of months stretching infinitely in both directions for good music, SKYNYRD included. nashville-native Jess Awh’s project BATS kicked off SOCCER MOMMY’S solo show at The Blue Room. she claimed to be nervous, but from where i stood, captivated in the crowd, i only saw an assured performance on acoustic guitar and frank, at turns sobering, winking lyrics.
i joined a friend for LAURA ELLIOTT at The End. for several reasons—size of crowd, age of crowd, amount of fun the band was having on stage—it felt like a house show. things only briefly got weird when the band played a cover of COLDPLAY’s “YELLOW”—a song that came out the year ELLIOTT was born—and i realized that i was the second oldest person in the crowd. i survived and left The End tempted by the prospect of another show there later in the month: FLYTE.
i was always going to get a ticket… but i waited a few weeks to follow through. something like pride kept me from being overeager, from expecting too much from a folkpop group whose music has innocuously entered and exited my orbit over the years. their most recent album (“FLYTE”) in particular is a little SIMON & GARFUNKEL, a little THE BEATLES but you know… not.
here’s my confession: FLYTE makes the type of earworm music that i feel a little guilty liking. not a guilty pleasure because, as i’ve said before, those don’t exist, but a brief communion with the snob in me i’m constantly trying to shed—the one who faults bands like FLYTE for writing heart-on-their-sleeve ballads that a lover might play for you on their couch at the end of the night, candles and all.
but guess what motherfucker? the songs are catchy. they are good. they feel good. and when i walked into a packed, sweltering The End during the middle of opener FAIRHAZEL’s set, i found myself a little giddy with anticipation.7 what followed was a magical show and the last one on the band’s tour to boot. the two frontmen, Will Taylor and Nick Hill, had serious chops (guitar, bass) and sang intricate harmonies. the crowd was hushed when it needed to be and accordingly exultant.
near the end of the set, Taylor declared there would be no encore, or rather, no formality surrounding the encore. in addition to only having a closet-sized room to retreat to off-stage, he appeared to dislike the whole pretense. instead, he said, they would bring down the house lights, the band would stand still and allow the crowd to make whatever noise it wanted, whereupon they would play their final song. respect.
they closed with the opening track from “FLYTE”: a tender caress of a love song called “SPEECH BUBBLE”. the mind meld between crowd and band that had been forming over the course of the show crystallized just in time. the audience nailed the utterly charming backing vocals while Taylor, eyes closed, reckoned all of the ways we reach out, fall short, try again—keep trying and trying and trying—until we get a grasp on the moments that constitute love. i think that moment constituted a kind of love. and many others this month. many others.
SHOWS IN JUNE: LAURA ELLIOTT / SOCCER MOMMY + BATS / UMBRELLAS + ORNAMENT / FAUX FEROCIOUS / FLYTE + FAIRHAZEL
SHOWS IN JULY: PEDRO THE LION + FLOCK OF DIMES / COLA / SHOULD I GO TO PITCHFORK WHILE IN CHICAGO FOR A WEDDING??? / ROSALI / whatever you invite me to
thanks Eli Motycka for editing
read Maddie’s poetry or else
on the ebike
BIG STAR’s “KANGA ROO” may be a spiritual predecessor to WILCO’s “MISUNDERSTOOD” (songs 55 and 56 respectively). give ‘em a listen.
another seasonal directive found in lyrics: i might crush in summer but i love in fall
all but one of the artists mentioned here have played, or will be playing, in nashville within this year. crazy.
july is when i will officially launch my campaign to get everyone i know and love to DRKMTTR on september 10. SOUR WIDOWS play in nashville. i’ve already come to terms with the fact that you all will see me jump, dance, sing, and possibly weep. please come.
taking a moment to commend both FAIRHAZEL and FLYTE on their stage banter. maybe it’s a british thing. FAIRHAZEL made comedic hay out of the heat (“i’m sweating out of my eyeballs”), threatened to only play FLYTE covers for the rest of his set, and, in reference to his merch, admitted that the music was just a front for his actual gig as a drop shipping company selling shitty chinese products. FLYTE dragged Florence Pugh for this—a rather uncomfortable rendition of their song “TOUGH LOVE” that she allegedly insisted on doing with them.