In my previous letter, I wrote, “I noticed I was happy in a way that didn’t feel like I was dying. Any other time I was happy this year it felt like I was clubbed in the abdomen by a crowbar.”
And I meant a crowbar. A tool to pry something open, usually nailed shut, also a heavy rod to bludgeon. I was being dramatic, and I was learning. Maybe being dramatic is how I learn: that there’s the heart of the matter, and then the blood of it. That there’s the sensation of blood coursing from the heart, oxygenating the body with vitality, and then there’s bloodletting from the vein, and the danger of draining away. I was noticing how I sometimes get them mixed up. I was l learning there was a question, of whether intimacy and intensity are antagonists, perhaps even hostile enemies. But now it seems so obvious. Stupid question, I’d rather not ask it.
Waxahatchee, Crowbar
Crowbar, an instant classic smack dab between Near Wild Heaven and Right In Time, is a song of tongue-clicking pace, of unpressured realizations hung out to dry on the porch, of post-dusk clarity, of prideful precision surrendered for the sake of moving along, alongside someone. The song gives me this fantasy of driving out to an overgrown lot strung up with empty cans, BBs going pop pop pop at blips of interior monologue, the nailed-it one-liners you crack about yourself and your chosen others. Cans sipped dry of their content and posted up as empty targets, thin shells of crushable metal of what once held what was intoxicating and effervescent, til you drank it up and pissed it all out. What’s left?
Katie Crutchfield’s delivery—buoyant, not chipper yet forgiving of the shoulder-chip—rattles those little empties, poking its own ribs about metaphors and their influence over realities and relationships. “I move awkwardly at the speed of light,” she sings of emotional hyperactivity, and the sense of having a psychic power so elemental it can bend the crowbar with “tension that’s telekinetic.” Or, or, you could just set the thing down. Who cares if it's a tool or a weapon. It’s just a piece of metal.
To me, the whole song is irresistible: the sound of someone with a dense and knotty heart, doing whatever it takes to become lighthearted, metal objects be damned.
Hannah Everingham, Giving Up the Dog
I dump a bunch of songs on a playlist each quarter of the year and revisit them in the passive moments of my life, such as driving into the parking lot of the Whole Foods lot in Glendale as the sun sets over TJ Maxx. This is where I first was gut punched by this song by Hannah Everingham, crying on my steering wheel before going in to shoplift from the hot bar. She compounds a devastating capsule of daily life’s granules, which diffuse toxically in a body craving escape. A portrait of static crisis, of spinning wheels to nowhere and making checklists of far-off dreams at the kitchen table, of “all of these sardines and baked beans/all of these things in this world/some are tempting/some are absurd.” Everingham’s voice is ominously confident in its waver, as if she’s a woman on both sides of the mirror: the narrator judging the fool, and the subject looking at itself, poised to flee from its reflection.
You hear the terrible freedom of abandoning life recklessly for the thrill of reckless abandon. You consider the point of agency, and remember how a dog has none. A dog has no choice except to love who it belongs to. Is it worth it?, the voice of an angel, or a ghost, or conscience itself pleads, watching as the inner fantasy completes its detonation, collapsing in on itself before its impact spreads.
Rosali, Slow Pain
All that Rosali sings sounds like grace, even her sentiments that tremble, scurry, and confess. She amazes me, and with the Mowed Sound band behind her, she’s just potent. On “Slow Pain,” I hear the hurt thrum of what it is to be a woman and to be turned down: the way the drums metronome the see-saw of wanting to know the pain and wanting to release it, guitar whining and scratching like a dog at the door of love, the track pacing like a wind up, tension releasing at the moment of flat utterance: “maybe you don’t like me” is rendered in butterfly-floating melody, taking flight from the shame of its admittance. At the climax of the song, she lets the simplest answer be the loudest—the grace of owning the obvious, of detangling the straightforward to let it be itself, slack and meaningless. She sings, “standing in the doorway/I should find another way,” perhaps referencing Dylan’s romantic tragedy (“don't know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you/It probably wouldn't matter to you anyhow”), with a desire to diverge from the slow pain itself. Nevertheless, you feel it throb, “fuck me or fight me, it’s all the same,” a pulse without damnation, just the blood doing what blood does—following the beat of the heart.
Fust, Violent Jubilee
I thought this letter might be all women artists to reveal a point about something, but once again—as always?—my original presumptions are useless. Go figure! I’ve listened to Aaron Dowdy of Fust’s songs on nearly a daily basis, for the better part of a year, songs that are weather-worn and lived-in and sound the way a good day feels. But beneath are syllables stretched out like interstates that give the individual a feeling of roaming freedom while, when zoomed out, connect to a larger network. There are drawn-out intonations of soft-landing surrenders, stories about the small scale self-arrivals of real life taking shape.
In “Violent Jubilee,” there’s a quivering, head-hung notion of inevitable return, to home and to pain, threaded through the song’s needle eye—“I can’t remember how these violences make me dimmer”—was the memory about the stab of the needle, or the thread that runs through it, tying your past to all your other layers? The song hurtles towards memories and escape: “I used to be a child once and all that's left of is a way to shut down when it gets too rough,” because now we’re in “family country, where supplies are running low.” We all come from some kind of stock, don’t we. Despite my attempts at replenishment, I often wonder, if I can’t trust the people who made me, how can I trust the stuff I’m made of? What happens when inventory is down on what’s good of us? As the song peaks, all you can trust is the charge beyond, moving forward so fast it feels like you’re hurtling: “I like driving with the odometer busted, I know the stars are gonna fall any minute/and I’m ready to burn up with it/I’m ready to receive my hurt.” Hurtling: you say it too fast and it sounds like hurdle, and it also sounds like hurt. In “Violent Jubilee,” gentle and compounding as it is, I hear hurtling, and all the other things hurtling sounds like. Sometimes moving fast away from the violence, rushing towards the jubilee, has me tripping over my words as I make my way home.
Allegra Krieger, I Want to Help You Move (No. 1)
Allegra Krieger is an oracle of the interior! I forgot who told me this while watching her set at my party in Austin, but they said she is the most accurate, talented scribe of what the inner world feels and sounds like while walking through the city. Her songs feel like the perfect thing you craft in your head to say to someone to be fully and finally understood—melodically precise, crystalline in its complexity, tangential yet complete—before it comes out of your mouth all wrong and tangled in regret. It’s songs like hers that translate the inside so stunningly, that make me pause in envy to consider my writing impulse, what it is for, what it even feels like. I realize how much writing feels like a mistake that I have to make to get to the other side of something. My sentences, flaws marked with purpose. My thoughts, all wrong steps in the right direction. She sings:
Everyone is trying to outrun the samе feeling
There’s nothing you gotta prove
So say less and close your eyes
Make a mess and come inside
Everyone is trying to outrun the samе feeling
And I want to help you move
In “I Want To Help You Move (No. 1)” off of her B-sides collection, the notion of this possibility—that you could say what you mean in order to get somewhere, rather than to prove something—suggests an ultimate destination, doesn’t it, or at least something worth moving towards. No more stasis in convictions, no more tripping over words to make my way home. And look how sweet it could be, to have help getting there.
yours until next time,