Turn It Up - 10/23/2023
Earworms, obsessions, recommendations
We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first this week, then David, and we’ve also included some reading recommendations at the bottom.
“Ancestors Too Young” – Jeremy Dutcher (from Motewolonuwok, 2023)
I’ve heard little music this year that’s more astonishing than this. A Two-Spirit musician, composer, archivist, activist, and member of the Tobique First Nation, Dutcher won Canada’s Polaris Prize for his debut, and he returns now with the startling and beautiful Motewolonuwok. Mixing languages, sounds, and impulses, with Dutcher’s astonishing voice at the center, Motewolonuwok meditates on loss and survival—bypassing clichés of “resilience” to achieve something like transformation. On “Ancestors Too Young,” he attacks the problem of Indigenous youth suicide in Canada with the anger and love it deserves. While some of Dutcher’s songs envelop the listener in waves of sound, “Ancestors Too Young” eschews such resolution in favor of rupture, with stinging guitar, unsettled drums, and a squalling trumpet punctuating Dutcher’s cries of “No one cares until she’s dead” and “If I go too, will I see the ones we’ve lost?” A haunting and haunted song, it makes a demand for recognition that recalls Diamanda Galas, Nina Simone, and others who crafted similar (and similarly striking) symphonies of refusal. In cases like this, mourning doesn’t – and shouldn’t – mean acceptance. - CH
“Goodbye Evergreen” – Sufjan Stevens (from Javelin, 2023)
Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is exquisitely sad, a loving meditation on the loss of his partner Evans Richardson. Opening with Stevens audibly drawing in a breath, the tender “Goodbye Evergreen” sends me from the first line (“Goodbye evergreen, you know I love you”), and each couplet wrings out more from Stevens’ tear-stained letter to his beloved. A small choir of voices cradles Stevens’ fragile tenor as he bids farewell over soft piano, until a noisy bridge clatters through the fragments of thought and feeling that accompany grief. Fading out to the barest flicker of organ hum, “Goodbye Evergreen” is unresolved beauty and pain, a juxtaposition Stevens explores throughout the rest of the record. The last line makes sure we remember its central message once more: “You know I love you.” - CH
“Cryin’ in the Streets” – Faith & Harmony (from I Heard the Voice, 2023)
Part of the gospel scene that’s coalesced around Memphis’ Bible & Tire Records, Faith & Harmony is a sextet of cousins from North Carolina who just released an excellent debut album. “Cryin’ In The Streets” is a cover of Louisiana R&B artist George Perkins’ 1970 meditation on the funeral of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a song that gained tragic new life in 2005 when Buckwheat Zydeco recorded it after Hurricane Katrina. Perkins’ song – in all versions – is both a precise description of the rituals that turn private pain into public mourning and an aching cry for a better world. The women of Faith & Harmony gather around the spare lyrics, delivering both the news and the Good News as an expert group of Memphis musicians offer their support through subtle, supple backing. Lead voice Christy Moody rises out of the circle, reminding that, in the face of such sadness, sometimes “all you can do is moan.” If that message isn’t timeless, I don’t know what is. - CH
“Keep Me in Your Heart”– Jason Hawk Harris (from Thin Places, 2023)
Jason Hawk Harris’ new album considers his own grieving process, for his mother who died a year ago. Throughout the album, Harris – a Texan whose iconoclastic music makes room for everything from country to classical – offers songs that chronicle his sadness, anger, confusion, and persistence. Despite the thematic hard traveling, though, the album sparkles, soars, and even rocks with songs that pair Harris’ sweet-and-salty tenor with arrangements that emphasize Harris’ wide-ranging, Americana-centered sonic orientation. He makes room for one cover, a breathtaking version of Warren Zevon’s heartbreaking goodbye. With strings swelling behind him, including an extended instrumental coda, Harris relays Zevon’s first-person wish of the dying for the living with loving intimacy. Another kind of prayer, another kind of love song, “Keep Me In Your Heart” is a perfect fit for Harris, Thin Places, and anyone finding their way through similarly deep waters. - CH
“Tiny Garden” – Jamila Woods (feat. duendita) (from Water Made Us, 2023)
Love as rebirth and regeneration, in the hands and voice of Chicago-based poet and performer Jamila Woods. Woods’ new Water Made Us is a rich and restorative set of songs, and this percolating R&B track is a highlight. Over a warm bed of keyboards and percussion, Woods invites her companion to join her in a process of growth – personal, romantic, world-enriching – that grounds their sweet love in real-life, real-time, real-good work. Woods and guest vocalist duendita sing with restrained joy as they detail the commitment and fulfillment of feeding and watering a “tiny garden” of love as it blossoms into something beautiful, unique, and – most importantly – theirs to share with each other. - CH
“Superhero Status” - Nas (from Magic 3, 2023) and “I’m on the Sideline” -Eddie Kendricks (from People… Hold On, 1972)
17 albums and nearly thirty years into his recording career, Nas is still bragging about how great he is (“My shit flows smooth and steady, pictures on Getty”), and true enough. Here, though, teamed with producer Hit-Boy, he takes a second to acknowledge that “some of the hardest rappers get overlooked and ignored.” “It’s a shame the way it’s goin’ down” as that empowering Eddie Kendricks sample he’s riding has it. Super-powers, for real. - DC
“Just My Imagination” - The Rolling Stones (from Some Girls, 1978)
Speaking of Eddie Kendricks, and before our Rolling Stones Week gets too far behind us… No way Mick Jagger could ever top Kendricks’ vocal here. But the Stones do tweak the Temps in all sorts of entertainingly Stonesy ways. It struts instead of sighs, lusts instead of longs, and what Whitfield and Strong emphasize as domestic dreams of children one day, Jagger and Richard makeover into erotic fantasies of everyone having a side squeeze or two. It rocks—and is very funny: Imagine a young woman, in New York, in 1978, who “doesn’t even know” who Mick Jagger is. - DC
“Love You a Little Bit -Acoustic” - Tanner Adell (from Buckle Bunny Stripped, 2023)
Tanner Adell’s originally released studio version of “Love You a Little Bit,” a country-rock banger that I’d bet Shania Twain wishes someone had pitched her, is one of the year’s best singles, from an album that has a few of those. This unplugged take, just piano and voice, sung to herself instead of shouted to the back row and beyond, reveals what sounds like some long-lost heart-song standard. It isn’t any better this way and, Lord knows, it isn’t any more or less real or country. But like everything Adell touches, it really is something else. - DC
“Sun to Sun” – Alice Gerrard (from Sun to Sun, 2023)
Imagine if Iris DeMent travelled back in time to write a song with Woody Guthrie. “Sun to Sun” really is that twangy, that catchy, and that pissed-off. Now eighty-nine, Alice Gerrard has been a link between such folk activists for decades, including in partnership with the late Hazel Dickens. With unplugged guitar, banjo and bass, her “Sun to Sun” sounds sunny and campfire sing-along, but it is mad as hell at yet one more round of gun deaths—followed inevitably by another useless round of thoughts-and-prayers. “Pretty little girl in her pretty new pink socks / Got shot up just a-walkin’ down the sidewalk,” she sings, shaking, and while everyone talk-talk-talks, “another fool went and bought a gun.” Gerrard’s protest is like that infuriatingly evergreen headline from The Onion—“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” It’s not funny because it’s true. - DC
Recommended reading:
Jewly Hight on the Shindellas, for The New York Times
Hannah Gold on Will Hermes’ new Lou Reed biography, for The Yale Review
Elizabeth Sandifer on Joan Baez, for Eruditorium Press
Jared “Jay B.” Boyd on the Memphis hip-hop underground, for Memphis Flyer
Chuck Eddy on the music in Reservation Dogs’ 1970s episode, for Eliminated for Reasons of Space
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