Turn It Up - 1/21/2025

Earworms, obsessions, recommendations

It’s a new week, so we’re back to share some things we’ve been listening to. Charles goes first, then David, and we’ve got a bunch of reading recommendations at the end.

Crys Matthews – “Sleeves Up” (single, 2025)

Crys Matthews just released a remarkable album of new-era freedom songs, Reclamation, which I wrote about last week. But this crucial voice in contemporary folk music isn’t done yet, releasing the fiery call to action “Sleeves Up” on Monday, January 20^th. The date isn’t a coincidence, obviously. Not only is Matthews’ song equipping listeners to confront this vicious new era with courageous action and meaningful solidarity, but it also resonates with the Civil Rights campaigns now symbolized by the federal Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King holiday. Over stormy acoustic guitar and march-ready polyrhythm, Matthews invokes the freedom songs of the past to prepare us for the fights of the present and future. It’s not the only kind of sustenance we’ll need going forward, but it’s an essential one. Keep on pushing. – CH

Lucy Dacus – “Ankles” (single, 2025)

The first release from Dacus’ upcoming album is a stunner, a string-driven meditation on physical and emotional yearning that makes perfect use of Dacus’ resonant alto as it caresses and pierces in equal measure. The sliding, gliding arrangement – rendered in vibrant detail by co-producers Dacus and Blake Mills – pushes Dacus as she details yet-unrequited desires ranging from the sweetly mundane to the vividly carnal; in her hands, doing the morning crossword together takes on no less anticipation than a night of hair-pulling passion. The real magic of “Ankles” is that Dacus adds ambivalence to this longing, recognizing through lyric and especially music that its fulfillment might not be as satisfying as the wondering, wandering state she currently occupies. Actually, the real real magic is that all of this is wrapped up in a stunning three-minute pop song, a testament to Dacus’ abilities as both writer and record-maker. I can’t wait to hear the whole album – CH

Rvshvd – “Dope Boy” (single, 2025)

“Dope Boy” pulls a simple but wonderful trick. Rvshvd takes a recognizable – even cliché – theme of a young man declaring his desire to be a drug dealer, celebrating the quick cash and flashy notoriety that he hopes will come with it. And then he delivers this lyric over rip-roaring rockabilly, turning “Dope Boy” into a stomping party that finds the shared terrain between two-step and gangsta walk. The juxtaposition isn’t just a clever mashup. It’s a subtle reminder of the shared tradition of outlaw songs across the country/rap continuum of which Rvshvd is such a deft traveler. And it’s a subtle rejoinder to the continued harrumphing of country gatekeepers about the supposed incompatibility of hip-hop sounds and themes with country’s “traditions.” Rvshvd shows such grumblers to be wrong (and often racist), but – crucially – he also reveals them to be no damn fun. “Dope Boy” is a smart subversion and a pure joy. – CH

David Lynch – “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” (from The Big Dream, 2013)

David Lynch – “Movin’ On” (from Crazy Clown Time, 2011)

David Lynch, who died last week, filled his films and TV shows with music ranging from the aching jazz of Little Jimmy Scott to the gleaming pop of Julee Cruise to the noise-rock of Nine Inch Nails. Some of the most famous moments in his work, in fact, are musical, including Dean Stockwell’s Roy Orbison lip-sync in Blue Velvet and Rebekah Del Rio’s mirror-image Orbison cover in Mulholland Drive. On Twin Peaks: The Return, he even turned over a few minutes in nearly every episode to a performance by a favorite artist, most of whom – like the country gentleman Cactus Blossoms or icy synths of Au Revoir Simone – expressed Lynch’s trademark mix of eerie and ethereal, an uncanny blue-light glow with dark and foreboding shadows right around the corner.

Lynch made a few records himself that work similar sonic territory. In the aftermath of his death, I found myself paying more attention to them than I had before. I was particularly struck by two tracks: His “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” may not be a great version of the Bob Dylan song, but I can’t imagine a more perfect pairing of song and performer. Voice wrapped in alienating echo, Lynch relates Dylan’s harrowing narrative over a stone-cold bed of percussion that swirls around Lynch as Brown’s life collapses. Like a complete unknown, indeed. But the one that really knocked me out was “Movin’ On,” a lurching slow-drag that finds Lynch – whose thin reed of a voice never sounded better – setting off alone down a dark road. It’s impossible to hear Lynch’s aching delivery of lines like “I can see how it ends” or “I’ve seen this face before/But I don’t recognize it anymore/If I could fix it I would” and not think about his recent departure. But it’s also impossible not to hear the strange transcendence of the song’s deep-blue arrangement and not picture either his commitment to meditation or the sonic textures that he favored throughout his remarkable career. Either way, both ways, it’s a fitting tribute captured in the song’s closing lyric: “Movin’ on,” Lynch exhales, “…gone.” – CH

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – “Downstream” (feat. John Anderson) (single, 2025)

By country music standards, Will Oldham’s homemade outsider art can read more affected than authentic, not so much idiosyncratic as merely pretentious. Through the years, though, Oldham has won me over by sticking to the bit—maintaining quantity and quality and, no small thing, by making a point to cut perhaps the best Merle Haggard tribute album going. So I was already eager to hear The Purple Bird, Bonnie Will’s forthcoming album cut in Nashville with David Ferguson (John Prine collaborator and famed engineer throughout Johnny Cash’s American Recordings run) as producer. But then I heard this duet with ‘80s country radio star and recent Hall of Fame inductee John Anderson, and my interest shot through the roof. A banjo-fiddle-and-penny-whistle lament about environmental doom, “Downstream” feels like a lullaby but resounds like a wake-up-call to our polluted, late capitalist catastrophe: “We live in the ruins of another’s life’s dream, oh but nobody told us that we all live downstream.” Anderson’s the perfect partner here. Singing the blues about nature despoiled has long been one of his specialties—think “Seminole Wind” and, speaking of Haggard, his Merle duet “Winds of Change”—and few singers mingle grief with urgency so powerfully. – DC

The Cody Sisters – “Not My Thoughts” (single, 2024)

The Cody Sisters are a Colorado bluegrass trio who specialize in quiet, fetching melodies delivered via an inviting warm-and-lonesome blend. The playing from sister Megan on mandolin and sister Mandie on banjo favors mood over pyrotechnics and the same goes here for a jazzy, wee hours solo from bassist Will Pavilonis. The song, about life’s brevity, universal grief, and thoughts that are yours, not mine, and vice versa, is heavy but in a welcome, arm around the shoulder way. When one image unexpectedly flew to the sun, I gasped. –DC

Bad Bunny – “Turista” (from Debí Tirar Más Fotos, 2025)

An early album of the year candidate, Bad Bunny’s latest, Debí Tirar Más Fotos finds him celebrating, preserving, and synthesizing a variety of Boricua roots sounds in a moment when Puerto Rican culture, and Puerto Rico itself, are endangered. Usually here that means dance music, as on irresistible album opener “Nuevayol,” which samples, then intensifies, 1976 dembow classic “Un Verano en Nueva York” by El Gran Comb des Puerto Rico. “Turista,” though, feels like an especially heartbroken and embittered bolero, with a lover who came and went likened to a tourist coming for a wild weekend then heading home without really knowing anything about the island, its dreams or its struggles. I don’t speak Spanish; I had to look up a translation. But thanks to the vulnerable, twinkling accompaniment (a cautro, I think?), and Bunny’s embittered and confused vocal, I got the gist on my own. - DC

Hailey Whitters – “Casseroles” (single, 2025)

This one’s sentimental, probably even what you’d call corny, but it gets at something universal, too, a feeling you’ve experienced or seen, or are going to, which is to say it’s one good reason I’m glad we still have country songs like this one by songwriters Hillary Lindsey, James Slater and Tom Douglas. In the first verse, Whitters watches a man who’s lost his wife. The guy feels like he’s drowning in a house full of mourners, each bearing their obligatory casseroles. What will the widower do when the people leave and “after the casseroles stop coming”? In the second verse, backed by elegant country chamber-music strings, Whitters takes a look at herself: “Am I tinfoil and Pyrex, I show up, that's it / Or am I a knock on the door when nobody's knocking no more…” So drop off some food, by all means—“Eating is a small, good thing at a time like this,” as Raymond Carver reminded—but don’t forget to keep showing up. – DC

Eileen – “Ces Bottes Sont Faites pour Marche” (from Femmes de Paris, Vol. 1, 2002)

A couple of weeks back, I made my way through comedy-drama series The Sticky, starring the great character actor Margo Martindale in her first lead role. It takes place in rural Quebec, centers around a big maple syrup heist, and lands like a slightly broader, slightly less dark, addition to the Fargo universe. It took a couple episodes but as the wacky plot thickens, and the comedic pace quickens, I began to enjoy it quite a bit. One nice touch is that the soundtrack is full of sixties-era French language versions of American pop hits, my favorite of which was from Eileen (nee Eileen Robinson), an American who cut “These Boots Were Made for Walking” in 1966 as “Ces Bottes Sont Faites pour Marche.” (She apparently did versions in English and German at the same time.) It follows Lee Hazelwood’s arrangement for Nancy Sinatra pretty closely, but it’s also a tad faster so hits bouncier, snappier, poppier. C’est bien! Eileen’s a better, more buoyant singer, too, than Nancy (no, not a typo), so “Ces Bottes…” becomes my second favorite version of the song, behind only Loretta Lynn’s. Folks who know their Ye-Ye French pop have surely been all over this one forever, but it was new to me and a treat. –DC

Reading recommendations

-Carina del Valle Schorske on Bad Bunny’s “politics of presence,” for NPR

-Craig Jenkins on Mac Miller’s new posthumous album Balloonerism, for Vulture

-Stephen Thomas Erlewine on Frank Black’s reissued Teenager of the Year, for Pitchfork

-Andy Greene on the final years of Eric Carmen, for Rolling Stone

-Hunter Kelly on the business reason behind Carrie Underwood’s turn to Trump, for MSNBC

-Jonathan Bernstein talks to Yola, for Rolling Stone

-Various writers on David Lynch’s sonic worlds, for The Wire

-Natalie Weiner on the overlaps between jazz and country, for Don’t Rock The Inbox

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