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Last week was the first time I’ve missed a newsletter release since I started writing Record Store. I was in Montana on Saturday, near the Canadian border. I was supposed to be there still, but I’m unexpectedly back home in Berkeley. I drove here in a day, in fourteen hours, after deciding that the wildfire smoke from the Bootleg fire in Oregon blowing east made the area too dangerous. It felt like a dream; the sky was the same shade of gray regardless of time and although I knew there were mountains ahead of me, I couldn’t see them. Everywhere we went, the smoke followed.
I had planned to write last week about this playlist, and its title is a little ironic now. I was scared, for the planet and for my safety. I went into the store at the gas station on Sunday afternoon, unsure where I would be sleeping with hours on the road left to go. We had looked at the air quality map that morning and decided to drive seven hours south to the nearest point outside the yellow and orange areas. I realized we needed water; it was still ninety degrees out. I weighed the options as I walked the aisles: sleep in the car, where we’d be safe from smoke but the in which the heat might reach dangerous temperatures, or outside, where the air would eventually get cooler but might also fill with smoke overnight. Either way, we’d need to stay hydrated. I finally found the water, or where it should be; there were only three gallons left on the ransacked shelf. I bought one and hoped it would be enough.
Obviously everything turned out fine. I’m home now and I’m grateful that Berkeley is a respite from smoke, for now. I’m trying to soak up the places around me that I love while I still can, the hills behind my house and the mountains across the bay. This year is the first that I haven’t been able to get fire season out of my mind, even when it’s clear from my place to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Squirrel Flower album Planet (i) (2021) is actually a perfectly themed record for this issue. The title is a reference to the theoretical planet the rich will flee to once the earth is ruined. “Desert Wildflowers” is a meditation on disaster, on the acceptance of one’s fate as a part of the natural world.
I'm not scared of the storm
I'll be lying on the roof when the tornado turns
It’s uncanny how well these descriptions of ruination function as metaphor for the desire to be smaller, unobtrusive, easy. These sentiments echo much of I Was Born Swimming (2020), Squirrel Flower’s last album. It’s a break-up record, in the broadest sense, and also my favorite record of last year, full stop. Much of Planet (i) is thematically and sonically incongruous with I Was Born Swimming, but “Desert Wildflowers” is a sweet and sad connection.
Desert wildflowers don't need much to grow
To be like that, oh, to be like that
Being scared always makes me want to burrow, nest, retreat. I get nostalgic for the music my mom listened to, the kind that’s already wedged deep in my brain somewhere. I heard “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” in my local hardware store the day before I left on this trip, and I’ve listened to it everyday since. The guitar work on this song is so good and infectious, as are the harmonies on the chorus. Jim Croce can’t decide whether or not he wants to call up his ex-lover and her new man, or to let sleeping dogs lie. He’s tortured, torn up. In the end, he calls the whole thing off.
Operator, let's forget about this call
There's no one there I really wanted to talk to
Thank you for your time
Ah, you've been so much more than kind
You can keep the dime
Before I decided to only listen to albums I’ve known since I was a child, I got really into the new Lucy Dacus record, Home Video (2021). I, like everyone with a soul, was deeply affected by “Night Shift,” Lucy Dacus’ anthem for a horrible heartbreak. Home Video is a collection of stories from Lucy’s life, ages seven to seventeen. At moments achingly funny and deeply upsetting, it explores her relationship with sexuality and religion, which I’ll touch on more in later issues. The last song on this playlist is “Please Stay,” maybe the first good song I’ve heard about loving someone who is suicidal. I’ll probably never completely understand a lot of this album, the religious trauma especially, but I know exactly what she’s feeling when she says:
Call me if you need a friend
Or never talk to me again
But please stay
This record is brilliant and unlike anything I’ve heard before in the scope of the project itself, these specific memories that make up the artist as a person. And somehow, in all its specificity and sadness, it’s still the perfect compliment to my summer days, to the driving and the planning and the hoping. I’m really grateful for this album, and this song. I hope you find something in it too.