You didn’t miss anything—check out 617 who do you love, 618 the right time, 619 do you ever, and 620 throwing shadows.
When I think about the formation of my music taste, mostly there are a few key individuals across the years (when I was ages twelve, fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen) that I’ve decided, consciously or subconsciously, know all the best music. I take their recommendations very seriously, keep track of what they’re listening to, and functionally absorb their personal library into my own. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed filters with which to determine inclusion into my own rotation, but ultimately even those are the product of the first time that I let myself be influenced. I think of my brain as one of those art projects where you smear glue onto a surface in a certain shape and then dump a truly unreasonable volume of some small granular substance—glitter, sand, tiny beads—onto said surface and gently shake it, hopefully over some sort of trash receptacle, so that the shape is revealed once more, covered in a layer of the granules. Some of the music that I’m exposed to through these people doesn’t stick, slides off the surface of my brain in the case of this metaphor, for one reason or another. This admittedly limited discernment is how I justify basically co-opting the taste of the people I like and calling it my own, the years layering upon each other to hopefully form something original.
I dilute the singularity of that influence with other recommendations, typically impersonal ones from the internet, so as to remind myself that I am my own person with agency and the enormity of a streaming service at my disposal. Next to the process described above, the thing that has likely had the greatest impact on my personal listening practice is Song Exploder, a podcast wherein host Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians about the stories behind their songs. They talk about production, recording, personal histories, and their inspirations and then play the song at the end so the listener can put together the pieces.
I first discovered Yo La Tengo through Song Exploder, an episode they did for the release of their album There’s a Riot Going On (2018). I had probably heard “Autumn Sweater” playing in an Urban Outfitters sometime before then but I didn’t have any real familiarity with the band when I listened to the episode. I remember being impressed specifically by the fact that There’s a Riot Going On is their fifteenth record, that they had been together since 1984. That was so much longer than I had been alive it was dizzying, like looking up at a very tall building from the street. Ira Kapland and Georgia Hubley are also married. I imagined what my life might be like if I found my soulmate, not in a romantic sense but in a collaborative one, a person with whom I could make art for upwards of thirty years. I was immediately obsessed with them.
The song on this playlist is from I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (1997), the album that cemented their place as greats of indie rock. They had already achieved critical success with Electr-o-pura (1995) and wrote this record without much of an agenda, playing long jams and carving songs out of them. “Damage” is a slow burn, instrumental elements dropping in over an atmospheric soundscape before the initially unassuming vocals start. Ira Kaplan is describing a quiet New York evening and then suddenly sings these lyrics that have caused me to play this song on a loop since I heard it:
I used to think about you all the time
I would think about you all the time
Now it just feels weird
That there you are
These lines are living rent free in my head. As a songwriter, you endeavor to say something this poignant in so few words, which I believe is the essence of poetry—encapsulating a feeling in such a simple statement that it slips past the logical defenses of the mind and straight into the heart. Every time “Damage” ends I want to hear it again, so I can think more about what it means to love and lose and heal over, without really noticing that you’re changing at all.
This week in the mail I received a gift to myself that I had purchased and forgotten about (the best kind): the tenth anniversary edition vinyl of Bon Iver (2011). I hadn’t really listened to it since I was thirteen, when it was maybe the only album I listened to. I put it on, felt exceedingly outside of my body, and sent a series of unhinged text messages to my friends:
and:
I can’t hope to explain it any better than Phoebe Bridgers did in the foreword she wrote for the jacket of the new pressing. She describes the way that this album is so amorphous that it simply makes things feel bigger, rather than consistently inspiring any specific emotion. I think that this unique quality of the record is perhaps the reason I had to have a little cry—I wasn’t sad, per se, but rather overwhelmed, by the beauty and the horror of being alive. It was rather dramatic, not something I’d normally indulge myself in, but I couldn’t help it; I felt like a teenager again, listening to this record in my room, feeling deep in my bones that no one but Justin Vernon would ever understand me.
The record sleeves are covered in text, mostly normal stuff like lyrics and acknowledgments, but also little groups of words and phrases that accompany the songs. I found reading these while the song was playing to be very moving, and so I’ll include the one for “Towers” here:
Katy Kirby recently released a few bonus tracks for her most recent album, Cool Dry Place (2021). This record continues to be one of my favorites of last year, of ever, and I will die on the hill that it is a brilliant debut album, a vision of everything that a debut could be. I’ve written about her and this record extensively, so I’ll just touch on this expanded edition.
The Andrew Bird cover is originally from his record Things Are Really Great Here, Sort Of… (2014), which is itself a cover album of Handsome Family songs. The original—which is interestingly enough reminding me of Yo La Tengo—is quite a sad song, but Katy Kirby makes it sadder somehow, perhaps by trading the rollicking acoustic guitars for a soft, hammer-heavy piano accompaniment. She describes it like a game of telephone, which is a perfect metaphor for the art of the cover, a bit of yourself appended to something you love.
And it’s also a perfect metaphor for the formation of taste—we’ve come full circle. See you next week.
Super glad that a friend turned me on to your substack, Amaya! I've been digging through your archives...so much good stuff. For the last year, I've been running a similar thing over at the Make Space substack. Check it!
I feel like every time I listen to a YLT song, I pick up something new. A note here, a chord there. What I haven’t paid much attention to are their lyrics. Sounds like I need to change that!