You didn’t miss anything—check out 684 some dream, 685 don’t let go, 686 graceless, 687 truly, 688 tell me you love me, 689 make a wish, 690 highway, 691 can i tell you something, 692 wide awake, 693 i know you see me, and 694 same old song.
I’ve been anticipating the Babehoven album all year, since I first heard their single “Fugazi” in January. I was moved by a lyric in the refrain:
An idea
Will leave me breathless
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways that we write about inexplicable feelings, about my own inexplicable feelings and my futile struggle to name them. There is such comfort in this linguistic exercise—therapists will often tell people who suffer from panic attacks to name objects in their immediate environment to calm themselves—and learning to accept that some things in life are indescribable has been a hard lesson for me.
I find that music touches those soft, unexposed, unnameable parts of the human experience in ways that no other medium can. Much of what I’ve been drawn to this year has been lyrically arresting in this way, emotionally ambiguous but inarguably intense. As a lyricist, I know a song is worth writing when I find something in it that speaks to an emotion I’ve experienced but cannot describe.
The Babehoven record Light Moving Time (2022) is full of expansive, emotive moments that explore the difficult spaces of grief, healing, and acceptance. The first song on this playlist, the closer of the album, has a line that I return to:
You are family, and that means loss to me often
You're family, and that's lost to me often
Maya Bon’s writing on this record is incredibly poignant and vulnerable, a clear eye trained on her own experiences of relationships with herself and others. The record hinges on candid portrayals of struggles and joys, the ways the two are intertwined:
In these end gamеs, we've got to
Creatе a life that's liveable
And be seen
For what we need
Choosing pain when it's clean
Learning how to be angry
But not be mean
These songs and the feelings they evoke are rural somehow, exist in trees and fields but not in skyscrapers or streets. I’ve seen the word “pastoral” used multiple times in reviews for this record, and I have to agree; the instrumentation is rooted, in every sense of the word.
Florist’s record Florist (2022) resides in the same sonic and emotional space, and was interestingly enough recorded in the Hudson Valley, where Babehoven is based. Florist has even more explicitly addressed the ambiguous emotional space that their songs seek to describe; lead singer and lyricist Emily Sprague told Pitchfork in an interview, “Language just scratches the surface of what we experience […] I feel like I need to be able to explore sound and communicate things without words, too.”
Florist deftly explores that space, but does not attempt to map it. The walking the thin line between the two is what sets this record apart from most releases I heard this year. At least half the tracks on the album are instrumental interludes punctuated with the sounds of the space itself: creaking of doors, rain, wind, chirping birds. These wordless transitional pieces are as emotional as the more traditional folk songs. One stand out lyrical moment comes from “Sci-Fi Silence,” towards the end of the record:
You're not what I have
But what I love
Fleet Foxes has always written in a lyrical mode that speaks to land and the natural world. Fiction writer and essayist Brandon Taylor wrote in the foreword for Wading in Waist-High Water: The Lyrics of Fleet Foxes (2022), “In the hands of the Fleet Foxes, the pastoral feels less like a particular zone in time and more like a space in which to parse ideas of self-reliance, the inconstancy of love, the pain of intimacy, the fear of loss, the sting of betrayal, and the strange but urgent project of hope.” These themes are timeless and universal, but Maya Bon, Emily Sprague, and Robin Pecknold all seem to know that returning to the seemingly simple relationships between people and their environments yields affecting writing that transcends specificity and circumstance. Pecknold sings on “Wading in Waist-High Water:”
Soon as I knew you
All so wide open
Wading inside of fire
As if I just saw you
Cross Second Avenue
Wading in waist-high water
And I love you so violent
More than maybe I can do
These writers are doing the impossible work of putting language to the complexity, the obscurity, the contradiction of human emotion. I personally owe them a debt for that. I suppose the purpose of my life will be endeavoring to name my feelings until I die, surely without succeeding at all, but try I will. Songs like these make it seem like a less futile task.
I have this theory that the way a song or an album sounds is mainly influenced by the geography of the place it was made and the place(s) the artist grew up. I’ve lived my whole life in the Pacific Northwest, I feel the woods and mountains in my bones. Sometimes I’ll hear music and feel that it belongs here. And every time, when I look up where the artist is from, they’re either from Oregon or Washington or Alaska or from a place geographically and topographically similar. There’s lots of discussion on how a culture or people group can influence music’s sound, but not much on how the drive from home to work and back becomes part of you, how the feel of the woods and the way the specific hills out your window look in the morning and smell of the mountain you live on seeps into your soul and bleeds into everything you create. I think about this all the time and I may write a book on it someday