Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#57 Jim O'Rourke, INSIGNIFICANCE

Listen on YouTube

vs.

#72 Kristin Hersh, SUNNY BORDER BLUE

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for SUNNY BORDER BLUE, and it’s from @lanna.bsky.social. Take it away, Alana!

It’s 2005. I’ve been on the phone with Kristin Hersh for over two hours and, as far as I’m concerned, if the phone call went on for another two hours that wouldn’t be enough. I’m gripping the receiver of the cordless phone tight, sure that if I listen long enough, I’ll learn the secrets of the universe.

I live in a trailer with holes in the floor, water that comes down the inner walls, with the child I had at nineteen and, part-time, my partner. I am twenty-six years old, in community college, and discussing my partner adopting my child. We are probably not happy together. We feel compatible, and are likely both wondering if that’s enough.

I am talking with Kristin because my cousin–who is younger and thinner than me and has far more energy and a brighter future than I do–has a zine. She lives at the Jersey shore, and early on in her zine’s inception she got some interviews with bands that later became famous. Those credentials have led to me being able to get photo passes for Ani DiFranco, Badly Drawn Boy, the Pixies. If I aim my sights on the smaller venues, I get interviews.

I have no idea how to interview, but Kristin doesn’t care. This is a conversation to her, and to me too; I feel completely at ease asking her questions about her life even more than her music, because she is in love with her life, with her family, and is enthusiastically sharing her thoughts on relationships and parenting, things I currently am struggling with.

“I find marriage to be wild!” she tells me, and my head explodes at the idea of marriage being the opposite of “settling down,” a thing Kristin, with her constant music output, four sons, and van life, is not interested in doing. “It’s not comfortable. I mean, maybe we’re at peace, we’ve got inner peace going on, but you’ve got somebody with your heart in their hands—any minute, they could just mess up your whole life. The terror that goes along with love is crazy.”

I have always thought of Kristin Hersh and her stepsister, Tanya Donelly, as an either/or situation; Betty or Veronica, The Beatles or the Stones. Never mind that they had a band together. Tanya’s tracks in Throwing Muses, Belly, her solo albums–those were my jams. Kristin’s voice has always been too raw for me, it’s always felt like too much. But I’ve always been too much, myself.

When the call is (sadly) over, the show is next. It’s at The Tin Angel–a Philadelphia venue that has only a few tables that, from what I can tell, you reserve by also buying a meal from the restaurant downstairs. The rest of us stand, watching people who are older and richer than us eat dinner.

Kristin is blonde now, her piercing blue eyes no longer the focus now that she doesn’t have dark hair and heavy, blunted fringe to make them pop. She has an easy, mom haircut. Dressed down, she’s not looking to impress or perform Being a Musician. She looks like someone you could easily pass on the street. Between each song, she talks, and she is as entrancing in front of an audience as she was on the phone. But the songs–!

They’re intimate, they ARE raw, they couldn’t have been written by anyone else. They’re the stories she’s told me, and the ones she’s telling the audience, and more.

I spend the next several weeks listening to her back catalog, and it’s Sunny Border Blue that becomes the album I go back to most often. While the haunting “Your Ghost” off Hips and Makers is still my favorite song she’s done, there’s something about the entirety of Sunny Border Blue that feels like Kristin at her most everything. “Your Dirty Answer” veers away at its most catchy, “Spain” decides half-way through to stop being a ballad. Even though I know “Trouble” is a cover, it feels like hers when she sings it, and might be the most accessible song on the album.

At times, if I listen too closely, Kristin Hersh is still too much for me, but then a line jumps out and grabs my heart, and I keep going.

“It’s my experience that if you’re really paying attention, then [life]’s not boring, that’s for sure,” she told me on the phone. “Everything matters.”

Sunny Border Blue is an album where everything matters, where those small moments of life are on the same level as the hardest moments.

I wish I could care that much, about anything, but it’s been years since that phone call and I am still the person who struggles to keep a broken-down home, to stay in a long-term relationship, to give myself over fully to the hobbies I most enjoy.

But I still think of that call, that show, and all Kristin’s wisdom and joy often. Life, as always, is not boring, that’s for sure.

Thank you for that, Alana!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #8 Gillian Welch, TIME (THE REVELATOR) defeated #121 Ash, FREE ALL ANGELS, 162-53.

Thanks,

Kent