Of Note 015: On the road with Waxahatchee, on the water with Water From Your Eyes, and behind the mask of MF DOOM
Howdy folks!
Thanks for your patience as I took some time off.
I’m currently at Schuba’s in Chicago, on the corner of Belmont and Southport, enjoying CHIRP FM’s monthly listening bar session. The first Wednesday night of each month, a small group sits in the cozy upstairs bar and quietly listens to a selection of records, usually selected by CHIRP DJs in accordance with some theme.
It’s an nice few hours of quiet. Well, not really quiet as the speakers are blaring, but nobody speaks while we listen. We read. We write. We text stories about the records over WhatsApp. “Introvert hour” as our host said tonight. When I’m here, I’m always stuck by how rare it is in my life to just be quiet in public, among people other people doing the same.
This is usually where I tie this intro together into some theme relevant to my selections, but this month it’s just an invitation to push a deadline and go be quiet somewhere.
In this edition of Of Note, you’ll find an instant classic tour diary from Jenn Pelly as she follows Waxahatchee, a quick, tight profile of Water From Your Eyes, and the featured book of the month is The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast by S.H. Fernado Jr.
On Tour With Waxahatchee
My favorite kind of musician profile is the tour diary. Maybe it was coming of age during the heyday of Almost Famous, but I just love the insight a writer gets by traveling with a band. It allows more time and space for the observations to feel natural and not manufactured. When I was writing and interviewing, I never felt I could really get to know somebody in an hour and always wanted to just hang out in the practice room and spend a month with them.
Jenn Pelly has written an instant classic for Oxford American chronicling her six days with Waxahatchee as they toured across Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas.
This isn’t a story with a lot of drama. There are no late-night parties, tall tales, or the makings of rock and roll legends. What makes it a classic is the openness and breadth of insight into Katie Crutchfield, her relationship with her sisters, and her music. There’s a kindred spirit between author and subject here, in part because of similarities like both being twins, but also because it’s clear Pelly has a deep understanding of the artist and her art.
“Fire” wasn’t just the signature song of her early thirties: It is a song about the possibility of a breakthrough, capturing the energy of the precipice of something new and huge, the process playing out in its slow bloom. A line in the sand, a before and after, burning down the past to attend to the flame in yourself—it’s all there. “Fire” itself is like a bridge she crossed, and it remains an invitation to cross your own.
Setting Sail with Water From Your Eyes
Water From Your Eyes is one of those groups I hear a lot about, but don’t know a lot about so I enjoyed this quick, fun profile of the group from Quinn Moreland in The Guardian.
It’s a delightful jaunt down the East River that raises questions such as: who from your local music scene would you save in a Titanic scenario?
While not long enough to get really in-depth, Moreland captures a good variety of the band’s earnest goofiness and the bittersweet emotion that often is just beneath that.
Book of the Month: Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast by S.H. Fernado Jr.
For a long time, MF DOOM felt impenetrable to me. The volume of and scatteredness of his work was hard to trace, like jumping into a comic book universe without knowing anything.
S.H. Fernado Jr. does heroic work to organize all the aliases, labels, ideas, features, and one-offs and present it in a compelling and organized fashion. While this is mostly a straight forward biography, Fernado Jr. organizes into themed sections — The Man, The Myth, The Mask, The Music, and The Legend — that gives him enough leeway to jump around in ways that make sense.
The first three sections give the origin story of the Supervillian. It’s a story of tragedy, hard work, obsession, and addiction. What strikes me the most is how clearly the vision for DOOM came together from the start. This man was driven.
The Music section deep dives into individual records, almost like mini 33 1/3 books, giving ample time to dive into some of the key full-length recordings.
It does what any great music book should: makes you want to put it down and start listening. In the few weeks I was reading this, I’ve gone back and revisited every DOOM recording I can find and listened and then read. Listened and then read.
Bonus Links
Insightful review of the new Lorde record, Virgins, by Olivia Horn at Pitchfork.
Bob Mehr digs into some of the unreleased, mysterious corners of Brian Wilson’s catalog at the New York Times.
Thank you for reading! See you next month! On time!
Justin Anderson-Weber
