Howdy folks!

The new year has kicked off with a wealth of great music writing. This month’s selections have put me in a time machine or some kind of liminal, in-between space.

Nate Chinen gives us a new perspective on Bowie’s Blackstar and how it might have been perceived if it wasn’t so closely tied to his death. Eli Enis interviews Mannequin Pussy lead singer Marisa Dabice in a rare moment of calm. And the book of the month, Jonathan Bernstein’s biography of Justin Townes Earle gets us deep into Earle’s headspace.

All that, plus some bonus links!

Bowie’s Blackstar in a New (Old) Light

This January marked 10 years since David Bowie’s death and the release of his final album, Blackstar. With Bowie dying two days after its release, the album never got to stand on its own, instead viewed as a memorial of sorts.

Jazz critic Nate Chinen wrote one of the first features on the album for the New York Times. For his newsletter, “The Gig”, he’s dug back into his interviews with Blackstar’s supporting cast of jazz musicians and “assembled a prelapsarian oral history of the album’s creation” to capture how the album was viewed before Bowie’s death. It’s a time capsule and a clever way to offer up a new perspective on its anniversary.

Jason Lindner (pianist): When we started tracking, I realized: This is like a fucking rock band, just getting in there and sweating through it. It really had that feeling. And it made us play the way the music needed to be.

Marisa Dabice in Limbo

For his newsletter Chasing Sundays, Eli Enis interviews Marisa Dabice, lead singer of Mannequin Pussy, at a transitional moment. They’re standing on the cusp of a real commercial and cultural breakout after releasing their beloved fourth record, I Got Heaven, completing a tour with Turnstile, and are set to open for Foo Fighters later this year.

It seems so rare to catch an artist at the exact moment they’re taking it all in:

Are you familiar with “weltschmerz?” That's like what I feel every single fucking day. It’s this German word that describes the depression one feels for the state of the world, and the kind of isolation that you feel in not being able to contribute to making the world better. There’s that everyday ache that I still feel. But in my creative life and in my personal life, I feel more able to experience joy than I think I ever did in my 20s, certainly. And I feel very grateful for that.

Enis’s interview captures an artist who isn’t taking anything for granted. They cover her experience getting into meditation and how she’s taking the time to master her craft. There’s no mythology here about troubled times creating great art. Instead, it’s recognition of how space, time, and resources mean the world to an artist.

I feel so far from mastery. But I feel like for the first time in my life, I have the space, time, and ability to afford attempting mastery, in terms of what it means to practice something and see it as a lifelong practice. I think for so long in my life, I was really colored by not thinking I would live very long. And so there was this passion and this intensity to like…I started playing guitar, and then the next day started a band. And then, like, two weeks later played my first show. There was this idea that I was going to run out of time to experience the things I wanted to. Now, I feel like I might be around for some time.

Book of the Month: What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorized Biography of Justin Townes Earle by Jonathan Bernstein

When Justin Townes Earle died in August 2020, it was one of the first artist deaths that stunned me. It was the first time a famous musician who was my age and who I’d be following for years passed away. It was the kind of death that made me confront my own mortality.

Jonathan Bernstein’s fastidiously researched biography of JTE left me similarly stunned. Bernstein doesn’t shy away from the ugliest moments of JTE’s life. This was a deeply flawed man who hurt many around him, often in ways unseen to fans. Despite his faults, he still built a community that was devastated by his loss.

The thoroughness of this book is worth praise. What stands out most to me from Bernstein’s writing is how often it feels like he gets inside JTE’s mind, which is facilitated by JTE’s active posting on Twitter. Bernstein aligns tweets with key moments in the story; it’s revealing to see the tension between the public persona and what else was happening. Bernstein not only interviews JTE’s close friends and family (although Steve Earle declined to be interviewed), but also speaks to attendees of JTE’s shows to confirm some of JTE’s on stage banter, which adds to the depth.

This book made me stop and think for long stretches about why I may have idolized this man. JTE would talk about “the myth” - the idea that an artist needed to be troubled to make good art - and by shining light on JTE’s struggle with “the myth”, Bernstein also holds a mirror up for the reader to question their own role in bolstering it.

Bonus Links

• Steven Hyden with a very reasonable perspective in his newsletter, Evil Speakers, on Pitchfork adding a paywall and letting subscribers add their own score.

• Eric Harvey’s Sunday Review (really a whole history lesson) of Bob Marley and the Wailers greatest hits alum, Legend, is well worth using up one of your free monthly reviews at Pitchfork.

• For Stereogum, Tom Breihan revisits Cat Power’s The Greatest 20 years later and connects Dusty Springfield to Chan Marshall to Lana Del Rey.

• Marissa Moss asks “A Nurse Who Served Veterans Was Killed. Where You At, Country Music?” for Don’t Rock The Inbox.

Thank you for reading!

Justin Anderson-Weber