SCALES #82: crooked cane
gifts, guitars, scrobbles
Hello!
One piece of Popcast lore that has always stuck with me is Caryn Ganz’s insistence on waiting to make her year-end best-of lists until the year is truly over, rather than jumping the gun with something in early December. So, in that belated spirit, a music issue. Not a best-of list, or even strictly constrained to the past year, but clearing out the backlog of some tunes I’ve been wanting to write about.
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Bright Future, Adrienne Lenker’s album from last March, is full of songs that fearlessly approach big feelings head-on. Not every song succeeds but when it does, the result is electric, particularly on “Sadness as a Gift”. It’s a classically beautiful piece of songwriting, full of little details that have kept me returning to it over and over: the entrancing violin line that culminates in a solo that can be imagined as a wordless response to a question “too much to ask”, the progression of “think you will”/”bet you will”/”hope you will” in the chorus, the little extra breath before the final verse, the evocation of spring, winter, eternity. It all tumbles out as a single, delicate yet unfussy utterance.
Seeing there was a Song Exploder on the creation of this track, I was a little nervous to listen to it. Would it reveal too much and ruin the song? Reader, the answer is thankfully not. Lenker talks about the genesis of the song and the titular gift, but at the same time she keeps the song open for exploration, riffing on possible meanings of the lyrics (is the old man a tree? could be!) instead of reducing them to a fixed interpretation. And then a revelatory discussion of how the album was recorded: in a single room, playing together, without headphones, isolated tracks, or even playing back the recording between takes. In hindsight, of course that’s how the record organically unfolds as it does, with the counting-off at the start arising from the happy accident of that take rather than something planned in advance. The episode handled the song sensitively enough that it deepened my appreciation rather than acting as a spoiler.
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I’ve made my way down the guitar-god line from MJ through Mk to ML. Namely, to ML Buch, who released the marvelously strange Suntub in late 2023. Dreamy, experimental riffs, with bright and open harmonies played with hyper-real guitar tone, set off against surreal lyrics, as on “Flame shards goo”.
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Both Waxahatchee and Nilüfer Yanya released new albums in 2024 and they are both the kind of album that is extremely me: watching musicians incrementally refine and mature their sound. Waxahatchee’s Tiger’s Blood (a shave-ice flavor!) is not so different from the preceding Saint Cloud and yet it has its own unique touches: the guitar playing and backing vocals of aforementioned MJ Lenderman, with a great riff on “Crowbar”; the stripped back introspection of “365” (not to be confused with the other great “365” of the year); the group vocals closing out the title track and album.
My Method Actor highlights one of Yanya’s great musical characteristics is her patience to let a song spread out, unhurried, as on “Binding” or “Call It Love”, with the latter unearthing a new hook at the four-minute mark. There’s an unshowy confidence in the intricately interlocking patterns that play out in the songs’ arrangements (sometimes reminiscent of certain strains of arty late aughts rock I’ll always have a soft spot for). As Yanya announces before launching into the instrumental break on "Mutations": "Watch this".
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One climate scientist on the absolutely heartbreaking LA wildfires: “One lesson climate change teaches us again and again is that bad things can happen ahead of schedule.”
Meet Elaine, the clean water advocate, and Elaine, the tunnel borer: “A machine that is 619 tons, 18 feet in diameter and 460 feet long — who wouldn't want a machine like that named after them?“
Forty Fort? It’s “named for the forty families from Connecticut who arrived in the Wyoming Valley in 1769", of course.
An appreciation of scrobbling.
Rob Schneider, of The Apples in Stereo, and now Assistant Professor in mathematics at Michigan Tech reports: “Apparently my Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath (EBS) number is 6 = 2 + 2 + 2.” (Tom Lehrer? 9 = E4 + B2 + S3, via John Cleese and Kermit Unpigged, variously.)
Regardless of what happens to TikTok, eternally grateful for Jordan Stone's #postcorecore.
Tabs is off the Trail and back on the Internet beat, albeit on a less punishing schedule.
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