Category: Uncategorized

Playlist – 2025-08-31

This week’s playlist is somewhat skewed towards songs I’ve been listening to for longer than a year. I have tended to be relentless in making sure I continue exploring new music out of fear that I would become mired in the quicksand of nostalgia, but now I fear that I’ll forget the songs I enjoy, having no material reminder of them beyond their temporary presence on the internet.

This week:

Cripple and the Starfish – Antony and the Johnsons
Beautiful, beautiful song that shows the basic song form has incredible depth to continue charting.

Elderberry Wine – Wednesday
I’m a bit suspicious of the ongoing turn to something like country given that country itself is essentially a poor appropriation of folk music, but songs like these give me hope for the genre.

Riding Around in the Dark – Florist
This song comes off the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, which is a great album in itself (and the movie’s great too). NPR has a write-up on the way that the album came together that isn’t as insightful as it could be, but might be a good introduction to the movie if you haven’t seen it already.

Words – F.R. David
“Words,” which comes to me via @norkpen, has the rare accomplishment of being a good meta song on the difficulty of language, and maybe it does this by investing its reflections into the form of the radio pop of its time (1982).

Alibi – Hurray for the Riff Raff
Alynda Segarra doesn’t get enough credit for her long commitment to mining the form of folk music, and coming back to this song over two years reminded me I never listened to the album it was a single for.

Fish in the Jailhouse – Tom Waits
I’ve been listening to “Fish in the Jailhouse” for maybe a decade now, trying to figure out how guitarist Marc Ribot does what he does so well for Tom Waits, and I think this song might be his greatest guitar writing accomplishment.

Cowgirl – Ora Cogan
Ora Cogan occupies a surprisingly under-explored terrain in the area of folk, weird spooky sound, and at times a driving rock form. This song single-handedly inspired me to pursue other music that fits the bill, which I’ve called “pensive cowgirl,” and I’ve only found 2-3 other real contenders (Marissa Nadler and some Chelsea Wolfe).

Playlist – 2025-08-27

At some point, maybe after studying English and philosophy in college, I got into reading about music. I wanted algorithms and music discovery to be the way I could find good music, and barring that, having friends. Friends with good music were and have been rare. Algorithms, I have come to think, will never be a good way to find new music. At least until this historical epoch called capitalism comes to an end.

I grew up burning mixes for friends onto CD-Rs, and later, making playlists. At a certain point, this ended. In addition to the material conditions of becoming an older and old man, music listening has trended towards becoming an unending stream one turns on and off.

Music criticism has mostly collapsed due to the unending assault of the free market on anything it can break down into the value form. The New Yorker doesn’t really get it right, or else it suffers from the same danger that brought down Pitchfork: you will be defunded for writing something good.

I don’t really know where to find music anymore. I followed Anthony Fantano recently on TikTok. Every so often I find a new piece of music mostly by chance. I desperately crave good music, and all the music platforms are mostly uninterested in facilitating this search. I have to know what I want before I open Spotify.

To this end, I’m making an effort to share a playlist a week of what I’ve been listening to on my drives. I might slow down to a monthly trickle, as I really do hardly find good music. I also struggle to even find my old music, and I wish I kept physical collections like this mom:

@haydenbegley

#DidYouYawn #fyp #fy #foryou #foryoupage #fypシ #mom #hoarder

♬ original sound – haydenbegley

I’ve posted this week’s songs below, and as I’m still on Spotify, I’m linking a Spotify playlist:

  • House of Self-Undoing – Boy Harsher remix – Chelsea Wolfe, Boy Harsher
    • I’m seeing Chelsea Wolfe on September 26th in NYC, and I’ve been listening to her 2024 album quite a bit. She’s one of this decade’s best songwriters, and this remix brings out her songwriting, stripping away the frantic percussion of the original to set her voice in an 80s pop production.
  • stick – Jim Legxacy
    • Picked up this recommendation from Anthony Fantano. Beautifully produced song, ends too quickly, loops well.
  • Lost Highway – Hank Williams
    • Got into classic country over the summer, but it was a shallow dive, as it’s a shallow pool. Hank Williams is brilliant.
  • Will the Circle Be Unbroken – The Carter Family
    • One of the best American songs ever written.
  • Trains Across The Sea – Silver Jews
    • I love David Berman’s songwriting, and I hadn’t listened to this one before. It’s all about the driving beat leading up to the final lines: “In 27 years, I’ve drunk fifty thousand beers; and they just wash against me, like the sea into a pier.
  • Just As Was Told – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads
    • An album I ran into because the album cover is so atrocious. The storm this band generates is insane, nevermind that they do it in 2001. Don’t put on unless you’re willing to listen to the whole thing, and loud.
  • Wanna Quit All the Time – Faye Webster
    • Faye Webster put out multiple albums while I wasn’t looking, and she’s impressively consistent at writing well. The seconds of silence before the song’s coda always cross over into moments of frustration before the beautiful solo kicks in.
  • It Hits Harder – Marissa Nadler
    • Marissa Nadler has incredible taste that shows in both her writing and her Spotify playlists. She is a curator, and I wonder if this sometimes hinders her music in that she plays things close to the chest more often than I’d like. This one’s off her latest album, which is consistent but so far has no standouts for me. In this sense, it strikes me as Classical music does: the fault is in my ears, not the music, but I’m stuck with these ears.