A Playlist for Spring
Plus new albums from Four Tet & Dancer, a 1970s Japanese psychedelic soul compilation, interviews with Teju Cole & Julia Holter, an excerpt from Rita Bullwinkel's new novel, and more
The beginning of spring is officially two days away. I have been sitting in the backyard the past two days with the weather in the balmy lower 60s, listening to music and reading and birdwatching.
Enjoy the 23-song playlist while the earth warms up, summer vacation gets closer, and you can finally shed that winter coat for a half-year.
see also: my playlists for gardening, a collection of songs about birds, and some songs for walking.
Do you have any songs you associate with spring?
A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Music (9 albums, 75 songs, 5 hours and 23 minutes)
This week’s new music includes releases by Four Tet, Dancer, Kacey Musgraves, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, Sweet Pill, Holly Humberstone, Charles Lloyd, The Dandy Warhols, and a compilation of 1970’s Japanese psychedelic soul.
Largehearted Book & Music Links:
How Waxahatchee Made the Album of Her (Second) Life
“I think my life gets weirder and less relatable the older that I get,” she says. “So I try to write in a way that’s relatable to anyone with any problem. There’s some universal emotional truth that people can get to the bottom of, even if they don’t understand everything I’m talking about.”Phil Klay on the recent controversy at Guernica.
“If You’re Cool, Aren’t You Sexy?”: Kim Gordon, in Conversation with Chloe Sevigny
Leslie Jamison on writing her new memoir
From early on, I understood Splinters to be a book about haunting: being haunted by memories of my own marriage when it was full of love and promise, being haunted by the specter of another life in which my daughter was growing up in an unbroken family.The Icon and the Upstart: On Miles Davis’s Legendary Feud With Wynton Marsalis, an excerpt from James Kaplan’s book The Icon and the Upstart: On Miles Davis’s Legendary Feud With Wynton Marsalis
Teju Cole on about his new photobook
The stories do seem to disrupt some of the apparent serenity of the images. But I’m hoping that there is a unity there too; that, as a whole, it has this feeling of disquiet and unresolved difficulty, with the photographs conveying that feeling the way photographs can, and the stories doing it the way stories can, each mode being true to its own affordances.Love In the Present: Julia Holter Interviewed
“I'm not an avid, intense reader. I don’t read five books a month like some friends of mine, but I do rely on books as inspiration. It's a quiet place for your imagination to go wild when you're reading, and I just think it's healthy for our brains.”A new essay by Gary Indiana on aging
It happens when you see yourself in a photograph, no matter when it was taken. Everything recorded is a record of the past, and this is how you looked then, how the world around you looked: these were your friends and this was a room someone lived in and how people were wearing their hair. Even a year ago, you think, ‘I looked better.’The rockers putting their Blackness at the fore of hardcore and punk
Even though hardcore was pioneered in the 1970s in part by Black musicians such as Bad Brains, the genre has mostly been dominated by white bands. But a new era of rockers has emerged in the past decade, and the Black hardcore scene has gained traction through festivals such as the Break Free Fest in Philadelphia and the recent releases of the books The Secret History of Black Punk: Record Zero, an illustrated archive of overlooked luminaries, and Black Punk Now, an anthology of nonfiction, illustrations and comics around Black punks. Longtime musicians are mentoring the younger generation and educating them on the Black roots of the genre. And perhaps now more than ever before, artists are using their style and lyrics to highlight their Blackness in hardcore.
Last Week’s LHB Feature Posts:
Elizabeth Brooks’s playlist for her novel The Woman in the Sable Coat
Jose Hernandez Diaz’s playlist for his poetry collection Bad Mexican, Bad American
Katya Apekina’s playlist for her novel Mother Doll
Margaret Juhae Lee’s playlist for her memoir Starry Field
Marisa Lin’s playlist for her poetry chapbook Dream Elevator
Parisa Akhbari’s playlist for her novel Just Another Epic Love Poem
Ray McManus’s playlist for his poetry collection The Last Saturday In America
Rose McLarney’s playlist for her poetry collection Colorfast