Peaceful Ghosts, Nada Surf feat. Babelsberg Film Orchestra.

Tyler: Ages ago, at some point during my unremarkable pair of semesters as a very-early-morning college radio DJ, I took a long look at the station’s copy of Nada Surf’s Let Go. The cover was abstract and understated, hardly what I expected from the “Popular” guys, and something about the look of it drew me in. I plucked the CD from its plastic tray and queued up its first song, “Blizzard Of ’77.” I loved it.

At least eleven years later, late ’13/early ’14, I noticed a recent Nada Surf release on a library shelf, and decided that, hell, I liked that one song, why not give this a try? The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy was the album, and it is fantastic—my chance selection of it the second step in my increasing fandom.

Finally, while wandering the aisles of Everybody’s Records in Cincinnati, as I tend to do for at least a little while whenever I’m in my hometown, I noticed a random Nada Surf LP tucked behind the plywood of the store’s back-room rock-section display racks. This time the cover was a black-and-white photograph of the band performing live, and the sleeve promised musical involvement from the “Babelsberg Film Orchestra,” whatever that was. The album was all of ten bucks, so I reached up and lifted it from the crowded rack. Peaceful Ghosts.

As the sleeve indicated, it’s a concert recording; as I hoped would be the case, it’s lovely. Each song reclines into fine, sympathetic accompaniment from the orchestra, frontman Matthew Caws’s tender lyrics elegantly boldened by the outside musicians and the band itself. When the purchase from a record store of a fresh, previously-unheard collection bears fruit—when hopeful whimsy leads to enjoyment of sounds the listener’s never heard—it’s a feeling of damn near victory. I’m well-versed in this one by now, nine or ten years since it found me at Everybody’s, but there will always be a little something special about it for me, the discovery of the unknown, clinching my abiding affection for the work of the band. It sounds so good. Both “Blizzard Of ’77” and Stars Are Indifferent personal favorite “When I Was Young” are included, along with fresh instant favorites, then new to me, such as the downbeat dusk of “88 Windows,” or soaring, aching “Inside Of Love.” Each song on the LP can be found in a studio version on prior Nada Surf releases, but these renditions achieve a power unique to onstage performance. They sound terrific, at turns melancholy and driving, not a single note misplayed, the band in top form, the orchestra never lush. It’s not mellow; it is often melancholy; it touches but it doesn’t depress. I rely on it for comfort when the precise mood strikes. Each of the albums I’ve included in my 25 is cherished and worthy of your time, but Nada Surf’s work is among the most purely listenable of the lot. That’s no shade. We all need some strong straightforward rock music in our lives, and there’s all joy and no shame in relishing the power-pop corner of that world. Nada Surf are awesome.

No Dogs Allowed, Sydney Gish.

Norman: Sydney Gish has made two albums. From her bedroom. She then went to film school and has mostly disappeared from public life, at least as far as I can tell. The second of those two albums is a hidden gem of 21st century indie bedroom pop. It has all the earmarks of a great album. Catchy, densely layered, lots of variety. But what sets Sydney Gish apart for me is the lazy cleverness of her lyrics. Though you know these songs require an immense amount of patience, precision, and reworking, they play as if Gish woke up in the morning with no particular plans, decided she didn’t need to comb her hair or brush her teeth and instead ripped off a few tunes. The wit is impeccable throughout. 

There are possibly two “singles” on this record, each one of them a masterpiece of self-deprecation: “Sin Triangle” and “Imposter Syndrome.” In these tracks Gish playfully identifies herself as a “two-faced bitch,” and a person overqualified to be a dog, but also underqualified to be a regular human being. For me, this is the mark of a truly great artist. Too many lyricists point the finger at someone else: a parent, an ex, the government, whatever. But Gish’s rich, even buoyant sense of introspection has won me over. 

This album has reached a top 5 status for me, partly because I relate, as I think all of us do, to a little self-loathing, and it’s good to have that with a a healthy dose of humor to top it off. My favorite track is titled “Persephone.” You might think, “Oh great a pretentious song about Greek mythology.” You’d be right, but you also couldn’t be more wrong. Gish uses her mispronouncation of the name Persephone (Purse a phone) as an opportunity to examine her own faults and flaws. But these flaws and faults are, of course, all shared. Who hasn’t mispronounced a word? Who hasn’t felt like a complete dolt for it? But at some point you grow up and you realize your experience is everyone else’s experience and it’s fine in the end. 

Favorite Tracks: “I am Filled with Steak, and Cannot Eat,” “Persephone,” “Sophisticated Space.” Bur really, just the whole album will do.

They Want My Soul, Spoon.

Tyler: Spoon kick ass through and through. Their exacting approach to making music leaves them sounding like no other band I know. My first real exposure to the band—beyond songs I’d heard in movies, such as “The Underdog” in Cloverfield and a handful of tracks in Stranger Than Fiction—came through 2010’s Transference, an album I very much enjoyed. My embrace of that record led me quickly to preceding LP Gimme Fiction, a 2005 release that is its own kind of perfect. Both of these albums had very solid shots at inclusion here—especially Transference, given that honor of being my introduction to the landscape Spoon call home—and to fall just short of matching my eventual selection here is no slight on either. It’s simply that my most reliable wellspring of the Spoon sound, how powerfully it can improve my mood, is 2014’s They Want My Soul.

It starts with a wicked drum snap, this irresistible thwack, that announces “Rent I Pay” and launches the album. From that moment we are in thrall, for 37 cool crisp minutes, until beguiling final track “New York Kiss” shuts down the scene. Spoon on this one work us like a speed bag, dispensing ten bangers in rapid succession, nine taut originals and a spooky cut of “I Just Don’t Understand.” On other albums this band has played around much more with tempo and rhythm, and frequently they get weird and muss up the hairwax with compelling sonic backbeats and sidenotes. I love all that stuff, and there are different Spoon albums for different moods. But, if I want both comfort and a kick, I set aside all the rest and turn up They Want My Soul, forever in thrall to its steady-as-she-goes, eyes-forward strut. This is undeniable studio-rock, assembled by a band that will also kill a live show. Frontman Britt Daniel, compelling and never quite brooding, snarling without a sneer, isn’t afraid in the title track to get ever-so-sentimental about an old photograph, just one song after the album’s darkest song, the sinister “Outlier,” cuts through its own stormclouds with a sudden, cauterizing takedown of Zach Braff’s directorial debut. Lamenting an old friend’s changed ways, Daniel snaps, “And I remember when you walked outta Garden State, ’cause, you had taste, you had taste. You had no time to waste.” Impressive, taking down a wayward pal right alongside the dude who managed to make Natalie Portman insufferable. Another achievement badge for Spoon!

For all these reasons and then some, down to the sinew of each song, I can’t resist this album. Like all Spoon albums, it’s worthy of attention. Moreso than most, it’ll keep it.

Gimme Fiction, Spoon.

Norman: Spoon. Ah, Spoon. One of the worst band names ever? Probably. One of the best, most consistent bands of the last 30 years? Also, probably. One of my favorite concerts ever was at Red Rocks. Courtney Barnett, Spoon, and The Decemberists. Spoon was touring in support of 2014’s They Want My Soul. Those razor-like guitars just cut right across the Colorado night. This pick for Spoon’s 2005 album Gimme Fiction isn’t really about the album itself, because I could have easily put 4-5 records in this spot. The four album run from Girls Can Tell – Kill the Moonlight – Gimme Fiction – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is nearly unparalleled by anyone this century. I know Tyler has a soft spot for Transference, so I’m sure he’d make that run of great records even longer! The point here is that I’ve had my own phases and it can be impossible to choose. On the right day I’d have Girls Can Tell in this spot. 

If I had to make an uneducated guess, Gimme Fiction is the Spoon album I return to the most. It’s also the first one I heard, so that may be a part of the draw. Song-for-song, Gimme Fiction gives the listener a little bit of everything that Spoon does so well. Swagger? Queue up “I Turn My Camera On.” Would you like an intricately designed studio masterpiece for your headphones? That would be “Was It You?” Do you want to rock out? Just put the album on and hit play, because the first track, “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” will blow the roof off your house. These guys have been long dedicated to precision in their production, but you almost never lose the sense that you might be in a room with a few guys who just want to let it rip. 

Favorite Tracks: “The Beast And Dragon, Adored,” “I Turn My Camera On,” “Was It You?”

Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch.

Tyler: Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch’s third album, is a pristine collaboration with her longtime musical partner David Rawlings. Every song is worthy of your time, stitched together as they are like a quilt full of plaid and gingham and rich homespun compassion. Throughout Welch’s ten tracks here, we meet remarkable characters—a young man left so lonely by clay stains he can’t avoid that, even in a vision of heaven, he sports a “red clay halo”; some bedraggled travelers who “looked sick and stoned, and strangely dressed”; the “tall and breezy,” long-haired gentleman who took Welch’s virginity to the sound of Steve Miller Band’s “Quicksilver Girl.” Even Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, plays into the proceedings, as do the sinking of the Titanic and the “Elvis Presley Blues.” The world of Time (The Revelator) is full of life, but life burdened. Even Welch and Rawlings cannot escape the great fade: their Napster-era “Everything Is Free” presages the era of paltry streaming revenues for musicians who somehow carry on with their artistry. There is wisdom in these songs.

The one that means the most to me, or at least that I’ve played by far more frequently than any other here, is “I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll.” There’ve been a lot of situations throughout my life in which I’ve exerted less effort than I should’ve; there are jobs I’ve had that weren’t too bad, that I misplayed and left behind due to drinking, or untamed anxiety, or plain burn-out. I’ve not built myself a career beyond decades of customer service. What I’ve had, at times I’ve squandered. Much have I lost by my own hand. I could’ve done better.

When it comes to writing, on the other hand, I have always come to play. The results too often may have been unfortunate, even disastrous, but I’ve kept my eye on the details and scratched out words that sounded good arranged in order. I’ve had my droughts. I know, though, that I have really tried. Probably because I still love the work.

So it is then that “I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll” has me by the heart. Recorded live, a fact betrayed by a quick dash of audience ebullience at song’s conclusion, it features an irresistible solo by plum-grand guitar-picker Rawlings, and divine harmonies from the pair as they sing. It’s a song about wanting to spread that work far and wide—“traveling near and far”—and it is perfectly performed. I’ve listened to it countless times, more than most of the songs on any of the albums celebrated within this feature. It’s wonderful, and it reassures me that, perhaps, there will be some creative success along my journey—but, more importantly, it tells me with sage warmth that, if there isn’t money to be made, the creation of things will still be invaluable. It may be that art never pays the bills, my bills, a tough reality to choke down. But I’ve written the words, so however many. I still put them together and set them down. I love it. This song reminds me that the act is worth it, even if it seems at times fruitless—“I wanna lay down my old guitar”—and it makes me feel so very much better about my own aches for the validation that comes with success. We all know those pains, no matter our trade, unless we are very very lucky.

Welch and Rawlings know these things, and so they in this song speak in universal terms. Their efforts mean the world to me; the album all the same. Time (The Revelator) is stark, unrelenting, focused, and undeniable. It will stand the test of time.

Befriended, The Innocence Mission.

Norman: My father’s side of the family, at least most of the ones I still keep up with, are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses, unlike fundamentalists and some evangelicals, will listen to secular music. This is largely because they haven’t created an alternate JW music ecosystem of their own. Like other religious groups, they avoid swears and sexually explicit lyrics. But they also avoid all mention of Christian religion. This is how I found The Innocence Mission, a band from Lancaster, PA, made up primarily of the married couple Don and Karen Peris. My older sister had bought one of their early albums, 1991’s Umbrella. It had a few oblique references to the Holy Spirit, what with the band being Catholics and all, and so my sister decided that it was too much for her, and passed the album on to me. That album got them on a few late night shows and should have put them in the Lilith Fair lineup. It was an unfocused mix of 10,000 Maniacs, The Sundays and Kate Bush, with a few songs that could pass for singles. I liked it well enough at the time but rarely listen to it now. It was their third album, Glow, that made me a fan for life. It dropped what had been a dated aesthetic on Umbrella for something that was more direct and propulsive. They had taken a left turn. And then, for their fourth album, 1999’s Birds of My Neighborhood, they took yet another left turn, opting instead for an extremely subdued, stripped down folk approach meant to make room for Karen Peris’ voice. They took that approach and began to refine it over the next 25 years. Don and Karen would have trouble conceiving a child and then when they did begin having children, they decided to quit touring and make a living from album sales and music lessons. 

In this new century, they have released no less than 6-7 albums I’d happily include on this list. I’m going to put 2003’s Befriended in this spot for the simple reason that I’ve known it longer than everything that has come after. 

The Innocence Mission are not a major band. Few have heard of them. I imagine that some of the readers of this article have never heard of them. So, I’ll do my best to describe what they are. The one word that comes to my mind over and over again is that they are a gentle band. This gentleness works its way into the musical arrangements, which are never aggressive, loud, or demanding. The listener is simply asked to pay close attention to the detail. Karen Peris’ voice, which has a childishness that reminds me of Joanna Newsom, is your guide to a world where friendships bloom, sorrows are cared for, the everyday world is relentlessly beautiful, and children sleep soundly. Their music is comfort music to me, the kind of thing I put on if I’m feeling down and need to feel loved. 

Other albums you could check out from 2000 on: We Walked in Song, My Room in the Trees, Hello I Feel the Same, Small Planes and See You Tomorrow. 

Favorite Tracks from Befriended: “While Mac Was Swimming,” “Beautiful Change,” “No Storms Come”

Foxes In The Snow, Jason Isbell.

Tyler: This conclusion of this series, the 25 Essentials of the 21st Century, should by all indications have been ready months ago. After the first four articles were posted, though, I hit a wall. Norman passed his final five along briskly; I couldn’t find a way to write about mine in a manner I found satisfactory. I’m not even ranking my selections, even, not really. I’d saved a handful of specific works to describe in wrapping up. Another one or two got bumped to this entry as I tapped out my first twenty. In the end, too, there was one final choice to make. I’d written out maybe forty options in brainstorming when we started this, but none of them felt close enough to me to clinch that ultimate spot. There were a couple that almost grabbed the position, standing idly in place for weeks within a WordPress draft, but they got booted. Great albums, all of them. In the end, though, as I finally find headwind, I have to do as I did with Sturgill Simpson/Johnny Blue Skies. I have to cheat a little.

If you’ve been reading along, you may recall that in a prior installment I celebrated Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free. That 2015 triumph features a full band throughout, much like each of Isbell’s other albums before and after. It was a formula that worked.

Then, in 2025, Isbell found himself divorced from sometime bandmate and longtime partner Amanda Shires. The split was one of some note in Americana music circles—Shires’s time in Isbell’s orbit dated to his drinking days, and his 2013 LP Southeastern‘s immortal “Cover Me Up” lays out in plain terms how pivotal she was to him achieving sobriety. In that classic, Isbell details a harrowing night with Shires, singing “Put your faith to the test, when I tore off your dress, in Richmond on high.” He continues, “But I sobered up; I swore off that stuff, forever this time.” Through countless shows over many years, Shires stood alongside the man as he sang the song. The audience cheers at the lines depicting sobriety; nobody quite considers how difficult it must be for a woman to hear onstage for years about the time her future husband grew so intoxicated that he tore off her clothes. The couple alludes to that particular difficulty in the 2023 HBO documentary Running With Our Eyes Closed, a film notable for depicting the pair in constant turmoil. “Cover Me Up” is a beautiful song, but not for nothing has Isbell ceded its spotlight in recent years to mainstream country performer and noted jackass Morgan Wallen, who scored a big hit by recording “Cover Me Up,” earning Isbell no end of royalties until Isbell began to kick those dollars to charitable organizations in the wake of Wallen getting busted on camera using the n-word. It cannot be a song that’s easy for Isbell to sing, so indelibly as it is about his ex-wife, the mother of his still-young child. On the ’25 post-divorce album I’m about to describe, he sings to Shires, “I’m sorry the love songs all mean different things today.” In setting that love song aside, though, perhaps Isbell knows that some associations can’t be revised. “Cover Me Up” can’t be sung about Isbell’s new love Anna Weyant, because he was sober when he met her. The song was written by Jason for Amanda. It always will be.

That the lyric about the love songs meaning different things today isn’t entirely on the level, though, does not mean that the 2025 LP is to be dismissed. Rather the opposite. Foxes In The Snow represents an achievement for Isbell so intentionally unique that its remarkable successes might never quite be matched by the man without his band The 400 Unit. Foxes was recorded by Isbell alone, not a single additional musician to be found, the ten songs within recorded live in a studio on a vintage acoustic guitar. He had a heartbreak to chronicle, a new love to commemorate, and a daughter for whom he just had to write an advice song. Apart from the advice, packed into an unnecessary mid-record whimsy called “Don’t Be Tough,” the album cannot be denied. The songs about Shires bear both the frustration and the devastation of terminating a dying love; the work about Weyant manages to make the new couple’s unlikely pairing sound as natural as falling rain. It’s a crafty move, chronicling in raw terms a parting and a new love—Isbell prevented Foxes In The Snow from tilting too far one way or the other, dodging categorization as a tried-and-true Divorce Album, while undercutting any saccharine pinch by depicting that divorce alongside quite a few uncharacteristically doe-eyed tracks about a blossoming new romance. Over the decades Isbell has proven himself a hall of fame talent, and he showed with this collection that he can thread conceptual needles with the best of them. Foxes is not an album about heartbreak, and it’s not concerned with infatuation. It’s all about love, losing it, finding it again, knowing it deep down in your bones. Isbell foregrounds the fresh relationship in theory, naming the album after an erotic nightime ode to his new lover, a lover—herself an artist—whose painting adorns the album cover. Fair play to him, who clearly wants to look forward. “Ride To Robert’s,” “Open and Close,” “Foxes In The Snow,” and even album closer “Wind Behind The Rain,” incidentally written for a family member’s wedding but nonetheless a sublime final note touched with just enough doubt. “I love you like the morning loves the afternoon, like the prairies love the plains; if you leave me now, I’ll just come running after you—I’ll be the wind behind the rain.” These are stirring love songs.

Isbell’s not a dummy, though. The ballast is in the farewells. “Gravelweed” is the source of that line about the love songs meaning different things, and within proper context it cannot be easy for his former love and muse to hear. The title character in “Eileen” “shoulda seen this coming sooner.” Finally, in the penultimate track of Foxes In The Snow, Isbell lays out his laments in a stone-cold stunner called “True Believer,” in which the musician tells his ex-wife that he’s not to blame just because he’s the one who filed the papers. “And all your girlfriends say I broke your fuckin’ heart and I don’t like it,” the chorus rails, “There’s a letter on the nightstand I don’t think I’ll ever read. Well, I finally found a match and you kept daring me to strike it. I guess I have to let it burn to let it be.”

Devastating. But, in that very same song, Isbell just has to bring it back to nobility. He seems like a genuinely good person, based on interviews and social media, chosen causes and basic humanity. Presuming that is the case, that he isn’t a closet shit, the final lines of “True Believer” are decency distilled. End of the day, Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires deeply loved each other, and she even bore their child. Maybe the lion’s share of romances aren’t lifelong, maybe anybody who sticks it out can consider themselves as lucky as they are romantic, but none of that faded hopeless romanticism means that our memories of what’s past are for the scrapheap. Foxes In The Snow is a brilliant achievement by a platinum-souled artist at another peak in a career of them. It’s special, standing above even his best, and his is a considerable body of work. It has Weyant to thank for existing, in that Isbell conceded on Threads after the divorce, while commemorating a sobriety anniverary, that staying dry over the previous twelve months had been no easy task. “The dog didn’t get in the door,” though, he added, in typed reassuring words that somehow read in his wonderful drawl.

It’s in sung words, though, that are delivered this album’s climax, moments before the calm landing of “Wind Behind The Rain.” “True Believer” continues beyond that struck match. It takes a deep breath, considers any true heartbreak that any of us have ever known, in the grave context of how short life can be. “Like the stain on your teeth,” it goes, “I’m as stubborn as wine.”

Just when you think that I’m beaten I get up every time.

So when we pass on the highway, I’ll smile and I’ll wave.

And I’ll always be a true believer, babe.

I’ll always be a true believer, babe.

Let’s Get Out of This Country, Camera Obscura.

Norman: I remember the moment I discovered Camera Obscura with absolute clarity. I was in a Borders. You may remember, dear reader, that the late media chain store Borders had a feature where you could scan the barcode on a CD and listen to it. I was casually listening to albums at random one day and the opening sound of an organ captured me at first. Then the rest of the instruments rushed in, and finally Tracyanne Campbell’s voice – a voice I would listen to if she were singing ads from a phone book – began a tune about knowing that you could be heartbroken, but rushing into it anyway. The song was simple enough, but is, as they say, a worm in the ear. I don’t recall if I bought the album that day, but it can’t have been much later. And when I did buy it, I listened to it on repeat probably enough to make my wife insane. 

Camera Obscura has not reinvented the wheel. They write literate pop songs about love and heartache. It’s all about how good they are at doing just that. They come from Glasgow and have formal connections to Belle & Sebastian. They are twee and sweet and sad in just the right amounts for a former Chicago hipster like me to eat up like a feast. They have been my favorite band overall since my college days. Picking my favorite album was difficult. I was tempted to go with 2024’s Look to the East, Look to the West, a more mature and laid-back album. I was tempted to select 2009’s My Maudlin Career, an album that basically works as a sister album to Let’s Get Out of This Country. But in the end, I chose Let’s Get Out of This Country because it was the record that introduced me. It’s wall-of-sound, reverb soaked aesthetic is the kind of thing I fall for like a sucker. 

Favorite Tracks: “Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken,” “Come Back Margaret,” “Dory Previn”

Back To Black, Amy Winehouse.

Tyler: In 2011, Amy Winehouse passed away. Her lonely death, a tragedy of alcoholism, came after a steady personal unraveling, her misery the stuff of rampaging amoral tabloids. Her final years were torpedoed wholly by addiction and outside emotional brutality. She was a human being, and she deserved so much better.

Thus is it both a miracle and a testament to Winehouse’s generational talents that we have Back To Black. Lead track and monster hit “Rehab” alone boasts a wit, self-deprecating and otherwise, that eventually was plowed under by the obvious reality that the woman really did need to abandon her “daddy” and check into a facility. That never happened, and so the song’s success became a millstone. For the sake of authenticity, a classic addict’s justification, she had to live up to the lyrics. She died so young; she never found out that life can be beautiful beyond seductive poisons, that devastating heartbreak need not derail a life. She could’ve sustained for decades, creating beautiful things for the world to hear, or, conversely, retreating into a quieter existence. After all, even in “Rehab,” she’d rather be at home.

Nothing on Back To Black is a misstep. The sultry hit “You Know I’m No Good” slots in second on the LP and establishes the narrative of love and love trampled that threads together the album’s uptempo swagger and minor-key devastation. There’s the ebullient joy in “Me and Mr. Jones,” “Tears Dry On Their Own,” and “He Can Only Hold Her,” all three tracks incandescent tales of coy affection or Stax/Motown melancholy. That melancholy gives way to devastation on darker songs, the misguided defiance of “Some Unholy War,” “Wake Up Alone” and its lonely sensuality, an ode to her and a lover’s quest to be “Just Friends.” It’s one classic after another and another, not one subpar effort in the lot, each bursting with an individual, hurtling charisma. Back To Black, as a record store clerk wrote on the plastic sleeve cradling my own vinyl copy, is perfect.

I don’t revisit this one often, if ever. Winehouse’s passing coincided with a devastating era in my life, undiagnosed bipolar mania and an abiding love of the work sent me careening out of a relationship, out of Chicago, out of sanity. I also was an impossibly heavy drinker, dumping oceans of poison into my body, burning away days and nights and jobs and friends, consoling myself with this religious-esque conviction that Amy and I were kindred spirits tied at a hip, both as we were traumatized by failed affairs, crying out and desperate for love romantic and platonic, drinking and drinking and drinking deep into very long very dark nights. I put my whole life into this conviction that she and I were linked, that our mutual pains in the face of the world were inevitabilities. Can’t put down the bottle. Can’t ever find true happiness. Might leave this plane before the time is right. Gonna forever wake up alone.

It was with this dangerous, however soulful obsession fueling my every move that one night in my new, temporary home base of Ann Arbor I got revved up down at the bar and wandered through that college town to a tattoo parlor that by no means nor in any realm should’ve allowed my patronage, hammered as I was. They let me in, though, and they got to work on my very first piece of ink. I wrote down in bold capital script an archetypal two-word couplet of Winehouse’s from the most devastated piece of Back To Black, “Love Is A Losing Game.” My penmanship off, my natural neurotic intensity wired further by the booze, the tattoo came out imperfect. There’s a period too close to the first word, a crushing development that leads people to misread and miss my intention. It looks okay at first glance, I suppose. And, it’s so very dear to me in a way I can no longer acknowledge. “Self-professed. Profound.”, it reads. It’s Amy describing love.

I can’t think about the years surrounding that night in the parlor without, for the sake of my stability, carving out the more insane elements of my connection to this album and this artist. There may be a day when I share those things. When I discuss the lunatic “Amy spot” on the deck of the Lincoln Square coach house out of which I would bail, away from Chicago and a long-term lover, our relationship detonated, my actions on fire, no matter how overdue the parting of ways. I’d stand in that spot and gaze up to the sky. I thought Amy was looking out. I thought she was with me.

Whether she or somebody was or not, whether we’re walled off from death by guardians from above, is all irrelevant, I say here as a man who’s dodged a sizable share of life-extinguishing debacles. My imbalanced devotion to Winehouse and art and love nearly ended my life a time or two. If pressed by memory or seduced by a manic tendril, I tell myself that my angel up there had better things to do after she ascended, actual loved ones to embrace. Comforts to find, pain to salve. I was her ambassador. She was my connection to something greater.

Years then passed. I quit drinking. I moved on from a grueling decade of romantic lamentation. I still struggled, because that is most of life. But I found my way out of a bottomless chasm. I learned something she never did.

Back To Black is masterful. Its artist, a wonder. The words, for the most part, brimmed with wisdom not found in people three times her age. But, when Amy Winehouse sang the title of the song from which I drew that intoxicated tattoo, she was incorrect. Love is consuming and so very often leads to devastation. Even as the world now descends toward apocalypse, though, fifteen years after Amy’s death, we have to remember—we have to believe—that the good of us can be held together by that so vital a thing, love. Winehouse, if you really are up there, I probably told you already in some hammered ersatz prayer, but it bears repeating. You told us that love is a losing game. No matter what, however, I love you, and that love will last. I leave your record in its place on the shelf, not because it’s ugly, but because it is a work of such beautiful power. Back To Black is indeed perfect, and it is all about what drove her devastation, the emotion that’ll buckle us at the knees but also elevate us to transcendence. From the earth down here, y’see, Amy, I’ll shout it up and out. Love drove you, and it drives me. It’s not a bad thing. You were wrong, my cherished friend. Love is no losing game.

Amen.

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case.

Norman: One of the classical arguments for God is from beauty. In its simplest form it claims that we can intuit God’s existence from the existence of beauty. This might come in the form of a sunset or the face of a baby. It might come from any number of things, depending on your personality and predilections. I’ve always claimed that I believe in God chiefly because of the existence of women and music. Women can be beautiful. Music can be beautiful. Therefore, God. I know not everyone buys this argument and I’m not here to defend it. I’m here to point out that the records I’ve chosen for this project all fall under the “music can be beautiful” part of the equation. And this album, 2006’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is Exhibit A. 

You’ll get the idea if you listen to “Maybe Sparrow.” At about the one minute mark, Case lets her epic vocals tear apart the heavens as she mourns the life of a sparrow. It’s a moment I’ve heard on the CD itself countless times and in concert twice. It never fails to make me tremble inside. 

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood finds Neko Case coming into her own, one foot in the alt-country genre she had been in for the past few records, but also branching out into something new. 

The whole album is fantastic, but I want to highlight the last five songs, a suite of short tunes that highlight the relationship between mankind and nature, a subject that Case has been mining for pretty much her whole career. Wolves are waiting at the door, sparrows are getting massacred by airplanes. Each song is crystalline perfect. The ghost of her past – a childhood full of poverty and neglect – and the very real violence of nature seem to dance and collide over and over in her world. 

It’s just simply an album I can’t live without. I return to it for the power of her voice, for the arresting images and ideas. In a lot of ways I return for the rage and pain underneath that voice of hers, sometimes compared to Patsy Cline but most definitely her own. 

Favorite Tracks: “Hold On, Hold On,” “Dirty Knife,” “The Needle Has Landed”

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