the last six weeks(ish) of songs

*shows up 4 months late with an iced coffee and a playlist*

Hello. Hello? Is this thing on? Consider this a CD with a handcrafted mixtape burned onto it slipped under your door as an apology for my silence. Things have been strange but as always I have had some #tunez getting me through it. To preface: this, like my last post, is the redraft of 2 different weeks-old posts I started to write and never finished, so I know it’s a bit of a sudden shift in pace but I’ve been in the music soup recently and there is no better way to re-emerge than by dragging you all down with me xoxoxoxo

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Cat Stevens — Don’t Be Shy [Love is better than a song, love is where all of us belong]

I really don’t want to sound the alarm but I am starting to suspect that there may be hope yet. This song is a masterclass in simplicity: 3 chords, a multitracked guitar, a piano, a voice, and less than 3 minutes all amounting to what will probably end up being my favourite find of this year. As soon as this needle drop came in Harold and Maude, I was obsessed. Therapy is expensive but listening to this on repeat for 4 months is actually really very cheap. I don’t actually have much to say about this song but I want everyone to listen to it so it IS staying in the substack and you ARE going to listen to it!!!!!!!!!! 

Peach Pit — Peach Pit [Lean back and see the darkness end, swallowed up and angled in]

Whenever it gets too much, I crawl back to the songs I used to love. Peach Pit by Peach Pit (me when I’m sooo funny actually :OO) is one of the few songs that still genuinely kind of holds up. It sounds the way the most lethargic days of summer do. The scuzzy guitar, the buzz of summer ambience under the intro, the melancholia of poisoned, rotting fruit and wondering where the time went—it feels like hanging from your fingertips on the edge of summer, the stagnant air thick around your unfalling body. I saw the band live in May, crushed up against the barrier, and when they played this song I felt like I could crawl up and over that wall of sound twisting up all around me and never reappear. Concerts are disquieting for me in a lot of ways: the contradiction of how visceral the show itself is—the sweat and the lights and the push of sound and bodies and the heat and then the silence afterwards being so loud it rings—and how ephemeral the memory proves to be. Maybe it’ll get better, maybe not. But I remember the sway of hearing this song, the tangle of my lungs upon actually seeing this song played live right in fucking front of me. Anyways: I’m trying not to tie songs to my personal experiences of listening to them as much as I used to, but there is something about the fact that the first time I heard this song I was 14 and now I’m not!!!!! I just love this song. I love the romance of summer and its dark underbelly. I love Peach Pit by Peach Pit and as the breeze gets warmer I can feel it creeping back onto my heavy rotation. Give it a listen, or don’t!!!!! Xoxo

The Sundays — I Feel [Don’t wake me, I was dreaming and I’m tired of everyone]

I’ve had a weird spring! Summer is just beginning and I could be anything!!! I’m in a state of transition right now emotionally, I can feel it needling through, and with that invariably comes a transition in music—BUT the Sundays need not apply for this state of transition!!!!!!!!!!!! I’ve had Reading Writing and Arithmetic on loop for months and baby seasons change but my love for the Sundays doesn’t and I’ll always be waiting in the back room. Most songs by the band make me feel the way the opening of Cemetry Gates does: a pure rush of euphoria and light trapped and suffused through the songs themselves. I Feel, with its Sundays trademark driving & lush guitars and earnest & simple yet still piercing lyrics, is like a kick to the heart to get it moving again. Their discography is so youthful, so sweet, so alive—for the most part, they managed to capture all the very best parts of late 80s/90s British and I miss them like some miss lovers at sea. My brain has been 90s mush since about February so I’m not going to make any claims about whether or not the Sundays are as timeless as I think they are, but regardless, I Feel makes me feel like I’m being suspended in time and space for 4 minutes and 4 seconds. I’ve yet to listen to Blind all the way through but this song means the world to me and it is carrying me through the transition to the longer days. 

Beabadoobee — Lovesong [I missed the train again / I called your name / As if you’d drive it back]

WHAT MUST BE REMEMBERED ABOUT BEABADOOBEE IS THAT I REALLY LIKE SOME OF HER MUSIC!!!!!!!!!! But not in a tiktok way more in a Ellie Rowsell’s black telecaster way & just saying I knew her before coffee got big also I love radiohead + 5’2” brunette & Aries btw. Where Talk and She Plays Bass, etc, are the all!!!systems!!!!go!!!!!!it!!!is!!!love!!or!!!!never!!!!!!!! lovesick adolescent headrush that she’s so good at conveying, Lovesong is the melancholy of the other side of the coin. It’s also the first time since the Space Cadet EP that I’ve liked a song of hers so much. The simple pull of longing threaded through the song is effective and, I’m sorry to say this, quite tender, all hinged on that guitar and the vaguely accordion-like instrument I cannot identify in the background, building and building as the song creeps along. Around half the song just being “doo–doo–doo” lets you just ruminate for a moment, to float around in emotion like a caterpillar in its own soup. Me when it’s lovesick June, give it up for lovesick June!!!!! 

Elanor Moss — Citrus [It was raining cats and dogs, a drumroll through the river fog]

(CW: implied abuse in the lyrics)

To remember: things can be as easy as watching someone sing over a guitar in a semi-crowded basement. To pull out of the drawer on the worst days: there are rooms of purple light and quiet chatter. This was another song I got to see live in May and I can’t convey how still the room became when she played it. Which makes sense: it is genuinely mesmerising. The drone of the open tuning, the notes swirling over each other beneath her voice is hypnotising, almost so much as to make you breeze over the gut punch of the actual words. There is something special about songs so tightly woven as to trap you in their threads and I am holding onto this one. 

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And here we are. No groundbreaking tracks, really, but hopefully at least something new for you to listen to, or at the very least a post halfway readable. I have a few posts bubbling in the drafts but they’ve all been going out of date before I can finish writing them which is really great and also useful.

Life has been overwhelming but music is neverending in its beauty & capacity for human emotion. I hope things have been kind to you all, or that they become easier shortly. Thank you for reading. I hope to write to you again soon. 

xo

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tunes for reading about other tunes & being too hot with the window closed but too oh my fucking god another fucking moth with it open: elastica — nothing stays the same, pavement — passat dream, the beatles — her majesty