Sunday Songs: 11/1/26

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: I promise that the wintry color scheme isn’t because I’m one of those people who starts celebrating Christmas the moment November 1st rolls around. (Let fall be fall, c’mon!!) Also: your monthly dose of sad girl acoustic music, alien abductions, and tortoises.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 11/1/26

“Angel Vision” – Julia Jacklin

There’s something strangely comforting about finding songs that would’ve permanently altered my brain chemistry if I heard them in high school. It’s probably a mercy that “Angel Vision” came out this year and not when I was 16, because this would’ve 100% soundtracked me slouching at the edge of the lunchroom with my dinky earbuds, sandwiched in between Sparklehorse, girlpool, Radiohead, and Phoebe Bridgers. (Was it that deep? Probably not.) It’s a minor way of connecting across the temporal divid with the 16 year old girl inside me, sending a transmission across song: you would’ve loved this. I love it now.

Either way, I’m pretty close to being on the Julia Jacklin train for good. “Angel Vision” is phenomenal. I haven’t listened to any other tracks from The Gem, which came out this September, but this has convinced me that it might be worth a listen someday. In sparse, acoustic tones, Jacklin conjures imagery of being hindered by paranoia and creeping thoughts: “How to be sure/The smoke coming beneath the door/Is not from a house fire?” (Totally not relatable. Nope. Nope. Not in the slightest. Nah…) In her words, they become the kind of choking ivy that invades the walls of a house, obscuring every crack where the light can get in. Sitting beside that paranoia is the vulnerability of it, the manipulation that’s easier to fall into when you’re already in an unstable place. This might be one of my favorite vocal performances I’ve ever heard from Jacklin: her voice is nothing short of soaring, elbowing straight into the walls she’s built around herself. The sparse, acoustic guitar allows her voice to take its deserved spotlight, but it also conjures a frigid, snowy backdrop for Jacklin’s imagery to take root. I’ve pored through many a sad-acoustic-girl song in my day, and I know the cream of the crop when I hear it—this is a huge success.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Life in the Dark” (The Felice Brothers cover) – Phoebe Bridgers

I’ll save my blabbing for next week, but in the meantime: waiting all those years to finally see Phoebe Bridgers live was worth everything. Absolutely unforgettable show. But this track is different—it’s her most recent release, and a cover, at that.

This track, which came from the tribute album Felice County Fair: A Celebration of The Felice Brothers, came out around the time I went to her show. She’s got a lot of covers under her belt, from Tom Petty to Tom Waits (twice!) to The Cure, and this one’s a worthy addition. I’d never heard of The Felice Brothers before, but Bridgers described the profound impact that it had on her: “it’s talking about how fucked up it is to live in America…but it’s also like, we all live here, and there are moments of goodness and poetry on it that are redeemable somehow.” The original, which veers into warm alt-country, certainly rings out with that bruised hope that things will get better in spite of the darkness (and…[checks notes] yup, Life In the Dark was released in 2016, go figure). In Bridgers’s hands, it’s reduced to a much sparser palette, with only her acoustic guitar to accompany her. Certainly here, living in yet another period of American darkness in 2026, the lonely, frigid chill that her cover evokes hits very close to home. But I think it stays true to the mission of the original: conjuring a flickering flame of hope within the long winter we find ourselves in.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Gary Ashby” – Dry Cleaning

Shh, it’s okay. I know you got walloped upside by the Julia Jacklin/Phoebe Bridgers combo, and that’s on me. Sorry. Wanna talk about tortoises now?

When I talked about Dry Cleaning recently, my main impression of them was that they had pretty cynical subject matter: lots of grim, wry diagnoses of the ills of modern society. That seems to carry through most of their music, with varying degrees of success. I’m not knocking it, but after listening to all of Secret Love, it did get a little tired after a while. Thankfully, behind the nasty album cover for Stumpwork, Florence Shaw and co. have a fraction of whimsy in their souls. Why, you may ask? Believe it or not, the Gary Ashby in question is a pet tortoise. He’s just a little guy!

Gary Ashby is (or was) a real tortoise; talking to Apple Music, Shaw explained that the idea for “Gary Ashby” came from a missing poster that she saw while on a walk during the COVID-19 lockdown: “The rest of the story came out of imagining the circumstances of him disappearing and the idea that it’s obviously a family tortoise…We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, which is a little bit disturbing, but hopefully we’ll find out one day.” In spite of the slight undercurrent of possible violence and disarray behind the chaos that caused Gary Ashby’s disappearance (“Dogs running free/Dad’s got blood on his head”), Shaw and the others concoct a jangly tale remembering the beloved tortoise. Her deadpan vocals are usually reserved for more ironic things, but I love hearing her dryish delivery translated to something cutesy like this: “Have you seen Gary with his tinfoil ball?/He used to love to kick it with his stumpy legs.” Even though we’ll probably never definitely know Gary Ashby’s fate, I’d like to think that he was found—pet tortoises do live pretty long, if they’re cared for properly. Whatever the case, this track is a fitting immortalization of the little creature.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Ropeless Free Climber” – The Asteroid No. 4

As of late, I think I’ve just been attaching myself like a barnacle to any songs about facing uncertainty with excitement. It’s a kind of novel feeling for me, having been a fearful person all my life. But after graduating college and having this nebulous future on the horizon that’s largely in my hands for the first time, it’s been a revelation that maybe, this next chapter will actually be an exciting one. It’s given me the feeling that I really do have the reins in my hands. (See also: FKA Twigs’s “Lonely But Exciting Road,” Phoebe Bridgers’s “I Can’t Wait,” Big Thief’s “Incomprehensible,” etc). I’m not used to having so many things about my life be up in the air, but these songs remind me that there’s excitement to be found in it.

Enter the serene resoluteness of “Ropeless Free Climber.” If there’s ever been a song title that felt scarily accurate to my state of mind right now…whoof. But there’s such a calmness that The Asteroid No. 4 approach the subject, with gentle acoustic guitars married with plinking sitars. Everything that I’ve found about the band is that they’re mainly shoegaze, and “Ropeless Free Climber” doesn’t quite fit that bill. Granted, this album—and several songs on this self-titled album—seem to go in different genre forays, if the reviews are any indication. The relaxed, ’60s-nodding indie rock of this track feels apt for its subject matter, with hazy and dreamy vocals singing skywards about the heights that can be reached now that they’re in this new phase of life; that vocal softness is perfect for the dreamy utterance of “ivy walls and waterfalls” in the second verse. Time after time, this breathy declaration ensnares and reassures me: “Suddenly, it occurs to me/I’ll never ever be the same/But it’s alright/I don’t wanna be.” Amen to that.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“The Mothership” – Alexandra Savior

There’s just no way that “The Mothership” came out last year. It would’ve felt right at home at the alt-pop station I sometimes listened to when I was in middle school in the 2010’s. It has that distinct, Arctic Monkeys-esque slink and coolness to it that immediately dates it to the era of Tumblr and purplish Instagram filters. Granted, that alt station I’m remembering was hit-or-miss for me, and there are elements of “The Mothership” that don’t work for me—namely that “you-hoo-hoo-hoo” chorus that loops into vaguely autotuned oblivion. But for the most part, “The Mothership” successfully evokes the distanced, drifting coolness of being willing to let go of all your earthly tethers for the one you love: “And when the mothership draws the curtain/I hope she beams me right up next to you.” It’s exactly as spacey as the title makes it out to be.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!