Category: Sunday Songs

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 3/1/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: lots of watery songs this week—you’re either in a swimming pool or standing mysteriously in the pouring rain, so pick your poison.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 3/1/26

“Nobody New” – The Marías

Apparently, 2025 was an exceptionally fruitful year for women who make music that sounds like you’re underwater (see also: Cate Le Bon). There’s a broader spectrum of both vibes and aesthetic here without a doubt, but in separate ways, María Zardoya and Le Bon have made music that sounds like dunking your head into crystal-clear water and watching tiny fish dart past your face. Of course, Cate Le Bon’s completely on another planet, but although The Marías don’t snag me nearly as much as she does (and nobody makes aquarium gravel music like Cate Le Bon), they’ve clearly perfected their own art of making music that sounds like light reflecting off the bottom of a swimming pool.

Here’s another contender for my list of songs with specific lyric pronunciations that scratch a very specific itch in my brain; pretty much everything that comes out of Zardoya’s mouth is downright ethereal, but the way she sings “nadie como tú” in the chorus feels like a massage on the tired folds of my brain. Gently wistful and listless, “Nobody New” has the heavy-eyed feeling of the first thoughts that tumble through your head after you drag yourself out of a dream you can’t quite remember. It’s sleepy, but in a way that instantly draws you in—in my limited experience, the best Marías songs feel like slipping into the sea, but fully embracing the swell of the waves as they crest over your head. It’s simultaneously weightless, like hair billowing underwater, but sagging with the weight of yearning.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Seep – Chana Porter – “Baby, I promise/There’s nobody new/I’m being honest/There’s no one like you…”

“Raymond Chandler Evening” – Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians

I often lament that perfect songs are too short. I’m the last person I’d expect to say that about a Robyn Hitchcock song that barely scrapes past the two minute mark is just the right length. “Raymond Chandler Evening” only repeats its chorus once, and it’s generous to even call it a chorus when there’s only just verses apart from it. But some songs were meant to be a brief but potent punch, and “Raymond Chandler Evening” is one of them. It’s a series of polaroids strung together from the atmosphere of a noir detective novel—fitting, since the song itself is a tribute to detective fiction author Raymond Chandler. Every darkly humorous turn of phrase creates a vivid image that can only seen in black and white, from the abandoned body to the rain-soaked pavements. The only burst comes from Hitchcock’s description of the “yellow leaves [that] are falling/in a spiral from the sky.” It smells like rain. But interspersed within that noir backdrop is some of Hitchcock’s most wry lines: “I’m standing in my pocket/And I’m slowly turning gray” and “There’s a body on the railings/That I can’t identify/And I’d like to reassure you/But I’m not that kind of guy.” Hitchcock knows exactly how to package so much vitality and wit into such a short amount of time—as usual, Hitchcock doesn’t get the flowers that he deserves by and large. But the song was included in the comic The Crow, and a Cyberpunk 2077 side quest also paid homage to it in title, so it’s made more than a few ripples in pop culture—and rightfully so.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Even Though I Knew the End – C.L. Polk – “It’s a Raymond Chandler evening/And the pavements are all wet/And I’m lurking in the shadows/’Cause it hasn’t happened yet…”

“Queen of the Bees” – Jack White

I wish that there was a real, tangible reason for Jack White to get on my nerves. Scratch that—maybe it’s good that it’s just his personality that’s grating. It could be way worse. I’ve just never recovered from how much of a pretentious prick he came off as in It Might Get Loud. But he’s recently created his own publishing house and absolutely shredded with IDLES…the man makes it harder and harder to hate him every day.

After No Name proved to be rather samey (I saw a promotional poster last year that said “the best rock record of 2024 has no name“…lmao), it was official that I was just kind of sick of Jack White. After the adventurous two-for-one deal that was Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, White’s sonic range started becoming the same song over and over. So I let him fade into the background…and somehow forgot about this gem from Entering Heaven Alive. How could I have possibly forgotten about this song? “Queen of the Bees” is one of my favorites of his. He’s putting on every ounce of bluesy airs, but this time, but it doesn’t feel as posturing as some of his other stabs at the genre. So much of his solo work is very bluesy, but there’s a point where he almost becomes a caricature of himself (we once again circle back to It Might Get Loud). But “Queen of the Bees” feels like an honest embodiment of the genre. It’s a slick, charming strut where every strike of the mallet against the xylophone feels like a Cab Calloway-style cartoon feeling a visual chill up its spine. White’s rasping croon, though indebted to past rockers, comes straight from the soul, surpassing mere tribute. Yes, almost everything about the man is a meticulously curated performance, but I’ll give him this: he never half-asses anything. Everything you get from him is a labor he puts every ounce of his passion into.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Portrait of a Thief – Grace D. Li – “I’ll butter your toast/While you’re taking it easy/My tea needs honey/’Cause it’s not so good/And who cares if I’m misunderstood/’Cause I love you…”

“Alien” – Beach House

NOTE: definitely proceed with caution before watching the music video if you have epilepsy or any kind of photosensitivity issues.

Sometimes there’s no use in giving a big preamble about how I found this song. The other day, I just thought to myself, “isn’t there a Beach House song called ‘Alien?’ Wonder what that’s like,” and here we are. I’m just glad that it’s good—but then again, I’ve never met a Beach House song that I didn’t like. Them naming a song “Alien” is almost redundant, because all of their songs that I know have an equal degree of spaciness, and this track is no different. But it’s pure shoegaze indulgence; the distortion roars like the engine of a rocket careering through space, while Victoria Legrand’s vocals are whispers clinging to the soaring jet trail hurtling through the stratosphere. The lyrics verge on being surreal, but the castoff “helpless and glimmering” feels exactly how it is to be carried away on the comet’s tail of this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Ocean’s Godori – Elaine U. Cho – this track would fit in with the shining, sci-fi world of this novel: glistening, but with traces of rust and grime around the edges.

“There She Goes” – The La’s

“There She Goes” has to be one of the more ironic stories in rock music history. It’s considered by legions of musicians, music critics, and music directors for every rom-com under the sun to be a perfect song. It heralded a renewed appreciation of the ’60s styles of The Beatles and The Kinks, but is often credited with being one of the songs that jumpstarted Britpop in the early ’90s. Yet by all accounts, its architect, Lee Mavers, hated it. Even when you brush past the inevitable “this song is popular and mentions veins once, it’s gotta be about drugs” (it’s been confirmed by multiple band members that it isn’t about heroin) rumors, there’s so much mythos swirling around this song; most of them are about frontman Lee Mavers, who hates the band’s one and only album. The characterizations span from troubled perfectionist at best to irascible and impossible to work with at worst, cycling through dozens of producers and band members just to achieve the unreachable, perfect sound in his head. It has to be a tragedy to never have that satisfaction be reached, and to have your legacy be the runoff from those fruitless sessions. And yet…how the hell could “There She Goes” be considered a failure? This ought to be the guidebook for a pop song—catchy, charming without being cloying, and guaranteed to make you nostalgic. This song is a must if you want to make your bus ride into a rom-com montage. It’s jangle pop royalty, and rightfully so—nobody jangles like The La’s, and not many have jangled quite so well since.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Isles of the Gods – Amie Kaufman – “There she goes/There she goes again/She calls my name, pulls my train/No one else could heal my pain…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/22/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: even though I mention both Water Moon and Underwater Moonlight in this post, they’re somehow not paired together…sorry. Plus, songs about grief, love, and illegally keeping wild animals in your apartment.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/22/26

“The Man Who Stole a Leopard” – Duran Duran

I didn’t expect to be putting such critical Madeline Todd lore here on the blog, but it was recently dredged up from the annals of my mind after not thinking about it for, at minimum, a decade. So here you are.

I’ve been something of a Durannie from a young age. Second-generation Durannie on my mother’s side, if you will. My mom was at the critical point of fandom for Duran Duran, being a tween (and then a teen) in their heyday, and from an early age, she passed down that love to me. I have lots of fond memories of watching their music videos from a DVD on our old TV, along with listening to their CDs while we played with Barbies, some of which my mom had passed down to me as well. That brings us to All You Need Is Now, which came out when I was in elementary school; a lot of the tracks have heaps of nostalgia attached to them, including “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” which I loved at the time. Fast forward a few years, and I now had my own iPod nano that I could listen to music with at night. “The Man Who Stole a Leopard” made its way onto the first playlist that my dad lovingly made. But at night, this song transformed into something that scared the shit out of me. Specifically, the violin sample beginning at 5:52. “Scared the shit out of me” is an adequate description, but what might be more accurate is that it gave me the absolute willies. My heebies were jeebied, dude. Something about the mild distortion of the violins, under cover of darkness, sounded so fundamentally wrong to my 10-year-old mind, huddled under blankets. Thankfully, I got my dad to remove the song from the playlist, and the nightmare ended.

Naturally, this was a very pleasant thing to remember when I woke up at 4 am a few weeks back. But when I revisited “The Man Who Stole a Leopard,” I found that my memory had completely distorted my perception of that violin sample that freaked me out all those years ago. Admittedly, I get a kind of knee-jerk sense of dread in the lead up to it, but I was pleasantly surprised that it sound completely innocuous to me—a little distorted and reverby, but just a handful of fuzzy chords to give a flourish to the outro. I’m now hovering where I was in the pre-iPod era, when I was allured by this song. Despite what the fabricated (yes, FABRICATED, I’ve been living a lie since 2011) news broadcast might lead you to believe, this tale of the man who stole a leopard and kept it in his apartment is entirely fictional. (Granted, some of the wording in the broadcast clues me in to the fictionality of it now, but it’s still fairly convincing, especially considering that they got the real newscaster Nina Hossain to record it.) What stands out to me about this track, along with most of the tracks I fondly remember from All You Need Is Now, is that there’s hardly a sense of Duran Duran trying to put their youthful, ’80s glory days in amber and imitate it. Sure, there’s a very “Hungry Like the Wolf” sensibility to the subject matter, but its prolonged runtime (6:15) and more eery atmosphere better fits their earliest albums, before they became perennial pop icons of the ’80s. Like a prowling cat, it’s a drawn-out, seductive crawl through a tale of toxic seduction and love that isolates you from all else. But from all of these memories, there’s one crucial lesson I have to take from this: things tend to sound a lot more sinister when you’re in the dark. Shed some light on it, and this track—like so many other things—will lose the fangs you thought they had. What a relief it is to not be 10 anymore. I love this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Open Throat – Henry Hoke – I think there’s enough overlap between a big cat being inside human houses and almost being domesticated to bridge the gap between a leopard and a mountain lion. Literary fiction isn’t always my favorite, but this was an excellent read.

“Queen of Eyes” – The Soft Boys

At its worst, a lot of punk music and culture became a caricature of itself; There was such a dogged determination to “sticking it to the man” that, in declaring that they were different from the mainstream, they created a different kind of conformity in sound and style. If you’re not exactly like x, y, or z, you weren’t punk. As insufferable as that is in retrospect (and today, presumably, though I don’t keep up with a lot of modern punk), it did breed a veritable garden of absolute weirdos who weren’t punk enough in a myriad of ways—bands like XTC and The Soft Boys, whose quirky members adhered in some ways to punk’s musical style, but were too sincere—and literary-minded—for punk, because punks don’t write about statues who come alive and wander out to sea. I’ve definitely been influenced by some aspects of punk bands and aesthetics over the years, especially when I started becoming more aware of politics; however, I feel like the bands I identify more with are the ones that were a little too soft, melodic, or just authentic enough for punk. And I think that’s where my expression falls too—I’ve always identified, in terms of my makeup and my clothes and my politics and my music, with “alt,” just because it’s an umbrella term for anyone who falls outside of those strictly-defined, often social media-enforced lines in the sand between one aesthetic from another. My music taste was bound to fall here eventually.

I’d loved about half of Underwater Moonlight ever since I saw Robyn Hitchcock for the first time, but now that I’ve started collecting vinyl, I picked up a copy of the album when I saw him again at the beginning of the month—AND GOT IT SIGNED BY THE MAN HIMSELF!! I’m still in shock, honestly, so on the off chance that you’re reading this, Mr. Hitchcock—thanks again. It’s been in the background of my life consistently for the past month, and I can’t think of any downsides, other than my neighbors hearing the lyrics of “Old Pervert” through the walls. (Look, it’s not my fault that they made a song called “Old Pervert” but also made it an indisputable banger.) I was agonizing over which song to include here, since they’ve all more or less been on a loop in my brain, but “Queen of Eyes” stuck out to me, probably the sunniest inclusion on the record, especially on the heels of the jagged, leering stylings of “Old Pervert.” Even this early on, Hitchcock was nothing but himself: his half-nonsensical, half sweetly sincere and lovesick lyrics are wrapped in a wallpaper collaged from the psychedelic Beatles, Syd Barrett, and something that could have only come from his brain and his alone. Bright, jangly, and infectiously catchy, it embodies this line from the booklet that came from my record booklet, written by David Fricke: “the Soft Boys dared to ask: did punk rock and the end of the 1970s…also have to mean the end of joy, literacy, and bright voices?” That torch remains the same one that Hitchcock has carried for the rest of his prolific career. What struck me while listening to Underwater Moonlight is that this same spirit has always been there—his sprightly musical vitality has only brightened since his early forays into music.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Song of Salvation – Alechia Dow – “Here I am again, it’s no surprise/Locked in orbit ’round the queen of eyes…”

“Sienna” – The Marías

Expect a lot more about The Marías in the coming weeks—they’ve been a very calm anchor in the chaos of…well, everything in my life. I’ve spent the past week digging more into their music, but this song was one of the first I discovered, in no small part because it was the soundtrack to a recent art trend that went around Instagram and TikTok. (The one I linked is from @zaiciart on Instagram, who has such a wonderful style!) From what I’ve heard of the album, Submarine really was the best possible name—every song feels like it’s been submerged, crafted from trails of bubbles and that special kind of whispery echo that happens to your voice when you’re trying to talk to your friends in the pool. María Zardoya has such a uniquely ethereal voice, so much so that it was genuinely jarring to hear her normal, lower speaking voice on their (excellent) Tiny Desk concert. “Sienna” is a wistful track, but one that only really harpoons you in the gut out of nowhere once you look into the lyrics—the backdrop is the fallout of Zardoya’s previous relationship, but specifically mourning the baby she imagined having with her partner: “she would have done all these things like us. But because we broke up, Sienna will never exist,” Zardoya said about the origin of the track. The track’s ghostly qualities crystallizes once you know that meaning—this entire future that Zardoya imagined is nothing but mist now; it’s fitting that, as this future fades away, so does the song, and Submarine as a whole—”Sienna” is the last breath before the album closes, an exhale of resignation before Zardoya’s wishes become ephemeral.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Water Moon – Samantha Sotto Yambao – “And I smile when I think of all the times we had/On the beach in the winter, when the waves were mad/Down by the water, crystal clear/See her face in the forest, then it disappears…”

“Cuckoo Through the Walls” – Cate Le Bon

Sunday Songs has basically become one of those Scooby-Doo villain reveal scenes. You rip off the “Sunday Songs” mask, and it’s just a weekly excuse for me to blabber on about Cate Le Bon. You fools all fell for my trap!

Did Cate Le Bon just casually come out of the womb with years’ worth of fully-formed talent? I still have two albums of hers that I haven’t listened to, but I swear that she’s incapable of making a bad album. Mug Museum feels a lot more like a standard indie rock album than her more recent works, but even the more (marginally) accessible style couldn’t keep her from her quirky engine firing on all cylinders. Moments of somber contemplation (“Mug Museum”) are hand in hand with ragged rage (“Wild”), and yet all form the weave of Le Bon’s experiences surrounding the album. Most of it deals with the death of her grandmother and how Le Bon processed her sudden absence from the matrilineal line; for her, it was less about what her grandmother meant to her as an individual and more about how her family rearranged and shifted in wake of her absence. The titular Mug Museum is a kind of haunted house of sorts where memories live: she called it “an imaginary place where relationships are looked at and thought upon.” Walking through this album does feel like strolling through a museum built inside of someone’s old house; small objects hold centuries of memories, and every strand on a curtain or crack in a window holds a deep history. “Cuckoo Through The Walls” is one of the tracks that I felt exemplified this feeling the best. Its more restrained, steady pace feels like tentatively peering through all the corners of said aging, dusty house, glancing at the light illuminating unseen gaps in the floorboards. Le Bon describes a state where these memories have anchored her to the house, to the point where she almost becomes the house itself: “And I watched the dinner drown/I drank for hours/Never leave the house/Cuckoo through the walls/Lay still on the ground/Exhale the sound of symphonies.” Like her signature, left-of-center takes on the most universal emotions, her grief doesn’t keen, but sinks into all the hollows of her mind and body—and that might be more of an honest depiction of it than most songwriters are willing to take.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Immeasurable Depth of You – Maria Ingrande Mora – “I will not sing your name/And tie my heart to Jupiter/And watermelon dreams/I felt the fear of change…”

“Au Pays du Cocaine” – Geese

Alright, you got me. The jury’s still out if Getting Killed is getting lobbed onto the mounting pile of albums I want to listen to, but “Au Pays du Cocaine” makes me understand a modicum of the hype. Sometimes an album invades your Instagram feed for no reason, but half the time, there’s at least something to it, even if that something boils down to only a song or two. This song just makes me feel…safe. Yes, it’s seems more to be about a relationship with someone who’s ruined their life, but it feels so safe to me. It sounds like the friends you give you a ride when it’s too far to walk, and the people who texted me and offered their showers when the hot water shut off in my apartment. It’s a hastily-built up lean-to to give you a fleeting moment of shelter in the rain. The middle ground between my feelings about “Au Pays du Cocaine” and the more literal lyrics is that it’s a promise: believing that people can change, and being ready for them when they do. I’ve learned the hard way that for some people, you just have to let them heal on their own terms, but that you by no means have to forgive them, or even be there for that healing. There’s a hard-won freedom in that realization. But this song is for the ones that are worth sticking around for—the people you love despite their faults. It’s rare to find those people worth sticking around for, but maybe that’s why I feel such solace in this song—those people are few and far between, but this song is for them.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – “You can be free/You can be free and still come home/It’s alright/I’m alright…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/15/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: some of my favorite women in music getting unabashedly weird with it, the pioneering bisexuals of Britpop, and…crabs.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/15/26

“Wonderful” – Cate Le Bon

In her review of Crab Day for Pitchfork, Laura Snapes said this about the album’s inspiration (Cate Le Bon’s young niece replacing the mean-spirited pranks of April Fool’s Day for Crab Day, where you celebrate by drawing crabs): “nonsense is often the best response to nonsense, that the constructs we use to prop up our lives are often totally arbitrary.” Le Bon has had a deep sense of absurdity, but Crab Day as an album is built all about taking ordinary things in our life to task, but also about being faced with the fact that half of the things in our lives are arbitrary, flimsy constructs. Some of it’s done gleefully, as in the creation of Crab Day, but for others, it’s more emotional—“I Was Born on the Wrong Day” came out of Le Bon’s mother digging up her birth certificate and admitting that they’d had her birthday wrong for decades. Crab Day, both lyrically and musically, explores the pain that comes from realizing that our world is built on the flimsiest stilts imaginable, but also the glee that comes with spitting in the face of them and embracing life’s absurdity.

There’s always been quirkiness surrounding Le Bon’s music, but Crab Day feels like the moment that the eggshell split open and she fully embraced offbeat, unconstrained creativity. That’s not to say that any of her earlier work isn’t creative—quite the opposite, having just listened to Mug Museum—but this album is where her current sound began to coalesce in earnest. It’s much more guitar-oriented than her more recent works, but it’s got all of the hallmarks of what’s become her signature style: artful blares of saxophone, offbeat lyrics, and slanted melodies and rhythms that read like the audio version of a picture frame hanging at a crooked angle. “Wonderful” exemplifies that crookedness, easily the most unfettered moment of weirdness on the album. The guitars scream Lodger-era David Bowie, and the lyrics of mid-’70s Brian Eno. But the fact that seemingly every commenter in the YouTube comments section has an entirely different band comparison as to what it sounds like proves how original Le Bon’s unique arrangement of elements is. With everything from the xylophones to Le Bon’s vocals at a breakneck pace, it’s an ode to being constantly in motion: “I wanna be your motion-picture film, oh yeah/I wanna be your ten-pin ball, ball, ball.” In the context of the album’s crusade to expose life’s absurdity, it feels like a concentration of her spirit throughout this album, but also her career at large: to be adventurous in all sorts of ways, and to be constantly be searching for a new way of setting creativity and weirdness in motion.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Floating Hotel – Grace Curtis – it’s difficult to match a song as singular as this to a book, since it’s so distinct; but if anything, this would match the bustle of a Wes Anderson-esque hotel in space.

“Marigolds” – Kishi Bashi

Realizing that Kishi Bashi had written a song named after my favorite flower was already an exciting revelation, but finding out how engrossing of a song it is made that discovery all the better. Tinged with both joy and melancholy, “Marigolds” surrounds cross-generational experiences, and bridging the gap of realizing that everybody around you has a complex inner life, separated by time, but united in the here and now: “It’s the realization that another person’s perception of the world is just as real to them as yours is to you, and that this humility is the first step in living in harmony on a planet that is ultimately made up of 8 billion parallel universes.” With that emotional core to the track, the field of marigolds couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor—each bloom appearing similar on the outside, but each one having a unique, complex makeup that can’t be seen from the outside. His usual lush string arrangements are layered in a glimmering swarm evoking the delicateness of flower petals and the ephemeral wingbeats of songbirds. Paired with a gorgeously animated music video by Geoff Hopkinson, featuring marigolds that turn into fantastical, jellyfish-like beings, “Marigolds” is an utterly transportive track, scented with pollen and wistful longing.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Record of a Spaceborn Few – Becky Chambers – “I wish that I could grow up with you/I wanna see the world the way you do/I want to fall off the edge with you/I want to have fun with you…”

“Drink Deep” – Florence + The Machine

You guys, I’m sorry. Every time I hear a Florence + The Machine song, it’s described as some masterpiece that leaves permanent claw marks on your heart, and then I listen and I come back feeling…perfectly alright? I’m sure there’s something I’m missing, but some things just aren’t everybody’s cup of tea all the way. Objectively, Florence Welch has great vocal range, and I’ve never hated any song of hers, but I’ve also never thought to myself, “I need to listen to more Florence + The Machine.” Maybe part of it’s just that she’s been unfairly associated with the TikTokification of female rage (or, “female rage is when a woman sings loud and man is bad”) and “divine feminine” becoming a buzzword, but that’s not her fault at all. However, as I follow a lot of music publications online, I saw that Mark Bowen of IDLES was one of the producers on her latest album, Everybody Scream, so I was at least intrigued.

One of my dearest friends has been trying to convert me for quite some time (once again, SORRY), but I heard a snippet of this one, and I was hooked out of nowhere. It sounds almost nothing like any of her other songs I’ve heard. Again, Welch has a great voice, but I feel like a lot of her songs seem to rely on the strength of her voice in order to amp up the emotion, and the rest of the music doesn’t always follow. “Drink Deep” is more contemplative, but also, a lot eerier than I gave her credit for. Here, Welch translates her experience with her life passing her by as she’s touring (while everybody else moves about normally in their lives) as akin to being prisoner to the fae, trapped and ageless in their realm for hundreds of years while everyone else ages naturally: “What I thought was a night was a thousand years/What I thought was a sip was a thousand tears/But still, they said/Drink deep.” It devolves into a kind of Celtic-inspired folk horror where what Welch ends up essentially cannibalizing herself at the will of the fae—an apt metaphor for what the music industry puts its performers (especially women) through. The atmosphere of “Drink Deep,” with an ominous, thundering drumbeat, chimes, and a warbling choir reminiscent of Kate Bush’s “Rocket’s Tail,” evokes the passage into another, darker realm, a descent into an unbreakable deal made in blood.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Familiar – Leigh Bardugo – “They gave me gowns and riches/Cut gold thread with their teeth/Every night I went to see them/No, I did not sleep/And every cup they brought to me/Oh, you know I did/Drink deep…”

“Moon” – Björk

Every time I mention Biophilia, it’s inevitable that I go on and on about the app—which is appropriate, since it is the backbone of the album. But I feel like you’re missing an entire chunk of the album if you don’t talk about the delicately constructed visual language of it—for me, you’re missing half the story if you don’t see the elaborate costumes and the artistry of the visuals. All of the music videos for Biophilia are showstopping, and the music video for “Moon” feels like the best introduction to the album’s aesthetic. Literally, it’s a moving version of the album cover, but the superposition of the moon phases over Björk’s body visually convey the lyrics and the concepts behind them. I love the jagged, glowing constellation-shapes surrounding her, both a map of the app and of a galaxy itself; and I cannot get enough of Björk’s costumes for this album cycle. That combination of her rusty, Mars-orange wig and the metallic shades all throughout her bronzy dress and the playable harp corset, against the stark black of the backdrop, are just such a memorable, cosmic color combination to me. The blue ringing her face and eyes brings out the contrast spectacularly. This is the epitome of a wholly realized creative vision brought to life. Granted, this is much later in her career, but it gives me some hope that maybe, in some ideal timeline, some of the projects that I’m envisioning can someday can get as much of my creative freedom inside of them as possible.

The best way that I can describe “Moon” is that I feel as though I’m listening to a perfect circle. Set in 17/8 sign to mimic the phases of the moon, the chorus of harps seem to circle each other, an elaborate, delicate Ouroboros that encircles itself forevermore. It takes a. rare genius to make a song sound like a shape, but that’s exactly the kind of musician that Björk is. Her mind!! Her MIND!! Having a lighter, more celestial tone for a song about the moon, a subject that often invokes more ominous, sweeping majesty or loneliness (see: Radiohead’s “Sail to the Moon,” Bachelor’s “Moon”) makes it stand out from its many, many peers; the instrumentation is so pearly and dewy, and her line about “adrenaline pearls” makes me think of “Cocoon” in the sweetest way. And more poignant still is how she relates these lunar phases to the phases we cycle through in life—”Best way to start anew/Is to fail miserably/Fail at loving/And fail at giving/Fail at creating a flow/Then realign the whole.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Activation Degradation – Marina J. Lostetter – “As the lukewarm/Hands of the gods/Came down and gently/Picked my adrenalin pearls/They placed them in their mouths/And rinsed all the fear out…”

“The Drowners” – The London Suede

I think I just like 90% of Britpop. The only band in the genre that I’ve never liked is Oasis, and I’ve heard some argue that they’re not stylistically Britpop, but were just lumped into the genre because they blew up at the same time as bands like Blur and Pulp. I’m not sure if I can agree in good conscience just because I despise Oasis, but given what I’ve heard of them…it makes sense. Other than them, I’ve loved everything I’ve heard from the rest of the Big Four—and “The Drowners” is really convincing me that I need to listen to more of The London Suede.

At the forefront of every other explosive new subgenre, you will find a bisexual. The London Suede were one of the first bands to be called Britpop in earnest, and contributed a significant amount to its sound, although they were focused less on British social commentary and more on a dramatic, glam rock resurgence that recalled David Bowie’s storytelling and subversive sexuality and Morrissey’s literary-minded lyrics (and half-unbuttoned shirts). In their earlier days, they very much banked on the profitability and controversy of the queer imagery and lyrics in their band, as Bowie did back in the ’70s, from the lesbian couple on their self-titled album cover to Anderson’s obliquely queer lyrics and androgynous presentation. If he wasn’t bisexual, I’d honestly feel like it bordered on queerbaiting, relying on the shock value of subversive sexuality to make more money. But it’s not his fault, necessarily—God knows there’s legions of glam rock/metal artists from the ’70s and ’80s who glommed onto the queer aesthetics for the money it made them, and later disavowed queerness entirely. (Lookin’ at you, Alice Cooper.) Ultimately, The London Suede feel more like they’re indebted to English literary tradition to me—often queer, often subversive, and dramatically indulging in themes of class division and excess. That’s what Anderson and co. feels like to me, and “The Drowners,” with its cult of ambiguous sexuality, glamor, and wealth, feels like a worthy tribute.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Atlas Six – Olivie Blake – this brand of Britpop being big and dark academia being a major literary trend missing each other temporally is either a major blessing or a curse—they fit a little too well with each other.

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/8/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!

This week: unfortunately, the pink theme couldn’t be scheduled for the week of Valentine’s Day, so enjoy your pink disentangled from the holiday. Also, Madeline being pretentious from the age of 5, a whole lot of beep-boop-beep, and Kathleen Hanna’s answer to these trying times.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/8/26

“This Island” – Le Tigre

All rise for the anti-ragebait national anthem! The litany against ragebait, if you will.

I’m sure there’s some activism/politically-involved situation that Kathleen Hanna hasn’t written about, but you have to give it to her—in that sphere, she’s got a song for almost anything. Since 2024, every new Le Tigre song that I discover has hit hard in this political context, whether it’s the perennially relevant reminder to “Get Off The Internet” (destroy the right wing!) or the rallying cry of “Keep On Livin’.” Even in 2008, the internet already had shown the ugly side of not just enabling faceless trolls to spread misinformation, but for anger-inducing content to get the most engagement; it’s been a disaster for everything, really, but especially activism. Pair that with social media’s penchant to push the most shocking angles on news stories that are already shocking (and the sheer volume of said shocking, disheartening news), and you’ve got a recipe for disaster for anybody who wants to doggedly keep hope. It’s ground so many would-be activists into the ground, turning them into despairing doomers convinced that there’s no hope for the future.

“This Island” isn’t exactly the uplifting chant of “Keep On Livin'”, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. Its target is that kind of person who’s so hopelessly entrenched in internet-peddled doom that they need a bucket of ice water to the face to snap them out of it. It’s tough love (part of the chorus is just a repetition of “You’re a mess!”), but it’s vital if you want to carry on. The brutal 3.3/10-rated (3.3? Did Le Tigre kick your puppy?) Pitchfork review of This Island lamented that the album sacrificed its normal political bite in favor of making it more watered down and commercially accessible. Yet although the instrumentals are smoother and the beats poppier, no major label production could ever defang Hanna and co.; “This Island” rings as an unflinching slap upside the head and a call to remember all of the good things happening in the world; the backdrop of the album was the War on Terror, but now, in…well, a new iteration of just that, this last verse hits harder than ever:

“The horizon’s like a ship in flames tonight/You say you just don’t know/If you can take this city, cause the/Rent’s high, and the war’s on/And it’s last call/Even your friends look worried/My friends all think you’re smart/We think you’re super-fine/But it’s high time/I mean it’s high tide…”

I’m not above doomscrolling. Goodness knows that I’ve needed said splash of cold water in my face more often than not. It’s not our fault—social media has been deliberately manufactured to keep you hooked as long as possible; in just the same way, the ruling class wants to keep you hopeless and constantly posting so that you only make money for their corporations and don’t rise up. What matters most is what you are—and what you do—outside of the internet. What matters is that you have the strength of your friends and community beside you. Even when it seems like all hope is lost, we can take this city. Le Tigre took this city in 2004—who’s to say that we can’t do it in 2026?

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope – edited by Karen Lord, Annalee Newitz, and Malka Older – several of the stories in here have a similar aim that Le Tigre did back in the day: to merge political awareness with art.

“Always On My Mind/In My House” (cover) – Pet Shop Boys

Separately, the elements of this song should not work. If you just said, without context, that this was an ’80s synth pop cover of an Elvis song (which was, as with most Elvis songs, a cover in and of itself) that devolves into acid house halfway through and stretches to nearly 10 minutes long, I’d probably be put off, to say the least. It’s like the musical version of “I hate gay halloween, what do you meanyou’re dressed as [insert combination of niche references]?” Things that were only possible in the late ’80s, folks. But against all odds, this is incredible. A few weeks back, I was listening to this on repeat while making a digital drawing, and I got into a flow state so queer that the drawing practically flew from my fingertips. Originally conceived to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, this, “Always On My Mind” later morphed into the 9-plus-minute remix and combination with “In My House.” Retrospectively, most of the writing on this song talks about how, by all accounts, this shouldn’t have worked. And yet Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe make it look like the combination of Elvis, house, rap, and random firework samples was always meant to be. It’s a case study in lulling a listener into a false sense of security before letting the floor drop out from under them. Every beat drop and twist works seamlessly—the switch from house back into the Elvis cover at 5:26 knocks me off my feet every time. You already need a boatload of talent for a song to sound effortless, but to be able to unite so many disparate elements and make it into a chart-topper—this was the #1 Christmas single in the U.K. in 1987.—takes a special kind of band.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Swift and Sudden Exit – Nico Vicenty – thematically, it fits nicely with this book, but this had to have been hidden somewhere in the ’80s scenes (or the ’90s ones, for that matter).

“Cover Me” – Björk

I always come back to Post. To me, it’s one of her most experimental albums, but not in the sense of musical genre—it’s one of her more accessible ones, right after Debut. But it’s much more experimental in its mindset. She sends her feelers out in every possible direction, and the joy of the album comes from the sheer range of emotions and genres she explored, from grimy, electronic tracks to an attempt to channel Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (in the way that only Björk could). The adventurous spirit that she first fostered on Debut, playing the role of ingenue in both her life and music, practically explodes out here. You can hear it more clearly on the louder songs, whether it’s the bevy of strange instrumentals pulsating outwards or Björk herself actually screaming—another staple of her music that’s carried on 30 years post-Post.

“Cover Me,” the penultimate track on the album, is often forgotten in the deluge of other masterpieces stacked on top of each other on Post. But to me, it represents, both lyrically and musically, a key part of where Björk would go later on in her career. It’s a prickly yet twinkly song—the main body of the instrumental consists of hammered dulcimer, which is played in such a way that it feels cautious, like any sudden movement or snap of branches could trigger a trapdoor; the feeling is accentuated by the humid, jungle-like atmosphere, with all sorts of rattling noises that disappear just as quickly as they appear. Without a doubt, it’s one of the less accessible tracks on the album. Every time I listen to “Cover Me,” I feel like I’ve stepped into Henri Rousseau’s painting “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!),” pushing aside the woodcut-looking leaves and treading lightly so as not to alert the snarling tiger inches away from me; it’s fearful, but the fear is outweighed by the ecstasy of proving that “the impossible really exists.” Her lyricism feels fairytale-like, as though she’s mapping out an entirely new land, looking over her shoulder to guide you with her commentary; With a sly smirk, she declares, “I’m going hunting for mysteries.” Taking another step forward, she whispers back to you, almost afraid to admit: “This is really dangerous/But worth the effort.”

According to Björk, she wrote “Cover Me” to poke fun at herself for making the process of making the album so pointedly different, and purportedly, difficult. And yet, as the black sheep even in an album swarming with oddball anthems, it’s paved the way for exactly the kind of career that Björk has made for herself. Every part of her life has been about pushing music to its limits, whether it’s bridging together music, science, and technology to make a stunning album and an educational app or creating entirely new instruments for her tours. Björk has never shied away from what’s dangerous, and her willingness to bend, stretch, and outright break boundaries, musically and societally. Though she’s known by more iconic lyrics, this one might just be the best to describe her career so far: “I’m going to prove the impossible really exists.” And if there’s anything to be learned from her endeavors, is that all of that danger was well worth the effort.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Search for Wondla (The Search for WondLa, #1) – Tony DiTerlizzi – “While I crawl into the unknown/Cover me/I’m going hunting for mysteries/Cover me/I’m going to prove the impossible really exists…”

“Circuit” – Apples in Stereo & Marbles

Tragically, this song (and the album, Expo) aren’t even on YouTube. Criminal, if you ask me! But I think it should tell you how concerningly niche my music taste was, even as a child—”Circuit” was my favorite song when I was about 5. Less of a brag and more of a grim foreshadowing of me becoming an insufferably pretentious adult. Back in the day, I had this great little Hello Kitty CD player; I’ve got a specific memory of having this song on a playlist and having to press down on those thick, 2000’s buttons just so I could hear this song over and over, ad nauseam. I stand by 5-year-old Madeline—it never gets old.

Though it’s labeled under The Apples in Stereo, Marbles is the solo project of Robert Schneider, the Apples’s frontman; if you thought that you can’t possibly get any more beep-boop-beep than The Apples in Stereo…buckle up. Chiefly consisting of synths, Expo is nothing but electro-pop—emphasis on the electro. Every song I’ve heard from the album sounds like the kind of music that could only be made by squeaky robots from some ’50s pulp sci-fi movie. Little me specifically imagined Plex from Yo Gabba Gabba! singing it. It’s a self-contained sci-fi universe, complete with its alluring protagonist, some sort of robot or cyborg woman who “perceives circuitries/Inside everything she sees.” Lo and behold, this is the work of a man, not a machine. But with the precision applied to every single part of this track, “Circuit” truly is a well-oiled machine. Like the intricate, fragile fragments of a circuit board, every flourish of processed orchestral samples and every bubbly synth chord all work as cogs in a machine with so many moving parts, yet with effortless cohesion that so many artists can only dream of reaching. This is how you make a pop song. Embrace the beep-boop.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Infinity Particle – Wendy Xu – The robot is gender-swapped here, but he sure does see electricity.

“Typical Love” – Cate Le Bon

“Typical Love” was cut from the Pompeii sessions, but according to Cate Le Bon, was “disassembled and reassembled it many times but it always felt like a second cousin to the other tracks so was put aside for a rainy day.” It’s in limbo between the production of Pompeii but with the kind of lyrics I would’ve expected on Michelangelo Dying, cataloguing the quiet, suffocating mundanity of a relationship gone stale. If it had any closer cousin on Pompeii, it would probably be “French Boys”; it has the same kind of wry comedy of Le Bon putting on airs—she might as well be muttering “Typical love, typical love” before taking a drag from one of those long, old-fashioned cigarette holders. But as with most of her tracks, “Typical Love” is anything but typical, with percussive bursts of her own breath, saxophone blares that bleed out like oversaturated watercolors soaking through thin paper, and an Eno-like taste for taking repetition to its logical limit, stretching melodies and words until they no longer feel like their original forms. It’s all at once angular and circular, like an abstract painting, woven from brightly-colored, dancing shapes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “Nothing ever changed in your corridor eyes/Rely on me, baby/Rely on air/Only a shadow again/Typical love…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 2/1/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: who would win in a fight: righteous haterism or unfettered whimsy? Neither, actually. They’re both more powerful when they’ve joined forces.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/1/26

“Lipstick on the Glass” – Wolf Alice

It feels redundant to say that this is a very 2010’s song for it coming out of the 2020’s—”Lipstick On The Glass” only came out in 2021, and Wolf Alice were active all throughout the 2010’s anyway. And yet, I can’t shake how much they’ve crystallized that 2010’s indie sound. This song feels like a cousin of Eisley’s “Currents,” a favorite of mine in middle school, which came out in 2013. Both of them feel very cloudy and foggy, but adorned with clear, angular sparks that stick out of the mist like fragments of crystal. Even through the almost Cocteau Twins-kaleidoscope in the chorus, Wolf Alice have set up a system of lighthouses: the sharp percussion, and Ellie Roswell’s vocals, that range from a husky whisper to a diving bird of prey cutting through the sky. Free-floating and without much of an anchor, “Lipstick On The Glass” ha such a sense of urgency despite the deliberate blending of most of its musical shapes and textures into each other, making for an exciting, cinematic blend—especially when the chorus first kicks in. That beat drop is even more gratifying paired with Roswell’s lyrics, succumbing to the siren song of an old lover. But even after that beat drop, “Lipstick On The Glass” is beguiling all the way through.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Stars Undying – Emery Robin – “Oh, my body does deceive me/Just as did yours/Though we’re fighting different wars/In our ways…”

“Harbour” – Cate Le Bon

Straightforward for Cate Le Bon usually means that it’s still delightfully strange. When I first listened to Pompeii, “Harbour” was actually one of my least favorites—I never disliked it, but it wasn’t as in-your-face inventive as some of the others on the first listen. It’s a case of every song on the album being excellent, so the benchmark is extra high from the get-go, making songs like this get lost in the dust. To be fair, after experiencing “Dirt on the Bed” for the first time tends to overshadow all else when you listen to Pompeii, but that’s no excuse for leaving a song like this to languish. I maintain that it’s one of the weaker songs on the album, but at this point, a weak Cate Le Bon would be a career highlight in your average artist’s hands.

Pompeii as a whole has a pretty even, calm pace, as adorned with all kinds of weirdness as it is. “Harbour” got lost for me because it didn’t have the same strangeness on the surface, but the more I listen, the more layers I find hidden within it. That’s the joy of Cate Le Bon for me—even her more radio-friendly songs conceal everything from watery, pre-Michelangelo Dying synths to spurts of saxophone that sound like the happier cousin of the brass blasts at the end of “Dirt on the Bed.” Pompeii as a whole is quite ’80s, but not in the way of shoving neon synths down your throat—it’s just a more subtle exploration of the sound rather than a way to farm nostalgia; even so, the specific use of saxophones in “Harbour” veered too close to the latter territory on my first listen. Once again, the bar just breached the stratosphere, given how seamlessly Le Bon has been able to integrate saxophones (and brass in general) into her music without it being full on “Careless Whisper” cheese. Now, though she’s used it in better ways, it’s still a cut above the rest. That goes for “Harbour” as a whole—she’s a master at manipulating seemingly ordinary elements and twisting them just far enough to the left to make you do a double-take. She’s full of surprises.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley – “What you said was nice/When you said my face turned a memory/What you said was nice/When you said my heart broke a century…”

“Presumably Dead Arm” – Sidney Gish

I’m back with another unexpected kick back into late 2019 from my shuffle…OOF. This one came during the period where I discovered some the fruitful harvest of offbeat indie rock after I got Apple Music. The floodgates were open, allowing me to listen to way too much girlpool…and this.

The thing that stands out to me about Sidney Gish is that I think she’s a key part of a newer aesthetic that will probably be defined more in retrospect. She’s the spitting image of a certain brand of Gen Z, internet-bred musician who records their music on their laptops and cut their teeth with covers on YouTube. (Gish, for the record, has a very sweet cover of The Magnetic Fields’s “All My Little Words” that she recorded in her shower that stars her pet rabbit. That should give you an idea of her general vibe.) They’ve all got purposely poorly photoshopped album art and quirky, vaguely surreal lyrics. For Gish, I think she’s at least an inch above the rest because her lyricism is, for the most part, very distinctly her and not necessarily just there to service a meme-y aesthetic. Yet I’m almost certain that it’ll date her music instantly, given a decade or so. Ed Buys Houses is still a solid, unique album, but there’s no doubt that it’ll be more and more distinctly 2016 as time passes.

I think “Presumably Dead Arm” was the first song of Gish’s that I ever listened to, and to this day, the charm of it mostly holds up. The sound is so distinctly late-2010’s, complete with the fuzz you get from recording music off of an aging laptop speaker. Now that it’s 2026, I can’t see the title without hearing it in the same cadence as this, yet even so, it’s just such a softly charming little tune. It has a very late teenage kind of wistful melancholy to it, but with the added through line of finding said presumably dead arm in a graveyard (and taking it to prom). Between laments about isolation and drunk and high friends, Gish’s distinct flavor of lyricism shines through: “I’d rather let the poor kid sleep/But he’s tripping balls, he’s tripping testes/LSD, post-wisdom teeth/He got lost in the shower/And he barely knows the hour.” But what hits me now, seven years after I initially found this song, is the genuine fear hidden behind some of the lyrics, the kind you can only get when you’re approaching your 20’s and don’t have a clue what you’re going to do about growing up: “And all these pretend spouses are a happy storybook/That’ll turn to stark non-fiction in the time it took/For me to notice that I’m old, which means I’ll be thirty and happy/Likely married to personified business-casual khakis.” As silly as some of those lines are, they’re delivered with such an urgency that for a fleeting moment, I feel them like a skipped heartbeat in my ribcage. It’s uncanny, how quickly Gish can switch from abject silliness to existentialism. But that’s very Gen Z—and very Sidney Gish, in the end.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly – Sybil Lamb – an underrated oddball of the book world, as Sidney Gish is to indie rock.

“Therefore, I Am” – Jim O’Rourke

I’m all for having compassion and empathy in your heart, but there’s a special, beautiful place in this world for songs that innately feel like a massive middle finger. Sometimes it’s healthy to indulge the spite and blast your fuck-you song. And if you’re looking for a good fuck-you song, then boy, do I have the song for you.

I mainly knew Jim O’Rourke from his far calmer, instrumental world and his role as the longtime producer for much of Wilco’s discography. I knew that he had a solo career, but I honestly thought that it was more along the “Bad Timing” side than this. Apparently he’d been so steeped in his more experimental musical roots for so long and decided to try his hand at a more straightforward indie rock album, and came out the other side with Insignificance. It’s a shame that he doesn’t tap into lyric-oriented music and sing more—he’s got a great voice. And I’m not saying the stuff about the lyrics because they’re some poetic, soul-searching kernel of wisdom. They just happen to be some of the most artfully vitriolic disses I’ve heard put to song. Take this one:

“We are on a sinking ship/But I’d like to stay on board and shoot the cannons at you.”

DAMN. DEDICATION. On my first listen, I just kept hearing this over and over with each successive lyric:

I would not want to be on the receiving end of that. I pity whoever Jim O’Rourke was beefing with circa 2000. “As you can see/I’m a happy guy”—are you sure, Jim? For a song sung so calmly, every line is a gleeful slap in the face—it’s not just a fuck-you to whoever it may concern, but an open brag about how much his life has improved ever since they ended things. The instrumentals have a very Brian Eno, repetition-oriented feel to them (with a guitar tone that scratches every good itch in my musical brain, I might add), and yet even without any screaming or hammering guitars to pieces on stage, it manages to be so cleverly bitter under such an unassuming guise. Perfect cure-all for any and all breakups, toxic friendships, or just thinking about the excess of scummy authority figures all around. I need some Riot Grrl bands to cover this. God, it’s so fun.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – Moniquill Blackgoose – “Why do you hide behind somebody else?/There’s one too many in this room/And I think it’s you…”

“Octopus’s Garden” – The Beatles

I know the whole situation of 3/4 of the Beatles being at each other’s necks during the Abbey Road/Let It Be sessions while Ringo Starr just made a song about an octopus has been memed to death. But really? We should all aspire to be like Ringo in that scenario. Observe the chaos around you and defy it openly with silliness and childlike wonder. Being labelled as the goofy Beatle must’ve had its perks, because I doubt anybody would’ve expected “Octopus’s Garden” to have as lasting of an impact as it did. It’s a classic, both in the Beatles sense and in the sense of most every child since 1970 having fond memories of it. And it’s a classic for a reason. Unlike some of the other more obliquely “joke” Beatles songs (see: “Wild Honey Pie,” which, I’m gonna say it: a thing of sheer beauty), the production is staggeringly good. It came on shuffle the other day, and when I just expected to have a little laugh with Ringo, I got blown away at just how tight of a composition it is—the piano arrangement? George Harrison’s guitar riffs? The harmonies? EVERYTHING? For a song that often gets dismissed as one of the more shallow songs in their catalogue, “Octopus’s Garden” has all manner of hidden layers to it, like bits of seashells hiding just beneath the surface of the waves.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Sea Sirens – Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee – I’m convinced that this book is set exactly where Ringo Starr set “Octopus’s Garden.” We found it, gang. We found the Octopus’s Garden…

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/25/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: Here it comes again; a fantastic voyage to Palo Alto to answer this essential question: where’s my phone? It’s been undone!

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/25/26

“Where’s My Phone?” – Mitski

It’s finally come to that time of year when I start accumulating albums that I’m looking forward to. Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, which is set to release on February 27, is topping the list at the moment for sure! Mitski is back for her first album in two and a half years, and as usual, she’s set to put a pulse on the neuroses of the world; Nothing’s About to Happen to Me seems to be a concept album about a recluse who never leaves her cluttered house. With the aesthetics of cats and old wallpaper, this album has such a clear image—and an intriguing one. Mitski channels some of her heavier guitar work on “Where’s My Phone?”; it’s an exciting sonic callback, like she’s been dusting off the old Bury Me at Makeout Creek sounds (!!!). Adopting a falsely cheery tone, Mitski sings of this character desperately repressing every possible source of negativity, yearning to be “clear glass with nothing going on.” The sentiment of “I keep thinking surely somebody will save me/At every turn I learn that no one will” is pure Mitski all the way down, but it’s refreshing to see Mitski going headfirst into a new character; her introspection, fictional or nonfictional, is where her art shines. Plus, that music video, in which Mitski’s multigenerational home gets assailed by dozens of strangers, is nothing short of bonkers. Definitely somebody’s vivid anxiety dream, for sure.

For some reason, my mind got stuck on the classic censored beep sound on the “I would fuck the hole all night long” line. Sure, we are in the age of musicians proactively self-censoring, but of all musicians, Mitski seems like the last one to do that, especially with how she’s clawed to keep her individuality—and sanity—intact in the music industry. She’s not a Taylor Swift type, and she hasn’t shied away from profanity before. There’s no clean version of the song, and the music video has it too—and yet the official lyrics don’t censor it. So what’s the deal? Was it some sort of artistic touch for the album’s central character’s supposed shame and guilt? I still haven’t come to a conclusion myself, but I swear that it’s intentional. Whatever the case, “Where’s My Phone” buzzes with neurosis, crunching at the edges, an ember of anxiety.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid – “I keep thinking surely somebody will save me/At every turn I learn that no one will/I just want my mind to be a clear glass/Clear glass with nothing instead…”

“Fantastic Voyage” – David Bowie

As calm of a song “Fantastic Voyage” is, it’s a certainly eerie start to Lodger. I finally got around to listening to the album in its entirety not long ago, while mourning 10 years since Bowie’s passing in 2016. Listening to Lodger not long after Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy put me in an irreparable chokehold makes me realize the sheer impact of Eno on Bowie—his weirdness was all there, but after decades of being mainstream, it was Eno who resurrected the less palatable parts of weirdness. I’m sure it was less unexpected at the conclusion of the Berlin Trilogy, but expecting another “Starman” and getting…I dunno, “African Night Flight” must’ve been some unparalleled whiplash. And he’d keep the act going throughout his entire career. In a way, Lodger is a microcosm of what his career would later be. There’s no shortage of tricks up his sleeve, from the strange, often eerie left turns to the sneakier tricks; for one, “Fantastic Voyage” and “Boys Keep Swinging” have an almost identical chord progression, but their atmospheres are so radically different that I didn’t even notice. It’s a trickster kind of album, obstinate in its mission to not be boxed in.

After falling back to Earth, the Berlin Trilogy got much more worldly, and Lodger was its peak. The entire album reeks with the recollection that the world is rife with the unknown, be it in places unseen or the machinations of politics. “Fantastic Voyage” is the thesis of that song; it reads like a scrawled diary before the apocalypse, and it very well could have been, what with the threat of nuclear annihilation and the Cold War on Bowie’s mind. He pits the casual dehumanization of entire peoples against the plea for the dignity of all individuals. He looks skyward, pondering the missiles that could rain down on the population and end everything in an instant. But in the midst of all this turmoil, decades after 1979, the final verse rings truer than ever: “They wipe out an entire race and I’ve got to write it down/But I’m still getting educated/But I’ve got to write it down/And it won’t be forgotten.”

Oof. Certainly feels like a slap in the face, given that ICE has been snatching children off the streets and shoots unarmed civilians in Minneapolis, and I’m just holed up in my apartment trying to get my thesis done. Yet Bowie’s words feel like a guidebook. I’ve got to write it down—I interpret that both in the sense that we have to commit the crimes of these monsters to paper, lest the government conveniently paints them in a more pleasant light (as they already are), but also that in spite of everything, we have to keep on with our creativity. Sometimes, all we can do is write. Of course, that doesn’t make political action, however small, null and void, but sometimes it’s all you can do but journal everything around you to stay sane. All that matters, both for Bowie and for all of us, is to keep the pen moving—that keeps our minds sharp, it creates a record of the soul.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? – Temi Oh – “Remember it’s true/Dignity is valuable/But our lives are valuable too/We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression/And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression/We’ll get by, I suppose…”

“Palo Alto” – Radiohead

In a move that’s probably stunned nobody, I’ve decided to become the insufferable neighbor and take up collecting vinyl; my parents were nice enough to gift me with a record player, as well as my two favorite albums: David Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Radiohead’s OK Computer. I can’t thank them enough. My neighbors, on the other hand, are probably rueing the day that they had to hear “Fitter Happier” through the walls without warning. Your honor, I plead “whoopsie daisies.”

OK Computer—specifically, the 2017 remaster with all of the b-sides, OKNOTOK—all but swallowed me whole in my freshman year of high school, and the version of me that got chewed up and spit out was irreparably, permanently changed. Whether it was for the best or the worst is up to interpretation, but either way, it’s given me a love of Radiohead that hasn’t waned to this day, more than seven years after I first listened to the album. However, at that age, I was still in the woeful process of immediately deleting whatever songs that didn’t hook me on the first few listens from my library. The destruction left in the wake was irreparable—and it also made me completely forget that this absolute gem existed. I can’t even put my finger on why it wasn’t a favorite at the time; the only reasonable explanation is that OK Computer is just so jam-packed full of songs that shattered my brain that brain-shattering became the standard. I was harsh back then.

Yet on my new record player, “Palo Alto” came out of left field. In the mindset of Thom Yorke, I can sort of see why this one got the axe back in the day—musically, it’s less adventurous than some of the other tracks. It’s very much of the same, more straightforward rock/Britpop crop of The Bends, despite the avalanche of fuzz and decorative beep-boops. Thematically, it’s on par with the anxiety of OK Computer, with the tiresome monotony of corporate life: “In a city of the future/It is difficult to concentrate/Meet the boss, meet the wife/Everybody’s happy, everyone is made for life.” Even if it’s not as compositionally inventive as some of the a-sides, even Radiohead’s more straightforward songs are a cut above the rest, and “Palo Alto” is proof. With the sudden, grinding assault of Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s guitars against Thom Yorke’s exasperated delivery of regurgitated small talk, it encapsulates the exhaustion of being trapped in an endless cycle of work buttressed only with surface-level interactions.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Embassytown – China Miéville – “In a city of the future/It is difficult to find a space/I’m too busy to see you/You’re too busy to wait…”

“Here It Comes Again” – Cate Le Bon

I regret to inform you that I’ve been listening to way more Cate Le Bon again, but I can’t help it that it faintly fits the vibe of my honors thesis. Michelangelo Dying, Pompeii, and Reward all got revisited last week, and you will be hearing about it. This is, once again, a threat.

Among the many impressive things about Cate Le Bon is the myriad ways that she makes her music sound innately aquatic. I talked about how watery all of Reward feels when I first listened to it back in July, with “Miami” and its sounds of aquarium gravel and bubbles. Unlike a lot of her songs, “Here It Comes Again” feels more like water rhythmically; with an almost waltz-like rhythm, it feels like the motion of a plastic toy boat being carried out to sea. The melody continually repeats and lives by eating itself, a gently cyclical waltz across a flooded ballroom covered in algae. That precise quality of the melody is what enhances the lyrics. It’s implied in the title (and the chorus), but “Here It Comes Again” drowns in monotony, its sonic eyelids growing heavier with each repetition: “Man alive/This solitude/Is wrinkles in the dirt.” Very few artists make solitude and dreariness into such musical feasts like Cate Le Bon does—if it’s loneliness, she’s spun it into something as appealing as a bowl of candies with brightly-colored wrappers.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Here Beside the Rising Tide – Emily Jane – “Man alive/This solitude/Is wrinkles in the dirt/I borrowed love from carnivals/Set it in a frame/Here it comes again…”

“Been Undone” – Peter Gabriel

HE’S BACK! PETER GABRIEL IS BACK TO SAVE 2026!

Once again culminating in an album coming out this December, o\i is being released in singles corresponding with each full moon of 2026. Three days into 2026, it gave me some hope—and a bittersweet full-circle moment for me. I spent the spring semester of my freshman year of college listening to i/o‘s singles, and I’ll be spending the spring semester of my senior year listening to its inverse. The songs comprise of both castoffs from the i/o sessions and from further back in his career; according to this video, the chord progression for “Been Undone” has been on the back burner for several decades. As the starting gun for the album, it’s an expression of some of what I love best about Gabriel: his boundless creativity and his grounded humility. “Been Undone” is all about learning moments—the ones that cause us pain or overwhelm us, but ultimately teach us something valuable: “By all the forms that you get from the Mandelbrot set/I’ve been undone/By the recursive slaves in the home of the brave/I’ve been undone.” I’m assuming the latter is in reference to the deeply broken U.S. prison system, but back to back with a mathematical concept that results in dizzying, fascinating patterns, it proves the song’s point: both great wonder and great pain can be the origin of learning. Musically, I thought it was going to be a more standard new-era Gabriel song, and it continues so for nearly 6 minutes; but at 5:59, he takes a left turn back into “The Tower That Ate People” territory, turning a pleasantly synthy tune into his personal brand of almost-industrial, proving that even at 74, he has no shortage of tricks up his sleeve.

Also, the bit where Gabriel was asked about the Bright/Dark-side mixes and if he allows the producers to play with the structure cracked me up—probably the clearest vocalization of “no <3” I’ve ever seen HAHA

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Life Hacks for a Little Alien – Alice Franklin – “Though I want to observe, it keeps touching a nerve/And I’ve been undone/By the past that you trace, by a moment of grace/I have been undone…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/18/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: two queens maximizing their joint slay, songs that get a little confusing in the discography next to each other, and unintentionally capitalizing (as if I earn any money from this blog) on gay hockey being the next big thing. Also, a shoutout is due to my mom, because I ended up getting 3/5 of these songs from a single car ride with her. Love you 🙂

Enjoy this week’s review!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/18/26

“Sleeping Powder” – Gorillaz

Here’s the thing about Gorillaz: I’ve talked extensively about how since 2018, they’ve become less Gorillaz and more about the collaborations, and it feels like they’ve lost themselves somewhere in the midst. The thing is that they’re fully still capable of returning to their roots and balancing the old with the new. Even though it sounds like it could’ve come from Plastic Beach, “Sleeping Powder” was released after Humanz came out in 2018. According to the official Gorillaz lore, 2D made this song behind the rest of the band’s back because he felt that he’d been excluded from the album (shhh, don’t tell Murdoc); the song is primarily about the character’s drug addiction, as evidenced by the music video, complete with the classic “this is your brain on drugs” sample and a 3D 2D (they said it couldn’t be done…) tripping balls and abusing his green screen privileges. It feels like a promise of what Gorillaz still could be; “Sleeping Powder” never feels like it could mesh with Blur or Damon Albarn’s solo work, as some of his more recent music does. It’s pure Gorillaz, channeling the urgency and grooves from their earlier eras but giving them a more modern flourish. Complete with a fusion of acoustic guitars and synths—and one of Albarn’s signature raspy howls—”Sleeping Powder” feels like a reminder that the core of Gorillaz exists—it’s just been buried, which, given how hit or miss their output has been since 2018, is a real shame.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Shamshine Blind – Paz Pardo – “I get dropped from where I belong/I take my pills and I get in the mode/And I take five to get it to load in/Even in the place…”

“Heat Wave” – Snail Mail

Seems like this is a very advantageous time to write about this song, since a) the nearly 5-year Snail Mail drought is purportedly ending next Tuesday (!!!), and b) gay hockey is in. May I interest you in some lesbian hockey?

Hearing “Heat Wave” when I was 14 felt as though something in the world of music had cracked open like an eggshell, and the yolk of possibility had opened up for me. I’d just discovered Snail Mail on the cusp of her first album, Lush, and the first few singles instigated a seismic shift in me. Here was Lindsey Jordan, only 18 at the time, making such raw, fully-formed music with guitar at the forefront. She was openly gay, she wasn’t traditionally feminine, and she looked like somebody who I’d see in my brother’s high school class. But here she was, taking the indie world by storm.

It’s so oddly raw listening to “Heat Wave” now. I’m older than Jordan was in that video now. The lyrics are even more teenage now, but they hit almost as hard as they did when I was 14. At a show I saw her at when I was 16, Jordan admitted that she’d forgotten which song was about which girl; now, it hardly matters—she bottled that open-wound feeling of a fresh breakup and concentrated it so fully that its source is irrelevant. Concentrating that emotion so distinctly is a feat at any age, but at 18! 18! I was writing stories about weird spaceships with way too much purple prose at 18. Man. “Heat Wave” is so chock-full of emotion that it felt almost heady, like strong perfume, listening back to it after so many years; and yet, adorned with some seriously intricate and catchy guitar riffs (once again, AT 18, Jesus Christ), “Heat Wave” is such an indie gem, and Lush remains a testament to the sheer talent she’d worked so hard to cultivate.

Even if Valentine was weaker in retrospect, and even if this new single doesn’t turn out good, there’s still the Snail Mail I loved in 2018. She’s the main reason I picked up the guitar in the first place, and she gave me the courage to come out not long after I saw her at a tiny club in Denver. And I will always treasure that Snail Mail.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Perfect on Paper – Sophie Gonzales – “And I hope whoever it is/Holds their breath around you/Cause’ I know I did/And otherwise/If only sometimes/Would you give it up, green eyes?”

“Tied Up!” – Genesis Owusu

One word keeps popping up like a whack-a-mole every time I listen to “Tied Up!”, and that is “groovy.” Dear lord, this is such an expertly tight groove. There’s not really a genre I can definitively pin it to, and from the looks of it, the same is true for STRUGGLER, the critically-acclaimed album the it comes from. But either way, this song is neat as a pin—this is a groove, nothing more, nothing less.

Loosely centered around the character of The Roach, a struggler on the run from the manifestation of any antagonistic force you can think of, named God. (Sidenote: I love the bug-eyed sunglasses that Owusu wore when he toured for this album. Perfection.) Along with “Leaving the Light,” an adrenaline-fueled sprint away from God’s wrath (“I’m a beast I can feel them poaching/Stamp me down, but a roach keeps roaching”), “Tied Up!” embodies what feels like the mentality of this Roach character: no matter what God throws at him, roaches are famously unkillable, virtually impervious to apocalypse and mass extinction. Owusu declaring that he’s bleeding from his legs right on the heels of the most upbeat pop chorus is whiplash, but it embodies that feeling of taking pride in being unbeatable when you’re being beat down from all sides. Owusu chucks all manner of musical influences in the pot—hip-hop, pop, alt-rock—but they all come out feeling like something wholly new. Aside from a few weak lyrics here and there (“What other choice can I chose?” always trips me up), “Tied Up!” has no bumps in the road—it’s a slick groove all the way through.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Resisters – Gish Jen – “I’m bleeding from my legs but it’s alright today/Better out here than the hell where I stay/I said my feelings start to wobble when I stare at the doves/I’m fighting through life, I have no boxing gloves…”

“Always The Same” (feat. St. Vincent) – Cate Le Bon

If there ever was an audio manifestation of “two queens coming together to maximize their joint slay,” then this is it. This is the only thing keeping the fabric of 2026 together. I can only hope that Cate Le Bon will follow in St. Vincent’s footsteps and retroactively announce a tour date near me.

Praise! We get a momentary extension of my favorite album of 2025, Michelangelo Dying! From the looks of it, there was a fruitful window where St. Vincent and Cate Le Bon were drawing from each other’s musical wells; back in 2024, Le Bon contributed backing vocals to “All Born Screaming.” Now, St. Vincent’s switched roles, providing a harmony for Le Bon on this track from the Michelangelo Dying sessions. “Always The Same” falls on the slower side of the album with songs like “Pieces of My Heart” or “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” and deals with the same heartbreak, although not in the heart-ripped-from-your ribcage way. What stands out to me about Michelangelo Dying is that it’s not a breakup album in the traditional sense—it’s not about the romance so much as it is about the gradual buildup leading to the break. There’s little rage or sorrow, but what there is in great amounts is exhaustion, repressed and built up in the chest until it makes you collapse. She’s not a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl so much as she is a river running dry.

“Always The Same” takes that same bleary-eyed exhaustion and draws it out; Le Bon describes her losing battle with her lover as “back and forth like a country/losing land to war,” shrinking herself until there’s nothing left of her at all. The background saxophones are almost unrecognizable as the instruments they are, made so ripply and strangely plastic by the production, expanding and contracting like a lung made of rubber. Both lyrically and instrumentally, it’s like watching a bundle of herbs dry out in the oven: something that was once green burns up and loses all its color. St. Vincent offers her higher harmonies to rise with Le Bon’s sonorous vocals, a devil on her shoulder to dismiss her pain, repeating: “she can bury it!”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Ephemera Collector – Stacy Nathaniel Jackson – “I swallowed your memories/Like a morning prayer/I’m in your debt now/Almost there…”


“Troubles” – TV on the Radio

Nowadays, this song has to be a pain for TV on the Radio, since they put out a far more popular song called “Trouble” four years later. Oops. Hindsight is 20/20. At least “Troubles” is a bonus track, so it gets forgotten easily. Good for clarity, not good for a perfectly good song that deserves more attention. But if girlpool could make it work by having two completely different songs called “Pretty,” then TV on the Radio can too.

Either way, “Troubles” doesn’t deserve to get left in the dust; even if there are stronger tracks on Nine Types of Light, it’s a calm, steady track—the even-keeled instrumentals makes the chorus of “Despite all the heartbreak it brings/Our love is a surefire thing” feel just as anchored. With imagery of springtime fields and songbirds aplenty, it’s alight with flickers of hope amidst the plateau. It’s a vow to be the calm after somebody’s storm. Even if it’s more restrained than some of the more adventurous, intricate tracks on the album (see: “Killer Crane”), the vocal harmonies are as melodic and light as the songbirds they describe, and the flickers of horns and fluttering synths make for a song built like a dense greenhouse full of bright blooms.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea – Rebecca Thorne – relaxing and steady, with steadfast love and a pastoral, magical setting.

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 1/11/26

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: ever stopped to wonder about the baby and its umbilical? Or about who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle, by any chance? You’re in luck. I don’t have the answers, but Andy Partridge might.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 1/11/26

“The Ballad of Mr. Steak” – Kishi Bashi

I talked about Kishi Bashi and “Angeline” last week, but I failed to say what really snagged me about part of why I dove back into his music. Say what you want about the man, but Kishi Bashi is ardently committed to joyous whimsy. (see also: “Philosophize In It! Chemicalize With It!”, also from Lighght, and “Unicorns Die When You Leave”). It would’ve been inappropriate to talk about said joyous whimsy when talking about the very serious subject matter of Omoiyari, so I’ve made it separate. Buckle in, because I doubt that you’ll ever hear another song with the same staggering amount of steak/beef/cow related puns in your life. (Okay, maybe other than this. The point still stands.)

What stands out to me about “The Ballad of Mr. Steak” (and Kishi Bashi) is that yes, the lyrics are as goofy as all get-out, but it never feels like a joke song. This was never just a throwaway song for a bit—he puts the exact same amount of compositional effort and prowess into writing about heartbreak that he does into a song about eating some really, really good steak: “Did fate mistake us for a pair of star crossed lovers?/The savory ending wasn’t drowned in salt and pepper/And as we danced together, I cried a funny smile/As I felt you awake in the heat of feast/Now you’re gone forever now inside myself, here we go!” The synth riff starting at 1:03 never fails to jumpstart me into excitement, along with Bashi’s acrobatic violin playing—a staple of almost all of his songs, but it never gets old. And there’s just wordplay as far as the eye can see: “Grade A” sounds so much like “great, eh” that it almost seems normal. (It could also apply to “mistake” and “mis-steak.”) It’s just such a delightful song, one of my favorites of his as of late. Mr. Steak, you were Grade A!

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Screw it, just analyze this meme in whatever English major way you so choose: I give up. This one’s stumped me. Maybe I’m the bad guy for not knowing any books that are even tangentially related to beef, steak, or cows. Do what you will with this.

“Flower of Blood” – Big Thief

In their glowing review of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, Pitchfork suggests that this album is Big Thief’s The White Album. Comparing anything to The White Album is a bold move, but this one doesn’t feel without merit to me. They’re both long albums, expansive in their subject matter and exploratory in their sound. I’d say The White Album is more cohesive than Dragon, but I don’t come to the former looking for crisp cohesion. I come looking for songs that are, by all accounts, kind of all over the place, but unified by the shared talent of The Beatles. Both albums ask “hey, what if we tried this?” and commit to whatever ideas the others dish up.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is less successful than The Beatles, but that’s because…this is The Beatles we’re talking about, for God’s sake. Hardly anybody’s going to measure up. But it’s such an adventurous album, even if the many, many forks in the road that Adrianne Lenker and co. explore aren’t always successful. By and large they are, but I just can’t get on board with the twangy forays into country (see: “Red Moon,” “Blue Lightning”), especially since the album closes out with one of them. Everything else, though? They’re bouncing off the walls in the best way possible, verging from slow, wailing sorrow to ecstatic romance and everything else that fits (or doesn’t fit) in between. There’s nothing that Big Thief won’t try, and that’s what made this album so fun to listen to—at a certain point, I gave up on trying to predict what would come next.

For instance: “Flower of Blood” is the closest I’ve heard Big Thief come to trying their hand at shoegaze. A lot of the sonic palette of the album is hazy and dreamy, but it feels like they tried to write a Slowdive song from memory, and then adorned it with clanging percussion and industrial whines. What starts out as one of their ordinarily folksy love songs ends with a clatter of reverbed squeals and creaks, all of the instruments blending together, like a spaceship cobbled together from bits of mossy stone and rusty scrap metal. (A lot of the songs on this album evoke scrap metal, honestly. It’s a vibe.) In a way, it’s a capsule of what Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is in a single song: where you begin is never where you end.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Strange Bedfellows – Ariel Slamet Ries – “Give me some time on Earth to know you/Help me unearth the map and show you/Thinking of her, thinking of him, want to?”

“Season Cycle” – XTC

Quirky whimsy with airtight composition seems to be the partial theme of this week, because we’re crashing headfirst right into it. Not just anybody can rhyme “um-bil-ical” and “cycle” and make it work, but dammit, Andy Partridge makes it sound like the words were always meant to rhyme in the first place. Lyrically, the man can do it all. Among the many, many squabbles that Partridge had with Todd Rundgren (who produced Skylarking), one of them was that Rundgren thought this rhyme was stupid. Not taking a dig at the guy, but really…how does it feel to be that wrong, Todd?

The loose concept behind Skylarking was experiencing an entire lifetime in the span of a day, weaving in imagery of nature and themes about seasons and weather along with this lifespan. In terms of the track listing, “Season Cycle” comes right in the middle, and just before the record “grows up”—most of the other songs afterwards are about religion (see: “Dear God”), marriage, and death. But in stark contrast, this song is a whimsical, pastoral bundle of curiosity. The lyrics are sunny ponderings about how the world works. Partridge’s character admits confusion, but appears cheery all the way as he wonders about why the weather is the way it is, and of course “about the baby and its um-bil-ical/Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?” XTC have always been straight-up sixties, but I always associate them more with bands like The Monkees, but Partridge said this song was inspired in particular by The Beach Boys. Before I knew that, my shuffle gave me the glorious transition of “Season Cycle” back to back with “God Only Knows,” and it makes even more sense than it did before. Yet even with the sun-bleached, Brian Wilson-esque quality of the whole composition, it’s nothing but Andy Partridge; as world-weary he got early on in his career, they could never beat the whimsy and curiosity about the inner workings of the world out of him.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Letter to the Luminous Deep – Sylvie Cathrall – “Darling, don’t you ever sit and ponder/About the building of the hills a yonder?/Where we’re going in this verdant spiral/Who’s pushing the pedals on the season cycle?”

“Epitaph for My Heart” – The Magnetic Fields

I seriously don’t know how Stephin Merritt does it. It’s artists like him and Jeff Tweedy that absolutely baffle me: Jeff Tweedy in the sheer frequency of his records with his various bands and projects, and Merritt with the amount of consistently incredible songs that he can pack into an album. In this case, this is yet another fantastic track from 69 Love Songs—over three hours’ worth of Merritt’s stellar songwriting. The song’s intro is proof of how talented of a songwriter he is; against plunking keys, he puts the warning label from an electric keyboard to music, which turns itself into a miniature metaphor for a heart so busted and battered that it needs a qualified professional to put back together. The melancholy pop song that he launches into after is nothing but classic Magnetic Fields. Who else could casually include “anon” in a song that doesn’t sound purposefully antiquated? Then again, “on and on anon” sounds an awful lot like “on and on and on,” so that’s probably the only way. (Merritt switches it up into “on and dawn and dawn” later too. Layers, people!) Very clever nonetheless—whether it’s upfront or sneaky, Stephin Merritt is practically a songwriting magician with infinite tricks up his sleeve.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

So Lucky – Nicola Griffith – “And life goes on and dawn and dawn/And death goes on, world without end/And you’re not my friend…”

“Here Be Monsters” – Ed Harcourt

I pride myself on being a fairly punctual person, so this is a bit embarrassing for me, but once again, like most of the rules I’ve imposed on myself, it’s completely arbitrary. I wanted to write about “Here Be Monsters” three years ago, but it went on the wayside for whatever reason (read: it didn’t match the color palette du jour). Another recommendation from my amazing older brother, it soundtracked a hefty part of the second semester of my freshman year of college, perfect for the late winter chill. Now it’s mid-winter in 2026, I’m nearly finished with my degree, and the weather is once again ripe for dreary songs about religious bigotry.

“Here Be Monsters” sounds cloaked in fog from the get-go—it’s a very wintry song, and it’s fitting for the subject matter. Amid the hollow strums of an acoustic guitar, wobbly whistling, and high-pitched backing vocals fit for one of Danny Elfman’s scores, Harcourt examines the hypocrisy of a certain kind of Christian, the kind that claims to follow Christ’s teachings of compassion and forgiveness, but in reality uses their faith to ostracize and isolate anybody who deviates. I’m sticking to book pairings for these posts, but I can’t help but think of the new Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man, and its examination of this kind of hypocritical Christianity and the mental repercussions of the people who are unwittingly caught in the crossfire. The offhand, distanced delivery of much of the lyrics are the embodiment of the “turn the other cheek” line—even in the face of tragedy, it doesn’t matter, because they didn’t follow the teachings of the Bible (or, at least, their often misinformed interpretations of it). With every disaffected repetition of “such a shame,” Harcourt brings to life the façade of compassion that these people often put on, caring on the surface, but harshly judgmental in private. Cloaked in echoes and mist, “Here Be Monsters” is a frigid song, both in lyricism and in instrumentation.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Extasia – Claire Legrand – religious fanaticism and creeping dread.

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/28/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

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

This week: the last Sunday Songs of 2025 (good riddance), featuring one more song from Bad Sisters, early college memories, and Liz Fraser getting her money’s worth out of the letter ‘S.’

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/28/25

“Hate It Here” – Wilco

You know me—I’m a sucker for songs that are sweet, sincere, a little too sappy on occasion. I love a good ballad here and there. But there is a hair-thin line between being sincere and wholesome and being overly earnest and corny in a way that sounds disingenuous the minute you step an inch beyond that line. Being genuine doesn’t mean squinting more than usual when you sing into the mic and switching your guitar from electric to acoustic—unless the feeling’s there, it’s not going to sound sincere. So it’s always an acrobatic feat to make a song that’s earnest and sincere but doesn’t sound fake. Sometimes you have to be a bit of a cornball to get it across, but sometimes, being a cornball is better than thinking that you’re automatically moving people to tears by singing slightly louder.

I wouldn’t say that of Jeff Tweedy though, even if Sky Blue Sky’s legacy is that it’s the origin of the term “dad rock,” a kind of Frankenstein’s monster from Pitchfork writer Rob Mitchum, who now regrets what he created. Tweedy’s just a uniquely sincere kind of poet, no matter the lens he uses. “Hate It Here” is a long time coming on Sunday Songs ever since I discovered it this summer, after it became a setlist staple for Wilco on their most recent tour. The best way to describe it is that it’s wholesome without saccharine—Jeff Tweedy just misses his wife when she’s not there!! He’s lonely!! He loves his wife!! It’s this in song form:

It veers towards the sappy, but it’s delivered with the kind of longing you only get from a happy, stable marriage and a genuine affection—it can’t come across as anything other than wholesome. And like the house that Tweedy’s idly pacing around, there are all manner of quirky musical furnishings—this isn’t in the studio version, but on tour, when Tweedy sings “I’ll check the phone,” Mikael Jorgensen does this little riff on the keyboard that sounds like a phone ringing. And let me tell you, it instantly made me go “OH MY GOD!! HE DID THE THING!! THE PHONE!! THE PHONE IS RINGING!!” It just goes to show the ounces of care that Wilco puts into every song, no matter if it’s about the depths of addiction, existential crises…or missing the wife. Because every song deserves the same love.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – …Ashby and Pei. Just saying.

“Cold Was the Ground” – The Limiñanas

I promise this’ll be the last of the music I’ve swiped from Bad Sisters for the foreseeable future. I can’t help it! Whoever was in charge of the music direction should’ve gotten a raise, both for the sheer volume of great songs included, but for the subtle focus on women, be it Melanie or Wet Leg, Nancy Sinatra or Bikini Kill.

If not for the fact that “Cold Was the Ground” plays in-scene while the Garvey sisters are listening to the radio, I fully would’ve thought that it was part of PJ Harvey’s score—those resonant, plucked strings at the beginning sound almost identical to the musical motifs she scattered throughout the series. It’s a song so perfect for the show’s atmosphere that the characters practically break the fourth wall and recognize it themselves—it plays on the radio while they’re disposing of a body, and they insist that Eva switch to another radio station and play something less blatantly topical. “Cold Was the Ground” is a sparse but cinematic song. If Fargo goes on for another season, this would fit perfectly in it; it has that same feel of an unsettling, Depression-era Americana standard, despite the Limiñanas being French. With Marie Limiñana’s breathy vocals, a husky whisper through the mist, you feel a kind of old-fashioned dread, evocative of a campfire story that you’re trying to pretend didn’t scare you, but becomes realer the more you look out into the dark night.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls – Cherie Dimaline – “I was dreaming a note/In the cemetery/Shadows in my heart/And sadly/I still hear you cry…”

“Pre War Tension” (feat. Marta) – Lonely Guest

I just want to talk about the visual for the song here, because…why are we just zooming in on random parts of Joe Talbot’s face? Why is 1/3rd of this video just the camera slowly getting closer and closer to his hairline, and then zipping back down to his chin? I mean, zooming in on Marta’s eyes and smile during the “Saw it in your eyes/Sense it in your smile” line is a nice touch, but…everything else? Why does Joe Talbot’s picture look like a mugshot?? Why is Tricky’s picture so grainy compared to everybody else’s? No wonder those photos are so tiny on the Lonely Guest album cover…

Anyways. Lonely Guest is essentially just Tricky, but back in 2021, it was a collaborative side project under another name. I’ve only listened to a handful of songs from it, but it captures the modern incarnation of what Tricky’s music has bottled for me: agitation. He thrives on mining dread, anxiety, and all manner of creeping, looming feelings—Maxinquaye is a masterclass in taking that feeling and ballooning it up 10 times its normal size. Though “Pre War Tension” doesn’t musically give that feel—it’s more of a simple instrumental as far as Tricky goes—its guests do. Joe Talbot was the perfect mouthpiece for these lyrics, making the first verse sound like a less aggressive IDLES track; the opening lyrics (“There’s a Macy’s parade-sized pink elephant/In the room that renders me unintelligent”) sound straight off of Ultra Mono. But ultimately, it is still Tricky, and his signature rasp, spoken in an atonal whisper, articulates that tension of wanting to hunker down somewhere cold as the world around you slowly spirals towards ruination. Even Marta’s voice, the most even-keeled balance between Talbot and Tricky, has a kind of resignation to it despite its softness.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Junker Seven – Olive J. Kelley – “Life devours/Then it sours/You wanna go/But you really can’t stay/Your trouble and strife…”

“Aloysius” – Cocteau Twins

I doubt this is an applicable situation for anybody, but if you ever need to explain the definition of “sibilant” to someone (1. making or characterized by a hissing sound or 2. [of a speech sound] sounded with a hissing effect, for example s, sh), just use this song. This song was brought to you by the letter ‘S’: silly, saliva, sashimi, should’ve. Of course, I write down about half of those words without complete certainty that they’re in the lyrics, but either way, it’s a very sibilant song, silky and ethereal like the fabric draped over Treasure’s album cover. Due to that emphasis on ‘S,’ “Aloysius” is one of the more indecipherable Cocteau Twins songs for me—as used to their relative gibberish as I am, all of them blend together like watercolors with that consonant repetition. Frazer makes ‘S’ not even sound like a consonant anymore, with the airy treatment it gets, along with all of the vowels strung along with it. That’s the real talent of Frazer for me: words are malleable things in her hands, elevated beyond words and into strings of pearls.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Courtney Crumrin, vol. 1: The Night Things – Ted Naifeh – iykyk.

“Simulation Swarm” – Big Thief

I’ve manage to only double-dip on Sunday Songs sparingly through the years, but I’ve fallen for it again. To be fair, this one appeared before I was even writing about these and maybe 20 people saw them on my Instagram story, so we can pretend that this isn’t a repeat.

“Simulation Swarm” is so distinctly 2022 for me, and yes, I know, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You came out that year, but it’s a very specific part of 2022 for me. I remember listening to it while facing the lawn surrounding my freshman dorm in college, the sunlight on the fresh grass, the fear shaky in my legs as my headphones snaked over the worn strap on my purse. I was impressionable to my brother’s music taste then, and I still am now, but he and his girlfriend were guiding me through my first wobbly steps into college (god, THANK YOU GUYS), leaving Big Thief songs like crumbs along the way. I probably heard it at one of the coffee shops on campus too, but either way, if the local coffee shop run by college students isn’t playing Big Thief, what’s the point?

Cobbled together from a series of Lenker’s experiences—hospitalization, a childhood spent in a cult, and her separation from her brother—”Simulation Swarm” is so bursting with yearning that’s it’s difficult to pin down exactly how I feel about it on any given day. I’ve leaned towards an eagerness to escape myself, but it’s a tender little mood ring that burns a bit when you leave it on your finger for too long. Lenker’s lyrics are so poetic and surreal in nature that I can’t help but imagine a fantastical undercurrent to it; my heart always snags on the “last human teachers” bit, maybe just from the sci-fi image that it conjures up. Sure, the verse about “building an energy shield” in the backyard feels very much like kids playing pretend, but I can’t help but thinking of children on a faraway planet, scraping enough money together to make their energy shield out of scrap metal and hijack a spaceship and fly it far, far away, as far as they can get. That emotion, positive or negative, feels to me like the yearning for freedom—like the empty horses, it yearns to break free, and in the chorus, you get the feeling that something’s finally snapped, broken loose, and broken its chains: “I’d fly to you tomorrow/I’m not fighting in this war/I wanna drop my arms and take your arms/And walk you to the shore.”

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Hero for WondLa (The Search for WondLa, #2) – Tony DiTerlizzi – “I remember building an energy shield/In your room, like a temple/Swallows in the windless field/Very thin, with your mother/Tall as a pale green tree…”

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

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

Posted in Sunday Songs

Sunday Songs: 12/21/25

Posted on by madeline @ The Bookish Mutant

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well. Happy Hanukkah, Happy Winter Solstice, and in advance, Merry (almost) Christmas!

This week: speaking of which, I rarely end up aligning my Sunday Songs graphics to actually include any holiday-specific songs, but it worked out just right this year…you decide if it’s a pre-Christmas miracle.

SUNDAY SONGS: 12/16/25

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (cover) – St. Vincent

Yet another song I’ve swiped from a movie I have no interest in seeing…listen, I saw ads for this movie exclusively through Pinterest and I had no idea it existed until these songs came out. At least we’ve got several Christmas classics reimagined by indie greats, even if the movie is an afterthought for me (see: Jeff Tweedy’s cover of “Christmas Must Be Tonight”).

When I first played this song, I was afraid, with the key, that we’d fall into “St. Vincent goes too far out of her vocal range; things get awkward” territory (see: her cover of Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom”). As much as I love her, she…clearly has her limits. But she slipped into this cover of a Christmas classic with relaxed, comforting ease. Though I like covers to deviate some from the original, I feel like the rule can be broken for Christmas songs—they’re holiday standards, and they’re standards for a reason. The soft keyboards and synths generate a cozy, fireplace atmosphere, and Clark’s warm voice adds that special layer of Christmas cheer that makes me feel as though I’m under a warm blanket watching snowflakes gather outside my window. Even though it’s far from the place for her signature shredding (though I’m not sure any Christmas song merits that), I love that she lent her voice to this song.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell – I feel like I rarely read Christmasy books, but this one’s got lots of Christmas cheer.

“Drive My Car” (The Beatles cover) – The Donnas

Speaking of covers that barely deviate from the original…

There’s an element of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fit it” at play, especially since this is none other than The Beatles—there’s no denying that “Drive My Car” is an impeccable pop song, and a very nostalgic one for me as well. The other cover I can think of, by the exclusively-covers side project of Supergrass, The Hotrats, follows the same formula—and I love it. So sure, although it’s a little unadventurous that nothing’s really changed about The Donnas’ version of “Drive My Car,” sometimes covers don’t need all that much change. Some songs came out of the womb (or, in this case, out of the brains of Lennon and McCartney) nearly perfect, and there’s no point in trying to change it. The opposite can be true as well—“Cry Baby Cry” comes off of my favorite Beatles album, and yet I almost love Throwing Muses’ dreamy take on the song better than the original. (Apologies for the potential Beatlemaniac heresy.) And The Donnas’ cover retains exactly what made the original so fun—it’s catchy, it’s punchy, and the harmonization is as sharp as anything. Brett Anderson (no, not the Suede one) has the exact kind of vocals that “Drive My Car” needs—upfront, with a smooth yet sharp tone that demands to be front and center. You have to be a special kind of vocalist to pull off the iconic “beep beep, beep beep, YEAH!”—and Anderson absolutely is.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Monstrous Misses Mai – Van Hoang – “I told that girl I could start right away/When she said, ‘Listen, babe, I got something to say/I got no car and it’s breaking my heart/But I found a driver and that’s a start…'”

“(Nothing But) Flowers” – Talking Heads

Tiny Desk has had a score of heavy-hitters this year, and what better to…kind of cap the year off than David Byrne? With both new material from his latest album, Who is the Sky? and Talking Heads classics, it was truly just a shot of joy to the veins—just the thing I needed to loosen up after getting finals out of the way. For somebody so renowned for having a cagey stage presence, he seemed surprisingly loose. Maybe it’s just come with age or comfort level, but nonetheless, the joy was contagious.

I’ve slowly been picking up Talking Heads hits like ripe fruits on the side of the road. They’re one of those bands that I feel automatically a fan of, even though I only know 10 of their songs tops, just because I’ve become so attached to some of their songs. God knows I’ve got a score of fond memories attached to “Once in a Lifetime.” One of their latter-day hits, “(Nothing But) Flowers” is an upbeat yet almost cynical take on the post-apocalypse. Like many visions of the future, it imagines our polluted, industrial landscape returned to the vegetation, with Pizza Huts and Dairy Queens grown over and plowed away to make room for fields of wildflowers and wheat. Obvious references to the Garden of Eden, the world has become a pastoral haven—and yet, we cannot adjust to this sudden change, and even though our capitalist environment was pretty obviously worse, everybody yearns for that familiarity—”If this is paradise/I wish I had a lawnmower.”

It’s no wonder that Byrne chose this song for this Tiny Desk Concert, nearly 40 years after its initial release: the line “And as things fell apart/Nobody paid much attention” is a little too on the nose considering…everything. And that’s not even considering the overt political messaging in the music video. Even when we’re faced with a world full of broken, corrupt systems, we’ve become so used to living with the horrors that we might flounder when faced with something better. I hesitate to say that it’s fully cynical, since the vision Byrne and co. conjure is certainly akin to paradise, and yet the song ends with the cry of “I can’t get used to this lifestyle!” I suppose it’s less a condemnation of us and more of a condemnation of how capitalism has groomed us into thinking that it’s the Best Possible Lifestyle! while actively plowing us into the ground. It’s a testament to capitalist propaganda, for sure, to think that our hellscape of five McDonald’s in a two-mile radius and factories belching out chemicals into the air is better than idyllic fields of flowers and breathable air.

But it is, after all, propaganda: words, systems, all created by human hands. Human hands can dismantle it right over again and build something better. To quote Ursula K. Le Guin, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” Like the flowers, I believe that we can overrun what was once Pizza Huts and factories and make do with what springs from the ashes.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers – “This used to be real estate/Now it’s only fields and trees/Where, where is the town?/Now, it’s nothing but flowers…”

“If I Was Ever Lonely” – Sharp Pins

The lingering feeling I get with this song is that it has to be indicative of something. Something’s catching on. It could just be limited to Kai Slater, but I swear it’s proof that either Elephant 6, Jim Noir, or just weirdo, offbeat, ’60s-inspired indie is on the rise again. Radio DDR was released earlier this year, but if you hadn’t told me that this was Sharp Pins, I would’ve been fooled if you’d told me that this was a leaked Olivia Tremor Control demo from 1998. Either way you hear it, “If I Was Ever Lonely” is cloaked in pure, jangle-pop fun—there’s a very Brian Wilson-esque swing to it that makes you nod your head instantly. With the lo-fi production and the literal dizziness in the lyrics, listening to “If I Was Ever Lonely” strangely feels like staring into the sun. It’s not out of any sense of pain, but more of a carefree feeling of being so head-over-heels that everything is sunny and blurry at the edges.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Just Your Local Bisexual Disaster – Andrea Mosqueda – “Watching from the back seat of your car/Wondering how far you can take it when I’m so lonely/Dancing in the ballroom hall/Seeing how far I can take it before I’m over you, girl…”

“One Evening” – Feist

So I’ve found the second-most popular Feist song beginning with the word “one,” it seems. (All thanks to a good friend, by the way—thank you!!) I’ve heard scattered Feist songs here and there—“1234” was a childhood staple, and I discovered “Undiscovered First” through Legion, one of many, many songs from Noah Hawley’s playlist that I desperately need to steal, or at least have a look at. The glimpses I’ve gotten are disparate, but from what I can tell, that means that Feist has range, or is at least fairly exploratory in her style. There’s the indie pop of “1234,” the anxious build of “Undiscovered First” or “A Commotion,” and “One Evening,” which has a softer, more loungey feel to it. The entire production is soft and sly in places, a song composed out of stolen glances from across the bar and accidental brushings of the hands of strangers. With soft-sung harmonies, it’s such a tightly-woven groove in such an unassuming song—beneath the softness, it boasts an airtight, deeply catchy composition.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V.E. Schwab – “When we started/Both brokenhearted/Not believing/It could begin and end in one evening…”

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

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