Happy Sunday, bibliophiles, Happy Trans Day of Visibility, and Happy Easter, for those celebrating! I hope this week has treated you well. 🐰🏳️⚧️
For once, I’ve got a color scheme that lines up with the festive colors. Enjoy it while it lasts….either way, this week: songs about love, songs that feel like being in a swimming pool, and songs about jelly.
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 3/31/24
“Freedom of Speak (We Got Three Minutes)” – De La Soul
It’s been about a year since De La Soul’s music triumphantly returned to streaming after decades of legal battles, and about a year since my De La Soul awakening. Three Feet High and Rising is now permanently etched into my map of my freshman year of college; I spent a good two weeks with that delightfully creative and unabashedly silly album as my soundtrack, and it put a spring in my step even when the weather remained cold enough for those nasty piles of sludge and dirt leftover from at least three separate snowstorms to stay on the sidewalk. I listened to it in spring, but it’s undeniably a summer album, all bright colors and jumping joy.
Three Feet celebrated its 35-year anniversary earlier this month (3/3), and with it came a handful of demos that got left off of the extensive; it feels like a Kate Bush or self-titled St. Vincent situation (and no, I will not stop shoehorning the latter album into every conversation, this is just how it is talking to me) where they were just cooking so much and without any dilution of talent, so they just had to leave a few tracks on the back burner so as not to a) overstuff the album and b) blow our minds more than they already had. I haven’t had the chance to dig through the other demos and scrapped songs that they released, but it’s clear from “Freedom of Speak (We Got Three Minutes)” that it was a tough decision to leave them off Three Feet High and Rising. Never once was their joyous spirit dimmed, and this track is proof. After a conversation with my family, I concluded that part of what endeared me to De La Soul (and a lot of other hip-hop artists at the time) is that they lacked the machismo that defined the genre in the decades to come; not to get all “mOdERn mUSiC sUCks” with it, but I do find myself missing the early days when people like them or A Tribe Called Quest just released their collage hip-hop with subject matters that, most often, just ended up as anecdotes about their days and the snacks that they liked—or, in De La Soul’s case, a PSA about wearing deodorant that clocks in at less than a minute long. (“THAT’S RIGHT! YOU SMELL 🫵”) Who knows why that mentality got left in the dust; I bet it hasn’t gone away entirely, but I’m not well versed in hip-hop enough to know where it ended up. “Freedom of Speak” has a similarly stream-of-consciousness premise, with a good chunk of it being Posdnuos and Trugoy (rest easy) talking about their routines—taking a shower, cooking breakfast, shopping with girlfriends. But even with such a mundane subject matter, they managed to inject it with the same infectious joy that made the whole of Three Feet High and Risin so memorable—ordinary things feel like the smoothest, most cheerful events to grace the earth, and all of it is wrapped around a fake construct: being forced to cram all of their musings into three minutes. They got cut off at 2:51, unfortunately. Oops.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The World of Edena – Jean Giraud Mœbius – okay, fine. You got me. I’m double-dipping again. But there’s something similar about the ways that Mœbius and De La Soul are creative—and delightfully technicolor.
Lucy Dacus brought me here; while I was doing some digging on “My Mother & I” a few weeks ago, I found a thread talking about the performance with her mom on backing vocals, and a user mentioned seeing her with Deau Eyes as the opener on at least one of her tours. They both hail from Virginia and seem to be on good terms with each other, and any friend of Lucy Dacus (minus T*ylor Sw*ft) is a friend of mine, so I figured I would give her a listen. And…I can’t get fully on board with most of her style— it ranges from somewhat experimental indie to pure twang, but most of it comes off quite forced. And the fact that a lot of the marketing around her weirdly centers around her being a gemini, of all things (?), is certainly odd, but…if that’s her worst sin, then I can let it pass. That one’s probably more on her marketing team than on her.
“When,” against some of the other Deau Eyes songs I listened to, sounds more like 2020’s Sleater-Kinney, which is a win I’ll certainly take. Even if my enjoyment of Deau Eyes extends mostly to this song, it’s a smoothly urgent indie shuffle, rattling along with Ali Thibodeau’s (ohhhhhhh, so that’s where the name came from) vocals, which hold the melody steadier than an anchor holds down a time-battered ship in the stormy sea. Delayed guitar riffs travel in neat circles around the centerpiece of Thibodeau’s voice, playing tricks on my ears as I try to pinpoint exactly where they’re coming from—a single center or hovering all around? It’s almost dizzying on headphones, but Thibodeau keeps it reserved enough to not overwhelm the song. In this case, it’s the lyrics that are the spotlight; in a world where we are told that we are naught but products to be sold, when our bodily wellness is the cost for being able to navigate through the world with any kind of arbitrary success, Thibodeau has a bridge that couldn’t be any more relevant: “Hey, I see you/You matter more than you think you do/Each and every move, it matters too/So set the mood.” Just like how Thibodeau’s vocals anchor the music, she anchors the space around her, encouraging us to follow suit; the lyrics are simple, but undeniably true. Maybe I’m not sold on every part of Deau Eyes’ catalogue, but good on her for spreading the good word of letting yourself take up space in a world that wants to make us small. It’s what you deserve.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
VenCo – Cherie Dimaline – the time has come to reclaim your space, and by “reclaim your space” I mean “exact feminist witchcraft justice upon the skeevy, corrupt white men who wanted to take that away.”
“Jelly Filled Coffin” – Hether
Sometimes, you have a long and sentimental reason for finding and subsequently liking a song. Sometimes Apple Music digs it up, slaps it on the abject depression “Chill” playlist, and you listen to it just because of the name. It’s like “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh”—if there is ever another song called “Jelly Filled Coffin,” they’ll be copying this guy.
I first talked about Hether (a.k.a. Paul Castelluzzo) a little over a year ago, and I didn’t expect to be talking about him again—”Shy” was sweetly catchy, but I didn’t find myself wanting to uncover more of his music. I guess I’m a lazy, no-good, Gen Z slave to That Damn Phone then, since Apple Music did the discovering for me, but…for once, the algorithm did something good, unlike the time that of Montreal’s nearly 10-minute-long suicidal ideation “No Conclusion” landed on, of all places, the “Get Up!” playlist. I can’t make this shit up. At least we can take comfort in the fact that no human mind could fuck a playlist up that badly. You have to take the wins when they aren’t blatantly the product of automation. Even though Play it Pretty was released only three years after Hether Who? – EP, there seems to have been a shift towards the meandering for Hether; “Jelly Filled Coffin” has the glassy eyes of the peak of summer, humid and delirious from staring too long in the sun. The first comparison that came to mind was a less psychedelic Ty Segall—they have a similar delivery, drifting like a lazy river in the public pool, but just as brightly chlorine-colored. Every line feels like it’s being dictated from somewhere in the depths of the same pool, rippling and unnaturally blue (or is that the jelly? Depends on the jelly we’re talking about). The concept of a jelly-filled coffin was such an oddball pairing that I almost didn’t think of how oddly tragic it could potentially be—presumably being lowered six feet under, but trapped in a substance slippery enough to give you the illusion of movement. That would explain the resignation with which most of the lyrics are delivered: “Rip it out from my chest/Keep the love and leave the rest/Tether me to a post/A parasite chose you, the host.” And yet, even with the exhaustion creeping through the ripples of distortion, it never feels truly sad—it’s more delirium than outright depression, sleepwalking on the borders between sadness and just being tired. My dad made the comparison of his lyrics to Robyn Hitchcock, and many of his songs have a similar quality; on anybody else, it might sound tragic, but here, it could just be as deep as words strung together that sounded unique.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
In the Watchful City – S. Qiouyi Lu – a meandering body-hop between the stories of strangers inhabiting a strange world.
“Nostalgia” – Alice Phoebe Lou
Like Hether, I never expected to be wandering back around to Alice Phoebe Lou. I think it was around two years ago that I found her through “Witches,” which came from an old high school friend after I posted one of those “send me a song that reminds me of you” question boxes on my Instagram story. I was glad to have a new song to spin around in my head, and I was gladder still that something as gently bubbly as “Witches” reminded them of me. It sneaks back into my shuffle every now and then, and I never complain when it does.
“Witches” and “Nostalgia” are only about a year apart in terms of release date, but both of them are broadly categorized under blues; the former doesn’t feel like blues at all—more sparkly indie pop than anything, but I have no purview to talk about how blues has evolved as a genre over the decades—but the latter certainly does. Fitting that this song is called “Nostalgia” in the first place, since all of it evokes a time capsule made of sea glass, harkening back to the slow, swaying melodies of the ’40s and ’50s, but with a distinctly modern touch. If there was one lyric that would properly encapsulate this song, it would be this: “It feels like swimming/Swimming with my eyes closed.” Indeed, the soft organs and Lou’s voice feel like they’re being projected from inside of an underwater cave, a rich gray until the light from a crack in the ceiling makes the water dance on the ripples in the rock. With every lyric, you travel further in the water in slow motion, the foam from your impact fanning out around you, bubbles swirling upwards as you close your eyes, letting the waves kiss your skin. And yet, it feels just as vividly like a ballroom slow dance, engulfed in golden light as the sunset fades into night and drinks clink all around you. Whichever effect Lou was going for—or neither of those at all—is suited to her voice; her voice dips from a quiet, bluesy coo to a musical exhale that echoes through the caverns with ethereal gentleness.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Last Night at the Telegraph Club – Malinda Lo – lesbian love in the 1950’s, with a dash of butterflies and moonlight kisses.
This is one of maybe…three or four Samia songs that I’ve listened to so far, and I wish I liked them all as much as I liked this one. Then again, there’s only a certain type of as-of-yet undiscovered musician that can cover The Magnetic Fields’ masterpiece “Born on a Train” (which I reviewed about a year ago!), and…I hate to say it, but Samia is not that kind of musician. But I’ll let it slide—Arcade Fire covered the same song ages ago, and they didn’t quite pull it off either; they have the extensive instrumentation to theoretically pull it off, but the only recordings I could find were ones where the sound quality isn’t great and Win Butler was singing like he had the world’s most painful case of strep throat, so…not exactly their proudest moment either. It’s hard to cover near-perfection. I feel like Peter Gabriel has been one of the only people I can think of to cover The Magnetic Fields well and not make it sound either more melodramatic than it ever needed to be or just plain bland (seems there’s no in-between), but also, that’s Peter Gabriel. I should also mention The Shins and their excellent cover of “Strange Powers”—that, at least, was perfectly suited to James Mercer’s penchant for bare emotion, and even though The Magnetic Fields have such a dense orchestration to a lot of their songs, making this one acoustic wasn’t as risky of a move as it seems—Mercer makes it work beautifully. (Childhood staple, too.) We aren’t worthy of The Magnetic Fields, and we are similarly not worthy of Peter Gabriel or The Shins. It’s a hard act to follow. So props to her for trying, at least. Chances are I’m just too attached to “Born on a Train,” but I feel like to cover it, you’ve got to back up all that emotion with the toy-train-on-plastic-tracks instrumentals and faded grandeur peeking out from behind the curtain.
That aside, Samia captured something truly rare in “Charm You”—there’s something about it that sets it apart from all the other songs of hers I’ve listened to. Some of her other songs feel like she’s stretching her voice too thin, but the warm wails of this track perfectly suit the mood she’s meticulously crafted—a love song, but not one of wanting to chase a lover down or get them to like her. I’ve unintentionally bunched together too many songs that inherently feel like swimming, but this song in particular is a dive into a hot tub, a slow, boiling love that seeks to bare its soft parts: all of the pretense of a crush is gone, and all that’s left is to fall in deep: “What if we could shut up for an hour or two/Quiet, memorizing what the people do/Wouldn’t have to try and find myself in you.” The style of songwriting that Samia has taken is an approach I’ve seen a lot of indie pop artists take—collaging a hodgepodge of vignettes together to form a cohesive story—often a love story. It’s a move right out of the Phoebe Bridgers/Arlo Parks/Lucy Dacus/[fill in the blank with your sadgirl of choice] playbook, but what makes them stand out from the others is the emotion that strings them together—it’s not random moments just to flash your songwriting chops. That’s a trap I’ve seen a lot of songwriters fall into, but for once, Samia seems to have the writing flair to pull it off; every lyric on “Charm You” sounds like a red-cheeked confession with a bashful smile, giggling at some charmingly awkward memory: “Baby, let me show you the synthetic pond/Couldn’t we believe it was the hand of God/Making water boogie to a Ke$ha song?” Maybe it’s the way that the word “boogie” feels so out of place that it fits in perfectly or the image that it creates (I can see the warm, blue-lit water rippling from here, wherever there even is), but Samia’s vignettes are ones that stick, and not ones that just toss in a fruit metaphor and talk about smoking on the porch, or something. Like the album cover of Honey, there’s a blue warmth about “Charm You” that instantly charms the heart.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Margo Zimmerman Gets the Girl – Brianna R. Shrum and Sara Waxelbaum – trying to be someone you’re not—even if it’s the prevailing queer stereotype—isn’t the surefire way of making someone like you, but maybe tutoring and mutual pining will…
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!
The Bookish Mutant 