This is a May playlist
And some modest life updates right at the wire.
Good morning evening.
I’m sending this one to you later in the day—and just under the wire this month.
I think that’s because its a bit of a microcosm of this month as a whole which has been filled with stops and starts and interruptions. A few of those being
The flight my fiancee and I had booked to New York being cancelled and not rebooked by Delta
Rebooking a flight and losing time off our trip
Going into our offices in New York for the first time in about a year
Trying to nail down some of the final details of our wedding—like floral arrangements, our website, and mailing our invitations. Every decision involves multiple, smaller sub-decisions that take longer than you think.
A “supercell” storm featuring a “microburst” blowing through Austin on Wednesday night and knocking out power and Wi-Fi for over a day.
But until this last week or so, May had been wonderful. I started my second improv class and am having fun performing like that again. The end of a beautiful spring in Austin tailed off at the beginning of the month and we flew up to New York once the temperatures started to linger around the low triple digits. And we managed to catch about four days of perfect spring weather in the northeast before flying back down here.
In my time up in New York, I had the following great experiences
Getting lunch with each of my reports one-on-one and enjoying that quality time with them as people
Meeting one of my reports for the first time after working together for three years
Getting to talk about the state of media with my team in person and try my best to prepare them as professionals for how work and this business is about to change in the next five years
Having two great dinners with two old friends and their wonderful, charming significant others
Having an afternoon drinking session with an old boss and wondering what the hell we are going to do with our lives
Playing bus driver with my six- and two-year old nieces (me pulling them on a blanket for about an hour and making “stops” to pick up kids for school; its a good replacement for the sled dog pull I usually do at my trainer)
Seeing those same nieces for four days in a row
Carrying my six-year-old niece through the cold water at West Meadow Beach, as the tide slowly moved out to its lowest point of the day, so she could make it out to the legendary sand bar there for the first time.
Walking with my mother down to the end of Trustees Road and talking and then taking a swim at the spot where we once lived for two weeks right when we moved to Long Island almost 30 years ago.
Looking through photo albums and realizing that I was given and have lived a lucky and fulfilling life.
It’s no secret that the world is a scary and uncertain place right now. The global order seems to shift each week. And technology is rapidly changing how work is done. The media industry is going to completely change soon. Google is starting to play their hand a bit more. The way we use the internet is going to look different. The small changes are accumulating and suddenly we’ll look around and it will all be different.
At work, sometimes this makes me restless and frustrated. As much as I mourn for the end of things, I am excited but what the future might look like.
And I am trying to square what that all means for me, personally, as someone who values writing, books, and pieces of culture that are firmly rooted in an age that seems to be fast receding.
All of that is happening and there is so much in my life that brings me joy, that shows me that life is worth living. I don’t know what to say about that other than that it seems to be the very nature of proceeding through the world, year-by-year, as history happens within and without you for as long as you are lucky to be moving through it.
Anyway, here is a playlist if you like that kind of thing. And here’s where you can find all the playlists I’ve made so far.
See you next time.
“A Guardian at the Stables” by Field Music and the NASUWT Riverside Band
I’ve said it before, but Field Music are absolutely sick. This track is from their latest record, Binding Time (2025), which, according to Bandcamp, is “a suite of new songs inspired by the formation of the Durham Miners’ Association and performed with musicians from the NASUWT Riverside band.” If you like songs that feel like a sharp, blue, spring sky and that sound like John Cale’s “Paris 1919” meets Alan Menken’s “Belle” from the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, then this one should be right up your alley.
“Take Me” by Mamalarky
I told you Mamalarky would be back! This is another one from Hex Key, their great album from earlier this year. A breezy bit of pop that, in a just world, would be played just as much as any new Billie Eilish release.
“Sweet Talkin’ Woman” by ELO
As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world:
Those that get what ELO is all about and think that this is one of the most ebullient and infectious dance songs ever made.
And those that don’t.
I can’t tell you how many times I found myself, this month, mildly disco dancing to this song in the early evening while grilling dinner and watching the Texas sky slowly turn lavender and pink in my backyard.
Also, I’m fully aware there are more than two kinds of people in this world. I’d say there are probably at least like 10 kinds of people in the world if I had to wager a guess.
“Joy, Joy!” by Valerie June
I really like this new Valerie June record, Owls, Omens, and Oracles (2025). They’ve been playing this single a lot on Sun Radio the past month.
“Be True” by Bruce Springsteen
When my fiancee was out of town recently, I filled the empty space by pounding my brain with podcasts. I decided to revisit the Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott series of podcasts where they make their way through the discography of a single band. This started all the way back in 2014 with U2 and has moved on to cover R.E.M, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (sort of), the Talking Heads, and, most recently, Bruce Springsteen. These podcasts are incredibly silly and filled with some of the stupidest jokes you can imagine. And I love the shit out of them. It was a good reminder of when I used to listen to dumb comedy podcasts every day to get me through a job where everyone clocked in, sat at their desks, and never spoke a word to each other during the day.
Anyway, these podcasts are also great for song-by-song discussion of an entire discography and I really enjoyed making my way through Springsteen’s entire catalog again.
I hadn’t listened to Springsteen records in awhile and I still think Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) is tops for me. This song isn’t from that record but Bruce was on fire (no pun intended) from like 1978 through 1984 and “Be True” is an example of a song that never made the cut for an album but could’ve been the best song on countless records.
“Everybody” by Madonna
Heard this one out somewhere this past month. Can’t remember but I Shazamed it so it must’ve been when I was distracted at a restaurant or coffee shop or store. Another reminder of how sick Madonna was at her best.
“Take A Chance With Me” by Roxy Music
When I was in New York this month, I had dinner with my old roommate from when I lived in Williamsburg and his wife. We ate at a good new Georgian restaurant in the West Village (Laliko) and talked about lots of things.
Naturally, old stories from when my roommate and I used to live together came up. We remembered how, at 22 or 23, we used to eat Entenmann’s chocolate frosted donuts for breakfast as well as toast with pesto (this was 2008-2009, long before toast with stuff on it became a thing). And how my roommate, working on a Van Leeuwen ice cream truck at the time because we all went to college with Ben Van Leeuwen and people needed jobs during the great recession and Ben was building an artisanal empire before our eyes, used to bring home ice cream and we’d put a spoonful in our coffee.
We spent so many hours together in that large, square white tiled kitchen on Grand Street east of the BQE. In that kitchen, I had a crappy Crosley record player with speakers built in and a meager collection of records I’d inherited from my parents. One of the records was Avalon by Roxy Music. My roommate used to spin this one and tell me how “Take a Chance on Me” was the best song on it. And he was right.
What an album Avalon is! Absolutely taken for granted as this point, it basically invented the way pop sounded in the eighties.
“Men in Bars” by Japanese Breakfast
My fiancee and I saw Japanese Breakfast in Austin recently. The show was the first date on the tour for her 2025 record, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). A couple of things stood out: first, she has great stage presence; second, you could see how her stage show would translate to a bigger arena; third, there is a lot of Roxy Music in her songs. I’d never really noticed that last bit until seeing her live.
This particular song doesn’t show the Roxy Music influence that much, but it is my favorite song on the new record. It features a kind of random duet with Jeff Bridges.
“Charlie’s Garden” by Djo
OK, I never realized Joe Keery, of Stranger Things fame, made music. But apparently he does under the name Djo and this song is from his new record The Crux (2025). I like this guy even more. He really should be getting a bigger feature star push than he is. But I guess doing cool movies about Pavement is maybe better.
The whole album is a fun listen and produced really well. This track in particular is a perfect imitation of Ram-era Paul McCartney. And there is a melodic hook at about 2:20 that drove me nuts trying to place for several days, until I finally did.
“Hello It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren
I finally placed the random hook at about 2:20 in Djo’s “Charlie’s Garden” as the bridge chords or connecting chords (I don’t know anything about music) that you find several times in the verses of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me”—the first time being at about 42 seconds in. Solving that mystery got me listening to this absolutely strange and unorthodox pop song for the first time in a while.
When you actually listen to “Hello It’s Me” you notice it pulls off a great trick of being somewhat shapeless for a top ten pop hit. There’s no real chorus. The hook of the title comes at the beginning of verses and it's more of an exercise in shifting moods of longing or melancholy than anything else.
“Baby, You’re A Rich Man” by The Beatles
This has become, if not my favorite Beatles song, then one of my top five or 10 favorites. An absolutely undeniable Paul McCartney bass part, inventive drumming from Ringo, and a Lennon vocal that is persuasive in its winking intelligence (singular to him) will do that.
In Ian McDonald’s Revolution in the Head he absolutely destroys this song and uses it as part of his analysis of the Beatles acid-fuelled malaise in the summer of 1967 after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—the period in which they began to rely too much on randomness and chance in their work and over abusing their intuitiveness to the point of self-indulgence that McDonald believes characterizes most of their late period work.
“While the group were obviously excited about the track as a sound-event, there is a stoned sloppiness about the writing…which spoils the effect. Drugs and overconfidence here fool The Beatles into accepting their initial inspiration as a creative ‘found’ object. Gone are the days when, as McCartney recalls, they sweated over ever bar of a song. Even the didactic lyric, which Harrison insists was intended to show people that they were rich in themselves, mixes clarity with cloudiness.”
Now I obviously don’t agree with that assessment, but I find it fascinating to read. And its yet another example of Revolution in the Head containing some of the best writing on culture I have ever read.
“Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces
When I was about 16 years old, I was the only person in my town burning CDs of Small Faces songs and listening to Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (1968) all the way through. I wore this fact as a bright badge of honor.
At that time, I was fascinated by psychedelia and the 1960s. This song, a single from 1967, was, to me, was such a perfect distillation of what I wanted in a song: buoyant music that soared and seemed like a bright vision of the world, fluid bass playing that somehow made your stomach feel full as if you were coming up, and production with echo and fading that simulated the aural experience at the peak of a trip.
Even still, this song with its chorus of “It’s all too beautiful!” places me into a perfect May day—the afternoon and early evening somehow lasting longer than you can imagine—where anything is possible.
“Citadel” by The Rolling Stones
Another flavor of psychedelia from 1967. This is one is from The Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), which was a blatant attempt to create an answer to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It is a messy album full of interesting experiments and quite a few pleasures. This song being one of the latter. It has one of the most primordial riffs ever put on a rock record and it ranks as maybe one of my top five Stones riffs.
“Thawing Dawn” by A. Savage
I like the Parquet Courts enough, but I’ve spent more time with A. Savage’s excellent 2017 album Thawing Dawn more than any of his main band’s records. This, the title track, is the closing song on the record and is a poignant mini-suite that I never get tired of.
“Building a Mystery” by Sarah McLachlan
Heard this one on the radio one Sunday when my fiancee were driving from East Austin up to the Domain to shop for my wedding suit. Scary drive, but my fiancee was a pro as usual.
This one took me back. When I was 12 years old, this was on the radio constantly. Sarah McLachlin, to me, is not synonymous with sad ASPCA commercials but with that magical time when Borders was a place to spend hours of time browsing books and standing at CD listening stations to hear what Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews, Deep Blue Something, Oasis, Alanis Morisette, and so many others were up to this time.
This is a 90s nostalgia trip but also a rock solid bit of Americana that stands up to top notch work by Lucinda Williams and Sheryl Crow.
“Dumb Feeling” by Mei Semones
I read about Mei Semones’s 2025 album Animaru on Allmusic. Its a solid album and this is the opening track. A nice mixture of tropicalia and chamber pop.
“The Road to Somewhere” by Louis Philippe
Another 2025 release I read about on Allmusic. This is the kind of adult-oriented pop music (in the vein of Tears for Fears, peak Elvis Costello, Crowded House, and latter day Shins) that I’m a sucker for.
“Truck Stop Girl” by Little Feat
I was catching up with an old friend on the phone (more on him later) and we got to talking about Little Feat. He’s forgotten more about music than I’ll ever knoew, but he hadn’t spent much time with Little Feat’s catalog. And it had been some years since I’d listened intently to their records, even though Lowell George is one of my favorite songwriters.
So I turned Little Feat’s self-titled 1971 on one evening when I was cooking. It truly is one of the high water marks of American music in the 20th century and doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. This song, in particular, is a masterful little bit of American songwriting—muscular where it needs to be and then suddenly incredibly delicate and literate. One of the joys in life is texting with an old friend about Little Feat’s “Truck Stop Girl.”
“Deveraux” by Car Seat Headrest
Don’t get this one confused with the jingle for Deveraux Wigs from Season 1 of Detroiters. Its actually from the new Car Seat Headrest The Scholars (2025). I’m not super into Car Seat Headrest or anything (I think “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” from their 2016 album Teens of Denial one of the best anthems of the past 10 years) but I like the fact that Will Toledo and his band make American rock music like this in the year 2025.
“old yeller” by Nick County
Like I said, I was catching up with an old friend recently. We were long overdue.
Our call came about because he’d recently released some new records that I had seen him promoting on Instagram in the passing moments when I scroll through the feed on my laptop during the work day to research what people are even doing on social media these days.
In my twenties, I was surrounded by friends who were all trying to make it as musicians. In fact, it seemed like I was the only person in our friend group who couldn’t play an instrument or write a song.
Because of that, I took a certain pride in being involved in their creative processes by being someone who would listen to their music deeply and give them input as someone who loved music and the history rock and pop music in the 20th century in particular.
As time went by, it was hard to keep up with everyone’s records and shows. Everyone had shifted from trying to make it, to simply trying to keep making cohesive albums in an increasingly hostile music industry. And meanwhile I was trying not to lose my way as a fiction writer creating work in a vacuum while I maintained various day jobs. I had stopped writing long email missives to them about every new EP or LP release.
There’s something in the water about the challenge of male friendships today. (I know because I did a better job writing about it almost over four years ago.) I don’t know what keeps friends close or distant from each other. My hang ups are different from another man’s.
What I know is that, for this first time in years, because I felt a certain level of guilt as an absentee friend, I spent time engaging with a friend of mine’s recent creative work and it made me feel good. I realized that I had been following my friend as a singer and songwriter for almost twenty years. His voice was in my head not just as a friend—but as an artist in his own right.
So I sent him a long email about his work and he called me on a humid and moody Friday afternoon in Austin. I sat on my screened in porch talking to him about his music and then his life and my life and our shared experiences and our uncertainty in navigating the world today and trying to even make a life for yourself. All of this while storm winds blew and threatened but the storm never came.
This song, “old yeller,” is one of the finest compositions my friend has come up with. I told him it reminded me of a Lowell George song. And it does. There is a deceptive throughline of the American songbook in the track’s structure even if it isn’t obvious from the production. There’s something of Webb, Parsons, George, Nilsson, even a bit of Prince Rogers Nelson.
I know the song is about something else. But in the chorus when my friend sings, “I don’t know if anybody told you, but I still care/ I don’t now if anybody hurt you, but I’m still here / I don’t know if anybody warned you it isn’t always fair / I can’t live, live with regret” to me its an unspoken message, a wavelength, from me to him or any of my other friends who used to be in my life in a different way than they are now. I don’t know everything or anything anymore, but I’m still here and I still care—and I can’t live with regret.
“Ol’ 55” by Tom Waits
Earlier this year, another friend of mine, a guy I used to work with, tipped me off to the movie Eephus (2025). It’s by the same people who made Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024), which I think is an absolutely sick movie, especially if you’re from Long Island the way I am.
Eephus is a slow, boring movie about a bunch of grown men playing the last game in an amatuer baseball league in New England somewhere. I think its supposed to Massachusetts. Naturally, I think this movie is amazing.
Like Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, this movie is more of mood than an actual movie. It stretches on long a long fall afternoon when all of a sudden the evening is here and its starting to get cold. There is a shot at the end of the movie of men walking the edge of the baseball diamond in the New England darkness that made the feeling of October in the northeast palpable in my Texas living room in the near-80 degree heat. This movie is alive.
It’s probably about a lot of things—time passing, the end of certain traditions and ways of living and existing in the world—but I’m not qualified enough to say.
All I know is that when Tom Waits’s “Ol’ 55” hits at the end and the credits start to roll, you certainly feel like you’ve just experienced the end of something. And its not just because the movie is over.