May Playlist

Been a real sad bastard lately.

We kick off this month’s playlist with “Wait At Milano” by the incomparable Tim Barry. It’s a small song with big feelings, and it’s the kind of thing that every single time I hear it, sends me into a spiral. It turned up in a shuffle and the rest of this month’s playlist is informed by the deep, bone-chilling melancholy this song always brings to me.

“Sea Anemone” by Jets To Brazil is a great song to sit alone with, drinking the last two beers in your drafty, empty house, after your wife has left for good. This song, and many like it, were the soundtrack to the end of my first marriage. I’ll never be able to hear it without recalling the exact pitch of the echoes of my heavy sighs in that house in Cleveland Heights.

"Farewell Transmission” is one of those songs that has come around to me many times. I first heard it on a mixtape a friend made for me (likely a CD, actually, but I’m too old to ever think of them as anything other than tapes). It was probably around 2005ish, maybe 2006. I was late to the party on Songs: Ohia in particular and Jason Molina in general, as is my custom. A few years back my friend Dan Sinker was talking about closing down the Punk Planet Magazine office, and how this song was playing when he sealed up the last box and turned out the lights and how it breaks him every time he hears it. I revisited the song after that with this new context and it hits even harder. Mama, here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws.

Twenty-four years ago, American Football released 41 minutes of glorious Midwestern emo. The suburban Illinois house on the cover of that album became a touchstone for gloomy lil’ bastards everywhere, and this month the band bought it. I haven’t listened to this album since it came out but when the article about the band buying that house turned up in my feed I threw it back on and yep, it holds up. “Never Meant” is a perfect piece of suburban angst if ever there was one.

“I wish I had a bullet big enough to fuckin’ kill the sun” is the line that kicks off “Hate, Rain On My” by AJJ and uh yeah. Pretty much exactly that, some days. Pretty much exactly fuckin’ that. Sad isn’t uncommon for me, but angry is much more familiar and comfortable.

“Three Summers Strong” is one of my favorite Hot Water Music songs. It’s got stomp and swagger and open wounds and it’s also a great one for drinking by yourself and wondering where you fucked up. “We were locked / we had a lot / at times I’d say we had it all” is one of those lines that hits extra hard when you’re looking backwards. I’ve never quite been able to ask Chuck about this song, even though we’ve been friends for a long damn time. I know who he wrote it about, and I know that relationship is long behind him. Some part of me still wants some detail though, as though I need his closure to complete my own. Fuckin’ weird, I know.

And as long as Chuck & Wollard are here, might as well trot out a little Rumbleseat, an old side project with the two of them plus Samantha Jones. It was a very clear and obvious precursor to the solo work that Chuck would eventually do and every fucking note still holds up. Wollard pulls most of the vocal duty on this one and it always stood out to me. This and “Ragtime” are a good start to pulling this playlist out of a full-on fuckin’ spiral, so let’s do that huh?

I would love to say that I’ve been a Neko Case fan since the beginning but I’m just not that cool. I came to the song “Ragtime” because, oh hey, there’s my buddy Dan again…he posted this line somewhere or other:

”I'll reveal myself when I'm ready / I'll reveal myself invincible soon”

And man, sometimes shit just hits, you know? This hit. It hit hard. I tracked down the song he was talking about and really liked it, and then I started digging into the rest of her work and there’s a lot of great stuff there but this song will forever be “my Doctor”, the one that brought me to it.

Dinosaur Jr. covering “Just Like Heaven” might just be the thing that sends next month’s playlist into “all covers” mode. Aside from being a gloriously upbeat song by The Cure, what the Dinosaur Jr. gang brings to this song is a sense of reckless, wanton joy that, when tinged with the little bit of gloom that even the most cheery Cure song possesses, turns this into one of the absolute best covers you’ve ever heard. That the song ends so abruptly is the saddest thing about it, really, and more than once I’ve found myself just straight up looping it a couple more times.

There you go. Hope you enjoy everything on this month’s playlist. I know it’s a gloomy one but hey, I’m feeling gloomy lately.