A true romantic, Bill Callahan sings from the heart of a wayward troubadour in "Let's Move to the Country," a track off his most recent album, Gold Record. An exhibition of his love and reverence for the old west, Callahan dons a figurative cowboy hat in his discography as he talk-sings his way through loafing country western lullabies and ballads. "Let's Move to the Country" is a sweet, simple love song. It feels like Callahan is pleading, holding his hat against his chest. He paints the vision of what their lives would look like now that he's put his roving days behind him. Callahan previously included this track on his album Knock Knock, under the moniker Smog. Callahan performed as Smog until 2007, when he stylistically shifted from underground rock to more Americana style sounds. Gold Record was released on September 4. Give it a listen wherever you stream.

"Feel Like Doing Nothing" is an anthem for those days where you recognize yourself on the verge of burnout, and you take a moment to pause just before you fall over the edge. (Otherwise known as a Sunday, probably sometime in mid-August). Kate Bollinger's track opens with mellow acoustic guitar initially uncommitted to a tempo, skipping and starting in a way that still manages to feel more organic than forced. Soon warm jazzy-tone bass slides in and rounds out the pulse. Its heartbeat-like groove is a bit faster than you would expect—like someone trying really hard to take a deep breath and relax. Keys wander in and out like intrusive thoughts, while guitar lines try to establish a melody, and the bass keeps up its groove. The track keeps moving, not quite rushing, until the verse where She comes home and sits on the couch. Over the rest of the track, the heartbeat of the song gets progressively slower as the keys finally meld into the melody. It’s a thank you note for the people you love, whose presence makes it easier to feel like you can take a breath, lie on the couch, and feel good doing absolutely nothing. Photo by Jonathan Roensch.

Sometimes music is glowing proof that the universe strings the future to our present in ways we won’t learn for years to come—or, sometimes, for more than a decade. Such is the case for me with filous and The Kooks’ sun-soaked summer collaboration, “Hey Love.” Thirteen summers ago, in 2007, you could find me sunbathing in the often underestimated, blistering Midwestern heat on the back patio of my parents’ house. I snapped a CD into my red Sony Walkman, lamenting about whatever then-world-shattering-now-trivial heartbreak I was going through—and my song of choice? One that would echo the feeling reeling in my melancholy teenage heart: “Naïve” by The Kooks, who remain one of my favorite bands to this day. Fast forward to 2015, add in a few more heartbreaks and zoom out, and you would see an aerial view of myself and my now-fiancé on a sweltering July day, sipping iced coffees on our first date; it was a learning of fate, the feeling of meeting someone you feel you already know—a coming home. I say my favorite band is The Kooks and my fiancé, brightly smiling, says “no way, mine too!” Jump once again to 2018, and I am watching filous open for Mat Kearney; entranced by his uniquely smooth and electronic sonic palette. On the train ride home, I save all of his recent collaborations to my Spotify library. Less than a year later, my fiancé and I would finally see The Kooks together in concert. At the fusion of all of these memories is the happily shimmering made-for-summer anthem “Hey Love.” I was working on wedding planning the day I saw filous and The Kooks had collaborated and released this track, and I couldn’t play it fast enough. filous seamlessly supplements The Kooks’ trademark acoustic rock-pop strumming with gentle violin swells, slight tinges of distortion, and electronic clapping percussion. It was as if The Kooks’ frontman Luke Pritchard was singing this string of memories back to me: “It took a lot to find you / All the circles we've ever spun / And all the records when we sing along / The moments frozen, one by one.” Now, as we prepare for our wedding this autumn, in the stressful atmosphere of a worldwide pandemic, the warmth of “Hey Love” made me realize the universe is surely stringing us somewhere beautiful that we’ve yet to think about. As the song rings out (“I know where I’m going / I no longer need to run”), I smile, ready to face it all.

Arlo Parks is a poet as much as she is a musician, and this comes across profoundly in her new single, “Hurt,” in which she tells the story of a boy named Charlie with a “heart so soft it hurt to beat.” From the start, which kicks off with an up-tempo drumbeat, Parks shows listeners accustomed to her more gradual, muted introductions that she is not one to be predicted. The drumbeat carries throughout, with horns swelling behind the song’s chorus, until a break in the middle of the song, where Parks delivers spoken word over a bassline.  

From “watching Twin Peaks,” to “dreaming of a house with red carnations by the windows,” Parks uses detailed imagery to paint the vivid picture of someone whose anguish and longing we can all, on some level, relate to: the feeling that it would be better to hurt than to not feel anything at all. “Hurt” is energetic, taut and brimming with empathy and optimism. 

A clean electric guitar, simply plucked chords and the sleepy sweetness of Angel Olsen’s gorgeous vocals unfolding in waves around us. These are the pieces that make up ‘Waving, Smiling,’ a delicate track off of Olsen’s new LP. The record is appropriately titled Whole New Mess—it seems to be describing everyone’s current state of existence. Indeed, Olsen’s vulnerability and open-eyed candid songwriting is easy to get lost in as we spend more and more days at home. “All my fears, cried out all of those years,” she sings with grace, “Look out my window, the sun is shining.” She’s right of course, we know she is, the sun has risen again today. We dive into her voice, wrapped in the softest of reverbs as she hits a high note and reaches the peak of the tune. “I’m waving, smiling, [...] alive and dying,” she sings to us. So are we, Angel. So are we. Photo by Kylie Coutts.

Sometimes songs come along that feel so familiar it’s almost as if I wrote them in a past life. When I first heard Joshua Speers’s newest single “Other People,” I listened to it on repeat trying to identify why, “I live in other people’s homes / doing dishes writing other people’s songs / I cover my ears from other people’s moans / but never me” put a lump in my throat each time. It starts with soft reverb-laden guitar and Speers’s sweet and warm voice before building gradually to a soaring second chorus. Speers has a knack for writing songs that feel universal yet personal, which he showcased brilliantly in his first EP, and continues to do so with his newest offering. The production is measured but noticeable—giving the folk-rock track a nice pop polish. It reminded me of a poem I wrote back when I was subletting a friend’s room in an unfamiliar city: 

The window faces a brick wall
I get one beam of sunlight a day
From 10 to 11
Sometimes shorter
I lay on the floor
My eyes in it
Getting my daily recommended 30 minutes
Of vitamin D
Maybe I will go outside
Maybe I will sit amongst my things
Scattered in and around his
I live in a puzzle of
What is mine and what is not
Constantly shifting
Organizing
Tucking in and away
Myself and my things
I am learning to take up space
Make noise
Stop apologizing for just being
Bit by bit I let myself be seen
Heard
Felt
As I sit in the sunlight
Building up energy