Primordial calm sinks in when I’m sitting on a beach, some cosmic swirl of instinct and shadowed memory. If I could, I’d crawl back through the yarns of time, ego sloughing off in the volcanic air, no longer cursed by the workweek or wifi.

Las Vegas spills before me like lightning threaded to the floor. I’m south of town, ten miles from the Strip, which is framed like a still life by my eleventh-floor view, neon glowing lurid on my hotel floor.

Memory is the building block of everything — there’s no vision of the future unmoored from material history. When we picture where we’re headed, the vision is imbued with society’s hopes and dreams, concepts which could not exist without the past itself.

I’m building an ark of songs from the 2000s that I hope will never get old. It’s the Millennial Dance Canon. Let’s hit the floor, losers.

This is the year of our reclaimed youth: I’ve loved more skate pop and power emo this year than I have since Earwyrms began. Last year around this time, music’s big players were coping with the pandemic by dropping albums early or cashing in on nostalgia while young bands waited in the wings and prayed there’d be a future to play through.

This is a playlist I made one summer ten years ago as I waited for my cosmic new Ford Taurus wagon that would drive me through school. I was so excited to be able to drive around and listen to music that I burned seven CDs of twenty songs each that I called the "Birth of the Wagon" series — this is the first volume.

My favorite show on TV is Dickinson. Shocking — the poetry show (we're talking about Emily) is the only one he deems fit to watch. The Daisy follows soft the Sun.

We are makers of tools that map the divine, tracing shadows in chalk before they move. My room is a sundial: it follows the long, slow arc of god. These songs feel the same, organisms themselves.

These summer songs are for the eager sun and the relief of the hazy moon. In the heat, our sweat casts pheromonal spells — even the tiger is susceptible to pathogens of desire.

To honor Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, I compiled my own Jubilees: my songs of purest joy, immaculate hallelujahs. These songs measure the depths of our brightest emotions and prove that even the longest night is forgotten in the presence of the sun.

We care for neglected skin as we do unpolished silver—our touch removes the film of neglect, of doubt and disbelief. In place of cloth, it's the plow of soft fingers, electric atoms sloughing dead cells away.

This issue is dedicated to those Left Turn Albums, the follow ups to big hits that try out new sounds. They’re bloated. They’re weird. They’re often incoherent. Many stretch past twenty or thirty songs. They’re derided at first, then later admired.

Summer morning doesn’t strike the Midwest sky so much as it subdues it. The sun will lay the night down gently—first with the grip of firm, pink fingers, then a whispered command in daffodil light.

Polyphony—the singing of two or more melodies at once, like the left and right hands of a piano player. The pleasure of hearing multiple melodies as they weave through one another is as voyeuristic as it is edifying, like overhearing the sublime grammar of a couple’s secret language.

Every new song we hear is a fresh batch of feeling. After weeks of Wyrms looking back to the past, here is a collection of new music we missed—with every note, the chance to remake a memory.

One afternoon three years ago, I was feeling that classic early-twenties feeling like I had never and would never do anything and everyone would hate me for it. I sat down and made a newsletter on a whim.

It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.

From the lab: another microgenre discovered in the field. Pop songs that cruise around 150 bpm with a kick-kick-snare-kick that could snap off your heel.

The room is just as crucial to the music as the melody. Peripheral pieces of a song—separate from the pitch, the key, the tempo—can go unnoticed until they’re gone altogether, things like volume, echo, reverb, resonance.

As the warm weather comes, I lay my Soft Songs out in the sun. May this music brush you with the breeze of hope. There’s a reason Blake paired “The Tyger” with “The Lamb”—balance, balance. Everything is moderation. The hardest part is getting through the night.