I’m taking a break this week to watch the leaves change. Fall hit us all at once here in the South, and I think we should all go out and take a drive to the highest peak we can find. Gaze out at nature’s colorful rhythm.

As we crest the ridge that runs down September’s back, it’s clear to me that special frequencies hide in autumn air, resonances that only ring out when the air falls back to cool. There’s a reason Swamptember’s been around for centuries. The story continues:

Swamptember marches on, dragging its scaly feet down the canal of time, and our widely-recognized celebration of all things swampy—chokemoss, ancient hooch, sweatflies the size of quarters—has become quite the rage around the world. Here’s more fiction:

Welcome to Swamptember! To kick off our celebration of all things swampy — bog witches, gothic flora, big honkin’ lizards — here is the first part of a short story I’ve written for the festivities.

Musica Universalis is a cosmological concept which posits that the movements of the planets are musical. You could map their kinetics and relational mechanics onto patterns of frequency and hear them sing.

It’s been five years since Blonde came out, and five years since I left home. That was the day I drove 750 miles south with a trailer and my boxes of freshly cut shorts.

Whose is your favorite voice? It’s a question I was never asked, but I remember the day I knew my answer.

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.