Karaoke playlist. It’s my birthday weekend!

In Drive My Car, an actor directs a production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya in which the performers all speak a different language—Japanese, Mandarin, Korean Sign Language, more. They combine textual familiarity with deep attention to their partner’s body language.

When did 2021 begin? Was it January 1st? It couldn’t be—that was thirty Jeffreys ago. Was it two weeks after we got the second shot? That was May 1st for me. Half a year went by before I emerged, stunted and shaking.

These are songs that represent the wrangling of time, the freedom of the future. Through tempo, these songs can change our heartbeat, grant us the energy to hit the road. It’s the inherent power of keeping time—it’s fuel for the engine of hope.

Last week, I talked about music as a manipulator, an art form adept at drawing forth emotion. But there’s another side to this manipulation: tension and the suppression of release. Coming inches from what you want, only to find you’re not going to get it—that is power in its purest form.

Life’s purest delights—singing, dancing, telling someone you love them—all come from indulgence in unsolicited feelings. The path to euphoria is narrow—it demands we ignore our exposure to pain. This section of the Canon is filled with those songs that speak directly to our emotional fears, the music that conquers pain with melody.

This issue of the Canon is about Voice—the first ten were an introduction to the list, but these ten are grouped by one of humanity’s great gifts, an instrument whose versatility often feels unnoticed.

I’m ending the year by tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.

It’s fitting for a holiday that celebrates death to reflect so aptly the nature of life—that there is far too much to do before we’re gone, and we will always dream it differently. But we feel our imagination as much as we see it, and thoughts change our cells as much as chemicals—

Last Wednesday night, desperate for consolation from lives shackled with chaos, I went with Elsie to go see Candlelight—a small concert series of classical music held in hidden, non-traditional venues around the city, each lit solely by hundreds of scattered candles.

I’ll meet you at the wrought iron gate—get there as close to sundown as you can because it only opens once a year. Wait for the moon to crest the roof, then dip down through the hedges to the yard.

For all my terror, I find delight in apprehending the grotesque. It’s the illness we ignore that tends to kill us, after all. So let us stare our specters in the eye—we’ll be dancing step-in-step with them for the next few weeks.

Swamptember is over.

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.