Music is melodrama. Pageantry, spectacle, vulgar vulnerability—the arrogant may sneer, but pain is universal, and songs are unique in their ability to immerse. The form allows us to wear the feelings of one another.

I’m at a wedding, here are wedding songs! Secular.

A confession: I have not finished a single book all year. I normally average between 15 and 30 by year’s end. And listen, I’ve tried—oh! have I tried.

I was always nervous about demanding a subscription fee. Maybe it’s the farmer in me, maybe it’s because I believe life’s pleasures should be free—and music and writing are nothing if not life’s unique and renewable pleasures.

This issue is full of my favorite drum songs. We keep time without second thought. Time passes through us almost like radiation, suffusing every step of our lives. The drums let us tap into some existential clock.

People, on the internet, a few years ago loudly pleaded “No pandemic art!” to whomever would listen (everybody was). I never agreed with the sentiment, but I stayed out of it—I know trauma when I see it. But today, standing this distance from that initial quarantine, the more I thank God Inside documented it, much moreso than I felt at the time.

Nothing complicated here—sometimes the office closes early for a holiday and you have to send your newsletter quickly because you're going to the pool. We have all been there. Cool off, kitties, and enjoy this little pool playlist.

I call this sensibility Midwestern because it’s an attitude inherent to life on the plains, where you can see storms gather from miles away and can do nothing for hours but brace for the worst. The winters are some of the coldest in the country. There’s a reason some of the only immigrants who could bear it were Swedes, Russians, Norwegians, and Finns.

My friend recently became my roommate, which means I now live with a skater for the Atlanta Roller Derby team—a phrase I would say to my younger self within the first hour of time traveling just to see him smile.

The first time I went crowd-surfing was in a stranger’s dark living room to “Come On Eileen.” I remember being lifted on shaky hands and the warm breeze borne from the drunken crowd. It was during that thumping chant of the bridge, every foot moving to the brow-beating stomp. My nose scraped the ceiling as I sang along.

Well, if it isn’t time again for Atlanta’s good ol’ rock & roll festival, that old Shaky Knees that hijacks an issue every spring. It’s a weird festival, a heady mix of punks with strollers, aging rockers, and new blood all gunning for the same shade in the 80-degree Georgian glare. I love it. Let’s talk headliners.

I’ve put together a playlist of all the music I missed from the past four years. Songs that didn’t make it to the year-end lists, albums I didn’t catch until far too late. An ode to the constant blooming that comes with loving music.

Song ensures Bad is never The Worst. We sing to bring joy to shipless oceans. This batch of Canon songs carry that knowledge—flames of understanding for those thinnest wicks of heart.

At the height of his fame, David Bowie forged Ziggy Stardust to help him withstand the heat of the limelight. He quickly came to resent it. He was starting to think that he was Ziggy. He even went as far as trying to kill Stardust off one summer in London. “That fucker would not leave me alone for years,” he once said.

I’ve been nothing but hot air recently—rising temperatures and all—so I’m taking a break from my little history lessons and absurd canonization efforts to catch us up on all the music we’ve missed.

Every spring, I like to stop time at the end of March to make a playlist of Soft Songs—gentle lullabies borne by warmer winds, paeans to nature and steaming baths.

I’m tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next few weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.

Pretend it’s 1962. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring hits The New Yorker in June. In a month, heavy smog descends upon London; the first Walmart rears its head in Arkansas. Another month, and Marilyn Monroe is dead. The world could collapse any day now.

Over eight albums and almost twenty years, surprisingly little has changed about Beach House. They still write gothic, cavernous love songs that glint and gleam like the sea.

I’m tackling the impossible: the 100 best songs ever recorded. Not ranked from #100 to #1, but instead given their own meaningful sequence, a personal structure to reveal itself over the next few weeks. It will be a compass for navigating my sonic perspective. An Official Earwyrms Canon.