Lil Aaron is The Internet's Last Hope

A bit of a sequel to my recent write-up on the 2017 Soundcloud scene, this post is a markedly more positive look at an artist who is using the same path blazed by trap musicians to create something wholly unique on his own terms.

While the hair-dyed “mumble rap” scene of 2016 paved the way for an unrelenting crop of new artists like XXXtentacion and Lil Pump, it also built a framework that allowed for the emergence of new artists who were able to use the same sound and take it a step further. The anthesis of these aggressive bass-abusing rappers is a long-haired dude named Lil Aaron. Described as one of the music industry’s “best kept (and weirdest) secrets,” Aaron is a 23-year-old rapper from Indiana who grew up with an omnivorous appetite for music. With a diet consisting of equal parts hip-hop and rock, Aaron’s music is the product of two decades of careful study and appreciation. He is the result of unrestrained internet access and becoming musically-conscious in an era where T-Pain and Outkast were as prevalent as Taking Back Sunday and Blink-182.

In 2017, those genre-based barriers are lower than ever, and Lil Aaron has spent the last year building a musical playground in which all sounds are treated equally. He isn’t making the same blown-out trap centered around adrenaline-inducing primordial chants, but he uses many of the same techniques as the Soundcloud rapper greats. From song topics, terms, and cultural idioms, even down to the dyed hair, Aaron takes the traditional signposts of the genre and plays with them until they’re barely recognizable. What emerges is a Das Racist-esque parody that shows immense appreciation for the scene while simultaneously deconstructing the tropes as he’s using them. It’s mercilessly poking fun at the genre in the way that only an insider can, all while making one-of-a-kind music in the process.

103°

I first became aware of Lil Aaron’s existence while browsing the Twitter-sphere on a particularly hot 103° day in Portland. I’d spend the day writing in my backyard, sweating it out and listening to Lana Del Rey in between submitting vaguely-flippant job applications. I’d put in a surprisingly hard days work and figured some mindless Twitter scrolling was a suitable reward.

I stumbled across a video that power user @belatweets2u had retweeted featuring a big white dude with green hair dancing and the caption “im a hot topic.” I’ll admit I was intrigued (and ready to hate it), but I clicked on the video anyway, mainly in an attempt to figure out how this played into my go-to high school clothing shop. When I expanded the video, I heard the unmistakable sounds of Panic! At the Disco’s ”I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and was taken aback.

I had to look away from the phone and catch my breath just to make sure I was hearing this right. To say I was perplexed would be an understatement. I hadn’t listened to the song in years, but the song’s instantly-recognizable opening notes took me back to middle school instantly. The 2005-era orchestral plucks were accompanied by Aaron’s alternating “ayyy’s” and “yeah’s” in between the song’s quickly-plucked pizzicato strings. His ad-libbed additions were on-beat and, while incongruous, fit in eerily well with the song’s original overwrought emo context. As the song’s eighth measure hit, right as you’re expecting Brendon Urie’s vocals to enter at their familiar spot, a catastrophic bass blast enters the mix accompanied by Aaron’s auto tune-drenched voice singing “I’m a Hot topic, yeah.”

I was smitten.

im a hot topic pic.twitter.com/xd4qRS9lIQ

— LIL AARON (@lilaaron911) August 3, 2017

He continued to dance, sing, and ad-lib along with his Disco-infused trap song, and within seconds everything fell into place. It was an instantly-endearing mix of modern trap stylings and middle school nostalgia that melted my heart and made me a fan within the space of a single 37-second Twitter video.

Further Down

From there, I sought out Lil Aaron’s Soundcloud and played his most recent song “Warped Tour” which takes the same approach as “Hot Topic,” this time sampling Paramore’s megahit “Misery Business” for another trap-inspired anthem. Within the song, Aaron toys with a common trap idiom by making a direct comparison between his bands (stacks of money) and the number of bands playing Warped Tour. In the time it’s taken me to write this, he’s since released “Top 8” which samples Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar We’re Goin Down” and acts as a loving, nostalgic ode to MySpace using the name of the site’s notorious friend-ranking feature as a springboard for wordplay which leads to the line “give me top, aye.”

It’s an incredible mixing of genres, sounds, terminology, and humor that I never would have thought possible given all the time in the world. Most of the tracks follow a similar format: lure the listener into a sense of familiarity with the original sample, throw them a curveball with a leaned-out trap chorus, sandwich a quick verse in the middle, repeat the chorus, then end. It makes for a brief but compelling listen that doesn’t overstay its welcome or wear out the novelty. And as short as these songs are, Aaron has since (perhaps jokingly) promised he’s working on “making his songs even shorter.” Brevity is the soul of wit, and Aaron is crafting a song structure that’s unmistakable and all his own.

You’d think the crossover between decade-old emo pop and modern trap wouldn’t be a very wide Venn diagram, but it turns out Aaron’s audience is surprisingly vast. It seems that many other listeners have experienced similar twists and turns in their journey of music discovery. Aaron is uncovering a built-in audience of fans that share a single touchpoint and cultivating a relationship with them as he continues to add onto it. With songs that routinely get hundreds of thousands of plays on Soundcloud and cosigns from Chief Keef, Slim Jxmmi, Bella Thorne, and even Kylie Jenner, Aaron’s audience is massive and only growing.

I’m glad the internet has allowed for artists like Lil Aaron to flourish. It’s such an audacious combination of genres (one that would have never found success or even life in the traditional music industry), and I’m glad that it exists. The ability for an artist to put something out into the universe and have it find an audience is one of the beautiful benefits of living in 2017.

He doesn’t fit perfectly into a box, but that’s fine, he’s not for everybody, and that’s the upside to our ever-splintering media landscape. In an interview with Pigeons and Planes Aaron addresses freedom:

“That’s what’s cool—with the Internet and where we are with media and technology, you don’t have to be selected by people in power to be successful in the music industry. Anywhere I am right now, I did all by myself.”

It’s absolute, unbridled freedom. The ability to mash two disparate sounds together and see what comes of it. Your audience will find you eventually, sometimes you just have to create and see what happens next. As Aaron revs up to drop his next emo-infused track “IWGFU” I find myself anticipating his every move and anxiously awaiting the inevitable collection of trappy-pop-punk bangers. Here’s to innovation, and a long, weird career. Here’s to Lil Aaron.

Heartache, Optimism, and Pop-Punk: How The Upsides Changed My Outlook On Life

The best creations are born of pain. A sad consolation prize for the inflicted, the result of life experience and raw suffering. As listeners, we judge music based on how much life and “realness” bleed through it, but we also don’t experience anything in a vacuum. Art is tainted by our own memories and experiences. It’s the reason that two nearly-identical albums can feel so different. It’s the reason you enjoy A while I prefer B. Memory is where it all comes into play, and it’s what we add to art as humans. In experiencing art we inject a bit of our own story in the listening process and add on to the creation in whatever way we can.

This is how our tastes, perspectives, and very personalities are formed: through interaction with both art and the world around us. While a positive experience, association, or context can improve our perception of an album, the inverse can also ruin something that’s otherwise objectively good. Think about any album, movie, or TV show that you used to recover from a breakup. Hell, think about a restaurant that once gave you food poisoning. Whether it’s well-founded or not, there’s probably a negative association and personal bias at play skewing your opinion.

I’m of the school of thought that traditionally “great” music starts as something you don’t necessarily love on the first listen, but becomes better over time. Music with depth and complexity that reveals itself with each subsequent spin. Challenging its consumer to be better. Most of my favorite albums were records that I didn’t think much of (or simply didn’t like) upon first listen, but gradually kept burrowing their way further into my brain.

And while memories often retroactively color our impressions of art, sometimes there are also individual works that are able to overcome our own mental hang-ups. Art that’s so strong it’s able to break through our negative associations and emerge from the other side, still enjoyable.

This combination of growth over time and overcoming an uphill battle of negative associations is one of the reasons that The Wonder Years’ second album The Upsides is one of my favorite records of all time.

From a South Philly Basement

Before I get into weird personal history: some quick background info on the band. Founded in 2005, The Wonder Years are a pop-punk act from Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Following two years of singles, split and EPs the band released their debut album Get Stoked on It! In 2007. Taking queues from the early 2000’s easycore scene, the band’s first record was a keyboard-heavy form of biting pop-punk. Get Stoked is problematic, but also very symptomatic of the year it was made. It’s not a bad record, but it bears very few resemblances to the rest of the band’s work and has been retconned by the band for good reason.

The biggest point against Get Stoked on It! Is that most of the songs were written about generic late-2000’s pop cultural buzzwords. You got a track about a ninja, one about a cowboy, one about zombies, and much more! This is in direct conflict with the band’s later hyper-earnest heart-on-sleeve meditations that pulled from real life experiences and heartfelt emotions (as opposed to funny songs about astronauts). There are still some tracks like “Racing Trains” and “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” that foreshadow some of the band’s future stylistic leanings, but as a whole, the record is much more underdeveloped and juvenile than their later work.

The band would later go on to “decanonize” this release, publicly stating their distaste for it both in interviews and even referencing it in future songs. When a remastered version of the album came out in 2012, lead singer Daniel Campbell said “If you like the record, enjoy the new mixes. If you hate the record, I’m on your side” which is something I’ve seen very few bands do.

Within two years of their first album, original member and keyboardist Mikey Kelly left the band. His departure essentially represented a “soft reboot” for the band which allowed the remaining members to pivot the group’s sound and take their next album into a more “honest” direction. A year after Kelly’s departure the band released their sophomore album The Upsides in 2010, and my life would change forever.

B-rate Version of Me

In 2011 I went through a horrible breakup. It was my first real relationship, and it hit me as hard as you could imagine a 17-year-old being hit. I’d recently got my driver’s license, started my first job, and I was embarking on my final year of high school, so overall it was a turbulent time of change for me. One night midway through February I was spurred to purchase a digital copy of The Upsides on a whim based on a Tweet made by Amazon Music. This is something I never do, but I had just gotten off a shift at my job and wanted to fill the void with blind consumerism. The album was on sale for $5, so even for a cheap 17-year-old, there’s not much to lose at that price. I can’t even remember if I even previewed the album, but for whatever reason, that tweet was well-crafted enough to spur me into a purchase right then and there. I was in the mood for something new.

I downloaded the album, loaded it onto my iPod, hit play, and sunk into it.

I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate the particular brand of slacker malaise I was engaging in at this time, but most waking hours that weren’t spent school were spent in my room playing video games listening to podcasts and music. I was pretty much distracting all my senses and escaping from reality as much as humanly possible without the use of drugs or alcohol. I wasn’t depressed, but I was in a state. Nothing really cheered me up, so it was more of an ongoing war of attrition with my own brain.

I credit The Upsides with single-handedly lifting me out of this post-dump funk and getting me back to feeling like myself. With years of reflection, I was being far more dramatic than I’m giving myself credit for, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being seventeen. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it felt like it… until this album came along.

A Pop-Punk Oddessy

Upsides begins with a bait and switch. Most pop-punk detractors dislike the genre for pretty specific (and valid) reasons. Maybe they don’t like the genre’s propensity for bitter lovesick lyrics, or they’re turned off by the whiny vocals, but in most cases, they probably have a cartoonishly-exaggerated version of the scene in their head. Thanks to the genre’s explosion in popularity during the mid-90’s, most people just think the music consists solely of whiny Blink 182-types when that’s not the case. While there certainly is no shortage of nasally lovesick songs, that sound isn’t representative of the entire genre.

For better or worse, Upsides begins with exactly what people would expect from the genre. Within the first seconds of the album’s opening track “My Last Semester” a nasally slightly-filtered Campbell sings over a twinkling electric guitar “I’m not sad anymore / I’m just tired of this place.” Within 15 seconds the singing ceases and the guitar strings sustain. An electric whir emerges from the back of the mix and quickly overwhelms the held guitar notes. Suddenly the entire song, album, and band spin to life, energizing the track with a cacophony of brash drum strikes, a biting guitar riff, and a driving bassline. Campbell, now singing at the top of his lung repeats the first lyrics with an angry vitriolic twist, and with that, Upsides has officially begun.

Those first lines of the album sound stereotypical (great, another white dude talking about how sad he is) but upon closer inspection, they’re actually a beautifully-constructed phrase that flips the listener’s expectations on their head by talking about the futility of those sad feelings. It’s a notion that’s devoid of nostalgia, firmly present, and anxiously self-aware. This specific idea of not letting sadness win is a recurring theme throughout the album that the band circles back to frequently. The mantra comes full-circle on the album’s star-studded closer and is even developed further on subsequent releases. But in this first song, the singer articulates this concept by listing all the reasons he could be sad, but then explains that he opted to find the silver lining in his situation: his music. Campbell would go on to address this later in an interview explaining:

“I thought that I had kind of beaten my issues, but when you struggle with depression or anxiety, you never really win. You always carry it with you and the point I learned isn’t to win. The point is to keep fighting. It turned out that ‘I’m not sad anymore’ wasn’t a victory speech. It was a battle cry.”

The opening line pulls double duty by acting as the album’s thesis statement while also serving as the band’s new mission statement. This represents a far tonal shift from what we last heard on Get Stoked. They’re not the same group of 18-year-olds who were singing about pirates and zombies three years ago. They elude to this with the meta line “college hit those dudes like a ton of bricks.” The band did a lot of growing up since we’ve last heard from them, and they are guided by a new creative north star.

Art Imitates Life

The foundation that the band began to flesh out with this record (and would expand upon over the course of a trilogy of albums) is a style of hyper-intricate, self-referential, and pop-culture-obsessed rock that depicts the good and bad sides of a life well-lived. Early on the band used the term “realist pop-punk” when describing the sound of their artistic rebirth. Call it what you want, but it’s still one one of the most refreshingly honest and true approaches to music I’ve ever heard, and it was an absolute revelation to me at seventeen.

There’s beauty in simplicity, and sometimes real life is more compelling than anything you could ever make up. TWY’s music doesn’t revolve around sweeping epics, chasing material goods, or even the other, it’s all music that’s firmly told from one perspective and all bears the insecurities and imperfections that come with it. The focus of the music varies from song to song, but this singular perspective allows for a cohesive vision that the listener can simultaneously empathize with, and project themselves onto.

Throughout The Upsides, singer Dan “Soupy” Campbell flexes his now-well honed writing ability, making it obvious he’d time between albums studying and working on his craft. One of the most under-appreciated aspects of his style is his acute ability to write minuscule details. Small observations and references that add a layer of specificity that makes the album feel more realized and lived-in. Each line adds onto the story that the listener is building in their head until an entire narrative is formed around the character. You’re fleshing out your own universe built on the language of the album and developing a one-of-a-kind relationship with its narrator.

Sometimes The Upsides tackles big psychological issues like post-college listlessness, relationship dynamics, and even death. At other times they zoom down to view life on a macro level and vignette the little scenes that happen in life like a broken down car or going on a midnight pretzel run to the stand behind your house. Sometimes it’s funny and biting social commentary on the Westboro Baptist Church or the shitty fist-pumping people you meet at parties. It’s an album that encapsulates the life of a post-college 20-something from every possible dimension.

To me, the quintessential song on the album is the Deluxe Edition’s penultimate track “Logan Circle: A New Hope.” The song is a stripped-down reworking of the album’s second track “Logan Circle” that echoes many of the original track’s sentiments but also serves as an incremental update on the life of Campbell. “A New Hope” is redone in a slower, more pensive approach that allows the lyrics and instrumentation to shine through and glisten to their full potential, highlighting both the brilliance of the lyrics and the proficiency of the band members.

The first verse of the original “Logan Circle” contains a lyric that hooked me for the rest of the album: “We just can’t blame the seasons / The Blue Man Group won’t cure depression.” The line resonated with me originally because it’s an obvious Arrested Development reference, but it also doubles as a bit of life advice about optimism and outlook. This all circles back to the cliched idea that this album is something I needed to hear at the time. I wasn’t hopeless, but I needed something hopeful. I needed to be told how to handle these feelings I’d never felt before. I needed to be told how to combat them and move on with my life, and that’s exactly what The Upsides did for me. It was musical therapy.

Emergence

Though I didn’t consider it at the time, I’ve only recently come to realize that pop-punk has been the genre that I’ve listened to for the longest in my life. It’s partly a byproduct of when I was growing up (thanks, mid-90’s) but also it just happened to be one of the first genres that I really explored. As a result, there was something comforting about sinking back into the genre after spending some time away from it. I feel like It’s cheesy to admit an album about not feeling sad helped me stop feeling sad, but Upsides was instrumental in my emergence from sadness in the wake of this first relationship.

It wasn’t just the optimistic messages, it’s that the songs found the optimistic messages in the face of everything else. Feelings of sadness are not invalid, but with enough distance, you realize that there’s no reason for them, there’s nothing to be gained from them, only energy wasted. It was a realistic portrayal of exactly how I was feeling then. And more on-the-nose, the album’s breakup song “Melrose Diner” served as both a validation of my feelings and a cautionary tale about becoming the shitty, bitter ex.

My love for The Upsides grew exponentially with each listen, and within a year it became my most listened-to album of all time, a title that it still retains to this day. In fact, my love for Upsides grew with each subsequent album that the band released as future songs would call back to lyrics contained within their earlier works. By fall of 2011, I’d begun my first term of college and the band had released their third album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing.

The Upsides marked the beginning of a three album “trilogy” that depict the arc of Campbell’s struggles with anxiety and depression, and with the trilogy’s conclusion in 2013, the band cemented themselves as my favorite act of all time. With three releases that were all equally impeccable, I’ve now spent roughly 12 days of my life listening to the band’s various releases, a number I wouldn’t take back if you paid me.

At the end of the day, The Upsides is one of a handful of albums that changed my life, and there’s no higher praise I can hoist upon it than that. It’s a well-crafted and powerfully intricate release that rewards close listens and spawned its own mythology. It engages the listener in a way that few other pieces of art do. There are lots of albums in my life where I can point to a clearly-defined “before” and “after” period, but Upsides is an album that changed my entire way of being. It shifted my world one step towards a more positive existence, and I can’t thank the band enough for that. It’s a radical powerhouse of a record that I still listen to nearly every week, and I can’t fathom my life in a world without it. It’s a beautiful creation, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

Thank you for everything, Upsides.

The Breathtaking Grace of Sprained Ankle

For years now I’ve seen the cover to Julien Baker’s 2015 album in random flashes across the internet, and it’s perpetually eluded me. It became one of those “mythical” bits of media that I saw everywhere, then suddenly disappeared from my mind.

Aside from the surprisingly-pervasive photo, I didn’t know anything about the record: I didn’t know who Julien Baker was, what genre she played, or if this album was even any good. I assumed it was, but I had zero context to go on, only this cover. It became one of those things that you see so often that you just assume it’s great but never look into. In 2017 I finally sat down to listen to the album and since then I’ve been kicking myself for taking so long.

Sprained Ankle is one of the single most impactful, graceful, flawless, and magnificent records I’ve ever heard in my life. Period.

It’s an album that’s great on first listen, and gets even better with each subsequent spin. Baker’s effortless balance between singer-songwriter folk and finger-plucked emo is an enchanting combination that makes for a grounded and heavy listen.

It’s definitely not a “fun” album in any sense of the word. It’s an album about God, death, and anxiety. On the second track (after which the album is named), she opens with the line “wish I could write songs about anything other than death.” That’s as close to humor as we get in the album’s 33 minute and 33 second running time, and even then it’s still a line about death that hits you like a punch in the gut.

Baker’s voice remains prominent in every song, laid bare near the top of the mix and paired well with her own guitar and little else. It sounds like you’re listening to a girl playing songs alone in her room just for herself. It almost feels invasive to listen to, but you can tell the contents of the album would have come out with or without your intrusion.

It’s a deeply personal album about everything dark in the world. It’s an album of purity in an impure world. It’s haunting and striking. It will stay with you after your first listen like a ghost. It sounds like someone wringing their soul dry into a bucket. It’s one of the most majestic and soul-crushing things I’ve ever heard in my life and remains just as impactful after dozens of repeated listens.

Julien Baker is a woman of few words. Amongst the album’s short nine tracks you’ll find only a handful of topics. You get the sense that these songs were carefully-selected and lovingly-crafted over time until they formed a single honed point. The fact that she’s just now revving up to drop her second album over two years later is a testament to her thoughtfulness.

Sprained Ankle is unlike anything I’ve ever heard, yet it feels immediately familiar. It’s an album about a universal topic delivered in a straightforward way. The universal of pain. It connects right away and doesn’t stop until the vibrations of Baker’s piano are overwhelmed by the dark static surrounding her on the final track. It’s an album that’s easy to grasp upon first listen, but slowly reveals its sublime intensity to those who listen closely.

Julien Baker is a beautiful person with a beautiful soul, and that fact shines through the pain and the sparseness of Sprained Ankle. It’s hard to put the feeling of the album into words, but it’s an experience that has transcended music for me. She has a way with words, melody, and sound that all come together into this perfect package.  

I’m writing this because I feel like I have to. I’ve been so deeply moved and affected by this record that I just need to document my thoughts on it in the best way that I know how. It’s unreal.

It hurts.

It hurts to listen to. It hurts to be away from. And it hurts to be without.

It’s a carefully-constructed album about loss.

About the blunt faceless pain of anxiety.

It’s stark beauty in its rawest form.

It’s Sprained Ankle.

Japanese Breakfast – Soft Sounds From Another Planet | Album Review

Oh her sophomore album Michelle Zauner stretches the boundaries of space, time, and love.

Japanese Breakfast began as therapy. An outlet for Michelle Zauner to stitch together scraps of feelings and lo-fi pieces of self-help as a way to cope with life. Initially conceived as a solo spin-off from the Philadelphia-based Little Big League, Japanese Breakfast soon grew into a full-on meditation of death, guilt, and humanity that culminated in 2016’s unparalleled Psychopomp. Clocking in at a blazing 25 minutes, the album tackles life from every angle, directly contrasting the bliss of love with the impenetrable grief of loss. It’s a raw view of life that can only come from losing a parent.  

In her second album as a solo act, Michelle turns her focus toward what comes after death. At its core, Soft Sounds From Another Planet is an album about intimacy. Real intimacy. Love that is complicated, and modernized, and imperfect. It’s not quite as heavy of a listen as Psychopomp but manages to address the broad subject in an equally honest and poetic way.

Soft Sounds opens with the absurdly-groovy “Diving Woman.” A spaced-out bass-driven 6-minute epic that sounds like a track off of a Breeders album or a forgotten Sonic Youth b-side. Based on pre-release interviews, this song seems to be the album’s “thesis” drawing parallels between relationships in 2017 and the Korean tradition of female sea divers called haenyeo.

After outlining her aim to be a “woman of regimen” Michelle repeatedly sings her desires: “I want it all.” After flashes of faded drugs and dead animals Michelle addresses a third party “When I get back there, baby / Gonna make it a home” which is followed up with “You’ll have it all / We’ll have it all.” It’s still a song about insatiability, but also wanting somebody to share it with. The tracks’ jangly 3-minute outro provides a meditative period for the listener to reflect on the tracks’ reassurances that “We’ll have it all.”  

From there Michelle ventures back into the grimy and dark word of modern day Philadelphia with “Road Head” where she recounts the visceral sex scene of a failed relationship over a dreamy soundscape. It’s a sexy but unsettling song, especially when paired with the song’s self-directed video. The outro of this song finds Michelle toying with her own vocal samples on a loop board over the now-familiar beat.

As a side note: I’ve had “Road Head” stuck in my head since seeing the band live in June. Witnessing Michelle improvise this song’s extended outro on her loop board was one of the musical highlights of my year so far. I still haven’t been able to make it through the album without rewinding to listen to this track at least once.

From there the “Road Head” bleeds warmly into the swirl and artificial air of “Machinist” which serves as the album’s lead single. When played live, Michelle introduces “Machinist” as ‘a song about falling in love with a robot.’ The track opens with a calmly-delivered monologue by Michelle that sound as if she’s talking to you directly. “I don’t know how it happened / Was it always this way, and I just couldn’t see it? / Heart burning hot enough for the both of us / I never realized how much you were holding back.” It’s a painful set of lines that immediately launches into a dancy explosion of instrumentation and distorted vocals.

“Machinist” concludes with a chorus that calls back directly to the album’s first track: “Can’t speak / You wanted it all / Let go a piece of your heart / All the pleasure it gives / Leave me, lost in the night / Shadows go in and go by / I just wanted it all” This brings back up the concept of wanting “it all” with some unknown force standing in the way.

When asked about the recurring use of space as a framing device on the album Michelle explained: “I used the theme as a means to disassociate from trauma.” The remainder of Soft Sounds’ tracks revolve around Michelle’s relationships large and small. From meeting her husband at a smoke-filled bar to her bassist who took a break from their previous band to write on Jimmy Fallon. In jumping between all these different people that have filtered in and out of her life, Michelle reveals a little bit about herself piece by piece.

And while I don’t think we’ll ever know all there is to know about Michelle, I’ll happily study each breadcrumb that she lays down. People come in and out of our lives every day. Sometimes it’s a sudden painful shock, sometimes it’s a gradual fade over time. Japanese Breakfast is proof that life continues. And through all the obstacles and cosmic unfairness, there are still people out there for you.

Even as loved ones die. Even as celebrities pass. Even as cruel men continue to win. Happiness can flourish. Sometimes all it takes is a chance encounter at the bar down the street. Or battling through multiple terrible relationships to arrive at the right one. It’s about sharing life and sharing trauma. If you truly want it all, that means good and bad, but you’ll emerge from the other side a more whole person.

Weekly Obsessions | 7/10/17

I listen to a lot of music. Sometimes looking back at my Last.fm or Cymbal and wonder what the fuck kind of music fan I really am. But that’s mainly because I jump from genre to genre so often that I never stay in one place for too long. I’ve been obsessed with a handful of disparate tracks over the past week, and I wanted to take some time to discuss them here. Hopefully, there’s a little something for everybody.

Snail Mail - “Thinning” | Emo

I saw Snail Mail perform live with Girlpool back in May. I’d never heard of them, but they were middling the show, so they were probably quality, right? To say I was blown away by Snail Mail would be an understatement. I was beyond floored watching this band. The lead singer Lindsey Jordan is a transfixing frontwoman, and I’m amazed at the small collection of excellent songs she’s already created by age of seventeen. “Thinning” is a rumbling emo track that flawlessly captures the lethargy of a warm, lazy summer day in suburbia. It’s a track about the simple pleasure (and displeasure) that comes with wasting time.

Half Waif - “Night Heat (Audiotree Live Version)” | Synthpop

Half Waif is the synthy spinoff helmed by Pinegrove’s Nandi Rose Plunkett. The outspoken frontwoman tackles issues of relationships, changing moods, and love in this haunting 3-minute track. It’s a song about losing your sense of self in the face of a relationship. Plunkett’s delicate, layered vocals intertwine over careful drum taps, cymbal crashes, and keyboard swells. It’s an enchanting track from someone that has more to say than words will ever allow.

Phillipa Soo - “Helpless” | Show Tunes

While it’s best experienced in a single sitting as a two and a half hour journey, I’ve recently started listening to individual cuts off Hamilton just to experience flashes of the show’s brilliance in quick, digestible chunks. “Helpless” is a goosebump-inducing track sung from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton’s love interest and soon-to-be-wife Eliza Schuyler. Backed by a chorus of female background singers, this is a love song that recounts the early stages of the historical relationship. It culminates in Alexander asking Philip Schuyler for permission to take his daughter’s hand in marriage. The song explodes in Eliza’s “I do, I do, I do, I do” as the background singers and Hamilton sing different refrains.

21 Savage - “Thug Life” | Hip-hop

While 21 Savage is usually known for overly-dark street music (or “murder music” as he calls it) “Thug Life” off of his recently-released Issa Album is perhaps the brightest and most summery song in his entire discography music. This shimmering ode to 2Pac explodes over a chopped soul sample that peaks with the song’s chorus “I’m thinking to myself you ain’t gang, nigga, fuck you / Feel like 2Pac, Thug Life, nigga, fuck you.” These lyrics provide quite a contrast between the song’s uplifting beat, but somehow it all comes together beautifully in a song that only 21 could have made.

Japanese Breakfast - “Road Head” | Indie Rock

While I have a full review of Japanese Breakfast’s sophomore album Soft Sounds from Another Planet coming up soon, I just can’t stop playing the album’s third single “Road Head.” In the self-directed video, Michelle Zauner finds herself in a toxic relationship with an imposing dark figure. The song itself is a dark but lush depiction of sexuality that ends with a spliced samples of a loop-board-interpolated Michelle placed over an absolutely hypnotic groove.

Vulfpeck - “Cars Too” | Funk

In this Pixar-punned funk song, Vulfpeck finds themselves in their most tripped out and relaxed state yet. It’s an absurdly groovy song, and slower than almost anything else in their repertoire. It’s proof you don’t need to be fast to be funky. In fact, you can slow things down to a snail-like pace and still find room for a bifocal-displacing guitar solo. A choice cut off of a near-perfect debut.

Julien Baker - “Go Home” | Folk

While she’s been on my radar for a while, I’m embarrassed it’s taken me until 2017 to discover Julien Baker’s Sprained Ankle. It’s a heavy-hitting and heartfelt 30-minute listen in which “Go Home” serves as the album’s stark final track. It’s thought-provoking, deflating, and gorgeous all at the same time. A ballad of pure, raw beauty that escalates without warning as Baker sings about skipping her medication and contemplating suicide. I can’t believe it’s taken me two years to discover this record, but I can’t describe how glad I am now that I have something this beautiful in my life.