Songs for travel, songs for home

View this email online March 16, 2024 by Ann Powers Justine Latour / Courtesy of the artist Hello sonic travelers, Forgive me if I seem a bit discombobulated today. My clothes are scattered all over my bed and I have 50 email messages and texts floating around in space, meant to tie up loose ends. This coming week I begin a daunting, if exciting, two months of wandering space and time zones: First I head to my favorite festival, Big Ears in Knoxville, then I’m in New York for an onstage chat with Indigo Girls and then I board an overnight flight to Sweden, where I’ll join my husband for a few weeks of Nordic spring that will take us to Norway, Northern England and possibly Finland and Estonia. I’m so lucky to lead this life of self-directed departures expanding my frames of reference. Yet I’m also fending off tension headaches and insomnia. Displacement, even when it’s self-imposed, is no joke. The other day as I was plowing through paperwork and searching for my passport, a new song offered solace in the form of empathy. It’s by Canadian singer-songwriter Myriam Gendron, the first from her upcoming third album Mayday, coming out May 10, just before I’ll return home. Like most of Gendron’s songs, “Long Way Home” reaches toward older texts — this time, to an old ballad about the sinking of the Titanic and a line that's appeared in folk favorites like “Lord Randall” and “Barbara Allen.” Gendron sings that line, “Oh mother, mother, make my bed,” in her weariest chest voice, adding, “I wanna sleep for a while.” This song heralds return, not departure — but the mental disarray travel causes lingers. In the folk songs she’s echoing, the nest prepared usually is a deathbed.  Gendron’s song is a lament about perpetual exile, an experience that can arise even when a person returns to a familiar place. I’m not saying anything original when I call exile the dominant condition of our times. It is part of our greatest global challenges, from war to climate crisis to the politics of the U.S.-Mexico border. It plays a large role in defining what it means to be oppressed, poor and/or marginalized. And in a different way, it has become the default lifestyle of advantaged people like myself, who constantly upend their family lines and disrupt routines in pursuit of power, money or simply novelty. I am well aware that my white middle-class American background makes my sense of dislocation fundamentally different than that of an immigrant or a refugee. The choices of the self-exiled (a longtime term for bohemians, among other things), in fact, often exacerbates the suffering of those forced from their homelands, as their resources allow them to claim spaces where others once thrives, from resort living to urban gentrification.  And yet I do think that the feeling of dislocation that haunts contemporary life seeps beyond these crucial distinctions. In a great recent essay on the cultural death of San Francisco — where I spent my own self-exiled youth in cafés and thrift stores bustling with artists, immigrants and eccentrics — Rebecca Solnit notes that the tech-bro culture now defining the city’s daily life is quintessentially unmoored: Actual unhoused people may be maligned in scary headlines, but it’s the San Francisco office worker, from assistant to executive, who is the real ghost of this once earthy paradise. “[T]he new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises,” Solnit writes. When I read these lines, I hear Gendron in my head, moaning, “I’m afraid the fire’s gone, I just wanna be alone.” Thinking about both unwelcome and habitual forms of dislocation, I began to notice other music this year exploring these themes. I thought of Vermont-based singer-songwriter Hannah Frances’s majestic folk gothic Keeper of the Shepherd, whose high points “Floodplain” and “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave” use the imagery of climate catastrophe — the greatest driver of 21st-century exile — to express emotional unrest. The Taiwanese psych duo Mong Tong’s new EP, Epigraphy, speculates about what might happen after that catastrophe, its instrumental music suggesting how future humans dominated by AI might respond upon finding a “gelatinous disc” (a vinyl album? A hard drive?) at an archeological site and learning of sonic roots they did not know they could access. Less fanciful but as ambitious is the Ethiopian-American singer and activist Meklit Hadero’s interrogation of the idea of migration, called Movement, which encompasses a podcast in which artists discuss their ideas of home, a live performance uniting diverse storytellers who have experienced different forms of exodus and Meklit’s musical fusion of Ethiopian, jazz and pop sounds in the song of return “Hagere Ethiopia” and the sky-bound “Birdsong.”  The flow of music across borders has always been edifying, a reason for optimism in a divided world. Yet by maintaining a sense of dislocation in their music, artists working with the legacy of exile make it impossible to romanticize such mobility without considering its costs. One of the most powerful recent examples is Moor Mother’s latest album The Great Bailout — a grave and dramatic work that immerses the listener in the suffering and rage of those lost souls victimized by the transatlantic slave trade. Arushi Jain’s electronic music, grounded in both her Indian classical music training and her mastery of modular synths, seems upon first listen to be the ascendant opposite of Moor Mother’s heavy trip; and yet, I hear similar questions in each. How does tradition both haunt contemporary life and make it meaningful? Given the centuries of movement that define the modern world, is there anywhere to rest? I’m waxing philosophical now, but that’s where this varied soundtrack takes me. Music offers the gift of transport as well as the reminder of what’s been left behind. Even as it raises unsettled emotions reflecting the world’s injustice, it can feel like respite. One artist I’m loving lately is Jon Muq, who was born in Kampala, Uganda and spent time in boarding school and working on cruise ships before landing in Austin, Texas, where he learned to blend African and retro-soul elements within his winning songs; he’s releasing Flying Away, his debut album for Easy Eye Sound, on May 31. His first single for Dan Auerbach’s label was called “Runaway.” The song perambulates through a melancholy groove as Muq expresses both his loneliness and his need to keep going: “It’s not mine, I gotta let it go,” he sings of the storm raging just behind him. What is his is not entirely clear. Maybe only the journey. Newsletter continues after sponsor message Here are a few other things that are keeping me grounded as I scatter myself to the winds: The Tiny Desk hosted another milestone performance this week when Justin Timberlake brought his 15-piece (!) band to the building. Hear me and Daoud Tyler-Ameen discuss JT”s new opus on the All Songs Considered New Music Friday podcast, too. The Atlantic published one of those clickbait-y lists the other day – this one devoted to “Great American Novels (after 1923)” – and I want to be mad at it, but many titles included are my faves, too.  A few: Corregidora by Gayl Jones; Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn; Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. But I have to join the chorus shouting on social media: Where is Richard Yates’s masterpiece, Revolutionary Road? Speaking of classic reads, I love that Kristen Stewart’s character in Love Lies Bleeding is pictured reading Patrick Califia’s short story collection Macho Sluts. Advisory: This book is very explicit and explicitly queer. But if you can handle that, read it! The Gosling fever that descended after that ideal 21st-century movie star won the Oscars with “I’m Just Ken” (we’ll never recover) has created a swell of interest in Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, a great 1970s-style noir with an insane cast, including our Ryan, his now-wife Eva Mendes, Bradley Cooper, Ray Liotta and Ben Mendelsohn. Watch it if you haven’t!  Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to see the amazing Shelby Lynne perform the album that (to me and many connoisseurs) heralded the eclecticism and guts of 21st-century women in country music, I Am Shelby Lynne. Her blood sister Allison Moorer and spiritual sister Ashley Monroe backed her up. Exquisite! This titan is signed to a new label (Monument!), has a new manager (Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild!) and will soon release a reissue of that classic and bless us with new music. Can’t wait! I’m on the hunt for cocktail alternatives these days, and enjoy the big names like Curious and St. Agrestic (Phony Negroni, yum). But here’s an inexpensive choice: Trader Joe’s Sparkling Coconut Water with Yuzu. Slightly salty and so refreshing. NPR Classical For the discerning Irish fiddler ... Introducing NPR Music+, a new way to support what you love and explore new music and conversations sponsor-free. NPR Music+ includes two podcasts with one convenient subscription: All Songs Considered and Alt.Latino, both sponsor-free. Learn more and support us at plus.npr.org/NPRmusic Get NPR Music+ Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to NPR Music emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 Unsubscribe  |  Privacy Policy