Catenaries and Dirigibles Brace and Buoy the Living Room
A new long thing about freak folk, and an update on other stuff
I have a long piece over at Stereogum today on the “freak folk” micro-phenomenon that is now 20 years old. As a S’Gum reader since freak folk started blossoming out of Devendra Banhart’s Arthur-enabled A&R efforts, it’s very cool to have my byline on the site. Technically the piece is defined as a “playlist,” but you know me, I spent a few months turning it into a modest cultural history of early 2000s’ free-folk/proto-twee/Drag City-core.
I truly enjoy a lot of this music (but do not enjoy some of it), and it was a blast trying to corral a “genre” that spread like kudzu into a manageable form (without just listing the Golden Apples of the Sun tracklist and being done with it). I talk a bit about genre in the piece, and if it didn’t come across, I think that making Official Statements about the starts and ends of things is one of the true joys not of music criticism, and of liking music.
(More broadly, I prefer giving historical context to genres and asserting that, yes, they run out of steam at a certain point and their words lose their meaning and become generic signifiers if you lazily insist on using them past their sell-by date.)
And because I’m generally unable to stop myself when I start making lists about music, here’s an expanded 50 Track Directors’ Cut version of the article’s Top 20 (hosted by the unembeddable Apple Music for Joanna Newsom reasons).
And hey, why not? Here’s a 60-Track Proto-Freak Folk playlist to throw on shuffle:
Okay Fine But What About These Annotated Monthly Mixes Of New Music You Promised Us?
I really made quite the decision to launch a newsletter with a regular publication schedule smack dab in the middle of what’s become the busiest semester in my two decades within the hallowed walls of academia. The playlist (for February lol) is done, and it’ll either go up tomorrow (heh) or Monday. The semester is concluding and the sabbatical is looming, and there’s going to be a TON more cool stuff coming down the pike. Swear!