Like most songs I love, it contains a gloomy melancholy, a yearning, the lightest shade of darkness fueling complex emotions.

It’s a blueprint for other art school kids who have noise to make and meaning to share. They remind me that there still is hope, that no matter how hard tech and capitalism try to replace us, we will always find a way.

Tha Crossroads might be the most melodious, upbeat sad song ever written, but it is most definitely a song about grief, about memorial, about the people we’ve lost along the way.

This passing of grief from artist to audience is a gift that not everyone wants to receive, but it’s a gift nonetheless, and within it lives a blueprint for how to move forward no matter how many losses stack up.

I try to remind myself that it’s okay to be sad, to be scared, to search for meaning in the dark hours of night. That it’s okay to be angry, and ranty sometimes. That’s how we resist apathy.

It’s important to consider the VU juxtaposed to our modern moment: they broke barriers and shined a spotlight on alternative lifestyles that were decades away from mainstream representation.

The saddest songs are the ones that welcome me in, a warm embrace. A voice, a lyric, a mood, a rhythm that breaks me down and builds me back up.

“The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free.” — James Blake

Jessica Pratt’s voice conjures a time and place for me, but also summons an era that predated me — a siren’s call to California’s murky yet dreamy backdrop of endless possibilities and broken promises.

The Well is one of his more Carver-esque songs, a character out of work, and in boredom and angsty rage the bottle he shatters sends him on a journey first to make sure he’d wounded no scurrying creature and then later to reassemble the mundane details into something whole again.

Listen, feel, process. Repeat for 23 years and counting. This album’s cousin is a sprawling novel, how it welcomes you into a world you never leave no matter how long it’s been since you finished the last word.

Fragile little men marking territory that’s not theirs to begin with is just about the most tired American thing to do. When they’re not trying to steal elections they’re plucking old tunes out from under where they’ve always belonged.

To be an empath with ADHD is to constantly worry how others are receiving you, and that comes at the expense of just being. It’s fucking exhausting.

If Taylor had grown up homeschooled by Baptist parents in the Florida panhandle, developed a propensity for Southern Gothic expressions, incorporated Gregorian chant and dark Biblical concepts into her lyrics, got diagnosed with Autism, and came out as a trans bisexual woman at the age of 20, she could’ve written Ethel Cain’s exceptional debut album Preacher’s Daughter.

I ask you to imagine yourself in a car moving fast through the desert as magic hour fades into night, as the tumbleweeds roll up under your wheels, as the lines in the road dance alongside you, as bugs splatter against the windshield, as your thoughts turn inward.

The restless, dreamy worker waving at his more adventurous self, reminding him to never stop chasing the career he desires.

When half a country believes a lie as fact, and the institution that can correct that lie instead promotes it, we aren’t headed towards Fascism, we’re already in its grasp.

Grief is a gun that shoots at you when you’re not looking, the storm that finds you wherever you hide, the response to a question you’re too afraid to ask.

The Town That Cursed Your Name is a concept album of sorts, one that mourns the fading days of a band aged out of time — the dying record labels, empty concert halls, snarky reviews, those end late stages after years of sleeping in vans on couches in sad living rooms.

It’s shocking, really, how natural she sounds in this space, as if she’s channeled Donna Summer’s ghost and pulled the spirit into a new millennium.