Oh My Aching Heart — Heartless Bastards
#365Songs: May 6th
As a storyteller, this hurts to write, even though it’s true: there’s too much content in the world. There’s so much content that it forces us to use the word content, which isn’t just a terrible minimizing word, it’s the opposite of art. Too much of anything makes it more difficult to discover what otherwise would rise to the top, and complicates our ability to discern quality when quantity exhausts us. Next time you open Netflix, time how long it takes to find something not mediocre. It’s practically impossible. More is not, in fact, better. It’s just more.
I was a literary editor three lifetimes ago, mostly for small university presses. A few problematic trends were all happening at the same time:
Master of Fine Arts programs were transitioning from a niche terminal degree program for the best and brightest artists to commoditized profit programs for universities that no longer cared about quality. This added hundreds of new programs, which led to thousands of writers who were being gaslit into believing they were good enough to publish.
Those thousands of writers started to submit unpublishable stories to hundreds of magazines, overwhelming editorial staff and adding untenable stacks to slush piles.
Fiction editors, like me, were tasked to read through hundreds and hundreds of these submissions until our eyes crossed and exhaustion prevented us from being able to spot the gems in the pile.
This led to self publishing, which was that era’s version of Youtube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels, an un-traversable mountain of landfill.
Why do I mention this? Because quantity hides quality, because I truly believe that the best art is the art we can’t find, the beauty that gets lost in the pile. The writers, musicians, filmmakers who deserve an audience can’t find one because audiences are overwhelmed, too.
We’re consumed with mediocre, unimportant content now, targeted to us by algorithms that aren’t designed to discern quality. And we never know why certain things are sent to us over others. Spotify’s Release Radar is pretty decent, most of the time, but there’s enough what the holy fuck suggestions that make me think even that, which is meant to be based on my listening habits and tastes, is for sale to the “artists” willing to pay for that space.
I’m sure there are countless examples of this across mediums, genres, and disciplines, but as this is a music post, I’ll provide my favorite: 2012’s Heartless Bastards album, Arrow. Not only had I never heard of Heartless Bastards, despite being from my native state of Ohio, I’d certainly never encountered this album. In the pre-Spotify, pre-overwhelm era, music this tight, this good, would never have fallen through the cracks for a listener like me. But I’m tired, overwhelmed, and even though I’m a discoverer, I’m still a victim to what’s shown to me at the expense of what I can find on my own.
But damn, this album. Seriously. If you don’t know it, you should. Heartless Bastards is a rather prolific band — they just released their eighth album last week. I don’t know those other albums, yet, because I can’t get past Arrow’s brilliance. The band lives in Austin now, so it’s no surprise that it was produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno, and you can hear the Texas anthemic country and folk vibes throughout — without sacrificing the Southern blues-rock influences that fuel the band’s sound. Arrow is a welcoming and intimate album, powered by singer Erika Wennerstrom’s scratchy, baritone vocals — at times reminiscent of Brittany Howard, even Billie Holliday (that’s not a stretch if you listen carefully).
I’ve listened to the song Parted Ways no less than 100 times in recent years.
They’re often compared to The Black Keys, perhaps because they’re both from Ohio and craft blues-rock-inspired anthems, but I find this version of Heartless Bastards far more interesting. There’s more emotional weight to the songs, something to grab onto, sing along with listen after listen. I’ve never felt that way about The Black Keys.
I started this week of essays with an abandoned promise to recommend only new songs, but got sidetracked by AI-generated music videos and Broken Social Scene rabbit holes. So while I urge you to listen to listen to Arrow in its entirety, because it’s that fucking good, I’ll leave you with a newly dropped Heartless Bastards track, Oh My Aching Heart. It’s good, really good, much deeper country than the songs on Arrow, but just as good.
The only way I know how to solve the quality over quantity problem, the art over content problem, is to share one song at a time. Word of mouth has always been our best weapon against the overwhelm.
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Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
