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.

The most artful country lyricists introspect, reflect, cast broken characters wandering confused through lonely landscapes in search of past selves, lost friends. They mourn old loves, drive dark highways with no discernible destinations.

That’s the beauty of art’s subjectivity. We bring in our own lived experiences and alter the meaning of everything.

Let’s not wait for the system itself to negate our sense of discovery, not wait for a few powerful companies to control our tastes, not allow ourselves to be lulled asleep by the same overplayed artists.

Driving streets once familiar, pizza parlors now fast food chains, supermarkets now dollar stores, a motel doubling as a meth lab and the bowling alley boarded up and even the graffiti’s uninspired, a joke two decades past its prime.

In silence, we discover. In rest, we reset. But where is the time for such a thing when the world keeps coming, when expectations mount, when debts wait without patience?

Imagine a world where we learned from history, where we stopped believing that “it can’t happen here,” and “it can’t happen to me.” Imagine a world where we could empathize with the disgruntled blue collar workers of the Midwest without minimizing them, where we could agree to disagree but maintain some foundation of decency and order.

What happens when the jobs leave but the people remain, when the factories stand as ghosts empty, boarded, windows shattered, waiting for a purpose that won’t return? What happens when everything goes away but the broken dreams of generations who sit haunted by impossible expectations?

If you’d told me ten years ago that Daft Punk’s Within would be 2023’s saddest, most introspective song, I’d have asked you some inane question like, “If you had to give up books or music, what would you choose?” And yet, here we are.