What I'm Listening To, 2025.05.12

"tell my mama I love her, tell my father I tried, give my money to my baby to spend"

My listening this week has been that of a man much more maudlin than I. There’s not really any accounting for it. Sometimes the sun is out, you’re with friends, you’re managing to ignore the omnicrisis, and you still want to put on songs that, in other circumstances, would be huge fucking bummers. So as not to wreck anyone’s mood, I’ve picked out some of the, if not cheerier, at least more uptempo songs.

I’m struggling towards a Unified Field Theory of good protest music. One question I’ve come up against is that of why is so much of the good explicitly political music is folk music? (I say explicitly political because all music, like all art, is implicitly political.) If folk is music (literally) “of the people”, maybe this points us in the right direction. This song, written about oppression over a century ago and an ocean away, still feels keen and still has political power because it’s written first for people to sing and not with consumption in mind. (This isn’t to say it isn’t capitalistically consumed. In the modern world all art must be. Mammon will have it no other way.)

Sinéad O'Connor’s life itself was, of course, an act of protest. So if anyone was going to deliver a gut punch performance of this song it would be her. I love this version and this video especially since you can see visceral emotional and sonic power in the quavering of her cheeks. It drives home the keen human need behind this song and the oppression that it evokes, even if no one is left alive today who lived under that particular oppression.

Bob Dylan is the archetypal songwriter who should never have bothered recording his own music. His songs, without exception, are all far better covered by other people. Songwriting and performance are, after all, not tightly correlated skills.

This swaying, bluesy cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” is my canonical version of that song. It has more soul than the originally, certainly, but it’s also more musically interesting. Toni Lindgren’s effortlessly syncopated, meandering guitar work is a treat on its own. Combined with Elle Cordova’s soulful vocals and the result is something that I vastly prefer to Dylan’s original flat, sloppy recording.

I come back around to Justin Townes Earle every few months and dive in hard. It’s usually that I hear a random Townes Van Zandt tune and then jump to his namesake. (Nothing against Van Zandt, he’s brilliant, I am just minorly obsessed with Justin Townes Earle.)

In this case, I woke up one morning with the chorus of this song stuck in my head (I wake with a song already firmly lodged in my brain most mornings.) I put on a shuffled mix of his discography with my coffee. I keep coming back to the studio version of this song in particular. There are a number of good versions of it out there, but most of them strip out the band in favor of finger-picked acoustic guitars. I don’t think stripping away the organ or chorus do the song any favors. Sometimes you just need a big, bold, quasi-spiritual song about drowning yourself in a filthy river to start your day.