Five Very Good New Albums by Old Favorites

As previously mentioned on this blog, I've been getting back into music over the last year, having not done much listening to music since my first kid was born in 2018. Some of what I've been doing is picking up albums by new-to-me bands (The National, Belle and Sebastian, My Friend the Chocolate Cake). That I will probably make a different post about someday. But the other thing I have been doing is collecting albums that bands I listened to pre-kids have put out since I had kids. I am seven years behind, so there is quite a lot to catch up on!

Florence + the Machine, High as Hope (2018) 

This is the fourth album by Florence + the Machine, an alternative rock band (I think? I am so bad at genre) from the UK. I think their most famous album remains their 2009 debut Lungs; certainly "Drumming Song" is probably their most famous song. Lead singer Florence Welch has an amazing, powerful voice, and I would say the band's sound is often distinguished by big, powerful arrangements. My favorite song by them is actually the title track from their 2015 album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, which features both powerful lyrics from Florence but also a beautiful trumpet solo.

High as Hope is actually a bit different, with somewhat less emphasis on the powerful stuff. There are a couple stripped back songs about the necessity of faith and grace that really resonated with me: "Big God" and, in particular, "Grace."

Kate Nash, Yesterday Was Forever (2018)

I think it was my sister who got me into Kate Nash, another female vocalist from the UK. In particular, I love her song "Foundations" from Made Of Bricks (2007): "My fingertips are holding onto / The cracks in our foundation / And I know that I should let go / But I can't." Her songs alternate between this very earnest emotion and cheeky irreverence that appeals to me; she has weird and fun lyrics but also a lot of anger and energy.

Though I like her a lot, I did kind of worry she had a very specific, period-based vibe. Like was that angsty, late 2000s/early 2010s vibe still going to hold up in 2025? Well, I guess I don't know about 2025 (she has a 2024 album I haven't got to yet), but 2018 was a good year for her because I think Yesterday Was Forever has a number of strong tracks. In particular, I like "Karaoke Kiss":

To be honest, like many songs, I'm not sure I could totally tell you what it's about, but my vibe is that it's about new love, and how meeting someone can fill an emptiness in you even when it's not necessarily the right thing for you: "Kiss me in the karaoke bar / I need something, I feel so dark."

Lena, Only Love, L (2019)

Look, they can't all be quirky UK female songwriters; some of my favorites are quirky German songwriters. I discovered Lena Meyer-Landrut back when I was in grad school, thanks to the magic of Pandora. She's probably worth a full post someday, because I think she's had an interesting trajectory, from her early work which has this kind of "I'm so cute and quirky and wholesome vibe" that I associate with mid-2000s female singer-songwriters (though she was always more poppy)—see for example "Satellite" or "Caterpillar in the Rain" from her 2010 album My Cassette Player—that transitioned into more traditionally sexy stuff—I am a huge fan of "Taken by a Stranger" from 2011's Good News.

Of all the albums on this list of five, this is probably the one it took me the longest to warm up to, and I do think some of it is pretty generic pop, not as fun or interesting as the work Lena was doing earlier in her career. I was thus a bit surprised to find myself coming around to and then actively enjoying the track "skinny bitch," which is about a far from wholesome as you can get!

However, there is something kind of freeing about the chorus, which I enjoy belting along with: "When life gives you lemons, mix it up with vodka soda. / Love your imperfections, fuck the haters, they don't know ya!"

But just not when my kids are around! 

Ingrid Michaelson, Stranger Songs (2019)

See, some of my quirky female vocalists are even American! Ingrid Michaelson has had what feels like a kind of typical trajectory for an artist I am interested in, which is from very quirky, stripped back stuff to more overtly poppy material. I feel like there's a world of difference between her strumming the ukelele on "You and I" from Girls and Boys (2006) to pop anthems like "Girls Chase Boys" from Lights Out (2014), even if I like both. I do have to say I don't really get why the conceit behind this album is that they are all inspired by Stranger Things, but it did result in some good songs nonetheless. My favorite from the album is "Jealous":

(What I did not know until just now is that "Jealous" has a music video with art by Amanda Conner, one of my all-time favorite comic book illustrators. What a weird and unexpected collision of two totally different worlds.)

Regina Spektor, Home, before and after (2022)

I swear do I listen to songs with male vocalists, but indeed, you will find none of them in this post. Once again we have a quirky 2000s singer-songwriter... perhaps the most archetypal quirky 2000s singer-songwriter of them all! If you didn't listen to Begin To Hope (2006) in college, are you really a millennial? So much good stuff throughout her career; I would be hard-pressed to pick an album as a favorite. I do have to say that 2016's Remember Us to Life is my least favorite; it has some good tracks but it's certainly the one I relisten to as a whole the least. Thus, I was a little trepidatious about her newest album after a six-year gap, Home, before and after, but it won me over basically right away, and I have been listening to it quite a bit since I picked it up earlier this month.

Lots of great stuff here, but I have particularly enjoyed the desperation of "One Man's Prayer" ("I just want some girl to talk to me / And tell me that I'm different or say that I'm the same. / I don't care what she thinks, just think of me.") and the extravagance of "Spacetime Fairytale" and the weirdness of "SugarMan."

But the one that knocked me over was "Up the Mountain," a kind of creepy song with very tantalizing lyrics:

In the ocean there’s a mountain.
On the mountain there’s a forest.
In the forest there’s a garden.
In the garden there’s a flower.
In the flower there’s a nectar.
In the nectar there’s an answer.
In that answer there’s another
And another and another
And another and another.

Not only did I love it, but it came on my iPod when I was driving my seven-year-old somewhere, and once it was done, they demanded I go back to the beginning so they could hear it all! If you know my seven-year-old, you'll know that it rarely gets better than that.

Five Very Good Albums from When I Was in College

A couple months ago, a colleague mentioned "millennial walks" to me. This is apparently a TikTok thing, where millennials go on walks listening to "our" music, thinking of a better time when democracy wasn't collapsing and it felt like maybe someday you could afford to retire.

I can't claim that I've adopted this habit per se, but the last six months have seen me listening to a lot more music than I have in a long time. After Kid One was born, my at-home music got a lot more curtailed because it felt like we were always trying to get someone to nap; later, Kid One would often complain whenever I played music. But things are better on those fronts these days and I find myself hooking up my iPod to its speakers (that's how you know I'm a millennial!) and playing music at home, or bringing my iPod along in the car.

This does mean that I haven't really developed any new musical tastes since my older kid was born in 2018... but let's be fair, I was in my mid-thirties by then, I wasn't developing new musical tastes anyway. Mostly I've been relistening to stuff I got into during grad school, and catching up on new albums by artists I was into back then.

For this post, I want to talk about five albums from my college years, my own "millennial walk" playlist of sorts... which is funny because I actually didn't listen to music until after I graduated from college. But this is the music from that era I've been reconnecting to.

The Decemberists, Picaresque (2005)

My grad school friend Andrew Grubb got me into the Decemberists, who were (I think) the first band I ever saw in concert; the first album I ever picked up by them was Picaresque, which for me remains their best in its sheer concentration of high-quality works: I think "16 Military Wives" was the one he gave me that hooked me, but I also love "The Infanta," "The Bagman's Gambit," "The Mariner's Revenge Song," and "Of Angels and Angles." It's also one of those albums that's perfectly sequenced, each track leading into the next in such a way that it's greater than the sum of its parts.

My favorite song, though, is "The Sporting Life" about a kid who's an eternal disappointment to everyone around him—at least in his own mind—rendered in an ironic upbeat style. If you want to understand what it is to be Steve Mollmann, you could do worse than to listen to this song on repeat: "There's my father looking on, / And there's my girlfriend arm in arm / With the captain of the other team, / And all of this is clear to me, / They condescend to fix on me and frown."

The Weepies, Say I Am You (2005)

I think it was my mom who introduced me to the acoustic rock strains of the Weepies, a husband-and-wife duo. One of the interesting things of getting back into music I enjoyed when I was in my mid-twenties is finding out that, somehow, all my favorite cute young quirky singer-songwriters are middle-aged and have children. How did they get old!? Perhaps most depressing of all was to realize there never will be any more Weepies albums because they got divorced. They tell you there's a point in your life where everyone gets married, they tell you there's a point in your life where everyone has kids, but no one tells you there's going to be a point in your life where everyone gets divorced!

But we can pretend these kind of things don't happen if we listen to a twenty-year-old Weepies album. It has a lot of good tracks, but "Slow Pony Home" is one of my favorites:

I need to seek out some of Deb Talan's solo work, but I haven't got there yet.

Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)

I want to say I discovered Regina Spektor thanks to Pandora back when I was in grad school, but who knows. All her albums are great, and I particularly enjoy Soviet Kitsch (2003) and Far (2009), but if we're looking for one that came out when I was squarely in college, that would be Begin To Hope. Like most of her albums, it has a lot of quirky, up-tempo energetic music despite its often dark topics. Just today, I listened to "That Time," which segues from her discussion of different kinds of cigarettes she likes:

Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros?
Hey, remember that time when I would only smoke Camels?
Hey, remember that time when I was broke?
I didn't care; I just bummed from my friends.

...into a discussion of when her friend overdosed:

Hey, remember that time when you OD'ed?
Hey, remember that other time when you OD'ed for the second time?
Well, in the waiting room while waiting for news of you,
I hallucinated I could read your mind,
And I was on a lot of shit too, but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky.

Remember that time the world was simpler? Not sure I could explain why this song does but it does.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Show Your Bones (2006)

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are a punk band, another my friend Andrew got me into during grad school. My favorite album by them is 2009's It's Blitz!, but their album that actually came out when I was in college was Show Your Bones. My favorite track from this one is probably "Cheated Hearts":

Cheated by the opposite of love,
Held on high from up up up above,
Kept my high from the second one,
Kept my eye on the first one.

Now take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.
Take these rings and stow them safe away,
I'll wear them on another rainy day.

Is the lyrics website I just looked at right? I always thought it was "stow them safely." Anyway, I very rarely feel like I know what any Yeah Yeah Yeahs song is actually about but I always enjoy the vibe.

Goldfish, Caught in the Loop (2006)

I got into Goldfish a bit later than all the other entries on this list. They're a South African electronica group; when my wife spent her summers doing field work in South Africa, the South Africans in her group like to blare them while working, and I ended up hooked too. There's a lot of good music here to blast, but my favorite from this album is "The Four Forty Five Blues."

Chill but you can also jam out to it I guess? Good music to grade by or do the dishes to; as a middle-aged millennial, these are my most common activities while listening to music.