I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone,” one of the greatest songs ever written, back in 2005, when it came out. I was a tasteless rube then, with only a few dollars for iTunes singles. No, I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone” yet, but when I did, I felt could have written it. It’s all the 12-year-old me felt at the time: “Hope there’s someone / Who’ll set my heart free / Nice to hold, when I’m tired.”

For over two decades, Cabbagetown—also known as my neighborhood—has held an annual chili-eating festival in the first week of November. The chili bell rings at 12:30 sharp! You get to eat from as many homemade batches as you can reach before they run out. The Dixie cups end up stacking 20 or 30 high.

In all 7½ years of Earwyrms, Halloween has yet to descend upon a Friday… until this year, baby! Oh, we’d gotten close to completing the bloody ritual in past years, but all it took was one meddling leapfrog from 2019’s Thursday to that Saturday in 2020 to completely waste a decade.

We’ve yet to perfect a word for death by thirst. “Dehydration?” Inelegant—a prefix sewn ad-hoc to an embalmed corpse. Yet rarely has the word been so necessary as today!

Last night was a most special night—the harvest moon. The first full moon in autumn has long given ancient protection to farmers and workers. She’s given us light so we could reap our crop in darkness, allowing us to race against days growing shorter, against a future growing ever colder.

Sometime in the 1990s, an incredibly rare cultural gag reflex was triggered. This was the first generational challenge of the status quo since the 1960s: queerness, for once, wasn’t necessarily a death sentence, and feminism even had a third wave. The fact is a miracle to this day.

The best adaptation of 1984 actually came out in 1985, and it was called Brazil. That’s how things go—it takes a year or so to process prophecies. By stamping it 1984, Orwell all but assured the powers that be would only mobilize once the year was safely in the rearview.

From the minute we started making these little beep boxes, we’ve been writing symphonies for them, and also inspired by them. Vaporwave, chiptune, chillwave, chop house (made up)—whatever you call it, the genre’s been blossoming. Here’s what we got as a sampler.

1975 has officially been sold as the year of the shark and the Saturday Night. These two things were the ones to last. As much as it might make you cringe to say, it’s undeniable: I’m a Brody sun, a Quint moon, a goddamn Hooper rising. A Gilda sun, a Conan moon, a Chevy… agh, you know what, fuck it.

The fountains at the Bellagio Casino are made up of spouts that dance to certain songs at each quarter of the hour (for those who didn’t already know). Over my four summers here, I have spent many 101º nights watching them, compiling a list of all the songs they play.

I feel so hot. Hasn't it been so hot, sometimes? There is a heat outside that makes me feel—bad. The heat subsides, the heat returns. The heat returns, the heat returns. And when it returns? The heat—it, the heat. It the heat—goes so over the line.

Every song I've heard this year felt like it'd be the last. It's the scorch (praise be its name!)—every drive, I blast my mounted phone with max AC. It's a prayer that keeps it from overheating.

Often, one massive sensation gets split into two—or three, or four, or seven—different words over time, for the sake of convenience or the human urge to atomize. One example: “feel” and “hear” mean, in a prelingual sense, the same thing.

Writer’s block snuck in through the doggy door in January—I’ve found that phrase is a more palatable way to say "techno-fascist despair." The soul rots in blue light, and that’s all my cell offers anymore. Oh, I still touch grass, believe me! The last clumps those bastards burn will have to be pulled from my purple fists.

The house where I grew up was two miles from Highway 61. That’s the historic blues highway that Bob Dylan referenced with Highway 61 Revisited, his 1965 album that, in turn, gave the film A Complete Unknown its name from a lyric in “Like a Rolling Stone.”

For years, my favorite song was 7 minutes long. I never chose to have “All My Friends” hit me how it did, but I can justify it: 7 minutes is the perfect length. Temporal mathematics have divine standards­ too—like the Fibonacci sequence in the natural world, in music, 7 holds liminal significance.

Places where the land ends are pure—you can hear water like that a mile away. Oceans are perfect, even radical, in their isolation. You could swim out into the sea as far as you like, if what you wanted was to drown, yet this desire to be free is forever compelling.

Bon Iver will be releasing the fifth album of their two-decade career this Friday. The elation this gives me is hard to overstate. Judging by the singles, it’ll be a masterpiece, for me—one that speaks to those silent floods that make up a private life. In truth, so far he has made four of my dearest albums on planet Earth.

As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously, but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia,

March is, generally speaking, when a lot of the year’s best music starts coming out of the woodwork. Think last year: Cindy Lee, Adrienne Lenker, Vampire Weekend, Challengers score (okay, technically April). Think Scaring the Hoes the year before that. The story of music in the 2020s is the story of March.