Floating Above a Piano in its Ocean Grave

ISSUE #214

With cracked hands and bleary eyes I bring you a playlist comprised almost entirely of songs that came out on this very day, pulled from every stage of the artistic career arc—from veterans like Built to Spill still releasing new albums after decades of fantastic work to mid-career millennial masters like Father John Misty and Arctic Monkeys, all the way down to flag-planting newcomers like Jockstrap and Sudan Archives, whose brilliant Natural Brown Prom Queen is my favorite album to drop in a minute. Waxahatchee and Jess Williamson’s duo Plains released “Abilene,” their second single, a stripped-down small-town masterpiece that suggests this will be one hell of an album. Plus, Ruth Radelet has reemerged after the dissolution of Chromatics, and it’s nice to see her actually release new music now that she’s out from under the thumb of Johnny Jewel.

A throughline for these songs in particular is a sound I call the “weird lullaby,” and not only because there’s been a resurgence of lounge music amongst the indie elder statesmen: Arctic Monkeys has a velvet-curtained smokers cut from their upcoming The Car, and, while I’m late to it, I just learned about Father John Misty breaking his four-year press silence with the big band, mid-century jazz album Chloë and the Next 20th Century. It makes sense, I suppose, that some time after four albums you might want to slow down, play a cinematic fantasy standing in front of a beehive microphone with a glass of brandy as the band plays on behind you. It’s a tempting chord to strike, and it almost always works for me.

I came to “weird lullabies” because I finally watched Jane Campion’s The Piano this week. In the film, Holly Hunter plays Ada McGrath, a woman who has been mute since the age of six. She is shipped off by her father to marry Stewart, played with sinister skill by Jurassic Park’s Sam Neill, in a remote part of New Zealand. Though she cannot speak, she does not feel she’s silent—she has her piano, which Hunter played herself on camera, having learned the instrument at the age of nine. At least, she had piano, before Stewart forced her to leave it on the beach for lack of patience to haul it back to the homestead, thereby cutting off her voice entirely.

It is a lush and nuanced rumination on compromise, complications, subtle bondage, agency, parenthood, and desire—but the most it has to say is about silence and sound. One line in particular keeps ringing in my head:

“I think of my piano in its ocean grave, and sometimes of myself floating above it. Down there everything is so still and silent that it lulls me to sleep. It is a weird lullaby and so it is; it is mine.”

And so we come to the title of this issue. These songs, like all those I love most, tend to wash over you, bathe the soul in texture and mood. Save silence for the grave—we will float above our pianos evermore.

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