Category: Music

My album on repeat right now (it’s true, we bought a record player in 2024!) is Bleachers’ ‘Gone Now’ from 2017. I’m not always very current with music (you can’t keep up with everything) so I missed the early boat on Bleachers as a talent, but of all his albums – including his 2024 ‘A Stranger Desired’ – I find this one the most interesting and joyful (even if a lot of the songs are sadly nostalgic).

Only An Octave Apart, Anthony Roth Costanzo and Justin Vivian Bond 

While researching opera for my next novel, I was introduced to the marvelously uncanny voice of Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor who made a splash starring in the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Philip Glass’s Akhenaten. Browsing Costanzo’s recordings, I came across his collaboration with cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond

Whenever I listen to music, I’m searching for emotional devastation. 

Before I hunker down to write, early in the morning, while the world is still dark, I will often go on long drives, blasting music that incites these feelings; those that break down my walls and allow me to reach a place of raw vulnerability. Particularly if I’m writing poetry. 

I've had Jeremie Albino's record Tears You Hide playing in fairly steady rotation at our place since seeing him at the StanFest musical festival in Canso, Nova Scotia in 2023. Albino wowed me with his strong, disarming voice and confident stage presence, and he's even better in the studio. I find the jaunty second track on this album, "Angeline," perfect for shaking off the day's stresses while I'm cooking supper in the evening. "Across the Hall" is easily the best pandemic-themed tune I've come across.

Listening: Explosions in the Sky – The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place 

Reading: Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild-Built 

I came to poetry through music: strange rhyming songs and lullabies as a kid, an absolute obsession with lyrics as a teenager, and now as an eclectic collector of songs that remind me of poems in some way. So I’m recommending music—interesting music that you may not have heard before, Joshua Burnside’s Ephrata. I happened upon it a few years ago, encouraged by an album write-up that mentioned the many hours he spent on his own in a small room, recording all sorts of different sounds, and then layering them together with melody and his poetic lyrics.

I learned of Lucky Lo’s album, Supercarry, by happy coincidence. 

Needing a weeknight drink, I went to a friend’s café in Odense, Denmark, only to find the café already stuffed with guests–young and old, plain and flamboyant–hunched around the tables, a buzz of anticipation in the air. 

As winter approaches, we should start to consider what music will accompany the gloom. Like central heating, stews, and mulled wine, Toronto musician Luka Kuplowsky’s, Capturing the Evening Song, is an essential comfort to get us through the cold. Released in the guts of winter 2022, Capturing the Evening Song is a meditation collection reminiscent of work by Beverly-Glenn Copeland and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It is a dreamy, synthy contemplation on simple, daily scenes.

I recently discovered a unique album called “I am in Need of Music: Songs on Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” The Silken Water Suite with music composed by Alasdair MacLean and featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc is arresting and beautiful. The four parts are: I. The silken water is weaving and weaving; II. Dear, my compass; III. Close, close all night; IV. Breakfast song. 

Amongst those who know me, I’m not known as someone who can supply music fit for every mood. If anything, I select a song list entirely against the tenor of the evening, the moving vehicle, or the dish pit. Slow sad burners when the night is ablaze and the inverse. Not to be contrarian, but more so oblivious.