#musicae

Árstíðir - Heyr himna smiður (Icelandic hymn) in train station

There is a photo in the booklet of a young Stevens, at the table, eating a banana. It's one of a few photos in the booklet that seem to depict some of those Oregon summers: a beach spotted with rocks, a small half-painted wooden house near trees and hills. His look is not happy or sad; he's just a kid at a table, eating. But there's something melancholic there, something maybe you add onto it after listening to Carrie & Lowell, but something real nonetheless: His mother is standing beside him. She's not looking at him, but she's there. (She appears in three shots, and in none of them can you see her eyes.) You imagine Lowell took the picture (on the back of the booklet you see his reflection in the mirror of a photo taken of Carrie crocheting). It's a haunting feeling that that little kid, years later, would create a masterpiece so knowing about suffering, sadness, death, and loneliness. In that photo, though, he's still a kid, with all those kid hurts, trying to make sense of the world. And, at least for that moment, he's close to his mother. And it seems like maybe he's happy.

By Brandon Stosuy

The song’s title is a nod to an American ritual of measuring our lives with a celebrity death — in this case, the death of “Night Stalker” serial killer Ramirez. Kozelek is on a flight home to Cleveland to attend a funeral (“Got a death in the family, gotta do some grieving”), mentally noting that public deaths help us “mark time” and go back in our minds to “when we were kids scared of taps on the window.” There is pathos at that remembrance, an innocent fear recalled through the prism of more pressing ones: The ambivalence at seeing a childhood friend “who still lives with his mom/ When he’s not in jail from innocent stalking”; the dread of realizing that your drummer — who’s only a couple of years older than you — is the same age as a recently deceased star (James Gandolfini). In his panicky strumming and staccato delivery of the lyrics, you feel the burden of having to cart around so much accumulated dread.

Both Kozelek and Louis C.K. are mining the same rich soil of loneliness and dignity. Louie is different not only because it’s a fragmentary comedy, but also because it’s told from the external gaze of contemporary culture. In the exhaustively dissected “fat girl rant” from Season 4′s third episode, Sarah Baker points at the camera and asks Louie to imagine: “If you were standing over there, looking at us, do you know what you’d see?” “What?” he replies. “That we totally match.” We laugh with and at Louis, but almost always from outside. In deference to that idea, Season 4 features Charles Grodin as Dr. Bigelow, a delightfully aloof resident of Louie’s building whose magisterial glibness in every interaction — “You know, I’m not entirely sure what your name is, but you are a classic idiot” — stands in for our collective social judgment.

By  Kirk Walker Graves

MUSIC OF THE IRREGULAR SPHERES