#ratboys

All around, it's in the stars!

Do you want to listen to more small musicians?

Do you just want to take me down a peg by obliterating this score?

You do? Okay yay!

Look at the reblogs for recommendations of artists I love and wish were more popular so they would tour near me because their music is so good!

(“Small” was determined by this poll; the median was 100k-500k, so I went with 500k as the max)

Or, if the links are not working, there is a list below:

Just like the crisp weather, which took its leisurely time arriving this year, my annual autumn mixtape is finally here in all its winsome, melancholic glory. So while you're putting on layers and indulging in seasonal introspection, enjoy these wistful, guitar-driven vibes of the Autumn mix 15th edition. Click here to listen to this mix in its entirety via Spotify / Apple Music. Enjoy!

Ada Lea - something in the wind

Snocaps - Wasteland

Whitney - Back to the Wind

Flock of Dimes - Long After Midnight

Ratboys - Light Night Mountains All That

Florist - Gloom Designs

Drugdealer & Weyes Blood - Real Thing

Jeff Tweedy - Enough

Skullcrusher - Dragon

Big Thief - How Could I Have Known

Kacy Hill - The Garden

This Is Lorelei & MJ Lenderman - Dancing in the Club

August Ponthier - Karaoke Queen

Tombstone Poetry - Bear Down

Wednesday - Elderberry Wine

Cass McCombs - Peace

Gordi - Broke Scene

The Mountain Goats - Rocks in My Pockets

Kacey Musgraves - If The World Burns Down

Andrew Montana - Silver Fish

Neko Case - Rusty Mountain

S. Carey - Daylight

Horsegirl - 2468

Lord Huron - Watch Me Go

Kate Bollinger - What’s This About (La La La…)

Sharon Van Etten - Idiot Box

Matt Berninger - Little By Little

Jensen McRae - Daffodils

Dean Johnson - Death of the Party

Ethel Cain - Nettles

I was finishing up yet another listen of the excellent new Kevin Morby record the other day when it occurred to me that the final track is a kindred spirit to the closer of Ratboys' (coincidentally, also excellent) new record. Morby's "Field Guide For The Butterflies" and Ratboys' "At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood" close their respective projects on a note of grace, finding slivers of serenity in retreat to the natural world and offering nuanced but ultimately optimistic takes on how to move forward through the dizzying, suffocating reality of everyday life.

There's obvious musical similarity, with both tracks stripping down to plaintive lead vocals and breezy supporting instrumentation. They convey a similar sense of sonic resolution, but the lyrical commonalities are especially notable. They earnestly sing of mornings and fresh starts (always a welcome trope at the end of a record). Morby hits the open road in his Econoline, while Julia Steiner and crew sail away to "leave my old life behind." They both even address the inevitability of death and lean towards accepting time's passage with a mix of dignity and defiance. Morby squeezes all the juice he can out of this life trying "to grow wings," and Steiner hints that the titular patch of woods is a source of eternal peace.

What really cements the songs' bond, I think, is their shared emphasis on friendship as a way to mitigate pain and joyfully live out shared values of community and love — Steiner even went so far as to cite Winnie The Pooh as an influence on the song, which is so wholesome it hurts. There's something particularly beautiful about saying it as plainly as "where there are my friends, there are happy times" and "laugh through the pain / it doesn't hurt so bad when I am with my friends." I'm grateful for these albums and songs and will always think of them as cousins — which got me thinking about other songs I think of in that vein, and more broadly about when artists are seemingly in conversation with each other across the years.

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In the "songs that are cousins" category, a few other candidates immediately come to mind — Hop Along's "Sally II" and Nervous Dater's "Farm Song" are earthy, country-indebted outliers on otherwise emo-heavy albums. Sticking with the Ratboys theme, I previously wrote that their 2023 epic "Black Earth, WI" was "the stonier, less abrasive cousin" to Wednesday's ferocious "Bull Believer." Which brings me to instances of music as both homage and conversation, something that Wednesday is unparalleled in the modern era at making manifest.

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One of the many things I love about Wednesday is Karly Hartzman's willingness to wear influences on her sleeve; she talks openly about the writing process and how she layers those influences into her own songs. "Chosen To Deserve" is a prime example of this metatextual spirit — she explains "I heard “Let There Be Rock” by Drive-By Truckers. The premise is describing a fucked-up childhood, basically, and I wanted to write that song but use all my memories instead." Even DBT's straightforward chord progression played a part in how the song was structured, relying only on three chords in service of simplicity and accessibility. And going one layer deeper, "Let There Be Rock" is a nod to the 1977 AC/DC album of the same name...will circle back if it turns out there's a reference to a reference to a reference to a reference I haven't yet peeled back.

"Bitter Everyday" also invokes one of the great American songwriters, alluding to Iris DeMent's "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day," a deeply mournful portrait of lower-middle class decline that's somewhat perversely become one of my most reliable comfort songs. Elsewhere, "Bath County" lifts multiple memorable lines from Loudon Wainwright III's "I Am the Way (New York Town)." "Fate Is..." borrows from the Arthur Russell classic "What It's Like" and "Hot Rotten Grass Smell" opens Rat Saw God with a Bill Callahan reference. It's impossible not to hear the opening riff of Dolly Parton's "Gettin' Happy" in the re-recorded version of "Phish Pepsi," and "The Way Love Goes" owes a debt of gratitude to, naturally, Merle Haggard's "That's the Way Love Goes." (Bonus reference — it's self-evident that MJ Lenderman's "Knockin" would not exist if it weren't for Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" before it.)

All these references fit seamlessly into the band's oeuvre and serve to enrich their lyrical depth, contextualizing the band's sound and explicitly placing them in a unique songwriting lineage. Discussing Callahan's "The Well," Hartzman notes the immediate resonance to her own personal life, along with her tendency to "collect stuff by tone." For someone with similarly avid music collection habits, it's so cool to witness my favorite band continuously layer in these easter eggs throughout their catalogue.

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I also love the path that songs can take changing hands from artist to artist over the years — Kate Wolf writing the stunning "Across The Great Divide" in the 1980s would have been more than enough on its own, but Nancy Griffith and Emmylou Harris valiantly breathed new life into her words in the 90s, as did Little Mazarn just last year. Shoutout Iris DeMent for backing me up ahead of this live cover — "this song of Kate's that I also think of as Nancy's song; in my mind, they're kind of merged somehow."

Cataloguing the full scope of artists who have covered "A Satisfied Mind" would be a fool's errand, but what a joy to hear the old country standard turned into Bon Iver's intensely emotional and vocoder-smothered interpretation, just as with Lucinda Williams' and Loretta Lynn's more traditional takes decades prior (not to mention Vampire Weekend's own interpolation!).

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