Today at Crucial Tracks: Monster Ballads, by Josh Ritter
I have a live version of this song from Josh’s 2020 Hell Yeah! album that’s so deeply searching and beautiful, with Sam Kassirer performing this delicate piano part that just lifts me up.
Today at Crucial Tracks: Sabotage, by Beastie Boys
What’s your go-to song for getting ready in the morning?
This is more of a gotta go, gotta go now kind of song, but it’s definitely right for some kind of mornings.
Today at Crucial Tracks: Across the Wire, by Calexico
Share a song that sounds like your favorite weather.
What a provocative prompt. I think one of my favorite weathers is a clear sky in pre-dawn light, a cool morning before a warming day.
Listening Post is such a great scrobbling solution. I’ve been listening to a lot of radio and am really happy that it works so well to capture that listening and mark favorite new tracks.
The improvements that Qobuz are making with their beta apps is really nice, and this alternative Qobuz theme by Jon Hicks is a great illustration of how much impact a thoughtful design has.
I’ve just recently began to find that newer releases of Qobuz provide the continuity across devices that I’ve missed from Rdio for years. I think this is because Qobuz Connect creates a link between devices that hasn’t previously existed. It’s great: I can listen in the car, and then pick up at the same place from my desk. It’s a little thing that makes a huge difference, and nothing since the good days of Rdio has done it in such a seamless way.
The rest of the family slept late enough on Christmas Day that I started a Project — the proper sorting of the albums, which had been in a jumble ever since we moved.
I’ve updated my annual last.fm summary stats app for 2025. I’m really happy with this year’s changes: The app should be faster for most users and it offers a simpler couple of visuals, displaying a shareable card for your top “new to you” artists as well as for your top overall artists of the year. It’s fun to update this year over year. If you’re a last.fm user, I hope you’ll try it out!
Such great reflections on joy and the current moment, in this essay by Lawrence Peryer on seeing David Byrne’s tour:
Depression has a gravitational field. It pulls everything toward itself, including time, attention, hope, the ability to feel pleasure in the moment it’s happening. You can know intellectually that your kids are a source of joy, that your partner loves you, that the music is beautiful. You can know it and still feel the absence of it, the gap between knowing and feeling.
Byrne’s show is not letting the audience hide in that gap. The joy isn’t theoretical. It’s not aspirational content you can file away for later. It’s happening right in front of you, thirteen people smiling at each other with genuine affection, moving in choreographed celebration of being alive together, and the invitation is implicit: this could be you. This should be you.
Seven years since the last time, I saw Josh Ritter in concert last night. He played from a small stage in a cathedral, flanked by wood and stone and stained glass, giant pillars, and Sam Kassirer at a grand piano. It was a joyful show that made me feel like part of a community in this city where we now live.
Every heart is a package, tied up in knots someone else tied.