On her new single “Puppy and a Truck,” Jenny Lewis reaches a pinnacle of easygoing self-assurance. As a songwriter, Lewis forged her legend, alongside her Rilo Kiley bandmates, by crafting pointed, poignant, decorticating songs about living with depression. Her process … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Jenny Lewis, “Puppy and a Truck”

On her new single “Cleo,” Shygirl takes the groove seriously. Augmented by strings, the song locks in to a smooth house beat as Shygirl claims the name Cleopatra and coos “You got me feeling like a movie star.” The track … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Shygirl, “Cleo”

Guitarist Leo Nocentelli helped form New Orleans band the Meters in the middle of the nineteen-sixties. The mostly served as studio backups on recordings made for Allen Toussaint’s Sansu Enterprises record label, a sort of Funk Brothers of the swampy … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Leo Nocentelli, “Give Me Back My Loving”

A mild panic rose a couple years ago, when Mitski announced she was withdrawing from the music-biz grind for an indefinite period of time. She had to take to social media to remind her devotees that “indefinite” is foremost a … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Mitski, “Working for the Knife”

It’s been twenty-six years since Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill. The album was a sensation, launching her to pop superstardom. The relative suddenness of her transition from obscurity to omnipresence combined with her youth made it see like a … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Deep Sea Diver, “Hand in My Pocket”

Hailing from Portland (the Maine one, not the Oregon one), Weakened Friends hit that fuzzy-end-of-the-lollipop sweet spot with their new single, “Quitter.” It’s got all the elements that time served in my particular era — or eras, really — of … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Weakened Friends, “Quitter”

Adia Victoria maintains that her new album, A Southern Gothic, is an act of reclamation. She takes back all that belongs to her and her kindred, in race, in culture, in gender, in every part of her identity that has … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Adia Victoria, “You Was Born To Die”

I often hear the famous Toni Morrison quote “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it” modified to speak to the particular need to fill gaps in the … Continue reading This Week’s Model — MUNA, “Silk Chiffon (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”

For those who are driven into recurring bouts of disappointment and misery because onetime titan of melancholy pop Morrissey now devotes his energy to finding novel ways to demonstrate he’s a wanker, I would like to remind you that Johnny … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Johnny Marr, “Spirit, Power and Soul”

If the likes of Haim can create elegant throwbacks to nineteen-seventies pop that somehow sound modern and fresh, then surely there’s a vast tract of fertile ground in reviving and reinventing the R&B groove of the same area. That’s what … Continue reading This Week’s Model — Amber Mark, “Foreign Things”