Songs For Autumnal Malaise
Our first annotated playlist is now available for your listening pleasure (wallowing, more accurately) on Spotify and Soundcloud. ‘Autumnal malaise’ refers to the general sociocultural, and also emotional/internal current of ceaseless tiredness, numbness, loneliness, and, at times, occasionally, love-iness of autumn—what seems to be the case for most people lately. The songs are complex because the feelings are complex; there’s not just ‘sad’ music but rather music that touches and merges different sensations that articulate autumn very well, in various ways. Read below, or, feel free to just listen to the playlist and ignore our commentary—the playlist is linked above and also embedded below.
“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” — Weyes Blood
Weyes Blood is a menace, and I mean that in the most admiring way possible. I adore her work, consider her to be in my top five favorite artists ever, and she never disappoints. When she finally released new music, there was, of course, the silly concern that Nothing Could Ever Live Up To Titanic Rising (because apparently women are allowed One masterpiece per lifetime or something, I don’t know). This song—along with the other single, “Grapevine”—proved, to me, that her genius is immutable and constant and not limited to one album or era. There’s that unique, gutting softness present here, that seems to inflect most of her music, and it’s always disarming. You have to listen to the lyrics a few times to move beyond the beauty of her vocals and to recognize the pain beneath what she’s singing, and I love music like this, that pushes us towards a layered consideration rather than just a first impression. “Sitting at this party / Wondering if anybody knows me / Really sees who I am” opens the song, and the crushing fact, of feeling fundamentally unknowable/unknown/unseen, arises next to the mundane, at another party. That line catches precisely the feeling I seem to experience at every party or social gathering I go to these days, and the jaded sort of yearning for something beyond surface-attention, beyond empty crowdedness. Alienation at its most acutely worded and felt.
The song spirals outwards in that way so characteristic of Natalie Mering’s style, and it’s immersive, holding you in its gaze of recognition, because “it’s not just me, it’s everybody” and so at least we’re all rotting together here on this flaming earth. Side note: kind of feels similar to “That Funny Feeling,” or, at least, describing that same peculiar existential malaise that’s become a cliche now, but Mering makes that sensation completely new and full of depth.
“Earlier Days” — Zsela
I recently discovered Zsela’s music and I’m entranced by it—her vocals are entirely unique, gorgeous, and quietly immense, and the weight of the song’s melancholy feels buoyed by its tenderness. The song reminds me heavily of Sade, actually, their voices similarly haunting and gentle in equal measure, and the melody of the music itself feels reminiscent of an early Sade song, slow and lush with lyricism that feels like a warm hand in your hair. “Faith will fade away like it does,” Zsela sings, and autumn often distills to this perpetual and difficult knowledge, coming back, filling your throat as with leaves; but we return to “those earlier days that I was in your heart.” We return, cyclical, and her voice reverberates, tripled. Nostalgia, if we are to follow its etymology, is literally the pain of homecoming, the pain of reverberations, of going home and finding that home isn’t anywhere identifiable anymore.
“You’re Smiling (But I Don’t Believe You)” — Margaret Glaspy
AH. This song. This song cuts. My friend once emailed me about finding this song on one of my (approximately 5 million) playlists and crying to it/about it and now I sort of associate it with her and that period of time, defined by all the ways we tried to communicate our pain(s) to each other, and failed, and still kept grasping, reaching. Glaspy has a deep, rich, uniquely shuddering sort of voice, and it’s haunting, mesmerizing, quiet in its movements even as it pierces you. All the ways we try to explicate our suffering and find ourselves unable to do so, to open our mouths, to drop our smiles. I’m thinking about Eula Biss’ now well-known essay “The Pain Scale” here: an essay about physical and chronic pain, which I myself experience a not insignificant amount of, but also, I think, applicable to the attempts to share and translate emotional and psychic pain, too: “The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father’s, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.”
“Folding” — Abimaro
“Folding” is perhaps the most romantic song on this playlist—romantic, yes, as in, burnt up with longing, but also, there’s that caveat here, too, telling us that feelings may not be reciprocated, that this act of ‘folding’ might not have the effect we want. Her voice is river-like and beautiful, careful, attentive to every little notch and curve of the song. You can wade into it and stay there, listening, and feel like you’re hearing water move against rocks, like you’re in the physical space of the song and not just hearing it.
“The Loch Ness Monster” — Matilda Mann
Mann’s songwriting is intricate and strange, reminds me of strands of kelp drifting through grey water and pearls bled from their shells: a dramatic way of saying, she’s really good. Her songs haunt. And haunt. And haunt. This song evokes all things and feelings unknown, unknowable, uncanny, infinite and hidden. I’ve been lighting my Santa Muerte candles (I’m half-Mexican, so, she’s everywhere in my life) and attending secular communal mourning rituals and outgrowing my own shape; there is so much to lose, always, but loss is fertile, too, can be, at least. There’s a lot of mystery embedded into loss that I myself have a difficult time really believing in, and I think this song kind of brushes up against that feeling in a particularly odd, lovely way; “I’m just swimming in lakes in my mind / Too afraid to get out and deny / And my coy little smile will defend me a while / So I’ll stay with the lakes in my mind.”
“Old Bone” — Wet
Think of all the leftovers that live and rot in your fridge, how you might forget about them and open the door one day to smell something rancid and sour. It’s gross, but also: who hasn’t felt like a discarded leftover dish, like an old bone, in the “back of the fridge” one time or another? Or, most of the time, these days? This is one of my favorite Wet songs and it’s a delicately sung, delicately balanced melding of feelings, of loneliness, but most identifiably, emptiness, the kind that comes from being, in any sense, with “no home, if it’s not with you.” The constant fraying and cutting and deforesting of ourselves for the sake of others: who hasn’t craved a warm bed to crawl into, any place that feels like we might be welcome there rather than inviting ourselves?
"Overstimulated” — Okay Kaya
We love Okay Kaya. She’s just fucking fantastic. This song is why: she takes seemingly weird abject images that somehow perfectly, poignantly, even, translate an amorphous sensation into a precise description. She fumbles in the dark to try and make some sense of herself and we’re there with her. “Anything could happen / At any given time / No wonder you’re overstimulated.” I mean. Such is life, such is being a cognizant and sentient human being in 2022, yes? “I’ll be the odd shape hurting / I’ll be the crust in your eye.” She takes disparate, odd images and delivers them so clearly that you immediately know there’s no other way to say these things. Anyways: this song epitomizes the way fall can feel like a forced reckoning with your own despair, and just the overwhelming of being a person, alive in this wold, period.
“August” (cover) — MUNA
Taylor’s original version is spectacular and equal proportions tender/longing-sick/wrenching, but MUNA’s cover of “August” does what I think the best and most interesting covers do: make it new, unfolding the song, revealing textures and meanings that would otherwise remain unrealized. This cover expands the loneliness and wistfulness of the original; Katie Gavin’s voice is like a wisp of warm light against your shoulder, but you’re sitting in a cemetery instead of on a salt-air/rust-on-your-door beach, so, you know—the summer is a ghost here, and it aches. This cover reminds me of this part of Paul Celan’s poem “Corona,” in which he writes: “My eye goes down to my lover’s sex: / We gaze at each other, / We speak of dark things, / We love each other like poppy and memory, / We sleep like wine in the seashells, / Like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam.” The sensuality embedded in Taylor’s lyrics (“twisted in bedsheets”) and the parallel imagery of wine (“August sipped away like a bottle of wine”) suggest the same quality of love-that-lingers and reaches towards the dark; MUNA converts the flushed-desire-drunk mood of the original song into a subdued version that feels farther away from the summer, from August, that feels like the memory of “sleeping like wine in the seashells” and “poppy and memory” love. That’s all to say: it’s fucking gorgeous, so listen to it, and hurt, in a good way.