More New Songs of the Day

Thoughts on new music by My Morning Jacket, Lucy Dacus, Jason Isbell, Samia, Mei Semones, and the mighty Horsegirl.

This is week #3 of my New Song of the Day feature on Substack Notes — my favorite brand-new tracks, accompanied by short reviews. I’ve been posting roughly one a day; if you haven’t been seeing them, subscribe or follow me, and they should pop up in your Notes feed regularly.

It’s been an experiment. A friend suggested I might shift New Song of the Day posts into the form of quick-hit daily newsletters, so he’d have a new song waiting in his inbox each morning to enjoy with his coffee. Songs would be easier to locate, plus I could punch up posts with extra links when necessary. (My shout-out of the new My Morning Jacket single, for example, is centered on a piano loop sampled from an obscure LP; in newsletter format here, I included both the MMJ song and the sample source.)

What do you think? A song a day, M-F, in your inbox and on your Substack homepage feed? Let me know! I’d continue posting them to Notes, too, and compiling them in playlists (with bonus cuts) for paid subscribers.

For now, here’s a rewind of last week’s songs, with updated playlists below. Enjoy!

New Song of the Day #16 - Samia “Bovine Excision”

Any song that begins “Diet Dr. Pepper, Raymond Carver/ Sitting in the bathtub …” has my attention; extra points if its deflecting title suggests a death metal song (it’s not). I encountered Samia’s “Honey” in August 2023 driving to Cape Cod with my wife and kid, and its sun-kissed hopefulness became our song of the summer. This 1st single from her LP due in April takes its title from a possibly-satanic form of livestock mutilation (see the recent New Yorker piece) — a metaphor slyly conjured in warm, writerly indie-rock, its lyrical snapshots lit with rhythmic sleights-of-hand and a faint chill of goth that destabilizes things just so. It captures the apprehensive mood in America right now. Breathe; just remember to breathe.

New Song of the Day #15 - My Morning Jacket “Time Waited”

Thinking about time’s passage today, as I stare at the spot of light four years ahead. This song speaks to how our relationships slow time, or speed it up. The forthcoming album is called is [sic], their 10th studio set, amazingly. I first saw MMJ in 2002 at the Mercury Lounge in NYC — Jim James clutching his flying V in a cloud of hair-tosses, a time-travelling Southern rocker hollering like some dude in a silo (where in fact he used to record those reverb-y vocal tracks). I love the piano loop that flows through this song, like a stream beneath ice promising springtime, and the soaring bridge quoting a Stones song, next-gen classic rock dudes fist-bumping their forebears. Similarly, the piano sample is off “Blue Jade” (below) from Emmons Guitar Inc., a beautiful, jazzy, self-released, beyond out-of-print set by pedal steel hero Buddy Emmons. It’s from 1971, perhaps (or earlier; no one seems sure) and known among heads as “The Black Album” for it’s b&w jacket, confirming once again that any album with that nickname will contain lava-hot guitars.

New Song of the Day #14 - Mei Semones “Dangomushi”

From Ann Arbor MI, she landed in Brooklyn, as one does after studying music at Berklee. Her mischievous bossa nova-ish guitar lines dart like bottle rockets, sketching songs I guess we should call indie rock? They make their case alternately in English, Japanese and vocalese. Her EP last year was great, an LP is due in Spring. Here’s a taste of the latter; not entirely sure what she’s singing about, but what I can make out is uplifting, and the video (just released, though the single slipped out late last year) helps translate a bit. One to keep an eye + ear on, for sure.

New Song of the Day #12 + #13 - Lucy Dacus “Ankles” “Limerence”

Boygenius: Kind of a miracle really, a supergroup frequently exceeding the sum of its thoroughly-great parts. Dacus strikes me as the book nerd-iest, in the best ways, and I hear it in her storytelling. “You are gonna make me tea” she sings here with gentle assurance, maybe the sexiest line in a very sexy song; the shifty power dynamics make it more so. It’s one of two fine singles that dropped yesterday from her forthcoming album, this one with a sparkly ‘80s pop vibe and 19th-century- women’s-lit-sitting-room-chamber-music set design, w/ cello and harpsichord up front. “Limerence,” meanwhile, is a torch ballad waltz with an excellent title — a not-so-still life with a blunt smoldering, a dude playing Grand Theft Auto with disturbing mastery, and a narrator wrestling with her heart. Judging from these, and Julien Baker’s new duet with Torres, Boygenius has made its members even better solo artists. Would that all our alliances worked like that.

New Song of the Day #11 - Horsegirl “Switch Over”

Speaking of trios: Phonetics On and On, by the Chicago-bred Horsegirl, is due in February, and it’s probably the album I’m most stoked for this season — if their “2468” and “Julie” hadn’t been released last year, I’d New Song them, too. The touchstones for their impressive 2022 LP Versions of Modern Performance, finished when they were in high school, seemed to be Lush and Pavement (who Horsegirl has toured with). The new stuff is quieter and makes me think of The Raincoats and Young Marble Giants — perfectly-turned playground chants whose seeming stream-of-consciousness is so convincing, I keep replaying them to catch the sleight-of-hand, and because they’re so damn catchy. “Switch Over” has a ramshackle New Order bassline and nods to “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, another trio with a woman’s voice at its center. Which is also fitting, as singer-guitarists Penelope Lowenstein and Nora Cheng are currently living in NYC and attending NYU (where, full disclosure, I sometimes teach, though I’ve never met them). Fwiw, I’d bet they’re “A” students, and that they’d prefer not to discuss it. PS - the new songs are beautifully produced by Cate Le Bon, an artist I really like who is shining lately as a producer (see Wilco’s Cousin). She’s really got a sound.

Song of the Day #10 - Jason Isbell “Bury Me”

“Bury me in the last few lines/of an obituary of these tryin’ times” Jason Isbell sings, with smoldering weariness, on the debut song from his forthcoming LP — a solo set, minus the 400 Unit, his Crazy Horse. It’s “country” in the classic sense, built to last, with verses that could’ve been handed down generations or penned yesterday. “I ain’t no cowboy, but I can ride/ and I ain’t no outlaw, but I been inside/ and there are bars of steel, boy, and there are bars to sing/ and there are bars with swingin’ doors, for the times between.” He’s got another film role on tap (in RZA’s long-awaited auteurist action-film One Spoon of Chocolate). But it’s good to know he’s not quittin’ his day job.