Sofia Bolt x Stella Donnelly – Bus Song
Similar artists: Stella Donnelly, Big Thief
Genre: Indie Rock
When all is said and done, few people will remember the chores that they needed to do their entire lives with much fondness. No, they’ll think about them as things that stole their time, their energy and robbed them of the opportunity to do other, greater things. To many, regular life isn’t just boring, it’s a vampire that takes away the opportunity of doing great things.
But it takes an artist’s eye to look not just at terrible things but at unremarkable things and dress them up in a natural glow as pure as the morning Sun. Seeing things this way, sure, is very impractical. It won’t land you any jobs working in an office. Not even people stuck inside of one want to be told how beautiful life really is if you look at it in the right way.
Sofia Bolt x Stella Donnelly’s “Bus Song” is a remarkably pretty song that you’d imagine might come ringing in your mind on the most unremarkable day. But, this isn’t a hippie fantasy either. There’s a droning, hazy tone to the composition that saves it from being too colorful. It’s too sophisticated to be adopted by people who spend their weekends chasing Peruvian shamans down for an ayahuasca ceremony. No, it’s just artists trying to life the vel off of a completely ordinary day.
Emerson Bruno – Sincerely
Similar artists: Wilco, The Felice Brothers, Spoon, The Kinks, The Replacements
Genre: Alt Country, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
Rock songs used to mean something, right? And rock bands used to stand for something, yes? Well, not always. But, indeed, most of the bands and artists that mattered lent their voices, as much as they knew how, to just causes. Better still, some of the sillier ones knew when to avoid those. Nobody is missing Poison’s acoustic ballad calling for peace in the Middle East.
The world seems ready to explode if you’re watching the modern news channels or revisiting folk songs of the 1960s. But, in many ways, things are getting better. There are fewer military uprisings. In places like the Balkans or Latin America, democracies are headed by presidents who occasionally finish their terms. There is less poverty in places like Africa or East Asia. And people all over the world feel like they have a stake in what’s going on. Maybe this is why murderous wars feel so unjust. We don’t want them. We could stop them. Nobody is asking our opinion.
Emerson Bruno’s “Sincerely” is an old-fashioned country-rock number led by an old-fashioned hippie ideal for peace, and we need more songs and more people like this. It’s written by someone who sees the absurdity of our ways, someone who’s going to fight without violence as a tool. It’s the path of non-resistance, of writing letters and songs, and of convincing regular people that, at this point in history, they can change the world one kind word at a time.
