The Hollowlung Review
Recently I feel like my voice is stagnant. It’s probably a result of analysis paralysis. I worry about being “big and small, and big and small, and big and small again” as Mitsiki sings in “Nobody.”
When I feel that dread call to dissect myself, I listen to music, and when I listen to music I listen for stories. I parse for ideas and riffs and stuff that arrests my attention with its relatability to myself and others. I feel like I have some sort of conversation in my head when I listen to an intricate song, and so when I listen to music I start to block the songs together in my head. I look to see where one song ends and another begins, and I put them together to make something new and meaningful. They’re conversations between the ideas of the artists and myself.
I came up with the idea for the Hollowlung Review after recognizing that there are few things in life that I regularly can be activated by, but music is one of them. I gobble up new music like it’s candy, and I love sequencing and resequencing it until some new collage of meaning emerges. When I feel like I don’t have anything to give, I can listen to music to revitalize my creative brain. In other words, when my voice is hollow, and I have no breath to make my own words, I use those of other creatives. The Hollowlung review is going to be a series where I (mildly egotistically) review my playlists and share what I think is neat about them.
Lions and Phoxes and Bears— Oh my!
Coping mechanisms are like a fun grab-bag of mental roulette. Are they self-abusive? Are they abusive to others? You never know what you’ll get until you have them. As for me, I cope with absurdity, because life is absurd and the more I lean in to the ridiculous the less I am rocked by the absurd things that happen. Plus it’s just fun to laugh at absurd things. Monty Python, anyone?
Lions and Phoxes and Bears, Oh My! (LPB, for short) is an absurd playlist from the get-go. The name is based off of the first band on the tracklist, Phox, an indie band which published just one folk-rock album back in the mid 2010’s. Their lead singer is Monica Martin, who has since gone on to feature on Vulfpeck and other NuFunk bands like Scary Pockets. Phox has a sweet sound, and kicks off the list solidly. I packed all of LPB with borderline-whimsical songs about being madly in love, coffee, time, and other ridiculousness like some alt-rock from Japanese band The Pillows. My favorite bit is in the middle, where I found a bunch of bands named after celebrities and stuck them one after another in this weird indie-rock jazz sequence. Organ Freeman, Harrison Fjord, and Steve Buschemi’s Dreamy Eyes have been favorites ever since I made this playlist.
These days when I make a playlist I go hard and lean into crafting an experience, but back in 2019 when I first drafted Lions and Phoxes and Bears, Oh My! I was finding my compositional voice. This playlist is important because I established my playlist formula when making it. Basically the formula is just to grab songs which have a meaningful sound and arrange them to have transitions which are technical and infuse meaning into the track sequence. It was important to me that LPB have a certain rise and fall to the pace of the songs, rather than being a proverbial junk drawer of songs. This playlist was also the first that I felt like it would be a sin to shuffle, and since finishing it I always recite the mantra:
NEVER SHUFFLE.
In LBP the songs are all meticulously explored and understood to the point that I was able to arrange a playlist with not only a general vibe, but a solid beat between the notes of interest. In other words, this playlist is where I decided that the playlist isn’t just about the killer riffs or clarion lyrics: it’s also about the way songs flow and the beats in-between. That’s what makes sequences with songs like Moon, How You Been?, and Hit the Ground Running, so significant: Nothing is put together by chance, and yet these three goofy songs by bands named after famous actors all managed to coalesce
All that said, LPB is still a bit derivative. There are ways in which it is unique and hAnDcRaFtEd and awesome, but there are plenty of other ways where you could sit in a cafe for a few hours and pick out a number of played-out millenial hits that are cornerstones of the list’s composition. However, in LBP I felt that being able to incorporate partially-popular music was more of a strength than a weakness. The breadth of musical popularity within LBP is what anchors it as a solid list: you get big indie names like OK-GO, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Passion Pit, Young the Giant, etc. alongside a litany of little fish like Little Tybee, Early Eyes, Esme Patterson, and Steve Buschemi’s Dreamy Eyes— AND IT WORKS! It was in this playlist that I discovered that good music really was just good music, and the only thing which prevents a lot of great music from blowing up is the conflict between novelty and familiarity.
To this day I’m proud of what I was able to draw out of the relationships between tracks in LBP. There are some rough transitions here and there, like mid century classic Let Her Dance from the Bobby Fuller Four falling into TenTwentyTen from Generationals like a transition hot off of the algorithm of a WASP mom’s confused pandora radio, but where there are conceptual shortcomings the beat transitions shore up the gap with a good shift in general sound.
If you like indie music of all kinds— from the coffee shop hits to the burnt-out conceptual bands to singer-songwriters— Lions Phoxes and bears, Oh My! is for you. Give it a listen through the player below, or take the link directly to the playlist by tapping here.
That’s all for now. If you listen in, leave a comment below or message me directly on social media! My handle most everywhere is @Jabbernewt (but on reddit I go by Jabberneut)
Pax,
Matt
