Dinner Music: The weekly lineup
Smokey psychedelia, lush Brazilian guitar, listening room sounds
The music this week is about transition. Finally, it’s less than one hundred degrees here in Texas. These albums and songs feel like a little bit of a chill in the air, like entering into a new season, a new era. Perhaps we can will some cool days into existence.
Claudia Lennear spent much of her career as a background soul singer and Phew was her first (and only) solo recording. The meaning is in the title — it was finally her time. The album is soulful (naturally), full of funk guitar, roiling, smokey vocals and slow, even-handed piano melodies steeped in psychedelia.
Manzanita is the common name for a kind of small evergreen tree endemic to California, but also known for it’s healing qualities. This dichotomy is present in Shana Cleveland’s album of the same name, it measures the contrast of destruction and beauty. The sounds are medicinal — Baroque and psychedelic, yet also soft and lush.
We continue with lushness of sound in Introspection, a no-vocals, Brazilian guitar wonderscape. The tones vibrate away and come back to us anew. The intervallic dimensionality plays softly with emotion — warm, haunting, somber. If it’s raining where you are, consider starting here.
On the opposite side, we move into an album that is uptempo and easy listening. No Comment! needs no comment. Consider throwing this on with a glass of nice wine on Friday. It’s simple and doesn’t ask much of you, except to enjoy the mastery of sound.
For our last album, I’ll let the artist close it out. “I have always been very interested in duality of life, that nothing is either/or but rather both, if that makes sense. There is a lot of melancholy in my songs but also hope. For me it can’t have one thing without the other. I need to get lost before I can be found. Words from Josephine Philip.
Enjoy.
The playlist is here.
Pitchfork wrote a Sunday Review about Color Him Father by Linda Martell, an incredible album by one of country music’s first commercially successful Black female artists. I wrote about it here last year.
Monday
Phew - Claudia Lennear (1973)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Tuesday
Manzanita - Shana Cleveland (2023)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Wednesday
Introspection - Luiz Bonfá (1972)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Thursday
No Comments! - Kjell Öhman (1969)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Friday
We Get Lost and Found - Josephine Philip (2022)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube / Other streaming services
Pair with:
Summer shrimp scampi with tomatoes and corn. I said it last week: make all of the summer recipes you can before it’s too late. While I am excited for cooler weather and easier walks, summer has the best cooking flavors and I will miss them.
Frauen Power Rosato. This rosé is very drinkable and very girl power. Made by a female winemaker, it’s very interesting and using Dornfelder grapes from Germany. It’s a darker rosé, so truly ~transitional.~
This essay called, ‘What is Lifestyle?’ Very relevant considering a lot of this newsletter is ultimately centered on life and style, though hopefully, not always, about lifestyle.
Speaking of lifestyle: clogs. Fuck it, it’s clogs fall/winter/spring.
Speaking of lifestyle: these wineglasses. Sorry! They are very cool!
This story by Rebecca Makkai, ‘The Plaza.’ “In both 1946 and 1947, Margie Bixby was crowned Trout Queen of the Upper Delaware River, an honor she lost in 1948 only because it wouldn’t do for the daughter of the newspaper editor—the editor of the paper that sponsored the pageant—to win three times.”
Thank you, thank you. Have a great week.