Prince is dead.

Prince is dead and I don’t know how to start talking about it.

There has been, and will continue to be, a tendency to make bold and sweeping statements about Prince’s undeniable genius and thoroughly individual place in pop culture. Prince redefined black artistry in the ‘80s, made it safe (as David Bowie had a generation before) to express any kind of identity (sexual or otherwise) you wanted to, used his global superstardom to champion unknown artists (mostly artists of color), and maintained a prodigious, peculiar and often brilliant level of output up until his final days. From first to last, Prince did exactly what he wanted to do, and he had the astonishing talent to back up that confidence.

Prince was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of musician, once who could stand tall with (and usually surpass) the greats of pop and rock music. He was Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown rolled into one. There’s a great video going around of Prince tearing into the guitar solo in an all-star tribute rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” simultaneously showing up and delighting Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood and George Harrison’s son Dhani. It’s prime Prince – he strides into the song like he strode into pop culture, with a grin and a swagger and the chops to go with it, and he basically redefines that performance, wrapping it around himself before tossing his guitar and bounding off stage as quickly as he arrived.

Lots of people have been and will be talking about all of these things, and they’re all true and worth talking about. Others will do a much better job than I would of saying all of that. For me, though, the loss of Prince is a more personal one. Prince has provided a consistent soundtrack to my entire life, and knowing that I won’t get to hear any more new music from him hurts more than I expected it would.

I think I can safely say that “1999” was my first Prince song. I was eight years old when it came out, and I vividly remember hearing both that and “Little Red Corvette” on my mother’s car radio as she drove me to whatever sporting practice I’d been enrolled in that year. I was never an outgoing kid – before music, I had books, and I was quite all right with that – and my parents, with the best of intentions, tried to make me more social by signing me up for soccer and gymnastics and basketball and Cub Scouts and on and on. The best part, for me, of all of these things was the drive back and forth, with the radio on.

As it happens, I can’t remember a world without “1999” and “Little Red Corvette” in it. 1999, which turned out to be Prince’s breakthrough record, was released the same year as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and I similarly cannot remember a world without “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” and “Thriller.” It was a great year to become musically conscious, I can tell you that. Two years later Purple Rain came out, and Prince was everywhere, and even though I was only 10, I knew “Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry” from the radio.

I know we had MTV by that point, but the first Prince video I remember seeing was “U Got the Look”, from his 1987 masterpiece Sign O the Times. And holy hell, did 13-year-old me love that video. Prince was like no one I had ever seen before. Those sunglasses. That white fur coat. There was something seamy and sexy about the video – as a good Christian kid, I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to be watching it, even though I had no idea what “this love is good, let’s get to ramming” could possibly mean. I was thoroughly intrigued.

Sign O the Times was the first Prince album I heard all the way through, too. My cousin Carol, a few years older than me, had it on cassette, and during one of our family get-togethers in New Hampshire that year, I snuck away with my Walkman and headphones and listened. (This is also how I heard The Joshua Tree for the first time.) It was awesome and befuddling. I couldn’t wrap my little mind around songs like “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker,” and “If I Was Your Girlfriend” kind of scared me. Prince was always at his best pushing at the comfort zones, being explicit and vulnerable and frank. That song is all of those things, and I’d never heard anything like it.

I didn’t buy Sign O the Times, because I was 13 and had no money. I had a job by 14 and could have bought Lovesexy, but I didn’t, because it was called Lovesexy and featured a naked Prince on the cover, and both of those things confused my still-developing mind. (I really missed out. Lovesexy is awesome.) But I did buy the Batman soundtrack, making it my first Prince album. If Batman the film was for kids, Batman the soundtrack absolutely was not. I knew by then what songs like “Lemon Crush” and “Scandalous” were about, but I still felt sort of embarrassed by them.

But I was still drawn in, and I think I know why: Prince’s best material is usually his sexiest, and his very best examines the tension between his deep religious convictions and his desire. Throughout his career, Prince looked at this dichotomy through many different lenses, and tried again and again to bring them together, to treat sex as holy and sacramental, to equate the ecstasy of sex with that of being close to God. His entire catalog can be seen as an extended dissertation on this act of reconciliation, his nearly 40-year attempt to bring the sacred and the profane into harmony.

As a teenage Christian, I was going through a similar thing, and Prince gave me the most sexually upfront art I’d ever encountered. (Keep in mind that I was still listening to Petra at the time.) Prince loved God (you couldn’t listen to a song like “The Cross” and come away with any other conclusion) and he loved sex. This was new to me, and it resonated. (Also, “Batdance” was freaking great.) Naturally I bought all of Prince’s prior records as soon as I could, which means I heard Dirty Mind and Controversy while in high school, which is pretty much the best time to hear Dirty Mind and Controversy.

At the same time, I was growing as a music listener, paying attention to credits and figuring out how it all worked. Prince’s albums contained a credit I’d never seen: “Produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince.” The man did literally everything on the majority of his material, and even at 15, I was pretty impressed by that. (Still am impressed, for the record.)

In 1992 I graduated high school and went north to Maine for college. Some albums very definitively remind me of that year – Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, for instance, or (lord help me) the Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite. One of those albums is definitely the one Prince named after an unpronounceable symbol, a symbol he would soon adopt as his name.

This record is amazing. It’s the apex of the New Power Generation, and of Prince’s dalliance with rap, and it simply glows with ambition. I worked at our college radio station, which was unlike other college radio stations in that it had a constricting top 40 format, and I would always look forward to playing “7,” one of the strangest smash singles I can think of. The album was progressive and slinky and sexy, and I adored it, even if I would still listen to songs like “Blue Light” and “The Continental” on headphones, blushing.

At that point, that was it. I was in. I’d fully recognized that Prince was an absolute genius, a musician unlike any other I could name. I was a committed fan, which means I was paying rapt attention as he started writing the word “SLAVE” on his cheek and vowing never to record for Warner Bros. again. I graduated from college in 1996 and started working at Face Magazine in Portland, and The Gold Experience was a big part of my soundtrack. (This one’s impossibly underrated.) And I was amazed when, mere months after completing his contract with Warner, Prince issued Emancipation, a three-hour album of new songs. Three hours! I’m listening to it right now, and it ranges from pretty good to very good. It’s quite an achievement.

And yeah, I joined in the ribbing when he started calling himself the Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or just The Artist for short), but I still tracked down his b-sides set Crystal Ball just to hear The Truth, the wonderful acoustic bonus disc. I suffered through Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic and reveled in the jazzy wonder of The Rainbow Children, Prince’s first album after converting to the Jehovah’s Witness faith. This conversion brought his lifelong dichotomy into sharp relief – he stopped playing his more explicit songs, and sang more openly about God. I was 28 and working for a weekly newspaper in Indiana, and I remember calling up my boss, a fellow Prince fan, breathlessly excited by how good The Rainbow Children was. (I made her a copy. She didn’t like it.)

I’d fallen on difficult times by 2004 – I was working in the HR department of a spice factory, of all things – but Prince’s almighty comeback record, Musicology, made things more bearable. I’ve never lost track of him since. (I even imported 20Ten, an album he released for free over in Europe, and loved it.) Prince has been such a consistent presence in our culture, he was like the atmosphere – we took him for granted. I never saw Prince play live. “He’ll be around forever,” I thought. I even failed to hear what turned out to be his final album, HitnRun Phase Two – I’d been waiting for a physical release. There was no rush for me. He’s Prince, he’ll have another record out in six or seven months anyway.

Prince died last Thursday after a weeks-long bout of the flu. He was only 57.

And so now I’m left to look back at all this history, and all this incredible music, and figure out what Prince has meant to me. He’s been with me my whole life, and I’ve never really thought about what I would say when he was gone. Part of me thought I’d never need to consider that, and another part thought I wouldn’t need to for at least 30 years. To lose him so young, and so suddenly, is a crime. This year has been particularly brutal to artists and musicians. 2016 has taken David Bowie, and now my generation’s David Bowie. And it’s only April.

So what does Prince mean to me? What have I learned from 30-plus years of listening to his work? Why am I so deeply affected by his death? Could I possibly put it into words?

Not yet. But here is what I know.

I’m never going to find another musician like Prince. He was one of a kind, and deliberately, determinedly so. He played two dozen instruments, possessed a versatile and powerful voice, made great-sounding records, wrote hundreds of tremendous songs, mapped out complex arrangements in his head, and to top it all off, was one of the best guitar players who ever lived. He made nearly 50 albums in his 37-year recording career, and even the worst of them feels authentic and sparkles with originality and musicianship. As a live performer, he was unbeatable, a force of nature. My generation only produced one Prince, and no one could top him.

But more than that, Prince was always wonderfully, magically himself. He did everything with an almost superhuman confidence, gliding through the world like a visitor from some other plane, warping reality around him. He was sexy because he believed he was sexy, cool because he believed he was cool. And if that helped a shy and awkward kid to embrace the weirder parts of himself and live more openly, I imagine that helped millions of other shy and awkward kids just like me. And for that I am immensely thankful.

A friend of mine made the point that Prince’s death hurts, in part, because he was still so vital, so at the top of his game. We’ve been cheated out of the 20 or 30 albums he would have made in the coming decades, and the years of live shows, and all the music in the vault that we will no doubt get to hear now won’t make up for that. Prince’s death is senseless and cruel, and has robbed the world of everything he would have done in his later years. It is, in many ways, the deepest cut in a year full of them.

But I’m choosing to be thankful for the enormous amount of music he did gift us with, and for the years we had him. It’s going to feel very strange never buying another new Prince album, never hearing another new Prince song. The air has changed, the world is different, the things we take for granted seem less certain. Hold tight to the people you love, cherish the things you enjoy. Life goes by, and baby, it’s much too fast.

Rest in peace, Prince.

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Marillion’s new album is called Fuck Everyone and Run.

If you wanted a clear sign that 2016 is one of the bleakest years ever, there it is. Marillion, traditionally one of the most thoughtful and hopeful bands on the planet, has chosen that title for their forthcoming 18th opus. And I believe Steve Hogarth when he says that the title phrase is sung in sadness, as a resigned condemnation of the self-centered and cynical world. I hope they let some light get in, but man, it’s a gray-toned year.

No album recently has epitomized that bleakness like Painting of a Panic Attack, the fifth record from Scottish band Frightened Rabbit. I was very much looking forward to it, after the powerhouse that was Pedestrian Verse, but I find I can barely listen to it. Part of the problem is that it was produced by Aaron Dressner of the National, whose sonic palette seems to be deliberately designed to grate on my nerves. Dressner has washed out all the verve here, leaving the band sounding half-awake, and the band has responded by writing some of their most boring, most National-esque songs. The preponderance of electronics don’t really help or hurt – they’re not bold enough to count as a change in style, they’re kind of just there, like the rest of this.

Combine that with an unrelenting first-person dreariness on songs like “I Wish I Was Sober” and “Woke Up Hurting” and “An Otherwise Disappointing Life” and “Die Like a Rich Boy” and “Break,” and it just gets overwhelmingly gray. Only “Still Want to Be Here” allows any optimism, but the sound, beige and listless, remains. The album is a dark cloud that the band sounds lost in, and it doesn’t make for a rewarding listen.

It’s especially oppressive lately, when here in Chicagoland, the weather has been gorgeous.

I took time out from work yesterday to indulge in a three-mile walk outside. I spent quite a bit of time last night just hanging out looking at the sky. Spring is finally here, and in fact we seem to have vaulted spring and headed straight for summer. If I wore shorts, I would be wearing shorts. It’s the kind of weather you dream about.

And that means it’s time to put away the drearier things for a while and lighten up. Of course, we’re living in a society that considers Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice to be a frothy summer film. I get depressed just reading about it. It’s not just Frightened Rabbit darkening up the music world, either. This week PJ Harvey returned with a difficult record about injustice and crumbling communities. Even Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros are getting serious on their new one. I’m rather loving the new Colin Stetson record, but it’s called Sorrow, for pity’s sake.

So what do we need, right now? We need Weezer.

I know, I know. Conventional wisdom holds that no one has needed Weezer since 1996 or so. Look, I love the Blue Album and Pinkerton as much as anyone (well, maybe not anyone), but to write off the nine albums since is to erase from history some of the best jaunty guitar pop of the past 20 years. Rivers Cuomo clearly exorcised some personal demons on Pinkerton, although it really isn’t the heart-on-sleeve masterpiece that many people claim. And since the band re-formed in 2001, he’s been on a mission to have as much fun as possible.

I say he’s done it. Has any band enjoyed the ride they’re on as much as Weezer has? From the first post-Pinkerton album, Cuomo has displayed a devil-may-care attitude about his own work. That waned somewhat when he shot for hit singles on Make Believe and the Red Album, but even those disasterpieces were flippant and funny and contained some gems. (I adore “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived,” for instance.)

You never know what you’re going to get with Weezer, and Cuomo seems to fly by instinct most of the time. He’ll duet with Lil’ Wayne one moment and get Michael Cera to play mandolin the next. He’ll call a song about missing his socks “Where’s My Sex.” He’ll put out a record called Death to False Metal. He’ll sing about girls from high school who grew up hot, and then about lonely robots. And through it all, he remains exuberantly tuneful, writing sharp and hooky pop songs and playing them through cranked-up amps.

I have been on the post-Pinkerton Weezer train for longer than many of my fellow critics (I loved and still love Raditude, one of the band’s most reviled), but lately I think people are starting to come around. Two years ago Cuomo led his merry band through one of their tightest and most solid outings, Everything Will Be Alright in the End, and now he’s followed it up with Weezer’s fourth self-titled effort, this one destined to be called the White Album. (Ballsy, that.) This new one is rightly being lauded, and I’m happy to see that.

Because the White Album is, at first glance, 34 minutes of sun-dappled fun. It’s a California album bedazzled with Brian Wilson “ooh-ooohs” and songs with titles like “L.A. Girlz” and “Do You Wanna Get High.” It’s largely music to play beach volleyball to. But this isn’t the forced fun of “Beverly Hills.” There’s a realism to the White Album that fans of those first two monoliths should appreciate. This is a record about summer narrated by a lovestruck, fearful misfit, one who just wants everything to work out. When it does work out, this record is resplendent. It’s an album by someone who knows that Brian Wilson was the saddest songwriter who ever pretended to surf away his troubles.

Has Cuomo ever sounded as upbeat and content as he does on the Wilson-orama “(Girl We Got a) Good Thing”? The production is Weezer meets Pet Sounds, Cuomo letting lines like “just a couple love birds, happy to be singing” roll off his tongue. But then here’s a darker bridge, in which he shouts, “You know you scare me like an open window.” “Wind in Our Sail” is unrelentingly sunny, firing off references to Darwin and Mendel and Sisyphus while pushing forward into a lovely future. And “King of the World” is hopeful and triumphant, an anthem about overcoming pain and fear by sticking together. “If I was king of the world, you’d be my girl, you wouldn’t have to shed one single tear unless you wanted to…”

Yeah, this record does drift into darker corners here and there. “Do You Wanna Get High” is not the non-stop party it seems – it’s about addiction, Cuomo speaking directly to the drugs: “I’ll never get tired of you.” “Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori” is an epic (well, a 3:25 epic) about fumbling, awkward attraction. I can’t even believe how much I like “Jacked Up” – my incredulity stemming at least partially from the fact that it’s called “Jacked Up” – a piano-led singalong about loss and dead flowers. And closer “Endless Bummer” is just what it sounds like, an acoustic campfire tune for the final days of a vacation that hasn’t gone as planned. “I just want the summer to end…”

The thing is, if you’re not paying attention to the sad undercurrent, you might never know it’s there. These songs are vintage Weezer, buoyant and memorable, masking insecurity and heartache with bold melodies and big guitars and an optimism that won’t stop. It’s often incredibly silly – the lyrics to “Thank God for Girls” are a wandering tale of cannolis and dragons and tender loving kisses on stab wounds and Adam in the Garden of Eden. (It’s kind of amazing.) And the whole record puts a big, warm smile on my face.

And that’s the bottom line for me right now: I want to roll my windows down and play this record. I want to dance to “Wind in Our Sail” and “(Girl We Got a) Good Thing.” It’s summer, and in 2016, the year of near-constant death and Donald Trump, this record counts as the feel-good hit I need. Yeah, it’s often sad and scary and it ends on a down note, but man, I’ll take it. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the road is open. Off we go.

Next week, purveyors of pretty noise. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

In a couple months, I will be 42.

That used to seem impossibly old to me. I made a promise to myself years ago that I would never turn into one of those people who loses track of current music, who moans about the kids these days playing their noise so gosh-darn loud. And I think I’ve done OK with that. Yes, I went to see David Gilmour when he came to town recently, and yes, that was a sleepy old time (but a great one). But I also just bought Legacy, the new album from Hope for the Dying, one of my favorite scream-y metal bands. And I’m jazzed to pick up the remasters of Kill ‘Em All and Ride the Lightning this week.

I’m good with loud, is what I’m saying, even in my advancing age. If I have a role model on that score, it’s certainly Bob Mould, who is still absolutely raging at 55. It’s not enough for him to have started Husker Du and Sugar, he has to maintain his integrity and his amazing hot streak into his elder statesman years. Mould has certainly had his dalliances with electronic burbles and acoustic balladry, but what he does best is play loud.

Mould’s new album, Patch the Sky, is loud. The guitars are thick and loaded with momentum, and they’re the strongest thing in the mix, blowing out Mould’s vocals and his awesome rhythm section. If you’ve heard Mould before, you know what to expect – twelve sharp tunes that waste no time whatsoever, rocking with melody and purpose. That his songwriting is still this finely honed almost 40 years into his career is remarkable.

Patch the Sky caps off a trilogy that began with 2012’s Silver Age and continued with 2014’s Beauty and Ruin, and it exists midway between them. He uses the same band – bassist Jon Wurster and drummer Jason Narducy – on all three, and I think with this one he’s explored all the contours of this particular sound. It never gets old, though – the band paints with fire on a rave-up like “You Say You” and breathes menace on more atmospheric numbers like “Losing Sleep.” This isn’t the non-stop jaw-drop that Silver Age was. It’s more nuanced, more complicated, while still moving faster and more confidently than Beauty and Ruin.

But really, the differences between these three records are subtle enough that they could easily be packaged together as a single work. There is one big difference, though: Patch the Sky is the darkest and bleakest of the three. The death of Mould’s mother and the ending of several relationships added to the hopeless tone of many of these lyrics. “Left here by myself, there’s no tears that will be falling, nothing more than dirt and dust, nothing left at all,” he sings on “Pray For Rain,” one of the most deceptively upbeat rockers here. “I need you, release me, make me feel again…”

The album never gets brighter, staying in that ‘90s mold of power-pop through a black window. Mould lashes out at others (“There’s lots of poison in your soul”), but saves the worst of it for himself. The album ends with the slow and siwrling “Monument,” about erecting a metaphorical statue to your biggest regrets, one that is never washed away by tide and time. “I never ever learned, but that’s my way,” he concludes, and it’s crushing. While I love this record, and the two that preceded it, I’m back and forth on ending it this way. I sort of hope there’s a fourth album that’s as strong and powerful as these three, but that it lets in shafts of light.

Whether or not he follows up Patch the Sky with another like it, this one is awesome. That we’re getting music this alive, this sharp, this flat-out loud from Bob Mould these days is wonderful. Long may he reign.

* * * * *

Mould is representing the old guard well, but there are few new bands playing the kind of big melodic rock that he pioneered. Thankfully, we have the Joy Formidable to pick up at least some of the slack.

The Joy Formidable is an English trio led by a badass guitar-playing woman named Ritzy Bryan. They sound like what peak Smashing Pumpkins might have if Billy Corgan had let D’Arcy sing. Their music is not just loud, it is epic – the production is massive, with thick keyboards and many, many guitars piled up into mountains. Their third album is called Hitch, and it’s the biggest and most expansive of the bunch, a 66-minute tower of ambitious, impressive, dynamic noise. It’s clear they took their time with this one, stretching out their songs and building up their infrastructure.

And that might be the record’s only weakness. If there’s a criticism of the Joy Formidable, it’s that they could (and perhaps should) be rawer. There’s a processed, labored-over quality to what they do, and it’s never been more apparent than here. Five of these songs either hover around six minutes or blow right past it, and while I love hearing them take their sound new places, it’s sometimes detrimental to the flow of the album. “Radio of Lips,” for example, is an awesome gallop of a thing that would have been a stunning three-minute single, but it drags a bit at 6:23. Same for the sorta-bluesy “The Last Thing On My Mind,” which runs out of ideas before its 6:20 is over.

Hitch is a mammoth listen, but thankfully, it’s also a varied and interesting one. “Liana” is a winner, a flying-through-a-tunnel minor-key concoction that oozes foreboding. “The Brook” earns its six minutes, shuffling through a strummy opening (with a banjo and Bryan’s lead guitar sounding like Irish pipes) to a rushing chorus that feels like going under water. Relatively short interlude “The Gift,” which finds Rhydian Davies singing over a keyboard bed and Bryan soloing like she’s been listening to “Comfortably Numb,” segues into “Running Hands with the Night,” which moves on one of the nastiest and darkest riffs of the record.

All of that big and loud serves as a nice contrast when the band pulls back, as they do on “Underneath the Petal,” one of the prettiest things – and absolutely the sparsest thing – they have given us. Bryan sings of lost love over an acoustic guitar, a little piano and flute, and that’s all. It gets only slightly bigger by the end, Bryan strumming like her life depended on it. The song is something special in their catalog, and I’m happy to have it. Closing track “Don’t Let Me Know” starts the same way, but by the end of its 7:37, it’s enormous, gigantic, pulsing, finishing this record with the requisite ambition.

That ambition is the beating heart of Hitch, and while they may take things too far in that direction here and there, I’d rather have that than a band that doesn’t try. I’ve loved the Joy Formidable since I first heard them, and Hitch doesn’t make me change my mind. Still, they are at the point where they will either make a self-indulgent double album next, or scale back. I’m interested to see which they do. They’re still one of the brightest stars in the rock firmament these days, and one of the loudest.

* * * * *

But who says you need guitars to be loud?

The members of Three Trapped Tigers don’t think so. This trio hails from London, and their second album Silent Earthling is one of my favorite discoveries of the year so far. (Thanks to Mike Messerschmidt of Kiss the Sky for another sterling recommendation.) A drummer and two keyboard players, Three Trapped Tigers play explosive instrumental music that feels like the future. If you can imagine Signals-era Rush without Geddy’s wail and with even more prog-rock overtones, you’ve got it.

The secret weapon of this band is drummer Adam Betts, who plays like he’s in a prog-metal band. While the armies of Keith Emerson-ish keyboards here are anything but tame, it’s the force of Betts’ percussion that gives this music its knock-me-down power. The songs on Silent Earthling are tricky, jumping time signatures and refusing to play things straight. But even when Betts is tasked with providing a beat that leaps from 7/8 to 4/4 to 9/8 he does so with enough power and sprinting energy that all you can think about is moving forward.

But it’s not like this band would be Vangelis without him. Just listen to the steamroller opening of “Kraken,” on which the two keyboards play what can only be described as a metal riff. There is guitar here and there, courtesy of second keyboardist Matt Calvert, but it’s subtle, and very rarely the lead instrument. (“Tekkers” makes the most use of it.) You won’t miss it, though. There’s really no other word for what this band does: they rock. And even as old and gray as I am now, I like to think I can still recognize rock when I hear it, whatever form it takes.

* * * * *

Next week, darkness and light with Frightened Rabbit and Weezer. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

It’s easy lately to be depressed.

I’m not just talking about myself here, although it’s always easy for me to be depressed. I’m in a constant fight for my own happiness, and most days, I win. But it’s still a fight, even with some of the incredibly positive turns my life has taken lately.

No, I’m speaking even more generally – I can imagine that its tough for a lot of people to stay hopeful lately. This year has been a non-stop churn of death, for starters. Over the past couple weeks we lost Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest (who was only 45, and died from complications related to diabetes), former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford (only 46, lymphosarcoma), Patty Duke, Andy “Thunderclap” Newman and the great Garry Shandling, among others.

The news is full of hatred and violence, the world seems on the verge of collapse, and a sizable portion of the population seems to actually want to elect Donald Trump president of the United States. Slipping into despair over all this is not only easy, but totally understandable. And if you want to soundtrack that despair, you’re spoiled for choice. If there’s anything art should be for, it’s the ability to express that which, if it goes unexpressed, might kill us.

Sean Watkins has been watching the news. The darkness that pours out of his fifth solo album, What to Fear, is remarkable, particularly considering how happy and contented Watkins has sounded lately. The Nickel Creek reunion was a blast, and recently he’s been joining his sister Sara and a bevy of uber-talented friends in a jocular collective called the Watkins Family Hour. The most depressing thing on their self-titled album was a cover of “Not in Nottingham,” from Disney’s Robin Hood cartoon. (Yes, the one with the fox and the bears.)

So to hear Watkins take such pointed aim at politicians and the media on the opening title track is jarring at first. The song is a pretty minor-key lament for the non-stop fear machine perpetuated by our cable news cycle: “We told you what to fear, and you listened up, we told you what to fear, you’re sticking to your guns and there’s no one in this dark world you can trust, except for us…” It’s one of the most powerful songs he’s ever written, sharp and on point: “There’s a new disease, don’t go away, how to keep your loved ones safe, the answer’s coming right after this break… we’re gonna sell you what to fear…”

The album never aims that wide again, but it remains that dark. Watkins zeroes in on personal failings and heartbreak, and plays the part of desperate, flawed men again and again. On “Last Time for Everything,” he examines mistakes from his past, particularly those he knew he was making at the time. “I Am What You Want” is a vicious stalker song: “I know you, you don’t like me, I know I’m not your type, but I swear you’ll learn to love me…” “Too Little Too Late” finds him examining the wreckage of a ruined relationship and trying to say he’s sorry, knowing there is no reason he should be heard or believed.

There are glimmers of sunshine here, but they are few. “Everything” is about fighting every urge to hold back secrets and to flee from vulnerability: “I’ve never been this far with anyone, halfway there is where I usually run, but I can’t deny you, I won’t turn away, I would give everything to you…” “Where You Were Living” is a splendid tale of breaking free, and looking back gratefully on the moment you did. And Watkins ends the album with a lovely cover of Glen Phillips’ “Back on My Feet,” a song of blessed regret and hope for rebirth.

But mainly, Watkins speaks from a broken and breaking place here, and it’s devastating. “Keep Your Promises II” is a rewrite of a song from his last solo album, and he’s made it somehow even more hopeless here: “What’s made will break, what lives must die, and you’re gonna change your mind, it’s just a matter of time…” Watkins sings so sweetly, and the folksy music (recorded with the likes of Matt Chamberlain, Benmont Tench, Sebastian Steinberg and his sister Sara) belies the difficult nature of the lyrics.

That said, this record is magnificent, a dive into darker places pulled off with perfect form. Sean Watkins is often overlooked in favor of his bandmates (especially Chris Thile), but he’s quite an extraordinary talent, and when no one was looking, he made one of his very best records here. What to Fear is a striking listen, and a splendid one.

But if you really want to wallow in black despair, the album you need is Ephemera, the surprising sophomore effort from Irish band Little Green Cars.

Three years ago, this upstart quintet from Dublin roared onto the public stage with a killer song called “Harper Lee.” That song kicked off their terrific, loud, memorable debut album Absolute Zero, and marked them as a band to watch. Well, Harper Lee died this year, and Little Green Cars have returned with an album so hopeless, so melancholy that it almost sounds like the work of a different band. Most of these songs are slow and acoustic, with chilly clean electric accents straight out of the Cure, and over and over, the lyrics speak of dissolution, of things falling apart and the center not holding.

Opener “The Song They Play Every Night” does a good job of setting the tone: “And every load I took to fill the hole that caved inside just made it deeper, darker, wider than before, don’t make me say it out loud anymore…” “You vs. Me” is the prettiest song about a war between two people I have heard in some time. Those two songs are sung by Stevie Appleby in his soft-spoken tenor. But it’s Faye O’Rourke and her deeply felt wail who truly brings the emotions to the fore. Her first song here is called “Easier Day,” and it’s a stunner, all about the consequences of her mental instability on others. “I’ve been this way for a long time…”

“Brother” is a short film set to music, a family portrait that is burning at the edges. The last verse leaves me empty: “Then last night, I had a dream but it seemed like real life, I awoke with a scream into lamplight, and all was quiet.” Dreams figure heavily in the paranoid “Clair de Lune,” its protagonists constantly asking each other if they’re happy. “OK OK OK” is so dark and powerful that I can barely listen to it – it’s O’Rourke and a piano, dealing with the aftermath of something horrible and finding no support.

And then there are five more songs of heartbreak and pain after that, songs that find O’Rourke admitting she doesn’t know who she’s singing about, and being unable to decide “if it’s you I hate or something inside.” Appleby’s finale, “The Factory,” brings one note of hope: “Jesus Mary mother of God I’m alive again,” he repeats, and I am hopeful that whatever happened to this band in the three years since their debut, this is the start of putting it all behind them. Because while the music on this album is wonderful – it’s one of the prettiest, saddest albums I’ve heard this year – I end it worrying about these people I don’t know, and hoping they will be all right.

Because there is hope. It often grows from small things – lending a helping hand to a neighbor, or paying for a stranger’s cup of coffee – and it blossoms into huge acts. Countering hate with love. Forgiving. Showing grace. These are all powerful things, what Bruce Cockburn described as kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight. And sometimes the strongest acts of hope can grow from the deepest tragedies.

If there’s a band that knows all about that, it’s Cloud Cult. This Minnesota tribe is led by Craig Minowa, and 14 years ago, he unexpectedly lost his two-year-old son Kaidin. After writing several cathartic records about the loss, Minowa dedicated his band to basically being the most powerful engine of hope he could create. Cloud Cult albums are sweeping statements of hard-won joy, and none have been more sweeping than their latest, The Seeker. The record is paired with a feature film, which I haven’t seen, but it doesn’t need one – it’s cinematic enough on its own.

Minowa’s songs are sometimes threadbare things, but his band builds them up into monoliths. The two-part opener, “Living in Awe” and “To the Great Unknown,” live up to their titles, the former a massive crescendo (“There will be joy and grief, but live it all in awe”) and the latter a true anthem (“Sometimes this life’s a lonely road, but you gotta find it on your own, so build a happy ship ‘cause this living is a trip, sing the kind of song that you love singing to the great unknown…”). The album follows a man who builds such a ship and heads off in search of the answers to everything, and he learns that the journey itself is the answer.

If all of this sounds hokey, believe me when I say that Cloud Cult makes it work beautifully. You haven’t heard a song of loss and loneliness that will pierce you like “Come Home” will, and it segues perfectly into “No Hell,” a masterpiece mantra about the world: “Someone tell the devil we don’t need no hell, we’re all pretty good at beating up ourselves,” he concludes, and it’s hard to argue. “No Hell” is the darkest this record gets, as the journey picks up from here – “Everything You Thought You Had” is a stunner, a song of love that dances to the infinite. “Everything I wish I’d done, and everything that I’d undo, everything that broke my heart can’t keep me from loving you…”

And I’m full up. The Seeker is an emotional ride, and it ends with beauty and grace. The mostly instrumental “Three Storms Before You Learn to Float” is gorgeous, and it leads into “You Never Were Alone,” a wonderful acoustic piece about seeking faith in the unknown, in the unknowable, in the unpredictable. “When I’ve screamed all my screamings, given up all my grievings, I’ll still love you with all of my being…” The denouement, “Through the Ages,” is so lovely I can’t even stand it. Here is the kicker line: “If ever I can’t see the magic around me, please take my hands off my eyes.”

That says so much. Despair and depression is failing to see the magic around us. I often need someone to take my hands off my eyes, and when they do, when I see all the wonder and beauty everywhere, I can’t imagine why I ever missed it. There is hope all around. There is darkness, yes, but there is more light. There is more light.

There is more light.

Next week, louder things. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook here.

See you in line Tuesday morning.