When I was a kid, my father had a subscription to the Columbia Record Club.

I’ve told this story before, about how my dad, who doesn’t really love music, ended up with some of the best albums of the ‘70s on vinyl. I was obsessed with these records as a young boy, playing them over and over again until I had them memorized. The selection included Led Zeppelin IV and Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark, Don and Mel and Leon Russell’s Carny. And it also included one of my favorites: Eat a Peach, by the Allman Brothers Band.

I didn’t know anything about the Allman Brothers at the time. Eat a Peach came out two years before I was born, and I must have been three or four when I first heard it. I didn’t know it was the last Allman Brothers Band album to feature both Allman Brothers – Duane Allman had died in a motorcycle crash shortly after finishing the sessions. (I do remember my dad later telling me the legendary – and untrue – story that the album had been named Eat a Peach because Duane had crashed his bike into a peach truck.)

No, all I knew about the album was that I liked it, a lot. The twin guitar harmonies on just about every song, but especially “Blue Sky.” The gorgeous “Melissa.” The 33-minute “Mountain Jam,” my first real experience with epic song lengths. I remember “Mountain Jam” was broken up over sides two and four, and I remember how revelatory it was to realize that it was broken up that way for record stacking – you’d listen to sides one and three first, then flip them both over to hear two and four.

I kept up with the Allman Brothers Band, and of course bought all of their classics once I was old enough to know how classic they were. Gregg Allman was a legend, helping to invent southern rock and setting the standard by which it is judged. He was also a fantastic guitar player. I know all this now, but whenever I think of him, I’m transported back to four years old, watching the record with the peach on the label spin around and getting lost in the songs.

Gregg Allman died this week at age 69, another legend taken too soon. May he rest in peace.

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I know no one really cares about my thoughts on Linkin Park.

Of all the bands I’ve admitted an obsession with here in this column, it might be Linkin Park that has generated the most backlash. My insistence that there is something worth paying attention to behind Chester Bennington’s screams and Mike Shinoda’s raps has all but ensured my eviction from the cool kids’ club. Between that and my ongoing praise of Hanson, I’m pretty sure I won’t be invited to write for Pitchfork anytime soon.

But for real, there’s something worth paying attention to here. Linkin Park’s first album established a core sound that mashed up rap and rock for, like, the millionth time, and their second followed suit, so I’m not surprised that people wrote them off. But those people need to hear 2010’s A Thousand Suns, an absolutely extraordinary inversion of that sound in service of a conceptual piece about injustice and love. They’ve yet to top it, but Linkin Park has steadfastly refused to make the same album twice – 2012’s Living Things builds on a foundation of electro-pop, and 2014’s surprising The Hunting Party goes full-on into thrash metal.

That’s one thing I love about them – they’re never afraid to alienate their audience. Hybrid Theory remains their best-selling effort, and they refuse to go back to that sound. They’re restless, challenging themselves and their fanbase as much as possible, never worried about sales or chart placement. And it works for them – they routinely hit number one on the Billboard chart, and in countries around the world, by doing whatever they want.

All of which makes their seventh album, One More Light, so mystifying. By every outward sign, this is a complete sell-out. The songs are all polished radio-pop, with virtually none of the raging guitars or abrasive synth sounds that have marked Linkin Park music since they started. Professional songsmiths share co-writing credits. Teen pop singer Kiiara duets. Cheesy pop drums click along as Bennington sings atop tracks that could have gone to Justin Bieber or One Direction.

And yet the band swears they worked just as hard on this one as they always have, and took this new direction seriously as an artistic choice. And it is only the fact that they have proven so restless, been so willing to throw caution to the wind, that I’m even thinking about this record in those terms. Everything about this record screams “we would like some hits, and we would like some money.” Which is odd, since they have been doing just fine, sales-wise. They don’t need to sell out, and they’re treating this obvious sell-out as genuine. So I almost have no choice but to believe them.

But man, listen to “Nobody Can Save Me,” the opening track. They’ve made this as safe as possible in every single way, from the fluttering keyboards to the snap-sound percussion to Bennington’s voice, smoothed out and supple, singing “I’m dancing with my demons” in the most radio-friendly way he can. “Battle Symphony” is even worse, a song of empowerment that even Katy Perry might have rejected, Bennington singing “if my armor breaks, I’ll fuse it back together” as if it were a strong lyric. This one is even more insidious because I can’t stop singing it in my head. As a pop earworm, it does exactly what it’s supposed to. “If I fall, get knocked down, get myself up off the ground…”

I could chalk all this up to maturity, to a desire to stop making angry, shouty records. Bennington is 41. Musical mastermind Mike Shinoda is 40, and you can hear those years on “Invisible,” a song of reconciliation and hope that features one of his best vocals. I’ll be 43 next week, so I appreciate a good maturity story, and that might be why I feel compelled to keep listening to this. Yes, “Heavy” sounds like every radio pop song from the past 10 years, and it’s hard for me to think of it as anything but pandering. But songs like “Invisible” work for me, even though I know they shouldn’t.

The title track, then, tips the scales in this record’s favor. It’s remarkably subtle – a faintly pulsing keyboard, some clean guitars, and Bennington at his most restrained – and God help me, I think it’s beautiful. It’s a song of compassion, reaching out to those who feel alone, those contemplating darkness: “Who cares if one more light goes out, well I do…” I could listen to this one for hours. It’s the best argument they have that One More Light is a true artistic statement.

I still don’t know whether to believe them. This is the most unabashedly radio-ready and inoffensive album they’ve ever made, and it only feels like Linkin Park in that it is typically uncompromising. There are virtually no nods to their previous sounds, no olive branches to fans of their louder material, no indication that they have ever been any more than a glossy pop act. Like it or not, this is the new Linkin Park, and the best I can tell you is that they never stay in one place very long, so this should be out of their system soon.

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I don’t know how this shoegaze revival got started, but I’m ready to give whoever got the ball rolling a wet, sloppy kiss.

Shoegaze has been part of my musical vocabulary since high school, when my good friend Chris introduced me to an entire gaggle of bands that remain favorites. Some are well-known, like My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, some more obscure, like The Moon Seven Times and Kitchens of Distinction. In our entire friendship I think the only shoegaze band I ever introduced Chris to was Starflyer 59, which certainly doesn’t balance the scales. I owe him, is what I’m saying.

One of the bands Chris brought into my world was Slowdive, whose 1993 album Souvlaki has gone on to be considered a gem of the genre. (It didn’t do quite as well upon release, when Britpop was all the rage.) Slowdive was led by singer/guitarists Neil Halstead and Rachel Goswell, and their intertwining voices were their trademark, along with their chiming guitars and cloudy, beautiful atmospheres. Their third album, 1995’s Pygmalion, was altogether stranger and darker, and it crashed and burned, seemingly taking the band with it. Halstead and Goswell formed Mojave 3, an earthier combo, and even that faded out by the late 2000s.

I never in a million years expected Slowdive to reunite. I got to see them on tour in 2014, and they were magical, and I figured that was probably it. But no, here we are in 2017 with a brand new Slowdive album, 22 years after the last one. And it’s fantastic. It’s a little smoother, a little more grown-up, but it handily sidesteps all the perils of a creaky old band trying to recapture their sound. Slowdive feels effortless, like it could have come out in 1997, or even 1991.

This record is obviously Halstead’s baby. He wrote most of the songs, except two he co-wrote, and he handles the majority of the singing and the production duties. I’d love to hear more of Goswell, but that’s literally my only complaint with this record. The glorious clean guitar sound is here, weaving its brilliant spell, and the band locks into its familiar groove on songs like “Star Roving” and “Everyone Knows,” both of which feel like rebirths. The epics (“Go Get It” and “Falling Ashes”) that close the record are monumental pieces, simultaneously crashing and soothing.

But it’s “Sugar for the Pill” that all by itself makes me overjoyed to have Slowdive back. This is a classic, deeply melodic and atmospheric, like floating and falling at the same time. It’s a song that makes me stop everything I’m doing and listen. It’s just the most beautiful thing, and it comes with seven other beautiful things on an album I never thought I would live to hear. Slowdive’s return is complete, and completely magnificent.

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I was hoping to get to the new Alarm album this week, but I’ll save it for next week. I’ll be 43 on Monday, and it feels like a good time to reflect on a childhood favorite. Talk to you then. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I can vividly remember the first time I heard Chris Cornell sing.

I was 17 years old, and in the full bloom of my teenage metalhead phase. I had a mullet – a big, curly, flowing one – and a ridiculous jean jacket. I’d discovered Metallica three years prior, which kicked off my love for all things heavy, and just one year before, Megadeth’s Rust in Peace had been released, and I was still convinced that it was the best album ever made. I still didn’t know what to do with Nirvana – Nevermind was only a few months old, but people in my high school were talking about it. I found it pretty simple, but I would, given I’d spent years immersed in technical metal tunes.

I had no idea that Seattle was about to take over the world. I’d been familiar with Mother Love Bone and bought Pearl Jam’s Ten (because of course I did, everyone who was alive and cognizant in 1991 bought Ten) and Alice in Chains’ Facelift, but totally missed Temple of the Dog, and so I missed the idea that this was a scene, a movement, a powerhouse. And I also missed that Soundgarden had already led the way with two albums, including one on a major label. I’d never heard of them.

All I knew about Soundgarden was wrapped up in the five minutes and ten seconds of “Outshined,” the first of their songs I heard. I don’t know if you all remember this, but MTV used to play music videos, like, all the time. (The M stood for Music. And now you know, and knowing is half the battle.) The video for “Outshined” looks like metal. Hell, it features a bunch of it – it’s set at a foundry, where we see saws buzzing and hammers striking anvils and pits of molten something bubbling.

So I was already in, and then the song. The song! It was slow and sludgy, built on one of those riffs that feels mired in mud. But this one soared. There’s a pre-chorus that I would have accepted as the chorus, and then the chorus itself lifts off with the single most memorable melody from the Seattle scene to that point. And out front, shirtless and wild-haired, was Chris Cornell, singing like some strange combination of Robert Plant and Freddie Mercury, just nailing it.

I bought Badmotorfinger, Soundgarden’s third album, that week, and was confronted with music unlike any I’d heard. It was metal, but it wasn’t – Soundgarden remained unconcerned with how fast or how precisely they could play, but they weren’t sloppy, either. A song like “Rusty Cage” piled on the tricky time signatures, even more than Rush at that time, and something like “Slaves and Bulldozers” took that thick, powerful sound and ran you over with it, slowly. They were heavy, but they also had melodies to spare, and it was clear even on this early record that Cornell could sing anything.

It would be a disservice to call these early Soundgarden albums “humble beginnings,” but there was no way I could have known that Cornell’s voice would be a constant in my life for the next 25 years. I’ve often said that I would listen to Cornell sing anything, and he gave me plenty of opportunities to prove it.

I know it’s cliché, but 1994’s Superunknown is not only my favorite Soundgarden album, but may also be my favorite thing to come out of the ‘90s Seattle craze. Even the ubiquity of “Black Hole Sun” hasn’t dimmed that record for me. (I thought “My Wave” was gonna be the big hit. Shows what I know.) Even at a time when everything on the radio was heavy and grunge-y, Superunknown stood out. The songs were tighter than a drum, and Cornell was nothing less than a rock star, able to belt it out with the best of them and hit subtler spaces at will.

I remember having a conversation with my girlfriend at the time and being unable to concentrate because the radio station in the background was playing unreleased songs from 1996’s Down on the Upside. (That relationship didn’t work out, but I don’t think it was solely because my attention was divided that night.) I remember buying the soundtrack to Great Expectations in 1998 almost entirely for “Sunshower,” our first taste of what Cornell’s solo career would be like, and being blown away by the tender nature of the thing, and the utter purity of his voice. I adored Euphoria Morning, that first solo album – it proved that Cornell was a hell of a songwriter too.

And yeah, I shook my head at his cover of “Billie Jean,” and was mystified by 2009’s Scream, a collaboration with Timbaland that was one part electro-pop, one part hip-hop and three parts confusing. But damn if Cornell didn’t love taking risks like that. Audioslave was certainly a risk, marrying that subtle, supple voice with three-fourths of Rage Against the Machine, one of the most single-minded, thunderous rock bands around. It worked, though. More than that, it turned into a strong argument for Chris Cornell as a rock god.

In recent years Cornell reformed Soundgarden, issuing the surprisingly strong reunion album King Animal, and gave us one of his best solo albums, the folksy Higher Truth. Things seemed from the outside to be going well, which just goes to show that you never know. I woke up Thursday morning to the news that Cornell had finished a Soundgarden show in Detroit, returned to his hotel room and hung himself. He was only 52.

I still don’t even know what to do with this information. I feel like I want to talk about depression and suicide – I’ve been living with the former for most of my life, and have definitely thought about the latter. Stories like this one have a tendency to knock me off my axis. But everything I want to say about it sounds clichéd and trite. Depression is sneaky and invisible, and affects people in different ways, and I don’t know that anyone could have helped Cornell. I’m sure there’s no shortage of people blaming themselves this week for not seeing the signs, but they’re very hard to see. Cornell suffered for a long time with addictions, and it sounds like a different kind of addiction might have played a part here.

It also strikes me that the music we loved during the ‘90s was largely about depression and how to deal with it, Cornell’s music included. Among the first lines I ever heard him sing were “I can’t get any lower, still feel like I’m sinking.” “Fell on Black Days” is an obvious one, as is “Let Me Drown.” A huge percentage of grunge songs were about drug addiction or depression, and we’ve now lost four leading lights to drugs or suicide. I never quite took the self-loathing and pain of those songs as seriously as, clearly, I should have.

But what I really want to talk about is Cornell’s voice, and how sad it is that we’re never going to hear it again. It’s still strange to think about. Cornell was such a constant presence – every couple of years since I was 17, I’ve been able to hear him sing something new. His voice was such a part of my life that I never even considered that one day that voice would be gone.

I’ve seen several people sharing this video of Cornell covering Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and I wanted to share it too, for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s awesome. For another, both Cornell and Prince are now gone, taken before their time. But most importantly to me, it shines a spotlight on that voice, here in an unfamiliar setting, singing a song you might not expect from him. And he absolutely slays it. Here’s where I might say something like “I’ve rarely heard his voice sound this beautiful,” except that’s not true. His voice always sounded this beautiful. He was the finest singer of the ‘90s Seattle scene. I would listen to him sing anything. I wish I could keep on listening.

I hope you rest in peace, Chris. I’m sorry you were in so much pain. And I hope we learn to be good to one another, to listen to one another, to really hear one another. No one is alone, no matter how it may sometimes feel like it. There is always light. There is always love.

Obviously, that’s all for this week. Next week I’ll try to write a longer one, with reviews of Slowdive, the Alarm, Linkin Park and The Lulls in Traffic. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

When I was a young boy, I always loved visiting my grandparents. Of course I loved them and enjoyed their company, but there were two reasons in particular I liked going to their house: they always let me have snacks my mother would not, and my grandfather always bought me comic books.

If I owe my lifelong love of sequential art to anyone, it’s to the kindly old man who indulged my longing for the further adventures of Spider-Man, back when comics were a quarter. (I also owe much of my lifelong love of music to his wife, my grandmother, a concert pianist who taught me to play my first songs.) My fascination with four-color universes has never faded – it now encompasses 96-million-color epics and black-and-white tales and everything in between.

Along the way I learned that many people have a strange misconception of comics as an art form, as if one can only use it to tell stories of costumed heroes punching one another. In college I found books like Bone and Cerebus and Strangers in Paradise, and discovered that comics can be anything. (One of the most brilliant professors at my school once borrowed a couple comics from me, and he returned them with a gleam in his eye as he said this: “I just realized you can write anything you want in the word balloons!”)

These days I buy dozens of comics, both in single-issue and book form, and I read voraciously. I expect my love for this medium will never die – I’ll run out of money first. So naturally, I’m drawn to anything that taps into the world of comics, particularly if I can simultaneously indulge my love of music. I feel like I’m getting some kind of two-for-one deal.

So you can imagine how ecstatic I am to be talking about both of this week’s contestants. First up, obviously, is Gorillaz, the best animated band on the planet. (That’s right, Jem and the Holograms. Sorry, Dethklok.) Created by Blur’s Damon Albarn and Tank Girl illustrator Jamie Hewlett, Gorillaz officially includes 2-D, Murdoc Niccals, Russel Hobbs and Noodle, four misfits finding their way through a post-apocalyptic future. Unofficially, of course, none of them exist outside of Hewlett’s imagination.

But the animated band is vital to the Gorillaz experience. For one thing, the band’s album covers and videos are all great, all rendered in Hewlett’s punk-influenced style. But for another, the four-color foursome allows Albarn to basically be invisible. Remarkably, this frees him up to sound like anything he wants, much like writing whatever comes to mind in the word balloons. Gorillaz music is hip-hop, electro-pop, soul and funk, all mixed together in a heady brew that goes by like lightning, and none of it has ever sounded like what you’d expect from the frontman of Blur.

Albarn and his co-conspirators have taken most of this decade off after releasing two records – the stuffed-full Plastic Beach and the more intimate The Fall – in 2010. Their comeback, Humanz, is much more the former than the latter. It spans 26 tracks and is positively loaded with guest stars. It’s also exactly what I want in a Gorillaz album. It breaks genre boundaries like they were nothing, confidently treads anywhere it likes and plays like a mixtape.

Albarn himself is on most of these tracks, but he takes a back seat, ceding the floor to his frankly astonishing roster of guests. Just to hit some of the highlights: “Let Me Out” features Mavis Staples and Pusha T and is one of the most stirring things here, “Momentz” harnesses the renewed power of De La Soul for a surprising strut, “Charger” brings Grace Jones to the forefront (and is a powerhouse), and Vince Staples fires off verses on album opener “Andromeda.” Carly Simon shows up on one song, as does Savages’ Jehnny Beth and splendid singer Anthony Hamilton.

You might think that such a diverse roster leads to a scattershot feeling, and you’d be right. Very little holds this record together as more than a collection of disparate tracks. But those tracks range from good to great, and if you think of this (and every Gorillaz album) as a mix CD created by these four fictional characters, it really works. Part of the thrill is hearing these tracks rub up next to each other. “Submission,” a pulsing winner featuring singer Kelela and a rapid-fire verse by Danny Brown, slinks its way into the dirty sorta-guitars of “Charger,” on which Albarn’s half-asleep vocal style slides into Grace Jones’ powerful one.

There are certainly low lights, as you’d expect from an album with 26 tracks. “Busted and Blue,” performed entirely by Albarn, is the first dip in momentum. It’s also the longest thing here at 4:37, which just shows how quickly this thing flies by. I definitely could have lived without “Sex Murder Party,” and “The Apprentice” feels thrown together. But it’s remarkable how much of Humanz is as good as it is.

Gorillaz is a band of comic book characters, and their albums feel like the soundtrack to their strange and unbelievable lives. It feels like reading comics, like getting pieces of 26 different stories every month, and reading them all back to back. Albarn doesn’t do the best job of setting a scene and telling a story, but this project has freed him in so many important creative ways. Just listen to “Hallelujah Money,” featuring Benjamin Clemente. I mean, what is that? Synthetic drunken future-soul meets noise sculpture? Any project that allows this kind of freedom is aces with me.

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While I love Gorillaz’ comic book style and sensibility, no one has better integrated comics with his music so far this year than Jonathan Coulton.

Coulton himself is a comic book story. A self-proclaimed internet superstar, Coulton made his name writing about geeky subjects – monkeys, robots, the Mandelbrot set. He’s a stunningly clever writer, able to find the sadness behind his sci-fi inspiration. Early song “I Crush Everything” was written from the point of view of a self-loathing giant squid, unable to stop himself from destroying the things he loves. “I’m Your Moon” is a valentine from Pluto’s moon Charon, on the occasion of Pluto’s declassification as a planet, and is one of the warmest songs of affirmation I know.

For years, Coulton has been shoving against the idea that he’s a novelty act, writing nerdy songs for nerds. His last album, Artificial Heart, was a clear sign that he was heading elsewhere. There were novelty songs, most notably the awesome “Je Suis Rick Springfield,” but they sat alongside truly heartfelt pieces like “Glasses” and “Today With Your Wife,” songs any writer would be thrilled to pen. Coulton is in the odd position of having to please an audience that loves songs like “Re: Your Brains” while also growing as a songsmith.

He’s found a way to do that, and do it brilliantly, on his fantastic new record Solid State. It is simultaneously the geekiest and most mature thing he’s done. Solid State is a concept album about the internet and its wide-ranging effects, accompanied by a massive graphic novel co-written by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Albert Monteys. The comic tells the album’s story, filling in details – it’s essentially about an internet troll who invents an artificial intelligence that causes a worldwide collapse, then leaves earth, returning many years later to survey the damage.

Yeah, that’s geeky, and it allows Coulton to say a lot of things he’s probably wanted to say for some time about anonymity and technology. But I’m not sure his audience is quite ready for Solid State itself, a record that is remarkably serious in intent and execution. This is a great leap forward for Coulton, a record that can stand proudly alongside the works of his heroes. And those heroes, it is becoming clear, are the likes of Elvis Costello and his new collaborator and label boss, Aimee Mann.

These songs. These songs! Coulton has never delivered as consistent a set of songs as this one. Solid State begins with “Wake Up,” from the point of view of the unnamed artificial intelligence awakening in space, and just by itself it announces the ambition and intent of this record. “The whole world is waiting for you,” Coulton sings over an epic arrangement that leads into “All This Time,” an electro-blip tune set in the future. This song name-checks Kurzweil and depicts a society where people are cogs in a machine, where all they have is all this time. The lovely title track bemoans this use of technology, and then we’re back in the past, looking at the origins of dystopia.

Those origins just happen to be an abrasive character who grows, changes and matures over the next nine songs, becoming a family man just in time for his creation to ruin the world. This section of the album kicks off with “Brave,” one of the very best things Coulton has written. A backhand to anonymous internet trolls set to a superb guitar-rock beat, the song finds Coulton taking on the voice of one, ranting about “sheeple” and declaring “when I torch the place, cover up my face, that will make me brave…”

But as the pressures of the world (and the internet) get to this character, they change him. Only Coulton would write a tender ballad about coping and call it “Pictures of Cats,” and only Coulton could make it this affecting. Only Coulton would write a song about creating a massive artificial intelligence, call it “Robots.txt,” and imagine it as a beautiful song of encouragement. And only Coulton would pen a song from that AI’s point of view as it scours the internet and decides that we’re not worth saving. That song, “Don’t Feed the Trolls,” is the most old-school Coulton thing here, and it’s wonderful. “Lucy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, Lucy went to heaven but she still felt like hell, so she only gave it two stars, worst place ever…”

By the time of “Your Tattoo” and “Ball and Chain,” the main character of Solid State has settled down and is a better person. So naturally, the world falls apart in “Sunshine,” possibly the most impressive and intricate song of Coulton’s career. “Long on Bitcoin and regret without much to show, the roaches took the kitchenette, we just let it go…” The chorus is superb, lamenting the burning world and leaving it behind.

Honestly, even though the record has 17 tracks, I could have used another song or two set in the future civilization. (The graphic novel does yeoman’s work filling in the narrative gaps.) The last four songs are a suite from the AI’s POV as it makes its way back to Earth, longing for humanity, for connection. The two-part “All to Myself” brings a Pink Floyd feel to the proceedings, and the brief “There You Are” depicts the reunion. The last panel of the graphic novel captures the same moment, creator and destroyer, face to face. What happens next, only Coulton knows.

I think this album is going to surprise a lot of people. It surprised me. I’ve been waiting for a quantum leap forward like this from Coulton for a while, but even I’m stunned by how good Solid State is. The songs are all top notch, without a wasted moment. The production is gorgeous. Best of all, you feel like you’ve been somewhere by the end of it. It seems like a ridiculous understatement to say that Coulton has grown as a songwriter and a record maker here. He’s made one of the year’s finest albums, a deep and coherent statement about where we are and where we’re going. This is one to experience.

You can hear Solid State and order both the album and the graphic novel online here.

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Wow, ran long this time. Next week, Slowdive and a few others. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So here’s the thing. I’m very, very behind.

Not just on this column, though I am behind on this too. I’m behind on every single aspect of my art-loving life. I have thousands – and I’m not exaggerating there – of comics and books to read, some of which I’ve borrowed from friends. I am so far behind on my television watching that I am just now getting to Fringe. (Which I am enjoying!) And as for music, well, I have probably two dozen records just from this year that are languishing unheard. Life is busy, and it leaves little time for my second career as a semi-pro appreciator.

Here’s how this manifested itself this week. I’m behind on the column, late as usual. I intended to write about both the swell new Gorillaz album and Jonathan Coulton’s delightful Solid State this week, wrapping them up in a theme about comic books. But I wanted to wait until my copy of the Solid State CD and graphic novel arrived, so I could explore the full experience and then write about that. Of course, it hasn’t arrived, and while I have the album practically memorized at this point, I still don’t feel comfortable writing about it until I’ve taken in everything Coulton wants me to.

Normally, that would be no problem. I’d just shift to reviewing something else. But because I’m so far behind on my listening, I don’t really have anything to say about anything else right now either. I’ve been enjoying several new records, including the wonderful new Slowdive (their first in 22 years) and the terrific collaboration between Isildur’s Bane and Marillion’s Steve Hogarth.

I plan to write about both of those. But if I were to do that this week, you’d get something rushed and disorganized. (You might get that anyway. But I don’t want it to be from lack of preparation.) I’ve heard each of those records twice, which is one more time than I’ve heard any of the other candidates for this week’s column, including Juliana Hatfield’s vicious Pussycat and Feist’s Pleasure. I haven’t even heard the new At the Drive-In yet, and I’ve been anticipating that one for months.

So I could just lag behind again, but I decided I would at least try to give you something this week. And as I often do when I’m in this jam, I decided to look forward at what’s coming up. This year is shaping up to be pretty good, so here’s a brief look at a few records I’m looking forward to. (Of course, I’ll buy them and then not listen to them for weeks, trying to find the time, but I remain excited!)

Probably highest on my list right now is Husky, whose tremendous sophomore album Ruckers Hill made my top 10 list a couple years ago. Husky, led by a guy actually named Husky, might not seem that innovative – they’re an acoustic folk-pop band, like half a million others. But they write outstanding songs, songs that stay with you for weeks. The two songs I’ve heard from the upcoming Punchbuzz (“Ghost”  and “Late Night Store”) don’t make me think that this will be the one to break the streak. I adore this band, and I’m jazzed to see where they go next.

I waxed eloquent about Sufjan Stevens last week. I think he’s one of the most important and compelling artists of this generation, and I’m interested in any project he’s part of. That includes the new Planetarium, a cosmic-themed project with string arranger Nico Mulhy, longtime Sufjan collaborator James McAllister and the National’s Bryce Dessner. (Yes, Sufjan’s involvement has me excited in spite of someone from the National muddying things up.) As with most things Sufjan, it’s difficult to describe or summarize. You just have to hear it.

I grew up on the work of Roger Waters, both with Pink Floyd and on his own. I can vividly remember hearing The Wall for the first time – that’s a revelatory record when you’re 14. Radio K.A.O.S. provided an embarrassing percentage of the soundtrack to my first years of high school, while Amused to Death scored my early college years with piss and venom. I never thought I’d live to hear another Waters album, but lo and behold, one is coming. It’s called Is This the Life We Really Want, and the two songs released so far (“Smell the Roses”  and “Déjà Vu”) somehow sound exactly as you’d expect them to, and at the same time very good. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia – I’m very much looking forward to this record.

I mentioned Slowdive above – they’re just the latest old-school shoegaze band to reunite and return after a long absence. Later in the year, English band Ride will return after 21 years with Weather Diaries. Single “Charm Assault” feels like they’ve never been away. Another surprise, announced this week, is supergroup Lo Tom, made up of Jason Martin from shoegazers Starflyer 59, David Bazan, Trey Many of His Name is Alive and Velour 100, and TW Walsh of the Soft Drugs. My bet is that most of you are befuddled right now, but some of you are nodding vigorously, salivating to hear this. Wait no more.

The great Steven Wilson has just announced a new record called To the Bone. I know virtually nothing about it, but Wilson’s track record is enough for me. Same with Fleet Foxes, whose third album Crack-Up is high on my most wanted list. (It’s only so far down in this column because I’ve mentioned it several times before.) The Choir plans to release Bloodshot later this year, and frontman Derri Daughterty will have a solo record before long. You all know how I feel about the Choir, so you can imagine how much I’m looking forward to these.

And finally, a band you may not know, but should. Marah in the Mainsail was a highlight of the second AudioFeed Festival for me, and their first full-length, Thaumatrope, didn’t disappoint. They’ve just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign for their second, the darker-sounding fairy tale Bone Crown. It’s a concept piece about animals fighting for dominance (I think), and it sounds like it’s going to be great. You can hear Marah here.

There’s more, of course, and I’m sure the release schedule for the second half of the year will fill out nicely. (Right now it’s a wasteland, save for that new Tori Amos.) But these are the records I’m most excited about. Anything you think I should be paying more attention to?

Next week, honest, I’ll get to Gorillaz and Jonathan Coulton, and then Slowdive and others. And hopefully I’ll stay on track. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

In 2012, Sufjan Stevens lost his mother.

It’s fair to say that Stevens’ relationship with his mother was complicated at best. She had abandoned him repeatedly as a child, staying sometimes for days and once, when married to his stepfather, for five years before leaving again. She died after a long battle with stomach cancer, leaving Stevens confused and standing on the precipice of complete despair.

And so he wrote an amazing album called Carrie and Lowell. Named after his mother and stepfather (who now runs Stevens’ label, Asthmatic Kitty), Carrie and Lowell laid bare the depth and power of Stevens’ grief. It was sometimes frightening to listen to. Stevens was at such a low point when creating these songs that even those things that previously had sustained him – his faith chief among them – were not enough anymore. The album is painful to listen to, sparse and bare to an unflinching degree, and I can only imagine how painful it was to live through.

But in many ways, that’s what art is for – to give us a way to live through it. Stevens has said that creating Carrie and Lowell was not cathartic for him, that as the songs kept coming, he kept feeling worse. The album bears this out, closing with “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” on which he descends into self-destructive behavior, and “Blue Bucket of Gold,” which finds him reaching out desperately, with no reply. It’s dark and difficult, a clear memoir of a place I certainly hope he has not stayed in.

And if I have hope that Stevens is clawing his way back to the light, much of it comes from Carrie and Lowell Live, his extraordinary new concert document. Stevens took these songs – some of which I can’t fathom how he could sing more than once – out on the road, and fashioned an affecting and beautiful show from them. All of the songs from the album are here, but they are reinvented. They’re fuller, bigger, they radiate life in surprising ways. They’re still haunting – they’re some of the most haunting songs you will ever hear – but they feel like progress, like kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight, as a wise man once said.

The show still begins with “Death with Dignity” (after a brief benediction in the form of “Redford”) and ends with “Blue Bucket of Gold,” but within those boundaries it opens itself up to new possibilities. “Should Have Known Better” takes the light electronic foundation of the original and runs with it, illuminating the second half (“Don’t back down, concentrate on seeing…”) with glorious synths and a small choir of singers. “All of Me Wants All of You” is a revelation, beginning a lot like Genesis’ “Mama,” all electronic toms and dirge-y keys in place of the strummy acoustics of the studio version. When it erupts into a blistering synthesizer solo, it feels like an entirely new song.

That’s the overall effect of Carrie and Lowell Live – these feel like new songs, or at least new ways of looking at familiar ones. Even “No Shade,” performed in a similar way to its studio counterpart, feels new – the way Stevens sings it and plays it here sounds less like a man on the edge of despair. It sounds like a man looking back on despair, remembering it and honoring it, and inviting his audience to honor it with him. Grief and mourning are important, difficult though they may be, and Carrie and Lowell Live walks a fine line, acknowledging their power while not celebrating it.

The reinvention is so complete here that when Stevens adds two songs from the manic The Age of Adz (“Vesuvius” and “Futile Devices”), they fit right in. “Blue Bucket of Gold” still finds Stevens reaching out, but the blissful 12-minute ambient outro provides a closure, a beauty that the album version eschewed. It feels for all the world like healing, like catharsis, like crying out through pain and being answered. (That Stevens chooses to encore with a goofy cover of “Hotline Bling” only underlines the notion that this has all been about putting grief behind him.)

I’m glad to see this get an official release, because Carrie and Lowell Live is now an essential part of the story Stevens began with the original album. Together they lead you through Stevens’ darkest places, first from within and then from without, showing that while grief is heavy and painful and it seems impossible while you’re in it, it does fade, it does become manageable. And eventually you will look back on it, not as a distant memory, but as something that helps define you, helps make you who you are. That process, as detailed lovingly here by Sufjan Stevens, is beautiful.

Carrie and Lowell Live is available as a video you can watch for free, and as a soundtrack that you can download for ten bucks.

* * * * *

In 2016 Phil Elverum lost his wife, and the mother of his child.

Her name was Genevieve Castree, and while she had her own musical legacy as O Paon and Woelv, she is perhaps best known as a frequent contributor to Elverum’s long-running musical project Mount Eerie. In May of 2015, Castree was diagnosed with an aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, and in July of 2016 she died at home, leaving Elverum to care for their daughter alone. It was the worst possible ending to what should have been a fairy tale story of two musicians in love, and in its wake, Elverum was lost.

And like Stevens, he wrote songs while in the midst of this loss. The new Mount Eerie album is called A Crow Looked at Me, and if you are familiar with Elverum and his work, this one will leave you stunned. Mount Eerie albums are normally enormous, mysterious things, but this one is bare, empty, full of space and longing. There’s precious little here except Elverum’s guitar and quivering everyman voice. Mount Eerie songs have tackled death as a subject for years, in metaphorical and poetic ways, but this one dispenses with all of that, just telling the story of his pain in plain language. It’s like reading Elverum’s diary. It’s almost too real. “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about back before I knew my way around these hospitals,” he sings on “Emptiness Pt. 2,” and it feels like a key insight.

A Crow Looked at Me is an invitation to experience Elverum’s greif along with him, from deep inside it. The liner notes even inform you of when each song was written, in relation to Genevieve’s death. Opener “Real Death” was penned one week after, while closer “Crow,” the latest of these, was penned four months after. That isn’t a long time, so there isn’t much of a journey here, just slow realization of what her absence means, trying to hold on to memories and not collapse while living each day, one at a time.

“Real Death” is in some ways the most raw, the most open. It casts a newly wise eye on Elverum’s canon, speaking as plainly as possible: “Death is real, someone’s there and then they’re not, and it’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art… When I walk into the room where you were and look into the emptiness instead, all fails, my knees fail, my brain fails, words fail…” The song ends with a story of a package arriving a week after Genevieve died: a backpack she had bought for their daughter, as a surprise. The album is full of these little moments, these horrible everyday things that bring her rushing back, that remind him that death is real.

“I watched you die in this room, then I gave your clothes away, I’m sorry, I had to, and now I’ll move, I’ll move with our daughter, we will ride over water with your ghost underneath the boat,” he sings in the crushingly beautiful “Ravens.” He sings of spreading Genevieve’s ashes in “Seaweed,” written 11 days after her death: “I brought a chair from home, I’m leaving it on the hill facing west and north, and I poured out your ashes on it, I guess so you can watch the sunset, but the truth is that I don’t think of that dust as you, you are the sunset…” In “When I Take Out the Garbage at Night” he explains that he is leaving windows open despite the cold, just in case “something still needs to leave.” In “Forest Fire,” written later, he closes the windows: “I kept them open for as long as I could, but the baby got cold…”

Most of these songs stop abruptly, refusing to offer comfort or release. “My Chasm” finds Elverum wondering, two months after her death, if the people in his life are growing tired of hearing about her. He writes about this in the most ordinary and painful of ways: “I now wield the power to transform a grocery store aisle into a canyon of pity and confusion and mutual aching to leave, the loss in my life is a chasm I take into town and I don’t want to close it, look at me, death is real…” It’s these details that make A Crow Looked at Me such a powerful and difficult listen, its author in the midst of the worst experience of his life and making us feel it. It’s a travelogue, and its mile markers are simple yet devastating.

The expansive and beautiful “Soria Moria,” written seven months before Genevieve’s death, is the album’s most poetic, giving us a glimpse into life before she was gone. It gives way to the finale, “Crow,” written four months after her death, and it offers a single glimmer of light. Elverum writes of his daughter dreaming of a crow just before one appeared, and it’s a moment that remains meaningful for him, one that helped him get through the pain he details throughout this aching wound of an album.

I wish A Crow Looked at Me did not exist. I wish it didn’t have to. I wish it were not important to live through these hellish experiences, and to talk about them and share them with each other. I have a hard time listening to this, and like Carrie and Lowell, I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like to experience. But I’m glad to have it, while at the same time glad to have albums like Carrie and Lowell Live that assure me that this is not the end of the story, that while death is real and grief is like a dark gray cloud covering everything, you can live through it. There is healing, there is hope, there is life.

Buy A Crow Looked at Me here.

Next week, Gorillaz and Jonathan Coulton. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.