I listen to a lot of things that other people might not classify as music. Some of Frank Zappa’s stranger material, for example, has cleared many a room for me. I have a large collection of drone and noise artists that most people I know couldn’t stomach for more than a few minutes. Heck, a couple weeks ago I listened to all six hours of the Caretaker’s masterful artistic representation of dementia, and I would do it again.

But if someone asks me for the strangest music in my house, my go-to answer is Jandek. There are three reasons for this. First, the music is unlike anything else in the world. Second, there’s just an unimaginable amount of it, which means there is so much to talk about. And third, I love talking about Jandek. For nearly 15 years Jandek has fascinated me, befuddled me, surprised me and kept me enthralled.

I could talk about Jandek forever. And since I have my own music column and no one can stop me, I’m going to use the next several weeks to get down all my thoughts about the man and his music. I’ve wanted to do this for some time, and with the column ending later this year, it’s now or never. So welcome to Jandek 101, a series in which I will examine every one of Jandek’s 101 albums. (There may be more by the time I’m finished, but for right now, the catalog stands at 101, which is the perfect number.)

I’m not doing this out of some misguided attempt to get my readers (however many there are at this point) into Jandek. I don’t honestly expect that will happen, and the music critic in me would much rather you explore some of the other bands I’ve been championing, like Marillion or the Dear Hunter. I am doing this because this music has bewildered me for a decade and a half, and I’m hoping to explore the complex feelings I have about it. I have so many conflicting thoughts, and writing them down is a good way for me to work through them.

I get that this may not be interesting to anyone but me, and I’ll probably lose some of you until October. That’s OK. Jandek is certainly not for everyone, and a series of columns about Jandek probably won’t be either. But for those of you who do stick with it, I hope to do more than just talk about the music. Jandek makes me consider and reconsider my whole idea about what art is, and why we make it. Deep down, I have some serious admiration for the man behind this project, and I’m hopeful that over the course of this series I can articulate why.

So, question one. Who or what is Jandek?

The basics are easy, and yet complicated at the same time. It’s generally accepted that the man behind the Jandek project – the man who appears on most of the album covers – is named Sterling Richard Smith, and he lives in Houston, Texas. I say this is generally accepted because he’s never explicitly confirmed it. Smith zealously guards his privacy, preferring to refer to himself as a representative of Corwood Industries, the record label that has been releasing Jandek music since 1978. So that’s how I will refer to him here from now on. (Jandek, by the way, refers to the project and everyone who plays on it, not just the Rep, even though he is the central presence.)

There have always been two aspects to Jandek: the music and the mystery. I plan to spend a long time talking about the music, so I’ll explore the mystery a bit here. But I guess I would start by saying that I don’t really think Jandek is meant to be mysterious. In a society where people make music mainly to be heard and to be famous, when someone creates strange, lonely art for decades and basically refuses to talk about it, we call that mysterious. But I think to the man behind it, the music itself is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need explaining.

Jandek, for a long time, was a secret even fewer people knew about. Between 1978 and 2004, Corwood Industries released 40 full-length Jandek albums, and the only way to get one was to write a letter and send a check to a post office box in Houston. Writing the post office box was also the only way you could get the typewritten catalog to even know what albums were available. If you were lucky, you’d get a terse handwritten note back. If you were really lucky, you’d get a box of vinyl albums with a request to hand them out, as a way of spreading the word.

The Representative from Corwood has only given a couple interviews: two in the ‘80s, one in the ‘90s to a reporter who tracked him down, and one for a cover story in The Wire in 2014. While the information in these interviews has been gladly accepted by fans, people who know Jandek appreciate and respect the Rep’s desire for privacy. That’s how we ended up with Jandek on Corwood in 2004, the first and only documentary about a living subject I can think of in which that subject does not appear. (The Rep declined to participate, but gave his blessing and suggested some folks to talk to. It was this documentary that first piqued my interest about the man and the music.)

All of this, plus the fact that Jandek albums contain next to no information – only the album title, track listing and copyright date, no hint about who plays what – led to the theory that the Rep was some kind of recluse, or perhaps mentally ill. But in 2004, after more than 25 years in the shadows, the Rep appeared on stage for the first time in Glasgow, playing an unannounced set at the Instal Festival. He was never referred to as Jandek, but for those who know the music, it was obvious. The man on the record covers was there, singing, and beginning his 16-years-and-counting retort to the rumors that surrounded him.

This is why I say the music is more important than the mystery, and I’ll certainly touch on that as we go. The Rep has continued to play live, performing more than 130 times around the world, and each show is wildly different, usually featuring local musicians he’s never met. It’s in many ways the ultimate act of anti-reclusive artistic collaboration – he’s still a private person, but has opened his very personal art up to as many co-conspirators as he possibly can. He’s even appeared in a documentary, I Know You Well, which shows us how these shows come together and gives us lots of face time with the Rep, talking about music.

Quite a lot of Jandek afficionados have become less interested in the music as the mystery has evaporated. But I think the music has always been the point, and this careful dismantling of the wall between artist and audience – hell, he even has a website now – puts the focus on that music. So what is the music like?

That’s the most difficult question, isn’t it? It’s one I hope to explore in depth over the next several weeks. It’s also wrapped up in why I find Jandek so fascinating. By the usual standards, the Rep is not a good musician. He plays guitar, bass, piano, keyboard, drums and harmonica, and he does all of these things without exhibiting any skill at any of them. I say that not to be harsh – by the standards of proficiency we’ve been trained to expect, the Rep cannot play any of those instruments. His voice, similarly, is untrained, to put it kindly. If he has any true compositional skill, I’ve not heard it. His music is improvised, mainly on one or two instruments that are often in atonal tunings, with his trademark impassioned howling over it. None of it sounds like we’ve been trained to believe music ought to.

I’ve certainly questioned whether Jandek’s 40-plus-year career is a sustained musical prank. But I’ve come to realize that the Rep is as serious about what he does as anyone else I can name. I’ve often talked about the inverse relationship between skill and impact, and that deeply applies here. This music is all impact. And if you immerse yourself in it for any length of time, it’s the rest of the world that starts to sound wrong. The beauty of the intent starts to come out, too.

I’ve described Jandek music as the loneliest sound in the world, and even when the Rep surrounds himself with other people (who are much more skilled than he is), he somehow manages to capture that feeling, that desolation, that despair. I think Jandek music is largely about conveying that emotion, with no barriers. (There are other emotions too, some of them more fun, but we’ll get to that.)

And this is why I say I admire the Rep. He’s carved out a four-decade-and-counting career through sheer force of will. He decided in 1978 that he was going to be a musician, he tailored the music he makes to his own limited skill set, and he pressed on when others would have stopped. He created his own world, and somehow convinced other people to live in it. Rather than learn to play guitar, he bent the universe to his will – he still plays the same way, with the same random strumming and atonal tunings, only now he travels the world and does it in front of people. And did I mention he has made and released 101 albums?

It is that sheer commitment to a musical vision, even one this strange, that I admire. And as you’ll see, Jandek has become one of the most unpredictable, daring and artistically restless music-makers that I am aware of. The Rep is constantly putting himself into unfamiliar situations, testing how the music he makes might be molded into different shapes. There’s a bravery to that, and I respect it. I’ve seen him perform live once, in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2008, and that show – which featured a harpsichord player, a trumpeter and a dancer who occasionally added wordless vocals – remains unique not only among my own concert-going experiences, but among Jandek shows as well.

It’s that surprise factor that keeps me coming back. In this age of internet publicity, I tend to know a lot about every album I buy. It’s not uncommon for me to know the track listing, song lengths, producers, songwriters and guest musicians, have seen the cover art and have heard at least one song before plunking down my cash. Not so with Jandek. When a new album appears unannounced at the bottom of the list on the website, I still get a bit of a thrill, and until it arrives and I play it, I know nothing about what it is, how long it is or how it sounds. There will have been no advance reviews, and I will not know what to expect. That’s exciting for me, and very rare.

All of this adds up to a bit of an obsession for me, and I hope over the following few columns I can explain more about what fascinates me. I haven’t even talked about the album covers, a gallery-worthy collection of Kodak moments and portraits of furniture. The aesthetic is like nothing else, and he’s stuck to it for more than 40 years. I could go on, and I will, next week. I hope this is of interest to some of you, because I plan to enjoy myself. If not, I’ll meet you again in October.

Next week, the first 20 Jandek albums.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Comebacks

I had just turned 21 when Alanis Morissette’s immortal Jagged Little Pill was released.

I wasn’t quite the target demographic – I wasn’t an angry young woman, but I was young and angry. But once I got over my initial reaction to the ubiquity of the singles, I fell in love with the record. I’ve probably told this story here, but I was resistant until my friend Jeff Maxwell offered to pay me for the album if I didn’t like it. I couldn’t tell a lie. The album was – and is – wonderful.

I think some expected that Jagged Little Pill would be just the first in a long line of tear-it-up-and-burn-it-down albums from Morissette, and her subsequent career must seem like a disappointment in that light. She’s never recaptured the fire that she bottled with that first big swing. Her music since then has been about healing, about finding yourself and being as happy as one can be in this world.

It’s all been pretty good, but none of it has stuck in my memory quite like her earlier material. I have to confess that, while I heard them a number of times, I don’t recall much about 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement or 2012’s Havoc and Bright Lights. I’ve checked my notes, and I liked both records, but I couldn’t hum a single song from them. And I’m not sure why. It’s possible that Jagged Little Pill hit me at the right time, and struck a chord with me. Songs like “Perfect” and “Forgiven” spoke to younger me, and older me still listens.

If that’s the case, then I must be at the perfect age and time of my life to hear Such Pretty Forks in the Road, Morissette’s seventh major release. We’re the same age – she was born four days before me – and in the same way Pill was an album about being 21, Forks is a record about being 46. It’s her first album in eight years, but it’s her best in far longer than that. Stylistically, it couldn’t be farther away from the music for which she is best known. It’s a brooding, moody piece of work, mostly quiet and organic. But in its own way, it’s just as raw and honest and compelling as she’s ever been.

This is, in the main, an album about perseverance. Its first three tracks are my favorites, and together they are Morissette’s mission statement. “Smiling,” a song she wrote for the Jagged Little Pill musical, gets things started on a minor key note, Morissette singing about hitting bottom, waving a white flag, and yet continuing on. First single “Reasons I Drink” is a nimble piano number about… well, it’s in the title, isn’t it. And between them, “Ablaze” is a song about what she fights for. An ode to her three young children, it’s a sweet reminder of what matters: “This nest is never going away, my job is to keep the light in your eyes ablaze…”

From there, I think people will be surprised how piano-driven and atmospheric this record is. Morissette is still cramming as many syllables into each line as she can, but on a dark and deep song like “Losing the Plot,” it works beautifully. Her voice is as strong and idiosyncratic as ever, and these songs are remarkably confident. I’m not sure this will please anyone looking for the musician she used to be, but I’m very much satisfied with the musician she has become. These songs resonate with 46-year-old me in ways I can’t explain, but then, Morissette’s best work has always done that. And this is definitely among her best work.

Morissette isn’t the only Canadian songwriter returning after a long absence. Kathleen Edwards is not nearly as well-known, but she should be. Between 2003 and 2012 she made four terrific albums of down-to-earth folk-pop, and with each one her reputation grew. 2012’s swell Voyageur found her working with then-beau Justin Vernon and co-writing with John Roderick, and it was her most successful. She was, I thought, on her way to becoming a household name.

And then it all became too much for her, and she set it aside. She opened a small coffee shop (cheekily named Quitters) in Ontario, took care of her own mental health and built an entirely new life. And though I knew I would miss her songs, I could only wish her well. It takes great courage to step back, re-evaluate and change everything. Throughout she insisted that she was only taking a break, and would be back to writing and recording songs at some point.

Eight years later, here Edwards is with her fifth album, tellingly titled Total Freedom, and man, I missed her. This record is just wonderful. Its ten songs are strummy, melodic, powerful, memorable, sometimes pointed but just as often beautifully at peace. Edwards’ voice is as strong as ever, and as a songwriter she’s as consistent as I have ever heard her. The weakest link here is a song about her dead dog (“Who Rescued Who”), but she even makes that work somehow.

When she’s at the top of her game here, she’s untouchable. “Birds on a Feeder” is a warm finger-picked delight, Edwards singing the lines that lend the album its title: “I’ve got total freedom, no one to need…” “Simple Math” is one of the best love songs I have heard this year (or last year): “Love is simple math, I don’t care how old we get, I’m just one and you’re one and we’re two together…” “Glenfern” is a sweet song of gratitude for the good parts of her former life, and it sets a gentle tone.

There’s a bitterness to some of this, Edwards lamenting failed relationships in “Feelings Fade” and “Fools Ride.” My favorite of these is “Options Open,” a wickedly good country-pop tune about two people missing each other. “For 39 years I’ve been keeping my options open,” she sings, taking her share of the blame. She saves her best heartbreak song for the end: “Take It With You When You Go” is an exorcism, Edwards begging her lost love to take all the hurt with him, and in the end realizing he is “just a picture in my wallet I can’t tear up.”

This is such a compelling record, such a strong set of songs. Whatever it was that brought Edwards out of her quiet life and back into a studio, I’m grateful for it. And if this is the last we hear from her as a songwriter and performer, well, I’ll still be grateful. This album is a gift, one I did not expect, but one I am so happy to receive. Welcome back, Kathleeen, for as long as you want to stay.

Outbacks

I’m still pinching myself at the news that we can expect two new Midnight Oil albums this year.

The first of them, The Makarrata Project, is due out soon, and is reportedly a set of songs about the native Australian people and their fight for equal treatment. Amazingly, there’s a single, released last week – it’s Midnight Oil’s first new song in 18 years, and you can hear it right now. It’s called “Gadigal Land,” in honor of the Gadigal people whose traditional lands are now called Sydney. It gallops along on a guitar-and-horns pulse, and Peter Garrett sounds tremendous, full of that old fire. It’s a new Midnight Oil song! Exciting times.

We still have to wait a bit to hear the Oils’ new records, but there is one Australian band whose new work we can talk about right now. That band is Husky, and I owe Rob Hale for the fact that I even know they exist. When I say I owe him, I mean it – Husky is one of the most consistently great new bands I have encountered in years. Their sound is easygoing, led by the soft voice of Husky Gawenda, but their songs are superbly crafted. The band has moved from the acoustic folk of their first two records towards a more vibey electric feel, but that songcraft remains.

Their fourth album, Stardust Blues, continues that transformation, and the results are sublime. First single and leadoff track “Cut Myself Loose” starts as the band means to go on – its head-nodding beat supports an ocean of ringing guitars and pianos, all there to set a gorgeous mood. “Light a Cigarette” threatens to quicken the pace, but its light melody vibes along, its twists and turns marking it as a classic Husky tune. “SYWD” (short for “Something You Wouldn’t Do”) feels like a breezy piece until you try to count it out – the verses slip from 7/4 to 4/4 to 6/4 effortlessly. It’s a perfect example of Husky’s trademark: catchy songs that are deceptively complicated.

There aren’t any dead spots on Stardust Blues, which means it continues the streak set by the previous three Husky albums. The sound is new – much of this album was recorded in a 1920s mansion and artistic commune, and you can hear that relaxed feel throughout – but the songs are just as wonderful as they’ve always been. Husky remains a band to watch, even now that their records only come out in Australia. I bought the download of this album, since I didn’t have much of a choice, and there aren’t a lot of bands I would do that for. Husky continues to earn my love.

And that’ll do it. Next week, if all goes well, I start an extended project I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. If all does not go well, I’ll be back with more music reviews. Come on back in seven days to see how things went.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

A couple weeks ago Fish released his new single.

Fish, if you don’t know, is a Scottish singer with a long pedigree. He was the original singer for Marillion, back when they were disciples of ‘70s progressive rock, and with him the band scored their biggest hits. After he left Marillion in 1988, Fish launched a solo career that has certainly had its ups and downs. But lately – heck, ever since 2003’s Field of Crows – he’s been on a mighty upswing. 2013’s A Feast of Consequences may well be his best work.

At least for now. For years Fish has been working on what he is billing as his final album. He’s called it Weltschmerz, a German phrase that means “pain of the world.” I’ve liked what I’ve heard, from the menacing “Man With a Stick” to the expansive “Waverly Steps,” but this new single, “Garden of Remembrance,” is the first time in Fish’s long history that he has made me cry.

The song and its extraordinary video are about dementia. They detail an elderly couple as they struggle with one partner’s loss of memory and identity, and Fish digs into the ways dementia can make longtime lovers feel like strangers. The video depicts how moments of clarity can feel like tender reunions. It’s beautiful stuff, and it got me thinking about dementia as a subject. My grandmother suffered from it in her final years, and it’s always been a particular fear of mine, to lose my grasp of who I was and who I am.

This, of course, led me to research other musicians who have tackled this subject, and that rabbit hole led me to The Caretaker. I’d heard of James Leyland Kirby before, and in fact listened to both his solo work and his music under the Caretaker name, but I apparently missed hearing anything about his magnum opus. About four years ago, Kirby began releasing a massive project called Everywhere at the End of Time, billing it as the final Caretaker album.

And really, even just reading about it, this has to be the final Caretaker album, because there’s nowhere else for the project to go. As the Caretaker, Kirby crafted haunting soundscapes out of old recordings of 1920s ballroom music, adding effects and editing them into loops to simulate memory and nostalgia. I can’t explain how or why it works, but it does. Listening to a Caretaker album feels like being very old and looking back on fading moments of joy. It’s beautiful and sad and dark and magical stuff.

But I’ve never heard any of Everywhere at the End of Time, and today I plan to correct that. This album, released in six distinct stages, is six and a half hours long, and is intended to mirror the experience of dementia. The music, so evocative of long-ago memories, is meant to deteriorate over time, and listening to it all in a row is intended to depict, from Kirby’s point of view, what losing one’s memory and sense of self must feel like.

Sounds like a good way to spend a pandemic Saturday, no?

I’m listening to Stage One now, and will write my impressions of this monster as we go. I expect this will be emotionally overwhelming about five hours from now, and I will try to capture it as best I can. If it gets too overwhelming, I will stop, but I hope to liveblog this entire experience from start to finish in one go. If you also want to have this experience – and I understand I am saying this before I take the plunge myself – you can download the whole thing for surprisingly little money here.

OK, here we go.

1:30 p.m.

Stage one: Here we experience the first signs of memory loss. This stage is most like a beautiful daydream. The glory of old age and recollection. The last of the great days.

That’s Kirby’s description of this first of six albums, and it tracks perfectly. Here are twelve pretty, hazy pieces formed from 1920s ballroom records, with the pops and crackles intact to add even more of a nostalgic feel. This is most similar to other Caretaker music I’ve heard, with a deeply romantic feel, like remembering the best dance of your life. There are a couple here, like “Slightly Bewildered” and “Quiet Internal Rebellions,” that speak to a hint of loss, but mostly this is gorgeous.

I find this music so easy to get lost in, so evocative of holding on to a life well lived. Everything here feels new, but also familiar. There’s a tinge of melancholy to it, but an ever-so-slight one, and the overwhelming emotion is joy. The horns on “Into Each Other’s Eyes” are punchy even through the mist, feeling like springtime in the movies. These days do feel great, and I expect I will soon wish they were not the last. Stage two is looming.

2:15 p.m.

Stage two: The second stage is the self-realization and awareness that something is wrong with a refusal to accept that. More effort is made to remember so memories can be more long form with a little more deterioration in quality. The overall personal mood is generally lower than the first stage and at a point before confusion starts setting in.

Oh, this is already getting to me. Stage Two feels like the same memories, only glimpsed through a thickening fog. Everything is slower, less full of life. The strings and horns weep instead of dance. I can feel the joy of Stage One slipping away, and the worst part is that none of it is gone yet. The songs are still recognizable, the memories still tangible, but you can feel that something is off kilter, something is slowing everything down.

When Kirby re-uses source material, that’s when this hurts the most. “What Does It Matter How My Heart Breaks” is built from the same piece that opened Stage One, only deteriorated and worn and sluggish. It’s like the song is trying to remember itself, but can’t quite get there. This stage ends with a song called “The Way Ahead Feels Lonely” – all of these titles feel like suggested meditations while the music is playing – and it’s almost desperate in its attempt to claw at the sadness surrounding it. The ending feels like sinking beneath the waves. This all still feels nostalgic, but that nostalgia is getting harder and harder.

3:00 p.m.

Stage Three. Here we are presented with some of the last coherent memories before confusion fully rolls in and the grey mists form and fade away. Finest moments have been remembered, the musical flow in places is more confused and tangled. As we progress some singular memories become more disturbed, isolated, broken and distant. These are the last embers of awareness before we enter the post awareness stages.

Functionally, this stage is not too different from Stage Two. These pieces are deteriorated further, some of them doubling back on themselves in an approximation of confusion. (My grandmother would ask the same questions multiple times in the same conversation, and this feels like the musical equivalent of that.) Some of these deteriorations are subtle, some are drastic as compared to Stage Two. The same piece of music that opened the first stage reappears here again, for instance, as “And Heart Breaks,” and it’s sadder and slower and harder to pin down.

There’s more noise here as well, which feels to me like the brain spinning fog around these memories, making them more difficult to access. A track called “Internal Bewildered World” barely feels like the music it is based on, the big band sounds only faintly audible beneath the static and drawn-out moans made from the melody lines. It’s haunting. Things get more confused and chopped up from there, as these memories gasp for life. This one is more jarring than sad, although a drone like “Aching Cavern Without Lucidity” no doubt presages some of what is to come.

I feel a little worn out already, and we’re just launching into the more difficult parts of this. The three stages I’ve already listened to encompass 38 of the 50 tracks that make up the whole, but only two of its six and a half hours. The final three stages are all made up of four tracks each, with each track running more than 20 minutes. We’ll see how I do. It’s not emotionally overpowering yet, but I am feeling this music, especially the sheer amount of it, in ways that I am not sure I expected.

4:30 p.m.

Stage Four. Post-Awareness Stage Four is where serenity and the ability to recall singular memories gives way to confusions and horror. It’s the beginning of an eventual process where all memories begin to become more fluid through entanglements, repetition and rupture.

Oh man. This stage was an hour and a half long, and it’s draining. Three of the four tracks are titled “Post Awareness Confusions,” and they sound like it. Everything is jumbled up and difficult to make sense of. These tracks are clearly built with the same source material as the previous three stages, but nothing coheres. There are snatches of pianos and horns, but they are soon swallowed up by the noise and fog. I found this music hard to concentrate on, but at the same time I found it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

That’s sections one, two and four. The third section is called “Temporary Bliss State,” and it’s something else entirely – a respite, a reprieve for 22 minutes. It’s probably constructed from the same pianos that made up much of the earlier material, but these have been manipulated to sound like ethereal chimes, and they float through the noise, carrying you along. This section is no less confusing, but it is less abrasive, less horrifying, and in that way it lives up to its title.

More than anything, what I took from this section is that the length of this experience is the point. This bewilderment is unending, and an hour and a half of it is nothing compared to the everyday torment of a post-awareness dementia patient. Even so, I can’t imagine what the next three hours of this thing are going to do to me. My head is swimming, and I feel like I cannot remember the songs I heard only a couple hours ago. I have never listened to anything else but this noise.

6:00 p.m.

Stage Five. Post-Awareness Stage 5 confusions and horror. More extreme entanglements, repetition and rupture can give way to calmer moments. The unfamiliar may sound and feel familiar. Time is often spent only in the moment leading to isolation.

Oh. Oh.

I am spent. This is tough going. Stage Five is a story in two parts. First is the 45-minute “Advanced Plaque Entanglements,” which is the most harrowing part of this journey. It is like Stage Four’s most abrasive moments, but everything is ramped up. It is denser and more confusing, with more bursts of noise and disorientation. The most affecting parts come when Kirby lets us hear moments of the recognizable music from the first two stages – a few piano chords here, a horn line there. It’s memories peeking through the cacophony of terror, snatches of a former life that can no longer be remembered. These bits go on for mere seconds, barely long enough to register, before we are back to the howling. It is legitimately horrific.

The second part, just as long, is a descent into dissolution. “Synapse Retrogenesis” calms things down, sinking slowly into “Sudden Time Regression Into Isolation,” which is almost an ambient dirge. This is the last of the memories and identity being wiped away, and replaced with a dull nothingness. I cannot imagine living this way, hearing this inside my head at all times. I also am not sure how I am going to make it through the next 90 minutes if they are like this. This might be the most physically draining music I’ve ever heard.

I’m in it for the long haul now, though. No matter how emotionally and spiritually exhausting Stage Six is, I’m not stopping.

7:30 p.m.

Stage Six: Post-Awareness Stage Six is without description.

While I don’t agree with Kirby here – I am certainly going to try to describe this – I do think that nothing I write here will emulate for you what it is like to hear this, especially at the end of this six-and-a-half-hour journey. The exhaustion is part of the experience, the sense that nothing has ever been right and will ever be right again. While the previous two stages used medical titles for their tracks, this one returns to the emotional titles of the first few stages. (“A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting,” as an example.) You’re meant to feel this, meant to succumb to its cavernous despair.

Stage Six is 85 minutes of near-nothingness, of darkness opening its maw and swallowing you. There is no sensory awareness for this stage – the noise has enveloped everything, but worse, the noise itself is distant and quiet. There are waves of it, but nothing like we heard in Stage Five. This stage is numbness, a mind unable to access even itself. What is remarkable is that it is clearly built from the same elements as the first couple stages, only slowed down to an almost time-breaking degree. We still hear the occasional piano hit, but it’s part of the empty nothing. The horns come in, distorted and sad, near the end of “Long Decline is Over,” but they quickly lose form and are folded back into the chasm. Everything has degraded until none of it exists.

And it emptied me right out. I’m not sure how to explain what it feels like to hear this, to come to this destination after such a long walk. And I am certainly not going to be able to explain the flood of emotions wrapped up in the final six minutes of “Place in the World Fades Away,” the concluding track. This whole thing is a dirge, in which individual elements can barely be discerned. It is the final dimming of the light, the final smearing of the lens. It’s louder than I expected, after the near-silence of the first three tracks.

And then, six minutes from the end, the dirge cuts, the record cues back up with the crackles at their normal speed, and the full-on 1920s music begins. And it is gorgeous. I think the idea here is that memories are restored at the moment of death? But hearing music, especially music this sad and glorious, after four and a half hours of confusing, heart-sinking noise, is inexpressible. It may be one of the most beautiful moments I’ve ever had with an album. It’s stunning. The last minute of the album is the silence of death, and its abruptness is shocking and perfect.

This is a thoughtful, difficult, hard-to-digest work. But it is also capable of devastating you emotionally, of cutting past all the questions about how it was made and what it signifies and just stabbing you in the heart. I end it tired and sad and uplifted at the same time. I had more to say here, but I have forgotten it. I am lying down. I am lost in thought. My words are gone. This will have to do.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Everyone loves a good story, and Taylor Swift’s Folklore comes with a really good one.

I assume no one needs me to tell them who Swift is. A darling of the country circuit as a teenager, Swift has masterfully evolved herself into one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Along the way, she’s shown a legimitate knack for tuneful, catchy songcraft, and for choosing some of the best collaborators in the business to bring her songs to life. The effervescent thrills of a record like 1989 or last year’s Lover cannot be overstated, and they helped elevate Swift to a position where her every move is watched and scrutinized.

So the fact that she made an entire new album in secret, while in lockdown like the rest of us, is a strong hook. Even on paper this is intriguing stuff: Swift’s main collaborator here is Aaron Dessner of the National, a band that exists about a thousand miles away from her usual fare. Folklore contains a duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, and musical contributions from Bryce Dessner, Rob Moose and James McAllister. It comes adorned with monochromatic photos of nature scenes.

And the fact that Swift did not even tell her record company that she was making Folklore is all part of its legend, which Swift has spun here with aplomb. Every part of this story is designed to tell you that this is unlike any Swift album you have heard. Dropping it 24 hours after announcing it, which she did on July 24, was an essential part of the story: everyone will be talking about this album for the next couple weeks, and if you want in on the conversation, you better buy it.

I mention all of this up front because I did buy it directly from her, and the story behind it is one of the reasons why. I like Swift, and have picked up her records in the past, but I’ve not felt that pull to be part of the discussion about her the way I have with Folklore. I kinda bought in – I had to hear this right away so I could talk about it. I don’t know if this is a failing or not, but I expect this is going to be part of the new music experience going forward. FOMO will play a part in how well projects like this do.

Thankfully, while I appreciate the story, I appreciate the record even more. Folklore might be a calculated move, a bid for respectability and critical acclaim, but there’s a genuine artistry behind it, and its songs point to significant growth in Swift’s writing. Dessner turns out to be a strong partner for her. I have struggled to like the National, and a lot of that can be attributed to the lack of passion in their delivery. Their songs just kind of sit there. But the Swift-Dessner songs on Folklore, despite using the same trappings, are never boring. The best ones are melodic and interesting in ways we’ve never heard from Swift.

Yes, I know it’s a cliché to consider the slow, quiet folk-pop that makes up all of Folklore as more mature than a record like 1989, but hear me out. The main step forward here for me is in Swift’s storytelling. Her previous records have felt at times like extensions of her Twitter feed, addressing her romances and her celebrity with first-person bluntness. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s the first-draft way to make her points. Folklore is more oblique – it finds Swift speaking through characters, delivering third-person narratives, and leaving clues for attentive listeners to pick up.

The two best examples of this are ones I picked up by being part of the conversation around this record as it unfolded. First there is “My Tears Ricochet,” which reads like a broken love song, but is sneakily about her travails with her record company. It’s the same lovely trick Aimee Mann pulled on Bachelor No. 2, and if you’re drawing comparisons to Aimee Mann, you’re doing something right.

Second, of course, is the teenage love triangle trilogy, which includes “Cardigan,” “August” and “Betty.” These three songs are each sung from the point of view of one character in this love triangle, with little lyrical breadcrumbs sprinkled throughout. Together they tell the story of a summer affair, from the perspective of the boyfriend, the girlfriend and the other woman. Swift does a nice job of telling the same events different ways, putting us inside the minds of all three characters. This is just good songwriting, of a caliber we haven’t seen from Swift before.

And these are not even the best songs. I have three favorites on Folklore that I think are as good as any songs I’ve heard this year. (While I do like the Bon Iver duet, “Exile,” it isn’t one of them.) “The Last Great American Dynasty” spins the story of Rebekah Harkness, who first lived in the Rhode Island mansion Swift now owns. Swift draws some nice parallels between herself and Harkness, and tells her tale sympathetically. “Seven” is a wonder, a song I would gladly accept from Tori Amos. It’s a nostalgic look back at a long-lost friend who had to hide her queerness from her father, told with the clarity of adulthood.

And then there is “Invisible String,” a song I cannot stop listening to. Its central idea is a reference to Jane Eyre, and Swift uses it to discuss the hand of fate connecting people and moving them together. It’s a very pretty lyric married to a gorgeous piece of music – the descending melody on “me” is my favorite thing on Folklore. This is a remarkably rich song, and I would have suffered through an album far worse than this one to get to it.

My main issue with this album is that it is too long, and that some of the songs here don’t pop like others. The CD version sports 17 songs over 67 minutes, and paring down some of the lesser tunes (like “Mirrorball” or “Mad Woman”) would have helped. But there isn’t much of Folklore that I don’t like. This album represents a shift not only in sound but in substance for Swift, and it’s an impressive one. It lives up to its story, and given how compelling its story is, that’s an achievement. I’m glad this album was a success, and now I can’t wait to see how she moves forward from here.

* * * * *

Of course, great albums are not always accompanied by backstories or by a cultural conversation that dominates social media. Sometimes the best records are the ones no one is talking about. Do I have an example? Of course I do, and it’s the self-titled album from Lianne La Havas. And frankly, this is a record that more people should be discussing.

La Havas is a British singer-songwriter whose work with Matt Hales, better known as Aqualung, brought her to my attention. Her work on her own is a complex form of R&B that centers her supple, soulful voice, and this – her third album – is the best example of it she’s given us. It is her first in five years, and it’s a breakup record, but a deeply joyous one. There are shades of Esperanza Spalding in these songs, but La Havas’s work is more straightforward and accessible.

It’s also awesome. Opener “Bittersweet” lets you know what’s up – it flutters to life on a slinky beat, and when La Havas draws back and lets those pipes loose halfway through, the moment is revelatory. “Green Papaya” is a lovely, jazzy folk song, while “Can’t Fight” is a loose and funky number with some sweet harmonies. La Havas again works with Hales behind the boards, and the production is exactly what it should be – the guitars are airy and rubbery, the bass is minimal but effective, and the sound is full without being crowded. There’s a live-band feel to most of this, and it works really well with her voice.

And at track six you get the best Radiohead cover you’ve ever heard. “Weird Fishes” is such a fascinating choice to take on, but she transforms it from a fussy bit of math-rock to a jazz-soul showstopper. I don’t know where the hell this came from, but I’m so glad it exists. Lianne La Havas is an artist who deserves far more attention than she gets, and I hope this album brings her some of the acclaim she’s been due. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter how many people are talking about it, or not talking about it. A great record is a great record, and this is certainly a great record.

Next week, something that scares me a little.

See you in line Tuesday morning.