The countdown continues.

One thing I thought about doing in this space, as my time slowly dwindles, was a holiday gift guide. We’ve seen an extraordinary amount of lavish and beautiful box sets this year, and I have a few favorites. But that seemed like a lot of work, and truth be told, I haven’t had the time to listen to all of them to the level I would like to in order to properly review each of them.

So here’s just a list, and you should hunt each of these down and explore them: Gentle Giant’s Unburied Treasure, Iona’s The Book of Iona, The Divine Comedy’s absolutely perfect Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, Richard and Linda Thompson’s Hard Luck Stories, the awesome Sign O’ the Times set from the Prince estate, Zappa’s Halloween ’81, and (though it is not out yet) the exhaustive-looking Closed for Business from Mansun. That list represents a nice chunk of my 2020 income, and I don’t regret a thing.

What did I decide to do in this space? Well, my opportunities to just talk about new music are quickly diminishing, and I think I would like to do that. I’m giving up this column because it takes so much time, and its audience is perishingly small. But I still love talking about music (and I’m working on ways I can keep doing that), especially new music.

What follows, this week and next, are the last regular old reviews of new music to be published in Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. In a weird way, I’m going to miss doing this. I won’t miss the weekly deadline and the need to fill all this space, even when I don’t care about (or have barely listened to) the music I’m discussing, but when I am genuinely excited about new records, I’ll miss being able to do… well, this.

Elvis Costello, Hey Clockface.

Longtime readers know that I hold Elvis Costello in the highest regard as a songwriter. I seriously cannot name a better writer – Costello has peers, but no betters, at this point in his career. He also doesn’t, at this point, need to keep showing us how good he is. He could coast along, never pushing himself, resting on his considerable laurels if he wanted to.

But he doesn’t. He’s transitioned nicely into his grumpy old man phase, but his writing has sharpened and deepened. 2018’s Look Now was a stunning piece of work, casting Costello’s latest batch of hard-luck tales and rebukes in a classic pop format. “Unwanted Number,” all by itself, would put Costello in the upper echelon of current songsmiths. He could have kept going in this style, but with Hey Clockface, he’s stomped all over it. This new thing is darker and more diverse, and in places it feels like nothing he’s done before.

Hey Clockface was recorded in three cities – Helsinki, Paris and New York – and the sessions are mixed together, giving this a mixtape feel. The Helsinki material, all of which was released as singles, is the most daring and abrasive. Drums clang and clatter, guitars slither and effects whiz by as Costello spits out his tirades in his thick, still-strong voice. “No Flag” is one of the strangest pieces Costello has written, its chaos matching the bleak portrait it paints lyrically: “No sign for the dark place that I live, no god for the damn that I don’t give…”

The bulk of the album – nine of the 14 tracks – was recorded in Paris, and while the production is delightfully off-kilter, these songs are classic Costello. “I Do (Zula’s Song)” is an utterly brilliant jazz ballad with horns to die for, the title track is a Dixieland jaunt, and piano numbers “The Whirlwind” and “Byline” are gorgeous. The New York songs, “Newspaper Pane” and the spoken-word “Radio is Everything,” add a touch of menace to the proceedings.

All wrapped together, Hey Clockface is another showcase for the unerring melodies and sophisticated songcraft that Costello seems to deliver more consistently than almost anyone. This is album 31 for Costello, and he makes the argument that so much experience can only help hone your skills. He would never write something like “Mystery Dance” now, and younger Costello could not have dreamed up the songs on this record. Following this man’s career has been one of the great joys of my music-buying life, and I hope he never quits.

Chris Stapleton, Starting Over.

Start with this: the plain white design of the Starting Over cover, with its handwritten title and byline, is my favorite of the year. It is simple, striking and effective, just like the music you will find on Stapleton’s third and best record. A country hitmaker who was clearly saving his best material for himself, Stapleton’s star has been on the rise in alt-country circles, and this is the one that should make him famous.

Lately I feel like there’s a war on for the soul of Nashville, and while bro-country rules the charts, people like Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price and Stapleton are trying to pull things in a more honest and traditional direction. Nothing on Starting Over should surprise you, melodically speaking. It runs the gamut from pretty ballads (“Joy of My Life”) to rockers (“Devil Always Made Me Think Twice”) to bluesier things (the two Guy Clark covers), but it’s all written and performed with an authenticity that can’t be faked. Stapleton isn’t afraid to show emotions, nor to take on wider issues, as he imagines justice for those who shoot up churches and synagogues on “Watch You Burn.”

Adding to the sonic goodness here are two of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, guitarist Mike Campbell and pianist Benmont Tench. They know how good Stapleton is, how perfectly imperfect his voice is, how genuine songs like his can launch and sustain a decades-long career. I hope they’re right in this case, and that Stapleton sticks around for a while. If you, like me, felt a little underwhelmed by Isbell’s offering this year, you owe it to yourself to try Starting Over.

Sara Bareilles, More Love: Songs from Little Voice Season One.

Honestly, if I saw Sara Bareilles’ birth certificate and it informed me that her middle name really is “underrated,” I wouldn’t be surprised. When I talk to people about her, I find that she’s respected, but her name isn’t one that pops immediately to mind when listing off great modern songwriters. She’s quietly put together a quality catalog that includes sweet records like The Blessed Unrest and last year’s Amidst the Chaos, and also the songs for the hit musical Waitress. I love her voice and her songs, and I’m in for anything she does.

So I guess what she’s been doing lately is working on a television show, one named after her second album? I haven’t seen a frame of Little Voice, but I immediately bought this album of songs from its first season. Frankly, I have trouble believing the show could be good enough to deserve these songs. I can hear how a television show might incorporate them, but these are not cast-offs and also-rans. These are top-notch Sara Bareilles songs, and deserve to be heard in their own right.

My favorites are the slower ones, which is not to slight anthems like “More Love” and “Simple and True.” “Dear Hope” is wonderful, with a jazzy foundation, a minor key melody and some delicate cello lines. “Ghost Light” is a perfect Bareilles song, led by her piano and a soaring chorus. Those falsetto notes, good lord, they get me. And the title track of the show, “Little Voice,” is a winner. This song was written 15 years ago, and Bareilles was persuaded not to include it on her debut, for some reason. Now it’s the basis of a television show, which shows what record execs know. I’m sad we didn’t get to hear this at the time, but so glad we get to hear it now.

More Love is yet another reason why I will buy anything and everything Sara Underrated Bareilles does, from now to eternity. I just watched the trailer for the show, and it looks like something I would enjoy. I hope there is a second season, and it’s full of songs like these, and we get to hear them. I can’t wait.

Meg Myers, Thank U 4 Taking Me 2 the Disco, I’d Like 2 Go Home Now.

On the other end of the emotional spectrum is Meg Myers, whose two previous albums of electronic-tinged rock have been equal parts exciting and darkly depressing. I found Sorry to be a powerful thing, full of sweeping songs like “Desire” and “Make a Shadow” that drew from the likes of Garbage. I found her second, Take Me To the Disco, to be a little too much the same, but still pretty good. Had she stayed on this track, I probably would have lost interest, though.

Luckily, she seems on the verge of a transformation. Her in-progress third album will apparently detail a spiritual awakening, and will feel different from her first two. Hence these two Eps, released to bridge the gap. They’re made up partially of songs that didn’t make Disco, mixed in with some new ones, but they also chart some well-earned growth. These 10 songs together make a better album than Disco did, even if we are still trafficking in darkness.

Hell, just “Grizzly” by itself outdoes all of Disco, its pounding beat and big guitars supporting one of her most kick-ass choruses. “The Underground” uses a slinkier beat to do the same, delivering a singable anthem, while the painful “I Hope You Cry” closes out the first EP with a piano-led confession. The second EP turns the guitars down somewhat – “True Liars” has a winning Pat Benetar feel, while “End of the World” might be the darkest song she’s written, set to a jaunty clap beat. Final track “Last Laugh” feels like a coda and speaks to Myers’ strength, overcoming everything she details here.

This is a great piece of work in and of itself, and I’d happily consider these 10 songs Meg Myers’ third album. But more is on the way, and I’m excited to hear where she goes. Myers isn’t a household name by any stretch of the imagination, but lovers of well-considered electro-rock should give her a listen. Despite its role as a stopgap in her catalog, this is a good place to start.

Deep Sea Diver, Impossible Weight.

I’ll end this with a shout-out to Jim Worthen of Tooth and Nail Records who told me about Deep Sea Diver. It’s the project of Jessica Dobson, who has played with the Shins, Beck, Spoon and others, and serves as a showcase for her songs. And they’re really nice songs, epic and tuneful and produced exceptionally well.

Impossible Weight is the band’s third album, and it’s one of my favorite little discoveries of the year. It’s similar to Myers in that the songs are guitar-driven and the beats sound electronic (even if they’re not), but Dobson’s voice is bigger, her choruses more cathartic and emphatic. “Lights Out” has a loose trio feel to it, Dobson’s full-throated singing giving way to her awesome guitar solo, and the title track is a wonder, Dobson and Sharon Van Etten sharing vocal duties as the song pulls you under.

Really, the whole thing is great, though I have a special love for the extended jam on “Eyes Are Red (Don’t Be Afraid),” Dobson again cutting loose on the guitar. Chances are good you haven’t heard of this band either, so check out their Bandcamp site and remember to thank Jim Worthen later.

OK, that’s it for this week. Next week, more of the same, for the last time.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

As most of you probably know, my plan is to wind this column down at the end of the year.

Which means I don’t have many of these left. With December bearing down, I’ve started to put some serious thought into how I want to wrap Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. up. (My most powerful instinct is just to stop, now, but I know an endeavor like this deserves some kind of send-off.) I’m sure in my younger days I considered how I might bring this in for a landing someday, but I can’t remember any of those ideas now.

And it’s just as well. I’m not the same person I was when I started writing this thing, and thank God. I go back sometimes and read some of my earliest pieces, and they make me want to curl up into a ball. I was trying too hard to be edgy, to live up to some idea of what I thought music reviewers should be. I hadn’t learned how to just use my natural voice. I learned a lot writing TM3AM every week for 20 years, and that was one of the big lessons.

I guess I am thinking of my final column, which should run on Dec. 29, the way some artists think about their final album. It isn’t often that songwriters know when they’re making their final albums. Often that decision coincides with mortality – David Bowie and Leonard Cohen and Warren Zevon all knew their days were numbered, and designed their final albums to reflect their state of mind. Those are tough and powerful glimpses of the end, full of insights we don’t seem to see any other way.

But sometimes artists decide to ride off into the sunset on their own terms, and I feel like that’s what I’m doing. Lately I feel an affinity with these retirement package albums, and there is no greater one from this year than Weltschmerz, from Scottish singer Fish. I’ve been a fan for a long time – in his wayward youth, Fish was the original frontman for Marillion, one of my very favorite bands – and he’s been talking about making one final album for years. Now it’s here, and I expect it is everything he wanted it to be.

Weltschmerz, in German, means “world pain,” and Fish’s concept here (because he always has one) is to tell stories of people struggling. Sometimes overcoming, sometimes not, but struggling. He’s normally a first-person writer, and we’ve heard a lot through the years about his own relationships and his own failings. But he’s always been a strong storyteller too, something he proved on his recent A Feast of Consequences album with his five-part suite about World War I.

Yes, I know, just the idea of a five-part suite makes some of you break out in hives. Fish belongs to the prog tradition, like his former band, and although he has certainly moved beyond the Genesis mimicry of his earliest days, the songs on Weltschmerz are longer and proggier than what he has given us recently. In some ways it’s a return to his roots – Weltschmerz is an old-fashioned double album, about 85 minutes long, and three of its songs break the 10-minute mark.

And that gets at what I want to talk about here. Weltschmerz is great, truly, but the same thing that makes it great also makes it hard to love. This album is the very definition of pulling out all the stops for one last ride. There are strings, horns, big arrangements. These songs have movements, and they take you on journeys. Fish, as a lyricist, has always been more of a prose writer, but here he writes miniature novels, and the music is often there as a delivery method. The 15-minute “Rose of Damascus,” the story of a refugee fleeing her home country, is incredible. The lyrics are erudite and pointed and poetic, and the crack team of musicians Fish has assembled here makes every moment of it count.

But nearly all of the moments are like this, and as it moves along, the 10-minute saxophone-laden “Little Man What Now” giving way to the exuberant 13-minute “Waverly Steps (End of the Line),” it gets a little wearying. The pieces of this album are all terrific, but sequenced one after another, it’s a lot. My favorite moments on Weltschmerz turned out to be the smaller ones. “Man With a Stick” is a great song, tracing a life through the various sticks one carries as one ages. “C Song” is delightful, a simple anthem (“I won’t let you bring me down”) that uses its 4:41 to the fullest.

My favorite moment here, in fact, is the gentlest, and not just in contrast with the rest. “Garden of Remembrance” is perhaps – perhaps – the finest little song Fish has written. It’s an examination of dementia, of a man struggling with the disease as his wife copes with his fading memories. It’s gorgeous, and the accompanying video is similarly heartrending. There’s a stunning simplicity to this – “He’s lost between the here and now, somewhere that he can’t be found, she’s still here” – that outdoes all of the pomp and circumstance elsewhere on the album.

If there’s a mission statement here, it’s the title track, the final song on the final Fish album. It’s the story of a revolutionary who bears a striking resemblance to Fish himself: “I’m a grey-bearded warrior, a poet of no mean acclaim.” It’s an angry song, but a hopeful one, and Fish ends this album and his solo career bewildered at the state of things, but ready to fight for change. Fish’s sense of social justice is at the heart of Weltschmerz, and I hope he carries on, even if this is his last musical work.

And it likely will be. Every minute of Weltschmerz feels like it knows that this is the finale, the last piece of music Fish will deliver. It’s big and grand and monolithic, and listening to it, I sometimes wish that those instincts had been pared back somewhat. The most emotional moments here are the quieter ones, and it is in those moments that I understand how much I am going to miss this man and his work. For this column, I feel like the lesson I can learn from Weltschmerz is to go easy, to not let the finality of things dictate the form of them. But for someone as ambitious and nearly mythological as Fish, this is the perfect way to go out.

Check out Weltschmerz here.

* * * * *

Of course, there’s something to be said for sticking around, too, and since this is likely my last chance to mention Marillion here, I’m going to. The band is coming up on 40 years, 31 of them with singer and frontman Steve Hogarth, and they’re as good now as they have ever been. Better, I would say. Their last two albums have easily numbered among their best, and last year’s glorious With Friends from the Orchestra revisited several of their finest hours with strings attached.

Now they’ve released a live album from their tour with string and horn players, With Friends at St. David’s, and it is equally glorious. I don’t understand how Hogarth, now 64, has a stronger and fuller voice than he did at half that age, but he does. The new arrangements turn opener “Gaza” into even more of a film score, add moments of unexpected beauty to “Ocean Cloud” and bring even the incredible “This Strange Engine” to new heights. I’ve heard each of these songs more times than I can count, and these settings make them feel new.

If you’re not already a Marillion fan, I’m not sure I would suggest starting with St. David’s. I’ve certainly gone on at length in this column about how wonderful I find the whole catalog, but I don’t think you should live another week without hearing Brave, Afraid of Sunlight, Marbles, Sounds That Can’t Be Made and Fuck Everyone and Run. (And if you want a dose of Fish-led Marillion, Clutching at Straws is my favorite.) Then, once you’re a fan, check this album and its studio counterpart out.

Marillion is working on their 20th album now, and it’s a little bit sad that I won’t get to review it in this space. But they’re one of my favorite examples of persistence and perseverance. 40 years, and no signs of stopping. Amazing.

Next week, the final reviews begin.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Well, that was something.

Last week I begged every American reading this column to go vote. I can’t definitively say it was down to my influence, but man, you did. Turnout in this election was hearteningly high, with more than 146 million people casting ballots at the current count. As Frank Zappa once said, democracy only works if you participate, so I would very much like to thank everyone who participated.

The good news is that 75 million (and counting) people voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, roughly four million more than voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. You can quibble over whether that is good news, I guess. For me, this feels like America stepping back from the brink. We’ve been on the verge of sinking into corrupt authoritarianism under this administration, and I know some think that is hyperbole, but I watched in horror over the past four years as our checks and balances on presidential power were eroded one by one. Waking up to this result has felt like being given a second chance.

Now all we have to do is earn it. As noted above, 71 million people (and counting) voted for more authoritarianism, swayed by fear-mongering about a Biden administration’s erosion of our basic rights and freedoms. I hope that the reactions of the two men to the result of the election points out to everyone watching the vast difference in character between them. Trump’s response is petty, small and selfish, spreading baseless accusations of a fraudulent election simply because he did not like the results. Biden’s has been generous and statesmanlike, extending the hand of healing to his opponents and vowing to set America on a path we can all be proud of.

We’re going to have to live with that 71 million (and counting) for a long time, and there’s no fixing the information silos that keep one half of the country divided from the other. Biden has his work cut out for him. But for the first time in years, I am breathing more easily, and I am less frightened for my more vulnerable friends and acquaintances, knowing they will not be targets in Joe Biden’s America. It’s a step on a longer path, but a step I am so glad we’ve taken.

* * * * *

It wasn’t all good news this weekend. We lost Alex Trebek, the longtime host of Jeopardy!, and yes, the exclamation point is officially part of the proper name. I was ten years old when Trebek began his stint hosting Jeopardy!, and he’s been a constant presence in my life, as he has been for a lot of others. His wry yet stately demeanor was the stuff of legend, and to say that he was an icon of American culture is to understate the case. Others have eulogized Trebek far more eloquently than I could. Suffice it to say that he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on Sunday morning at age 80, and the landscape of pop culture will never be the same.

We also lost Bones Hillman, the electrifying bass player for Midnight Oil. Hillman is less well-known, but his impact on my musical life is immense. Hillman, born Wayne Stevens, was legendary in Australia and his native New Zealand. He joined Midnight Oil in 1987, at the height of their popularity, and made his debut with the band on 1990’s awesome Blue Sky Mining. His voice added so much to the backing vocals, and his playing was always energetic and inventive.

Hillman stayed with the band until their breakup in 2002, as frontman Peter Garrett left to pursue politics. Hillman settled into the life of a session musician until the Oils reunited in 2017, and his work can be heard on their new album The Makarrata Project, which I reviewed last week. He co-wrote “Terror Australia,” one of the record’s most striking songs. The Oils have a new album in the can as well, which will be released next year, and these will be Hillman’s final songs with them.

Bones Hillman also died of cancer. He was only 62.

* * * * *

I don’t want to dwell on death and loss, though. There will be plenty of time for that. I want to leave you this week with a piece of music that has been an unending source of calm for me for the last few months. Brad Mehldau, one of my piano-playing heroes, composed a suite in April that encapsulated his feelings about this never-ending year. It’s called Suite: April 2020, and as usual for Mehldau, it’s beautiful. It’s also an uneasy, boxed-in thing, befitting a year with a global pandemic and so much unrest.

The final movement, though, is called “Lullaby,” and I cannot at the moment point to another piece of music that says “everything is going to be all right” as well as this one does. The next few months will be hard. The next few years will be hard. But there is always hope.

There is always hope.

OK, I’m going to enjoy the rest of this unseasonably warm weekend. Be good to each other, and be back here in seven days for some actual music reviews.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Today is election day, and I cannot hide my anxiety. My mental state is best described as shaky, I’m not sleeping well, I have trouble focusing. The last few weeks have felt like 20 years. I can see 2016 happening all over again, and I worry that this is the last free and fair election I will be able to vote in. The next few months are going to be terrible, and I don’t know how we will survive them.

So I’m writing this in what might be the last weekend of our surprisingly fragile democracy, and I’m urging you, if you haven’t already, to vote. Vote, vote, vote. An overwhelming Biden win, one that cannot be successfully contested in court, is literally the only way out of this mess. Please, please vote. I have to believe that there are more of us who believe in decency and equality and justice. There simply has to be.

Since I’m unable to truly focus on anything else, it should be no surprise that the music I have been listening to lately has been strongly political. Well, I say political, but what I mean is music that is invested in justice. The issues at stake in this election should not be political issues. They are justice issues. Racism and white supremacy are justice issues. How we treat the most vulnerable in our society is a justice issue.

Glenn Kaiser has been all about justice issues for the whole of his career, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that he’s delivered the fiercest political album of this election season. But I was surprised anyway. Part of it is that evangelical support for Trump is so loud and so pervasive that I can sometimes forget that it does not represent all of Christianity. I appreciate the reminder that the Jesus of the gospels would not be standing for this, and that some Christians remember this.

If you don’t know who Glenn Kaiser is, it’s understandable. He’s a seismic figure in the Christian music of the ‘70s, but outside that bubble he’s relatively unknown. For nearly 30 years he and his wife Wendi led the Resurrection Band, one of the first hard rock gospel bands, and pioneered the Cornerstone Festival, where thoughtful, innovative faith-based music found a home. I have, at best, a complicated relationship with the movement Kaiser is a part of, but his music has been an important part of my life, and Cornerstone was a magic place for me.

Resurrection Band broke up in 2000 after 13 good-to-great records, and Glenn has since been making music under his own name. He’s a gruff, bluesy player, at home on both electric and acoustic guitars (and lately on homemade instruments cobbled together from cigar boxes). In addition to his musical bona fides, Kaiser brings 50 years of experience living in Chicago and helping the people Jesus referred to as “the least of these” to his new album, Swamp Gas Messiahs. It is a stunning smackdown of Trumpism and the politics of racism and greed, and exactly the kind of thing I needed right now.

Throughout this thing, Kaiser pulls no punches. It’s largely him and an acoustic guitar, though he does plug in for a few tunes, and the stripped-down nature of it puts the focus on his impassioned voice and striking lyrics. “I Hear Talk” alone, all by itself, takes aim at the moneyed politicians who don’t want to see the broken and disadvantaged “on their front lawns.” “The money buys power and fascist prestige and the marginalized get the boot,” he sings, starting as he means to go on.

As it unspools, Swamp Gas Messiahs takes on the form of an old-time protest record, straight out of the ‘60s and ‘70s. “White/Right” takes powerful aim at the racism oozing from the White House, shining a light on the parts of our history the president wants to erase. “Straw Man,” one of my favorites, expands on that theme, taking it to its ruling-class conclusion: “How dare the peasants disagree, we were born to rule and them to poverty, let justice roll from our holy land, our might makes right as we burn the straw man.” This one sounds like a classic Neil Young tune.

“Fake” takes on the idea of fake news, and the man behind that idea: “Reality shows, bank account grows, a fake won the election.” The album grows more savage as it goes on, with an amazing trilogy near the end. “Market Value” is ferocious, its target the “all lives matter” crowd who deny the racism our country was built on. “You Ain’t” drives the point home: “Just so you’ll understand, they will make it clear, unless you’re just like them, you ain’t welcome here.” “The Principal Principle” is the most pointed anti-Trump song here, its lyrics leaving little doubt about who Kaiser is singing about: “At the sound of the last trump, pride before the fall, the most powerful liar in the world will have nothing to say at all.”

The message of this record is pretty obvious: the money-and-power politics of Trump is in direct conflict with Jesus’s exhortations to help the poor and needy, to walk humbly, seek mercy and love justice, as Kaiser quotes in the final song, “Mud and Spit.” How the mainstream church diverged from those exhortations is beyond me, but it’s so good to hear someone so immersed in that culture hold up such a powerful mirror. Swamp Gas Messiahs is a tough album, but a necessary one. In its righteous anger it holds truth: only by acknowledging our sins can we start to make them right. Check it out here.

Until Kaiser came along I fully expected Midnight Oil to deliver 2020’s most political record. If you haven’t heard the news: After a silence of 18 years, Australia’s most politically engaged band has returned. Frontman Peter Garrett spent much of those 18 years serving in the Australian parliament, fighting for the rights of the indigenous people. Like our natives, the aboriginal Australians were massacred and marginalized by white settlers, and have been shouting for a seat at the table ever since.

Midnight Oil’s music has always been a vehicle for social change, and Garrett and the band have taken up this fight in a new arena. Their first album in nearly 20 years is called The Makarrata Project and it finds the band collaborating with native musicians on a set of urgent, diverse music with a single theme. That theme can be found on the cover, a full reprinting of the Urulu Statement from the Heart, a plea for first nations people to be included in the Australian constitution. “Makarrata” means “coming together after a struggle,” and is the hope expressed in each of these songs.

First off, if you were worried that the members of Midnight Oil, all in their mid-60s, might have lost their edge, don’t even concern yourself. The opening salvo of “First Nation” and “Gadigal Land” will put that to rest. They have just as much fire as they always have, Martin Rotsey and Jim Moginie’s guitars crashing against Rob Hirst’s thunderous drums, and Garrett sounds incredible here, his voice remaining as striking as ever. “First Nation” is amazing, built around a pulsing synth bass line and incorporating a rap from Tasman Keith without even a hint of old-guy syndrome. The three-chord horn-driven stomp of “Gadigal Land” picks up that torch and runs with it.

Things get mellower from there, but the band emphasizes their melodic skill on “Change the Date,” with vocals from Dan Sultan and the late Gurrumul Yunupingu. It’s gorgeous, as is “Terror Australia,” sung by Alice Skye. Its tender piano arrangement belies its hardcore lyrics: “Where ignorance and wealth combine to crush the fruit upon the vine, it’s a terror in Australia.” Frank Yamma, one of the most famous indigenous songwriters in Australia, takes the microphone for the strummy “Desert Man, Desert Woman,” sung partially in traditional language.

One of my favorite things about The Makarrata Project is how willing the members of Midnight Oil are to cede the spotlight on their first record in 18 years. Their solidarity with indigenous musicians is more important than anything else here. You get an absolute Midnight Oil classic like “Wind in My Head,” but you also get the full Uluru Statement from the Heart read aloud by their collaborators over guitar soundscapes. This album is a glorious use of the band’s platform to elevate and stand alongside the forgotten people of Australia, and I would expect nothing less from them.

The Makarrata Project, at 34 minutes, is considered by the band to be a mini-album, and they have a full record in the works. If it is as focused, forceful and beautiful as this first taste, I will be even more grateful than I am to have Midnight Oil back with us. The world needs bands like them, pointing out injustice and working to heal. I fear our country will need a lot of healing in the coming weeks, and music will not be enough. But at least we have this.

* * * * *

One final note before I go. Have you ever had the experience of hearing just the right song at just the right time? That happened to me this weekend. I’ve been a Michael Penn fan since his debut album in 1989, and it’s been so long since we’ve heard from him – his last album came out in 2005 – that I’d all but forgotten what a thrilling songwriter he can be. Well, Penn returned this weekend with his first new song in 15 years, and I cannot even explain how perfect it is for this moment, right now.

It’s called “A Revival,” and it’s a beautiful anthem of hard-won hope. Listen to it. Like, right now. This song feels like the missing piece of the 2020 puzzle for me, the song I didn’t know I needed until I heard it. I don’t know if this will do for you what it has done for me, but it has stirred my heart in ways I cannot explain. It’s so good to hear Penn’s voice again, especially on a song that feels so much like this moment.

Vote. I beg you, please. Vote. And then hang on. We’ll get through this. There’s good news coming. Love is real.

See you in line Tuesday morning.