April Is the Cruelest Month: Songs for Spring & Playlist
Springtime has always been a season of grief. When the flowers bloom and the sun begins to shine on your back, I find myself plagued by a feeling of pervasive emptiness. I suppose that even in new beginnings, there is an unspoken loss. I’m one to indulge the solemnity of gray skies and shivering concrete city streets that occupy me in winter. It is a season where I feel allowed to be sad. In a sense, I am afraid to indulge in the joy that the changing seasons bring. Beginnings are harder than people let on; they are often arduous processes. It is abundantly clear why T.S. Eliot declared that “April is the cruelest month,” as the bloom of a new season is not always something easy. Oftentimes it is gut-wrenching, visceral, and demanding.
The playlist I’ve made explores this theme of a grieving spring. Take “Place to Be” from Nick Drake’s 1972 album Pink Moon, a ruminative song about a man looking back on his own life with a detached gaze. “Song To The Siren” is another beautiful folk song from the early 70s, as Buckley yearns for his lover to return, painting the wistful image of a man looking out to sea. While the work of both Drake and Buckley is impressive, their legacy is dampened by both of the artist's unfortunate young deaths. Sometimes the tragedy which afflicts an artist becomes inextricable from the work itself and their work becomes a testament to as is also the case with Daniel Johnston, who sang openly and poignantly about his own struggles with mental health and psychiatric care. These artists and their legacies explore the beauty that can come from sorrow, reflective of growth and transcendence past previous shackles. We think of springtime as a period of lushness, yet it is a verdancy paled by deathー like disintegrated black soil and crumbling flowers past their period of bloom.
Springtime is also a season where one’s body feels at odds with the nature around it, like a creature emerging from hibernation. Many of the musicians in this playlist explore their own relationships with their environments. Tim Hecker creates ambient electronic work yet there is still a strong connection to the natural world, as if he navigates the world as an omniscient spirit. Masakatsu Takagi also uses experimental, layered noise on his computer to imitate a fleeting catharsis. His album Tagayaki and the featured track “Urute” sees Masakatsu blending traditional Japanese folk instruments, recordings of nature and conversations, and electronica to create a sound that is at once grounded and transcendent. I always associate this synthetic yet heartful electronic music with the coming of springtime, as we slowly warm from our digital slumbers and return to nature.
Springtime is not only a return to nature but also to community, as holidays like Easter, Holi, Ramadan, and Passover become opportunities for families and communities to meet and celebrate. I tried to emphasize this theme with “let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out,” an ethereal track that blends the voices and talents of Kelsey Lu, Yves Tumor, Kelly Moran, Moses Boyd to create a sense of unity. This is also evident in “Tihilele” by Les Filles de Illighadad, a group of Tuareg women who blend traditional tendre and calabash instruments with guitar and a lilting, choral vocal style to create hypnotic melodies that replicate the feeling of sitting at a campfire and singing together. Likewise, “Didn’t I” by Darondo is a soul classic which resounds like a triumphant anthem against insurmountable odds. Songs like these show the importance that music plays in cultivating connections between others.
I hope that, through these songs, you are able to ruminate on what this spring will bring to you. I’ll refer you to Jeanette Winterson’s newsletter: “What do you need to do this spring? What needs to begin again? What ground needs to be prepared? What needs to be planted? What needs to be swept away, because it’s done? What new life is here?”