Music for a Sunday Morning, Christmas Edition: Joshua James’ “Winter Storm” and “Joy to the World”
OK, story time. Once, while interning for an English-language newspaper in Mexico during tail-end of the Bush years, I went with my office to Hard Rock Cafe-Guadalajara, for the CD-release party of a local Anglo band whose members had apparently moved there with their parents sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, as that’s about when […]
Excerpt: “There’ll Be Scary Ghost Stories”–English Ghosts of Christmas Past
[Apropos of the season, we present here a third and final selection from Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), available for order here or here, or as a free pdf download here or here. As with our previous two excerpts, I share this chapter as an example of what’s possible […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Christmas Edition: Revisiting Low’s Christmas EP
From the vantage point of 2021, what now stands out to me most about Low’s 1999 Indie-classic Christmas is how much it anticipates their development throughout the 21st century–and our own.
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 10: Sunday Afternoon with Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” and Stone Temple Pilots’ “Interstate Love Song”
Thus far we’ve spent the bulk of our time discussing that Sunday morning feeling–the one you sometimes get in the harsh light of the dawn of a new week–but now it’s time to shift our attention to Sunday afternoon. By then, you have (depending on your background and/or religious upbringing) sobered up, or come home […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 9: The Holy Ghost in Andrew Bird’s “Capsized” and The White Stripes’ “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”
But why do any of us believe in the first place? Church meetings are boring, Church history is sketchy, and Church leaders are (by their own admission) fallible, to say the least. And when you wake up on those Sunday mornings feeling that religion is both the cause of, and the solution to, all of […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 8: Kendrick Lamar’s “What a Dollar Cost” and Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”
Appearing on his massive (in every sense of the word) 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly and cited as a favorite track by no less than President Obama, Kendrick Lamar’s “What a Dollar Cost” is a modern Hip-Hop retelling of Matthew 25:34-46 and Luke 16:19-31. Here, the rapper places himself in the position of the […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 7: Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” for Your Halloween
Halloween falls on a Sunday this year, and hence it feels apropos to examine a pair of religious songs that fit in with the holiday’s vibe. At the risk of sounding like a freshman essay, Halloween is a study in contrasts: we have on the one hand an almost-gleefully morbid fascination with death, degradation, and […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 6: Taking Back Sunday’s “This Photograph Is Proof (I Know You Know)” and Cat Stevens’ “Morning Has Broken”
I was never a particularly big fan of ye olde Screamo-Emo during its mid-2000s hey-day (I was already in college at the time, so was perhaps just a tad too old for it to hit me in the adolescent feelings), but I still had a soft spot for the band-name Taking Back Sunday. It’s a […]
Excerpt: The Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic Halloween on the Borderlands
[Apropos of the October season, here is another selection from Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), available for order here or here, or as a free pdf download here or here. As with our previous excerpt, I share this chapter as a reminder of what can happen when we allow […]
Music for a Sunday Morning, Part 5: Beck’s “Sunday Sun” and Nirvana’s “Lithium”
Continuing our discussion from last week concerning the role of romance (or lack thereof) in those Sunday Morning moods, we now flip genders to consider that heartbreak experience from some men’s sides. First up is Beck’s “Sunday Sun,” appearing on his critically-acclaimed 2002 album Seachange, which Beck famously recorded after the dissolution of a 9-year […]