albums i listened to all the way through

posted this week and every week (37)

Nov 02, 2025

I had dinner with a few friends on Wednesday night. We meant to have a full writing workshop but ended up talking about our lives, music, and also, nothing really at all.

The topic of shoegaze came up, as it inevitably does in the company of cool people. Earlier in the week, I’d saved Mojave 3’s debut album, Ask Me Tomorrow (released in the wake of Slowdive’s third album Pygmalion and subsequent disbandment) to listen to on this gloomy Halloweek. While I adore Slowdive’s dream-pop and sonic ambience, the Mojave 3 project’s folk-influence appeals to me on a different level.

Neil Halstead said Ask Me Tomorrow was influenced by his listening to artists like Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, and Townes Van Sandt, all in an attempt to relax and cut lose from the writing and recording of Pygmalion. In a decade dominated by grunge, hip-hop, R&B, and slacker alt-rock, this earthier version of Halstead’s writing is a welcome surprise for my born-and-bred folk ears.

I listened to “Picture” a few times, letting the harmonies and lyrics sink into my hair like falling snow. What a gut-wrenching song, reminiscent of The Cure’s “Pictures Of You” and Leonard Cohen's “Famous Blue Raincoat.” The feelings and memories we tie to our beloved artifacts pulse and prod with a vengeance. They tease and comfort us in the same breath. Like these more famous songs, “Picture” reveals itself carefully, like opening a creased photograph or an old folded letter.

Similarly, Lily Allen’s heartbroken bitterness packs a punch in the song “Pussy Palace” (I bet you all are wondering how I’m going to connect the dots on this one 😉). Allen’s anger is tied deeply to the tools and toys of her betrayer’s alleged sex addiction—handwritten letters, sheets, the other woman’s hair strands, butt plugs and lube from Duane Reed—all of it is indicative of his blatant disloyalty and, more importantly, her blistering pain.

As an archivist/librarian, I often think about how physical objects are connected to our collective and individual memories. How bizarre it is that a pen a crush used for fifteen seconds once or a single polaroid our high school sweetheart took can bring us to our knees. Do our objects speak to us in some way? Are they somehow laced with the voices, faces, and feelings of our past? Why does art, regardless of the medium, always carry with it this association?

Last night, I watched a New York triple feature: Daddio, Joe’s Apartment, and the Kim’s Video documentary from 2023. There were so many threads of this same phenomenon. Throughout the latter film, filmmaker David Redmon is convinced the massive bootleg VHS and DVD collection of tapes once held in a store on the Lower East Side are speaking to him, begging to be released from their Sicilian prison in the city of Salemi.

Honestly, I get it. Also, having to been to the Alamo Drafthouse location where all of Kim’s Video collection is housed, I really get it. I spend a lot of time on the Lower East Side. Watching the Lower East Side of Joe’s Apartment and Kim’s Video made my Gen X heart ache. Despite having never lived there, much less having lived there at its raw, artistic peak, I am nostalgic for it. Thankfully, there are a few remnants of it hidden in crevices and back alleys. Living archives are important and help us tell stories. Preserving them is essential, albeit it incredibly difficult in such a careless and ephemeral culture.

In other words, the East Wing is not just a building. A picture is not just a piece of paper. A torn raincoat is not just a garment. A VHS tape is not just a roll of magnetic tape held in a case of plastic. The meaning we assign to these objects can ultimately constitute their value, beyond their monetary worth.

Do you all have objects you’d write a song about? What do they mean to you?

On Halloween, the Zine Library hosted a zine workshop for our university’s annual Social Justice Week. We had a wonderful turnout, allowing students to create some truly incredible zines from our gathered and found images.

I made one too, inspired by the religious and historical images I found concerning the topics of torture and martyrdom. There is more overlap there than one might initially think. To prove it, I made a defiantly sacrilegious zine, combining random images from issues of Crap Hound and Monsterama with illustrations and descriptions from a book chapter on early Christian Symbols. What resulted is something I’m not entirely sure will ever earn me points with the more religious among us, so I understand if posting this might lose me more than just a few subs.

A print copy of this zine will be mailed to the first person who correctly guesses which featured naked lady is a still from the 1977 version of Suspiria :D