Reporter's Notebook

A reader writes:

So you were hinting at a window view contest in a recent Orbital View. Come December 11, there may be many of us employees of the federal government looking for something to do. A contest might be a nice shutdown distraction.

On a separate note: The multiple, incompatible interventions in Syria has me thinking back to the strategic error that was (or perhaps still is) the Iraq War. Our actions contributed to the current crisis in Syria and constrain our options. When thinking about the Iraq War, I find myself listening to TV on the Radio’s masterful “I Was a Lover.”

Heard above. And full lyrics below:

I was a lover, before this war
held up in a luxury suite, behind a barricaded door
now that I’ve cleaned up, gone legit
I can see clearly: round hole
round whole, square peg don’t fit

I’m locked in my bedroom, so send back the clowns
my clone wears a brown shirt, and I seduce him when there’s no one around mano y mano, on a bed of nails
bring it on like a storm, till I knock the wind out of his sails
And we don’t make eye contact, when we have run-in's in town
just a barely polite nod, and nervous stares towards the ground
I once joined a priest class, plastic, inert
in a slowdance with commerce
like a lens up a skirt

And we liked to party
and we kept it live
and we had a three volume tome of contemporary slang
to keep a handle on all this jive

Ennui unbridled, let’s talk to kill the time
how many styles did you cycle through before you were mine?
and it’s been a while since we went wild and that's all fine
but we’re sleepwalking through this trial
and it’s really a crime it’s really a crime it's really a crime
it’s really criminal

We're just busy tempting, like fate’s on the nod
running on empty, bourbon and god
it’s been a while since we knew the way
and it's been even longer since our plastic priest class
had a goddamned thing to say

I was a lover before this war

A reader flags it:

Dustin Tebbutt’s voice is kind of dry and raspy in kind of the same way as Iron and Wine, and I really enjoy the interplay between him and Thelma Plum.

How Aidan Hogg frames the track:

The second single lifted off his upcoming mini-album Home, Dustin Tebbutt’s new track Silk is a delicate piece of acoustic driven gold. No stranger to collaboration, having just released a single with “The Kite String Tangle,” Tebbutt has Thelma Plum lending her soft vocals to verses, as well as adding some glorious harmonies.

Have a track to recommend? Drop me an email.

A reader recommends this soulful track off a new collaborative album, Big Gram: “I’m kind of a sucker for crossover stuff like this, but even given that, I think Big Boi and Phantogram have done it really well.” How Rolling Stone covered the track:

[“Goldmine Junkie,] a tale of broken hearts and romantic devotion, finds the Outkast rapper trying out a suave croon, with singer Sarah Barthel [from Phantogram] sliding into an unexpected rap verse. … “When we were in the studio, we were trying to figure what person to put on a track and Big was like, ‘Why don’t you just rap?’” Barthel told Rolling Stone about the track. “‘Uhhh. No. that's a bad idea.’ But he talked me into it and coached me in the studio, which is strange to be rapping in front of your all-time favorite rapper.”

Have a new track to recommend? Drop me an email.

The loss of the cargo ship El Faro—the worst American maritime disaster in some time—reminded me of this work, Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae, by the Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi. It’s hard to gloss Canticum because it’s such an unexpected work: occasional music, written about an event in the 1990s, with a text wholly in Latin. But here’s a try:

Canticum is written as a memorial to the victims of the MS Estonia.

In 1994, the Estonia was lost during a storm in the Baltic Sea: Of the 989 people aboard the ship at the time, 852 died. The loss of the Estonia is the deadliest peacetime European shipping disaster in history.

Mäntyjärvi’s piece followed three years later. It pulls its text from several sources.  As the piece opens, the choirs whispers the first lines of the Catholic Requiem Mass: “Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.” The piece ends in a Latin version of Psalm 107, in a passage beginning: “They that go down to the sea in ships…”

The middle section, a tenor solo, straightforwardly describes the disaster. The source of its text is almost more surprising than the fact of the piece itself: The words are taken from Nuntii Latini, a news update delivered entirely in Latin every week on Finnish national radio. (The Times wrote about Nuntii Latini back in 2013.) The first line reads as:

Plus octingenti homines vitam amiserunt calamitate navali in Mari Baltico septentrionali facta.

Which translates to:

Over eight hundred people perished in a shipwreck in the northern Baltic Sea.

Though slightly error-ridden, the rest of the text is here.

Between the work’s patchwork text and arcane language, you might think Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae would come off as esoteric or gimmicky. Yet especially in its first half, Mäntyjärvi’s music stays supple, earnest, and moving. The wordless soprano solo at the beginning sounds more like a folk melody than a canticle. In this performance from the Illinois choir Cor Cantiamo, which has worked with Mäntyjärvi, the miserere lament swells, tide-like, but never loses its respect or warmth.

And Nuntii Latini, by the way, is still going strong. You can listen to its most recent episode, about “praesidentes Barack Obama et Vladimir Putin” giving “orationes” at “Nationes Unitae LXX annorum,” on its website.

In a review of the newly released Martian soundtrack, Megan writes:

… The Martian is [not] solely soundtracked by [disco songs from artists like] Donna Summers. [Ridley] Scott’s film, in the grand tradition of the Epic Space Movie, does have an orchestral score—one that aims to evoke, The Martian’s composer, the Hans Zimmer protégé Harry Gregson Williams has said, Mars’s menace and hostility and loneliness. That score makes excellent use of tense strings and sharp winds to put its viewers in the mind, and body, of Mark Watney. (Take a particularly powerful moment when the stranded astronaut is performing surgery on himself: The music rises to a terse, sharp crescendo in accordance with his pain.)

“Making Water,” seen above, is the most popular of the scored tracks on YouTube right now. Have a track to recommend for the daily feature? Drop me an email. And be sure to catch Chris Orr’s review of The Martian.

Spencer reviews Janet Jackson’s latest album, Unbreakable:

There’s precisely one song that might endure in the list of Jackson classics: “No Sleeep,” the comeback single that’s enjoyed a solid run on the R&B charts. It’s about as far away from Rhythm Nation’s juxtaposition of hard beats with Jackson’s soft, breathy voice as you can get—here, as they did for many of her ’90s and 2000s albums, Jam and Lewis pair gentle with gentle, keeping time with a slow, swinging snap (I prefer the bonus version tacked to the end of the album, in which the rapper J. Cole doesn’t barge in, but oh well).

She’s not political here, either, singing about staying up 48 hours with a lover. But you can imagine the song being employed by listeners to set the mood for the very same, glorious fantasy situation that Jackson’s lyrics describe; for them at least, she will have succeeded in changing the world through song.

Have a track to recommend? Drop me an email.

Some things are guaranteed to be a hit when they burst online. An Erykah Badu treatment of a Drake jam is one such supernova.

Badu just dropped her remix of “Hotline Bling,” Drake’s soothing, summer-ready track still riding its wave of public celebration. Badu’s is lengthier, clocking in at just under three minutes longer than the original. But her voice is irresistible throughout, adding lilt and light to Drake’s forlorn reflection.

I’m generally opposed to spoken interludes—they’re unwelcome interruptions that tend to bring out my inner Kendrick Lamar. Badu’s got some sass in this one though, and it only adds to the coy tone of the song. The mix was co-written by Seven Benjamin, Badu’s son with Andre 3000, so listen closely for the nod to Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson.”

Have a track to recommend? Email [email protected].

Spencer has a new piece up looking at the trend of music videos depicting violent acts of female retribution against men, pegged to a new video for Disclosure’s “Magnets,” which “ends with the featured vocalist Lorde tying a guy to a chair, pushing that chair into a swimming pool, and then lighting the pool on fire.”

Spencer runs through many examples of the subgenre, but one music video he neglects to mention was one of my favorites when I was a kid: Aerosmith’s 1989 hit “Janie’s Got a Gun,” which depicts the revenge killing of a father who sexually abused his daughter. (I was a kind of a dark kid, I guess.) The video was directed by David Fincher, before he became the feature-length creator of brilliant films like Fight Club and Zodiac. Here’s a short history of how Aerosmith’s song was variously revised, censored, and banned.

Have a track to recommend? Email [email protected].

“Midlake might be stuck in the ‘70s, but they make it sound like the best place on earth,” wrote Tim Sendra, reviewing the band’s 2006 album The Trials of Van Occupanther. Darn straight. And no song on the album gets me to that place faster than the lush masterpiece “Roscoe,” ranked one of the best songs of the 2000s by Rolling Stone. The driving bass line and wandering, ethereal harmonies make this great road music, but it’s also a perfect sit-at-your-desk-and-escape tune. I don’t know what the song’s 19^th-century mountaineers had in mind when they were building those houses from cedar and stone, but I love that I can slip on a pair of headphones and go there any afternoon I’d like.

Want to recommend a track? Email [email protected].

The folk and rock roots band David Wax Museum has a new album coming out on October 16, Guesthouse (preorder here). Its fifth track, “Singing to Me,” is dreamy and delightful. Here’s David:

This is a song inspired by a tour we did in support of Tift Merritt. We had a joke amidst the band about which one of us Tift was singing to each night. Jokes aside, I realized that we were talking about the experience that drew all of us to music—the feeling that the song is written just for you or the singer is singing directly to you. That’s why music is so powerful. A song that resonates can penetrate directly into your soul. I wrote the song from the perspective of a true fan that scorns all the other people talking over the music, unable to see how incredible the experience is.

In a joint review of new albums by Disclosure and CHRVCHES, Caracal and Every Open Eye, respectively, Spencer plucks a track from the latter:

And in a super-savvy move, the highlight of the album is one that overtly nods at the past while sounding like the future; the TV comparison here might be to Sam Esmail using a cover of Fight Club’s signature Pixies song during a crucial moment of Mr. Robot. The CHVRCHES track at issue is “Clearest Blue,” a thrilling delivery system for ever-escalating momentum: New Order-y synth drones, the kind of rhythmic loops that recall gears turning. After two minutes of increasing enthusiasm, the song explodes into a riot of sounds that unmistakably interpolates the hook of “Just Can’t Get Enough” by the one and only Depeche Mode. Giving credit where it’s due has rarely sounded so joyful.

Have a track to recommend for our daily feature? Email [email protected].

A reader recommends a religion-themed song for Sunday:

Though my own personal beliefs don’t match Mega Ran’s, I can’t get enough of this song. It’s a powerful statement of his faith, a heartbreaking personal history ... and at its core, an extremely solid tune.

It premiered on Rapzilla a few weeks ago:

On “Believe,” Ran, who also goes by Random, “gets in touch with his Southern roots on an old fashioned Gospel jam. Stomps, claps and organs collide with tales of inner-city faith.” … Mega Ran, a prominent nerdcore rapper … has performed several times at San Diego Comic-Con, Nerdapalooza and SXSW, in addition to the first Halo 4 Global Championships. “Believe” will be on Mega Ran's seventh studio album, RNDM, which is set to release on Sept. 15.

Got a track to recommend? Email [email protected].