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youvebeenlivingfictional · 8 months

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Multitudes

Men I Always Meant to Write For Masterlist

Pairing: Don Eppes x Reader

Rating: M

Notes: Another part one of a shamefully indulgent (and unofficial) Men I Always Meant to Write For series. Not beta-read.

Warnings: Fluff; mentions of canon-specific violence; flip-phones because it’s 2007

Tag list: @informally-liz (here to infuence you on another obscure blorbo :P) ; @20th-centu-fairy-girl (it’s our baby) ; @nominalnebula @amneris21 @elen-aranel @missredherring @blueeyesatnight @brandyllyn (idk he’s tortured and I thought you might like him ¯\_(ツ)_/¯; feel free to ignore!)

Summary: You’d be damned if you said you’d never been interested in Don Eppes. In your brief acquaintance, you’d felt a certain pull to him. There was nothing to be done then—between his work trying to solve the case and your work trying to cover it for the paper you work for, the two of you had butt heads. But once Eppes had realized that you were more interested in helping the case that sensationalizing it, his irritation had cooled. You’d almost been chummy by the end of the case—almost.

“Hey, choke up on that bat a bit more.”

You do so without thanking him for the advice, without making a single comment. But when your bat connects with the ball with a sharp, resounding clink!, you feel yourself grinning.

“I was doing alright, you know,” You tell him. But you keep your hands as he directed, taking a swing at the next ball shot out of the machine. Your bat makes contact in as advantageous a place as before.

“I know.”

“Oh? You been watching me, Agent?”

“Caught my eye as I was passing.”

You grin, reaching back and whacking at the button to stop the machine before you turn to face him fully. You realize instantly that it’s a mistake.

Don is leaning against the fence behind you, two fingers hooked into the fence of the cage. He’s chewing a wad of gum like his life depends on it—like he’s trying to imitate his old heroes chomping tobacco and shooting the juice through their front teeth.

"You been here long?" You ask.

"Just finished up. You?"

"Got about, uh—" You shake your sleeve back, eyeing your watch, "Ten minutes left."

"Want a beer?"

The offer makes your brows raise in surprise. Of all the things you thought may come out of Don Eppes' mouth over the course of this conversation, this didn't break the top ten.

"I could go for a drink," You admit. Don's grin widens and he shifts from foot to foot, nodding to the machine.

"Get back to it, then. Sooner you finish up, sooner we can go."

"Are you just gonna stand there and watch me?"

"You intimidated?"

"Maybe."

Don chuckles, flashing you his pearly whites as he straightens fully.

"Alright. I'll wait for you down there."

"Okay," You laugh, nodding. You can't help but watch him go, and you damn the way he turns back to meet your eye in turn.

You’d be damned if you said you’d never been interested in Don Eppes. In your brief acquaintance, you’d felt a certain pull to him. There was nothing to be done then—between his work trying to solve the case and your work trying to cover it for the paper you work for, the two of you had butt heads. But once Eppes had realized that you were more interested in helping the case that sensationalizing it, his irritation had cooled. You’d almost been chummy by the end of the case—almost.

“What’s got you out here tonight, anyway?” Don asks. You shrug a shoulder, trailing your finger along the label on the beer.

“Just had the urge to hit something. Better for myself and everyone else that I work it out at the cages, right?”

“I hear that,” Don mutters. You smile a little.

“That why you’re here?”

Don raises a hand, tipping it back and forth. You smile, leaning back in your seat a touch.

“Tough case?” You ask.

“Am I on the record?”

“Oh, fuck off,” You grumble, fighting back a grin at Don’s laugh. “You know as well as I that California is a two party consent state. Anything I’d record without your permission would be inadmissible and punishable by law.”

“Nice to know you care about those rules and regs.”

“I’d be an idiot not to.” You tip your head to the side, eyes sweeping Don’s face. “You haven’t been sleeping.”

“Oh no?”

“Mm-mm. You look like you haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in a few days.”

“You know what that looks like?”

“I know exactly what that looks like. I saw you during the case, I saw you at the hearing. Those were two very different looks.”

Don pushes out an irritated huff between tightly pursed lips.

“You keep an eye out, huh.”

“Both of our jobs require reading people.”

“Is it my turn to say what I see?”

“If you like.” It’s only fair, but it’s intimidating. Don considers you for a long moment, eyes narrowing just a touch. It makes you want to squirm in your seat, but you’ve been given looks like this by people that would just as soon shoot you as look at you. Don’s not like that.

“You don’t like whatever it is you’re covering.”

“Oh no?” You arch your brows. “What makes you say that?”

“When we worked together—”

“—Oh, you mean when you subpoenaed my research and brought me in for questioning?”

“—You held yourself differently. Stronger eye contact, better posture. You were engaged. Whatever you’re working on right now is takin’ it outta you.”

Your brows shoot up at the accusations, and you find yourself pushing out a shaky laugh as you turn your face from him, raising your beer to your lips. It’s a little freaky that he can see into you like that.

“Am I wrong?” Don presses. You swallow thickly, the beer like a lump in your throat as you push it into your stomach.

“God, I wish you were.”

“What is it?”

“What I’m working on?”

“Uh-huh.”

You bite your lip, fiddling almost nervously with your beer. “How about a rule for tonight?”

“What kinda rule?”

“No work talk.”

Don leans back in his seat a little bit, tipping his head to the side. You can feel him trying to read you; you’re certain he’s trying to dig right into your soul. And then he gives a short nods, lips pursing.

“Alright,” He concedes. “No work. Then what the hell do we talk about?”

The two of you talk about family, and about school. He digs into your time at Quantico, and why you dropped out of training for the FBI.

“It was one of the biggest things that popped for you,” He tells you, “When I looked through your file.”

“Yeah, I bet.” You pillow your chin on your hand.

“You ever regret it?”

“Dropping out?” You ask.

“Mhm.”

Your hand slides from your chin to scrub at the back of your neck as you consider it.

“I...I won’t pretend that having my hands tied with the ways I can investigate sometimes doesn’t drive me nuts—knowing that I’d have access to way more if I’d stuck to that track, but...” You life your head again to look at Don. “But what you do, day in and day out? I couldn’t do that. I realized it a little too late.”

“You go right into reporting?”

“No, no. I did a few other things in between—marketing, analytics...Things that let me dig into how people think, why they do what they do. Then I hit on journalism.”

“Why the switch?”

“I felt like the things I was saying at work just weren’t being said loud enough.”

Don nods silently, then offers, “It’s too bad. You were good at it.”

Your eyes and smile widen, stunned. “You looked at my assessments?”

“Yeah,” Don admits with a soft laugh, “But it’s more than that, it’s—When we worked the case. The way you talked to the witness, you know, how you—twisted the emotional knife. We spent five days trying to get to that woman, it did nothing.”

“Well, sometimes you just need a different angle.”

“Hey, I’m all about the different angle. I’ve been working with Charlie for...Two, three years now, different angle is his middle name.”

“Charles ‘Different Angle’ Eppes? Gee, thanks mom and dad.” You smile widely as Don smiles, his arms folding on the table. “You two work well together,” You add. It’s Don’s turn to shift with nerves, hiding his face for just a moment as he scrubs his hand across it.

“We do now, yeah.”

“Not always a happy partnership?”

“Not even that, just, you know...We didn’t get along when we were kids. Sometimes the fact that we get along now seems like a...An anomaly.”

“A statistical improbability?”

“Exactly,” Don laughs. “Thank you—You know what, I’m gonna tell him that...I don’t know, though, you know.” His mirth sobers as he lowers his eyes to the bar. “It’s nice to get along with him now. It’s like I’ve opened the door to something I didn’t even know existed.”

“You happy you did?”

“Yeah,” Don’s brow furrows, nodding. “Yeah, he’s—He’s a smart guy, good kid. He likes to help—and I appreciate it, you know, any lead or any clue that he can point us to, it can make or break a case sometimes.”

“It’s nice that that can bring you closer, even if it isn’t always under the happiest of circumstances.”

“Never is if a crime is involved...” Don trails off, lips pressed thin. And then you see him push a smile onto his face, pointing an accusing finger at you. “You said no work.”

“I’m not sure family chat counts as work, Eppes.”

“Oh no?”

“Overlaps, maybe.”

“Definitely.”

You raise your hands in concession. “Fine, no family-slash-work chat.”

“Good.”

“So I definitely shouldn’t ask about the couple of times your dad consulted informally?”

“Who told you that?”

“...Your dad.”

it’s a bad idea to let Don buy you another beer. It’s a worse idea to let him drive you home. The worst idea you have is inviting him inside—but he follows you to your front door, up the steps, into your apartment.

He takes his damn time peering around your shelves, at your framed photographs and your books. You take your damn time opening your beers, eyes set primarily on Don—on the slope of his shoulders, and the slight narrowing of his eyes and purse of his lips as he takes in the contents of your bookshelf—until your bottle opener slips and you skim your knuckles. You hiss, muttering, “Son of a bitch.”

“You okay back there?”

“Uh-huh,” You answer hurriedly, looking down at the beer and cracking it open before you glance over your knuckles. The skin is irritated, raised just a touch. It’s not major, nothing some cold water can’t fix.

“What, the beers fightin’ back?”

You glance up, an irritated pout affixed on your face. It melts when you see Don holding a heavy, engraved crystal plaque.

“Find something you’re interested in?” You ask.

“Excellence in broadcasting,” He reads, then looks at you as he holds up the plaque. “You were in tv?”

“Produced from a studio for a year, then jumped ship for print.”

“Some would say that written journalism is giving way to broadcast.”

“If you’re gonna say that, you’re not getting this beer.”

Don raises a penitent hand, chuckling, “I said some, not me.” He sets the award down before he strides toward you. You hold one of the beers out, and he takes it—only to set it aside in favor of taking hold of your hand and looking at your knuckles.

“What’d you do?” He mumbles, crowding closer.

“Nothing.”

“Oh?”

“Wasn’t paying attention. It slipped.”

“Oh yeah? What were you payin’ attention to?”

It’s a trap of a question. You can’t tell him you were paying attention to him, but if you weren’t paying attention to your hands, then what the hell else could you have been looking at? You shrug a little bit, mumbling out a lame, half-hearted excuse.

“I don’t think I caught that,” Don chuckles.

“Nothing to catch.”

“No?”

“Nothing of consequence.”

“Not sure I believe that.”

Don raises your hand to his lips, brushing a tender kiss along your knuckles. It makes your stomach twist with shock. You almost feel as if you’ve stepped out of yourself—like you’re peering at Don from another vantage point. His warm breath brushes the back of your hand as he lifts his head to peer at you from under his sweeping lashes.

You watch one another for a few long moments before Don straightens up. But where you thought he’d let go of your hand, he tugs you closer. You wobble a touch, raising your other hand to catch on his shoulder. He dips his head, nudging his nose against yours. But he waits. Don doesn’t dive right in; his eyes search yours, and at such close proximity, his dark eyes seem to contain multitudes.

This feels like an awful idea. You don’t want this to hang over your interactions in the future; you don’t want to risk what has become a genial relationship with him, and his team. But more than that, you want to feel Don pressed far closer than he is now.

You lean in just a little, your nose brushing lightly against Don’s. You track one another’s gaze, hardly blinking as you grow closer. For a moment, you think that one or both of you will back off, laugh awkwardly, dismiss it. But before you can second-guess yourself, Don dives in for a kiss. Your eyes slip closed at the contact. Your free hand raises to curl around the back of his neck, keeping him close. Don slides his hand away from yours, resting them on your hips. Your skin prickles with heat as he backs you up against the counter. He groans softly, smoothing his hand up the back of your shirt. You tip your head, teasing your tongue between his lips and whimpering softly. You’re set to push yourself up onto the counter, but—

You groan again, tipping your head back as his phone rings in his pocket. He spits a curse, reaching for his phone and opening it.

“Eppes.”

You lean up, brushing your lips against his neck, grinning as his fingers press against your skin, sweeping against your bra strap.

“...Alright...Alright, I’ll be there in twenty.”

Dang.

You lean back, smiling a little as he closes his phone and tucks it away again. He sighs, and before he can apologize, you offer, “It’s alright. Could’ve just as easily happened to me.”

“Yeah.” Don agrees, but he doesn’t look convinced.

“You alright to drive?”

“Oh, yeah,” He nods. “You barely got that beer open, anyway.”

“Fuck you,” You laugh, shoving his shoulder. Don doesn’t get far, just leans back in and gives you a warm, slow kiss.

“Rain check?” He murmurs.

“Sure.”

You disentangle yourselves, and you straighten your shirt as you trail him to the door.

“Be careful out there, Eppes.”

“I will be,” He shoots you a wink. “You gonna be up long?”

“I can be.”

His smile widens into something dopey and warm, and he nods, promising, “I’ll call.”

#Don Eppes x Reader #Don Eppes x You #Don Eppes/Reader #Don Eppes/You #Don Eppes fic #Don Eppes imagine #Multitudes

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samusique-concrete · 3 months

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My favorite albums of 2023

This is not a list of the ‘best’ albums of the year. These are just my favorites. However, i need you to understand something: I don’t have the time and/or brain bandwidth to listen to and forge a bond with every single album i’d like to get to in any given year. Thus, my disclaimer is twofold — the following are my favorite records of the year, among the selection of records that i did have time to get to. I’m sure i would’ve loved many others, but i just don’t wanna be someone who’d listen to an album for the first time at the end of the year, decide it’s ‘great’, and rank it shoulder to shoulder with my favorites. It would be disingenuous.

I will now present my ten favorite records of the past year, but there’s another catch: i will only talk about four of them, and they won’t be precisely my top four either. Instead, i’m going to talk about my tenth most liked album, and then my third through to number one. It’ll make sense as the read goes on.

Let’s begin.

IN TIMES NEW ROMAN…

Queens of the Stone Age

I’ll just say this right now: there hasn’t been, to me, a better mainstream rock act than Queens of the Stone Age since at least 2002. They represent what i would say is ‘as good as it gets’ in the genre. Even now, in 2023, when frontman Josh Homme is older and naturally starting to slow down (although tracks like Paper Machete would suggest there's plenty of gas left in the tank,) he still manages to unabashedly follow his own musical compass, that which was forged decades ago by his own design.

In Times New Roman… is not one of the group’s best albums. In fact, i probably would prefer pretty much any other album in their catalog before this one, but therein lies the thing about this band: it doesn’t have to put out a mindblowing achievement of a record for it to be at least pretty good. Queens’ magic trick here is being consistent; if we were to buffoonishly rank their albums from worst to best, we’d find that the distance that separates the peak from the bottom is not at all Everest tall. That’s a hard trick to pull off.

Another point in favor of this album is its vulnerability. Infamously conceived as catharsis following a rough and tumultuous period in the frontman’s life, it was his interview on Neal Brennan’s The Blocks Podcast that really opened my eyes about this whole thing. In case it wasn’t made clear earlier, i’m a fan of the band, and as such it’s been always obvious to me that the guy’s had a complicated relationship with substances. You’d have to be deaf not to notice that. I’ve watched many interviews over the years, and i’d become accustomed to the certain type of way in which he carried himself. This is why his appearance on Blocks kind of stunned me. Here he was, nonchalantly going into a lot of detail about his drug abuse and how it has affected him and how he clearly sees how it has hurt others and also himself. Now, i don’t know the guy personally, i don’t know how he approaches these sorts of topics with people when the cameras are off, but what i do know is that that’s not the Josh Homme that he himself had constructed for years for the media to consume. The questionable performance seemed to be put to rest. This unceremoniously matured persona was refreshing to listen to: it made me appreciate the record a lot more, because he truly allowed himself to be vulnerable for once (although this feels like the next step in a process that began with 2013’s …Like Clockwork and continued with 2017’s Villains.) I’ll touch upon this a bit later, but that is, at least to me, very brave. The days of the emotionless tough guy are over, but that doesn’t mean that a very healthy dose of anti-establishment aggression has to be left by the wayside.

LIVE AT BUSH HALL

Black Country, New Road

Music isn’t movies. Therefore, it isn’t often that we get to say ‘you need to listen to the album that came before to understand this new one.’ This is the case for Live at Bush Hall.

Now, i would genuinely hate for this to add to the ongoing conversation in which the band’s past keeps taking center stage. I would much rather talk about the present and whatever the current work’s merits are. However, context is needed.

BC,NR quickly rose to indie fame thanks to the painful relatableness of their 2022 sophomore album, Ants from Up There; a beautiful, longing follow-up to their esoteric debut. The song’s lyrics were deeply personal and told what read as fictionalized autobiographical accounts of the band’s frontman’s love life. Shortly after releasing the record, however, he left the band. Paired with these news, the band announced that they’d keep making music without him, but that the old songs would not be played live in the future. This left fans and curious bystanders alike wondering about what they would sound like moving forward, who was going to sing now, how would the new lyrics meld with the pre-established themes of their past work, and so on. I think Live at Bush Hall is in equal parts a beautiful and thoughtful response to all of these propositions, which obviously the band worked towards answering first and foremostly for their own sake.

The fact that the group is a six piece ensemble containing piano, violin and saxophone on top of more conventional guitar music instrumentation notwithstanding, it is my opinion that Live at Bush Hall represents the present of all of rock music. What better way to capture this than with a live album? The idea is multilayered in its ingeniousness, since it wouldn’t be held to the audience’s expectations of what a studio album could bring in this new phase for the group. It’s also a gamble, though, since it’d be nearly fifty minutes of entirely new material played in front of a crowd, and also they’d have to nail the performances for the recording. Luckily, and to the surprise of no one who was already familiar with them, they proved to be excellent musicians who were very much up to the task and the gamble paid off in spades.

The fact that this is a live album also placed constraints on the compositions; these are the now canonized versions of new songs that couldn’t, by design, count on studio trickery or embellishments to stand out. It’s just the musicians, their instruments, and the arrangements. And it sounds amazing.

In a lovingly nodding manner, the opening track sees the band screaming “Look at what we did together / BCNR, friends forever”, in a way that seems to look back, but also look forward. Even more than in their already ambitious Ants From Up There, they take advantage of the instrumentation in very clever ways, adding to the performance and staging aspects of the album. Certain passages feel like they’re out of a play (with songs like The Boy explicitly being divided into chapters,) and it is obvious that this is very much the intended effect once you look at the video recording of the concerts that make up the the album: it was a whole mise-en-scène, purposefully directed, and well rehearsed. The band played three times at Bush Hall, and before each set they handed programmes to the attendees. They then hopped on stage dressed in deliberate costume design following a particular aesthetic. These ‘plays’, and their respective items (except for the setlist), were all different those three times. The movie intercalates takes of all of the three nights, so we get to see the band wearing all of their costumes, all of the sets, and all of the programmes.

This clear love of performance is evident in the songs themselves. Not to spoil the ending, but the album closes with a reprise of the first track (a real exposition-conflict-resolution move on their part,) and pretty much all of its themes are present and brought back, sometimes literally, in many of the songs. Even now distributing singing duties among several of their members, male and female voices alike, drama still emerges; not missing their vocal might after the departure of their lead singer, the band’s lyrics are still painful and their wails still resonant. Some of the performances are so good as to even elicit the sense that what they’re singing about isn’t just some story that somebody’s recounting; they’re happening to you. In performing arts that’s about the highest praise you can give.

PETRODRAGONIC APOCALYPSE; OR, DAWN OF ETERNAL NIGHT: AN ANNIHILATION OF PLANET EARTH AND THE BEGINNING OF MERCILESS DAMNATION

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

King Gizz have many times before come very close to having what could’ve been my favorite album of the year. It’s ok, though; i’m glad they can occupy that Scottie Pippen spot in my heart.

Petrodragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation is the band’s second full-fledged metal album, which is a genre that even before Infest the Rats’ Nest (its spiritual prequel) had popped up here and there amongst their numerous tracklists. Just in case you didn’t know already, the long story short is that KG has made a bajillion records and each of them has a unique concept and/or aesthetic. Sometimes some of those concepts reappear, making some of the records share a narrative and be in conversations with one another. 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest was the first time the band indulged completely in what was, inevitably at that point, a sound that needed to be explored comprehensively for the span of a whole record, after several songs in their discography having served as teasers of sorts. It proved to be a success (even being nominated for an ARIA Music Award for best metal album of the year, along with other, actual self-identified metal outfits,) pulling inspiration mainly from the thrash metal side of the spectrum and being always as vocal as they always have been in this particular common thread of theirs: we’re fucking up the planet. That's, like, their whole thing.

Petrodragonic Apocalypse feels like an evolution of Rats’ Nest in basically every regard. Its music is heavier, mathier, proggier, more dense, more environmentally minded, lengthier and, frankly, seemingly more difficult to perform. Being this not their first stab at heavier sounds, they complemented the album with one other area of expertise they possess: self-referencing musical passages.

Although their first record came out in 2012, it wasn’t until 2014 (which in retrospect isn’t that much time after) with I’m in your Mind Fuzz where they started to heavily introduce into their work the concept of melodies or refrains reappearing all throughout a single record. Maybe the first track would start out with a particular riff, which would later develop into a different melody for a couple of bars, which we soon would find would be used as the main riff for the following track, etcetera. This concept was then taken to its maximum exponent in 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, a record in which every track flows seamlessly into the next one (with even the last one looping back to the first one,) making it feel like one huge song. This would later culminate, at least narratively, in 2017’s space opera staging Murder of the Universe (that’s my favorite one!) but that way of making music, or albums specifically, seems to have become a habit of theirs, with fans now uploading countless videos on YouTube cross-referencing melodies from different albums to present as some kind of King Gizzard ‘lore’, regardless of what the main concept of each particular album ends up being. Petrodragonic Apocalypse harvests this skill and runs with it, adding some much needed cohesion to the madness. The drumming is insane, the guitar riffs are insane, the whole thing is insane! Yet, it is focused.

DESIRE, I WANT TO TURN INTO YOU

Caroline Polachek

Caroline Polachek made realize something very special: pop music is being vulnerable.

Now, we could dig into that statement with a hundred caveats, but that’d just suck the fun out of it. Here’s what i mean.

For many years i’ve thought of mainstream pop as something that didn’t, or couldn’t, contain me. It was very hard for me to relate to mainstream pop, probably because of its often rigid and spotless production and sound identity. Much of it sounded sterile to me, and i guess i sort of tagged that prejudice onto the entirety of the genre. I wanna be clear, though: i still think that about a lot of it — i just don’t think it’s all the same anymore. This type of change of mind would i’m sure seem inevitable to anyone that has simply sat down and listened to any given genre for long enough; pop music is simply an example in this case. It happens just like that; something unlocks inside your brain, and you get it. Heck, it’s happened to me with many other genres already.

I don’t feel any shame in admitting my teen-like stupidity. If you’re a teenager right now you won’t get this, but you have to be fifteen before you’re twenty-five. Any adult could tell you: it’s not that you have to go through adolescence — you have to live through stupidity. I didn’t say it, nor did i really think about it consciously in these terms, but when i was fifteen i took a certain kind of pride in not listening to pop music. I liked rougher, heavier stuff. That was my ‘whole thing.’ I would years later shift into the perspective that much of what i liked then was, actually, just as shallow, disingenuous, and, musically speaking, thought-murderingly conceived as the stuff i disdained and didn’t choose to listen to. However now i find that my favorite 2022 and 2023 albums have both been pop albums.

At some point i stumbled onto Queens of the Stone Age. Here, i found a band that, for lack of a better term, got it. Their "don't care if it hurts, just so long as it's real" attitude towards music, towards art, and by extension towards being a person in general, helped me. It’s not about the genre — it’s about what you make of it, and how you make it, and about it grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you. Years later this same ethos would aid me in making my mother understand that it’s not that she disliked all westerns or musicals, it’s that she didn’t like shitty movies.

The opener to QotSA’s 2002 mainstream rock masterpiece Songs for the Deaf could, potentially (though it hasn’t been scientifically tested, i’m pretty sure,) blow your head right off. Though in it, amidst hellishly screamed vocals, then-bassist Nick Oliveri mellows down his voice just the right amount in order to sing the following sentence:

Metal heavy, soft at the core.

This sentiment, purposefully or not, defines the band. It also crudely puts into words what i crave most about music, and the reason why they’ve been my favorite rock band ever since i listened to them for the first time: aesthetics are nothing if they’re not backed up by true emotion. You can tap into this true emotion by allowing your self to shine through whatever you’re doing, whatever that means to you. Façades are just that: 2D images that say nothing about who’s behind them, and it’s thanks to some real insecurity that you start depending on them, deploying them and taking cover. If you’re a teenager right now you probably won’t get this (or maybe you will and i got real old real fast and grew to misunderstand the youth,) but being yourself is the coolest thing in the universe because it requires of you a certain kind of vulnerability that is, more often than not, really hard to come by. You just have to be brave enough to do it. Motomami shares with Desire, I Want to Turn Into You that same vulnerability. I’m sure that had Sakura not been the closer to that album, it wouldn't have topped my last year’s list.

With Queens of the Stone Age’s refrain serving as my thesis statement, i will now use it to rephrase my opening statement: being yourself is being vulnerable, and being vulnerable is one of the coolest things you can be.

Caroline Polachek knows very well who she is.

During the brilliantly unorthodox set piece premiere performance of her single Dang, Caroline acted out screaming her lungs out at millions of americans watching live on a highly popular late night TV show. This isn’t regular ‘popstar’ stuff — she went and became a popstar at age 34 after already having recorded and released many different albums across many different projects, many of them not being really pop at all. She even dropped an entirely ambient album under the CEP moniker at some point. You might not get it right now, whatever age you are, but that’s fucking cool. I checked out Pang, the predecessor to Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (a sweetly elusive example of a punctuation mark deftly incorporated into an album title) right when it dropped, not really knowing who she was or what her ‘whole thing’ was. I figured she might as well have materialized right out of the pop aether. Well, i was wrong. Caroline has been very carefully crafting her musical presence since 2005, and i am as convinced that Desire represents the peak of her ‘herselfness’ just as i am, now knowing her, that whatever comes after will naturally surpass it in that regard.

Something interesting arises when thinking about her aforementioned premiere of Dang, or for example her NPR Tiny Desk Concert as well: she loves to perform. I can relate to this. There is a clear desire to display her art in striking ways, to set up these intricately rehearsed sequences that etch her everything into your brain with a tingling, instead of just letting the music stand on its own. It very much could, mind you, but by God, does she achieve the full effect. She’s a bespoke, partnerlessly designed whole package.

I could go on about how talented she is, but that’d be stating the obvious since it’s easily noticeable just from listening to any of her stuff. I particularly love how it’s evident in how she uses her voice that she’s not just a singer but also an instrument player (you will get this if you’ve played an instrument for more than a couple of years.) She even does all of the weird vocal stuff from her albums live, with her own vocal cords, instead of using effects or manipulation. That’s also so, so cool. But more than talent, i mainly wanna reflect on how Desire makes me feel. From its album cover (another example of her being on her own lane: the album clearly takes inspiration from early 2000s music, even bringing Dido on board for one of the tracks, yet the cover emphatically does not go with a generic Y2K aesthetic, even at the time of its release, when it seemed to be so in vogue,) it looks like there’s an unquenchable thirst powering her every movement. I interpret this as passion.

The music on the record is great, and i feel it's a step up from Pang. Each song has the right amount of space, and the harmony keeps the listener interested. There is more screaming (yay!) right from the beginning of the first track, Welcome To My Island, and i don’t know how to explain it, but the song itself does kind of sound like an island. I like how, as i alluded to earlier, it seems like the whole of the compositions are informed by her voice being thought of as the main instrument first, and how the songs are constructed around ideas that you could only have come up with after ‘noodling’ on your own vocal chords. The melodies become instantly super gratifying as she picks ear-pulling intervallic relationships to leap to or jump off from, or when she just makes interesting stepwise runs (some passages from the closer, Billions, remind me a bit of Morten Lauridsen’s Dirait-on, though i’m not necessarily inviting anyone to think she must’ve taken inspiration from it.) Her words can go from playful (like in the opener: “Welcome to my island / Hope you like me / You ain’t leaving”) to yearnful (from one of the slower numbers: “Starlight in a tunnel / Kind of familiar / Hopedrunk everasking / How does it feel to know / Your final form?”) But most of all, they are beautiful. Take the chorus of the single Sunset, for example:

No regrets

Cause you’re my sunset

Fiery red

Forever fearless

And in your arms

A warm horizon

Don’t look back

Let’s ride away

The words alone are gorgeous, but when you hear her singing them, it’s… Man, it’s something else. I’m lucky, and grateful, that a record as good and soulful and loving as this one could come along, reach out, and awaken something deep inside of me.

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