#sad folk music

[saturnsrocker]

♡ phoebe bridgers punisher ♡

[kaeandthekonstellations]

The Transbian Song

[marypsue]

There’ve been a few responses to/reblogs with tags on my post about DIY clothing embellishments that basically boil down to ‘I’d love to do this but I’m scared it’ll turn out bad/I’m not a good enough artist’. And I get it, I really do! I also want my art things to turn out nicely. But also...making it badly is sort of the point of punk DIY. 

Listen. We live in a world that would dearly love to charge you a subscription fee for breathing. The bastards are doing everything they possibly can to figure out how to turn art - stories, visual art, music, textile/fibre art, sculpture, crafts and creations of every kind - into a neat, discrete, packageable commodity, a product they can chop up into little pieces and stick behind a paywall so they can charge you for every drop of it you want to have in your life. 

The whole sneering idea that ‘everybody wants to be some kind of creator now’ and anything less than absolute mastery right out the gate is somehow shameful and embarrassing is a tool those bastards are using. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that only a set group of people can create and control art, and everybody else has to buy it. 

But art isn’t a product. Art is a fundamental human impulse. Nobody is entitled to a specific piece of art (which is where this message gets skewed into pitting people who love art against the artists who make it, while the bastards screw us all and run away with the money). But making art belongs to everybody. We make up songs and dances and stories, and paint things, and make clothes, and embellish them, and carve flowers into our furniture and our lintels and our doorframes, and make windows out of tiny pieces of coloured glass, and decorate our homes and our bodies and our lives with things we make and make up, simply for the love of beauty and of the act of creation. Grave goods from tens of thousands of years ago show that ancient hominids gave their dead wreaths of ceramic flowers, tattooed their bodies, beaded their shoes. Making things for the sake of beauty and enjoyment is one of the most ancient and human things we can do. 

The idea that we can’t, that we have to buy shit instead, because art is a product and you have to have the bestest prettiest most perfect product, is the enemy of joy. It’s the death of culture. And it means that, instead of whatever it is that you cherish and enjoy and value, you get whatever inoffensive (and to whom is it inoffensive?) bland meaningless samey-samey crap that the bastards want you to be allowed to have. What are you missing and what are you missing out on, if you don’t make or modify or decorate anything for yourself, if you don’t think you can because the product at the end won’t be polished or perfect or marketable enough? What do you lose? What do we lose? 

It is a desperately vital and necessary thing for you to make shit. For you to know that you can make shit, that you don’t have to just lie back and take whatever pablum the bastards want to force-feed you (and charge you through the nose for). That the bastards need you more than you need them. 

Become ungovernable. Be your own weirdly-endearing punk little freak. Paint on a t-shirt. Sing off-key in the shower or at karaoke night or at open mic night. Make up a story where you get to meet your favourite fictional character and you guys hug or fuck or punch each other in the face. Make art. Do it badly. Do it frequently. Do it enthusiastically. Do it for love and joy and creativity and fun and the spiteful joy of thumbing your nose at some smug motherfucker with a Swiss bank account who wants to track your heartbeat and location for the rest of your life in order to automatically pump AI-generated beats matched to your mood into your earbuds for a small monthly subscription fee of $24.99/month. It is literally the only way we are ever going to have even a chance to save art and our own lives from the bastards. 

So. Paint that t-shirt. 

(Also support artists where you can, and buy your music from Bandcamp.)

[dootznbootz]

Penelope playing on the floor with Telemachus with his toys, (maybe even wooden ones made by his dad)

Telemachus being tucked into bed by Penelope and being told stories about anything and everything.

Her and Athena keeping progress of what he's learning and how well he's doing.

Naiadborn!Pen teaching him how to catch fish and how to swim. Cheering for him like crazy when he catches his first one.

Penelope giving her son a piggy back ride while he's still small.

"I saw a deer today, mama!" "You did?! :D While you were on a walk with grandpa?" "Yeah! It was big and then it snorted and ran away!"

Penelope making Sandcastles on the beach shore with Telemachus so he's a bit distracted from constantly looking at the horizon for Odysseus.

Penelope and Telemachus playing games like knucklebones together.

Telemachus hiding and giggling behind something as Penelope pretends like she doesn't know where he is.

Penelope being a kickass, loving, and playful mother while still being able to worry for her husband. She was crying so much during the Odyssey because her ruse had just been found out and she is scared for herself and her son and her husband. Yes, she most likely cried on her own when she needed to. Of course she did, and it's an important part of her that she did worry about and miss Odysseus deeply, they both deeply missed each other.

But she would play with her son, she'd love him and the stories he'd come up with. She'd watch him grow and kiss his cheeks and tease him like every loving mom does. She'd discuss with Athena about him and how he's doing, Athena would check in on Penelope to see how she's doing. He's growing angry and hurt from the suitors and them destroying things. They comfort one another.

Like, I really love Mom!Penelope and Son!Telemachus moments and while I love them helping and comforting each other during the suitors. They would've still had so much fun together all his life too. Ups and Downs, you know?

[imogen-fae]

Damien Rice - The Blower's Daughter - Official Video

And so it is...

[blueiscoool]

Connie Converse: The 'Genius' of a Singer Who Was Ahead of Her Time - Then Disappeared

Connie Converse failed to find fame as a singer-songwriter in the 1950s, then mysteriously disappeared without a trace. On the 100th anniversary of her birth - and approaching the 50th anniversary of her disappearance - she's now remembered as a great lost talent.

In January 1961, an unknown Bob Dylan arrived in Greenwich Village with a guitar in his hand and $12 in his pocket, on his way to revolutionising popular music with his poetic, personal songs.

Maybe he brushed past Connie Converse as she went the other way. She moved out of the New York neighbourhood that same month, after a decade of struggling to get significant attention for her own intimate, sophisticated and beautiful songs.

There is a parallel universe where Converse was the one who got the big break, and she is a household name.

At least, that’s the theory put forward in a recent book called How To Become Famous – not a manual, but about why some talented people become successful and others stay in the shadows.

It imagines a world where Converse is "widely known" as "the most original, and perhaps the greatest, of the folk singers of the 1950s and 1960s", who influenced everyone from Dylan to Taylor Swift, and for whom "a Nobel Prize is not out of the question".

Musician and author Howard Fishman, who published Converse’s biography, To Anyone Who Ever Asks, last year, also thinks Converse could have made it big.

"I love to think about an alternate reality in which Connie Converse’s music did receive the recognition it deserved in its own time, and she became a recognised for the musical genius that she was," he says.

"I almost think a better version of American cultural history could have happened, had that been the case."

But How To Become Famous author Cass Sunstein concedes that Converse wasn't better than Dylan. She also faced barriers because she was a woman. And perhaps her clever, melodic and mostly melancholic songs just never quite had mass appeal.

They dealt with subjects like loneliness, promiscuity, quarrelling lovers, and frequenting saloons in the afternoons. It's certainly hard to imagine them really catching on in the early 50s, an age dominated by schmaltzy crooners, folk purists and show tunes.

"She didn't sound like anybody else that was making music in her own day," says Fishman. "And she doesn't sound like anybody else making music now, to my ears."

British singer Vashti Bunyan became a Connie Converse convert after a recommendation from US DJ David Garland, the first person to play her songs in 2004.

"I couldn't believe that they were [recorded] so long ago, it was the 1950s," Bunyan says. "And just to hear her speaking in a way that I would have always wanted to speak was very moving.

"She was completely ahead of her time, and it must have been very hard for her. She must have felt isolated.

"If she had any ambition for her songs, she must have known how good they were, how clever and funny and wonderful they were, and poetic. But other people didn't seem to recognise that kind of genius writing at the time."

Bunyan knows what it's like to have her music "rediscovered" decades later. She released an album in 1970, which has gained cult status in more recent years. She says their stories are very different, but agrees there is an allure to the idea of "the discovery of something from so long ago".

"And how lucky that she was recorded," she says. "Connie was recorded by her friends, and none of those recordings were supposed to be commercially released.

"But it's so wonderful that they have been, that they have been found. And it makes you wonder about all the other people that weren't."

Converse was recorded at the home of one of her friends and champions, Gene Deitch, but she never released any music in her time. She performed for small groups of supporters, but never played a proper concert. She made one TV appearance, but that led nowhere.

Ellen Stekert, a folk historian who was also performing in the 1950s, believes Converse was just "too different" to have "made it".

"I think she was wonderful. I think she was totally out of sequence of any kind of cultural impulse," she says.

"She was self-contained, and also self-isolated. It was too bad somebody could not break through that."

Converse did have her supporters, but any female singer at that time needed to be backed by a man with the right connections, Stekert says. And Converse was socially awkward, and not good at self-promotion.

"Unfortunately, she didn't have much social understanding of things. She did not have a very good rapport, I think, with people.

"Evidently, she had very bad teeth and her body odour also was fairly prominent. And those are two factors in middle-class America that will make sure you don't make it any place."

Converse worked for a printing company and then for the Institute of Pacific Relations. After leaving New York in 1961, she became editor of the Journal for Conflict Resolution in Michigan, and her intellectual activities, and peace and anti-racism activism, were highly regarded.

But then, her life seemed to lose purpose and direction. On 10 August 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she posted letters to family and friends, telling some she was returning to New York.

She drove out of Ann Arbor and has not been heard from since. Neither her body nor her car was found.

A new life?

"As far as we know, she never made it to New York," Fishman says.

"As far as we know, she never made it anywhere.

"I'd love to think that she started a new life somewhere else, and that she lived more years. But who knows?"

On Saturday 3 August, exactly 100 years after Converse’s birth, Fishman is in her home town - Concord, New Hampshire - for a ceremony to give the singer her first official recognition.

Her music has gradually spread over the past 20 years. So, too, has her story, and the mystery of her disappearance is often the first thing that gets people's attention.

"The unfortunate and darkly poetic thing is that she needed to disappear in order for us to see her," Fishman says. "That was the hook that was needed for us to pay attention to her.

"But what I always say is, don't focus on how she disappeared, focus on how she lived, because her life is so much more fascinating and meaningful, and has so much more to teach us than the fact that at age 50, she felt that she had to vanish."

By Ian Youngs.

[lala-blahblah]

I will never make this because it would be for an audience of one (me) but ever since reading "If we Were Villains" (story about serious drama kids in college who perform shakespeare and deal with a murder) I have been entertaining the thought of a crack fic crossover with High School Musical The Musical The Series where the staff decides they will no longer put on shakespeare after the tragic accident that happened at Thanksgiving, because Shakespeare plays would only increase the tension and drama. So they hire Ms. Jen who decides their spring play will actually be High School Musical (which exists in the 90s in this universe) and it ruins the vibe so much that everyone gives up on being dark and mysterious because they're universally pissed at Ms Jen for making them learn choreoraphed basketball dancing.

[artsnfeelings]

‘The End’ — Halsey.

the first song off her fifth album. coming out later this year.

written by: halsey

produced by: halsey, alex g & michael uzowuru

[satisaranea]

— the haylist (version 0.2)

inspired by my mutual + i've been meaning to put it here for the longest time

[opulence-is-decadence]

Anyways, stream Julien Baker's music. Those monthly listeners are criminally low for someone with amazing and devastating song writing skills.

[remusfinglupin]

Endings.

“I Want You” - Mitski / “I Know the End” - Phoebe Bridgers / “All Things End” - Hozier / “doomsday” - Lizzy McAlpine / “As the World Caves In” - Matt Maltese / “How Did It End?” - Taylor Swift

[swagspren]

I hope in kowt Kaladin gets an acoustic guitar

[vanx-97]

New song I am working on 🎶🎧🎸

[emeraldaquariumxo]

A song for those who struggle at this time of year 🩵

Listen now on all streaming services 🩵

Thank you 🩵

[ohgeeeznotagain]

The story of FOREST FIRE: (Trigger warning: discussion of depression)

Writing a song specifically about mental health and depression is an odd feeling to me. It’s not a topic I discuss with many people - publicly or privately. But as we crafted this album about venturing into the wilderness and encountering monsters all along the way, it was obvious that one of those monsters would be your own mind. Not only that, but the bands and artists that are most influential to us have made mental health a cornerstone of their artistry. I knew we couldn’t follow in their footsteps without staring into that inferno ourselves.

“Forest Fire” is about the most vexing part of depression to me: the fact that it never goes away. Even during good times, it’s always smoldering somewhere in the background, ready to flare up and consume again at the first sign of fuel. This can make trying to manage it seem futile - why bother, if you can never ‘fix’ it?

As you let your mind smolder and burn long enough, eventually the notion of being without the fire becomes an unimaginable, even terrifying notion. Who are you if not unwell? Navigating the world without it would mean re-learning everything. Would you be able to handle that?

For me, there’s never been an easy answer to these questions, and while I’ve been lucky to have supportive hands around me, I know there are many who don’t. You never know who those people are - the fire burns hot but frequently unnoticeable on the outside.

“Forest Fire” is for all of who battle on in silence, unsure of what the next day holds. While neither I nor this song have answers, all I can offer is my story and my hope for the future. While we may fight in silence, we don’t fight alone.

“Forest Fire” is out now 🔥🌲

Video by Joe Ludwig, cover artwork by @rileyclaw