A Playlist for Fall
A time of year for miracles and melancholy (featuring Fleet Foxes, Nick Drake, and George Strait among others)
Spring is usually talked about as the season of anticipation. The season when grass grows green again and leaves sprout slowly skyward to be rustled by wind anew. The sun rediscovers its radiance and shines on the world its truest shade of yellow. After the cold dark of winter, we anticipate such miracles. I am in favor of such anticipation. I am in favor of miracles.
I anticipate Fall with the same excitement that many anticipate Spring. Autumn, for me, is as much miracle as Spring, perhaps more so. Living things of the earth begin to die and somehow it is beautiful. Trees become pointy and bleak, shedding their tri-colored leaves, and somehow it is beautiful. The year’s twilight is one long (in Kentucky, often short) foreshadow of the season where death digs in to stay for awhile. And somehow it is beautiful. This paradox, of how everything can be fading and falling and disappearing while at the same time be cozy and lovely and rich in color, is the essence of the season. It is a feeling that begs to remain wordless and uncaptured, but that doesn’t keep us from trying.
Something about Fall causes me to reflect, to get inspired, to become nostalgic. It is an inescapably sad season tinged with the subtle peace of the earth taking a deep breath, resetting. It is intense melancholy wrapped in the thinnest layer of hope. It is enjoying the slight tilt of your pondering toward—not quite depression, but poignancy. It is a safe place to feel things deeply. The light reflecting vibrant shades of oranges and reds will keep us from falling too far down into any mental abyss, and will pull us up if we find ourselves falling anyway. It is a beautiful sort of in-between, a hovering between life and death, despair and hope. Everything feels slow and hazy, yet deep and sentimental.
Because Fall conjures such indescribable feelings as these, which I have of course attempted to describe anyway, I’ve always thought of it as the best time of year to listen to music. Now, a word on “Fall music”: There is this misconception that it must explicitly mention the season by name in order to be considered worthy of the Fall Playlist. Nothing could be further from the truth. Some songs that explicitly mention the season by name make for questionable Fall songs (Yo La Tengo’s “Autumn Sweater” doesn’t strike me as a great song for sweater season, yet I still feel obligated to include it on my playlist), and some of the best songs for Fall could technically mention or be about any of the other seasons (see Real Estate’s “Green Aisles,” though it’s certainly a great Spring song, too, and Pete Yorn’s “Summer Was A Day”). The point here is that “Fall Music” is all about how a song feels. It’s all about how a song seeps into your bones. And the best Fall songs feel like, well, like Fall: melancholy wrapped in longing, restlessness surrounded by contentedness. Occasionally, however, the song that wraps its Autumn arms around you is just sad as hell. Full stop.
Keeping that in mind, below I have written about seven quintessential Fall songs—to my ears, anyway. And there’s a lot more where they come from. Find my Fall 2024 playlist at the end of this post. It only contains 34 hours of music over the course of 503 songs. I’ve also linked my Fall instrumentals playlist entitled Sweater Weather Chill (I may have stolen that from Spotify; sue me).
Autumn, the year’s twilight, is one long foreshadow of the season where death digs in to stay for awhile. And somehow it is beautiful. This paradox, of how everything can be fading and falling and disappearing while at the same time be cozy and lovely and rich in color, is the essence of the season.
“Featherweight” by Fleet Foxes - Their 2020 album Shore reinvigorated my interest in this indie folk-rock collective. Released literally on the Autumnal Equinox at the height of the Covid pandemic, bandleader and chief songwriter Robin Pecknold knows his audience. Fleet Foxes have been making Fall-friendly music since the release of their Sun Giant EP in 2008. Releasing Shore in the middle of a world crisis at the precise meteorological moment that Autumn began was Pecknold saying, “I know we’re all depressed. Here’s something that might help.”
The group’s songs have the uncanny ability to either make one feel as if they are floating light as a, well, feather, or slightly rambunctious, similar in key to the slight zaniness of a Renaissance fair. Obviously, “Featherweight” falls into the former category, with it’s acoustic elements, wistful vocals, and minimal percussion. Pecknold gives us permission to begin reflecting on the trials and setbacks of the year as early as late September: “May the last long year be forgiven.” We are finally beginning to get some clarity about things, noticing the changes that are in the air: “And we’ve only made it together / Feel some change in the weather / I couldn’t, though I’m beginning to.”
The song sounds as if Fleet Foxes were singing in a forest of nearly unleafed trees, the always exquisite harmonies echoing through limbs and off trunks, as if the trees themselves were singing. A timbered choir—to use Wendell Berry’s phrase—sounds most majestic this time of year.
“Place To Be” by Nick Drake - Is there an artist whose music fits the tone of Fall more than Nick Drake? Lest we be fooled by the brief Spring imagery of “And I was green, greener than the hill / Where flowers grew and the sun shone still,” we have here a song about what happens when our blinders first get lifted and we see the twisted ways the world can operate: we get depressed; it’s hard to get out of bed, hard to stay strong day after day. The green he refers to is the innocence we eventually lose, the ignorance that is blissful, the inexperience we don’t always want cured.
There is a calmness but also a restlessness to Drake’s guitar playing here, as if the song could shatter at any moment. I do not wish to psychoanalyze the inner workings of Nick Drake’s mind, but this is perhaps reflective of how he himself felt at the time of the song’s release. “Place To Be” is from his 1972 landmark album Pink Moon. He was only 24 years old when it came out. Just two years later, he would end his life. “Now I’m weaker than the palest blue / Oh, so weak in this need for you” takes on new meaning in light of this fact.
And perhaps that’s why Drake’s music, so peaceful, so beautiful, so painfully joyful at times seems to come alive during the season when everything fades away—because it is haunted by struggle and loss and death. They’re always lurking there in the background whether you realize it or not. But thank God for recorded music, for Drake lives on in the perpetual Spring of his songs, coming back to us again each year at Autumn’s arrival.
“Disappearing” by The War On Drugs - Autumn is the earth’s great disappearing act. Leaves fall, baring clusters of long limbs like bony brown fingers in the trees. Grass browns, sending its green gradually off to an eternal-seeming hibernation. Warmth dims, mimicking the sun that has swallowed it. Things fall apart and fade away and feel heavy, but delightfully out of place.
Out of place will never be a descriptor used to describe any element of a War on Drugs song. Every piece is pored over, every sound perfected by lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Adam Granduciel. This perfection is apparent from the very beginning of “Disappearing,” as bass, drums, and guitar kick in immediately. Even the space between the notes and the thumps and the kickdrum stomps sounds placed with the precision of a surgeon’s hand. When Granduciel’s voice comes in, it’s just another instrument here. You don’t need to understand the exact words he’s saying in order to understand what he’s saying. And I’m sure that’s on purpose too.
The song’s definitive moment comes at the 2:13 mark when a riff (guitar? piano? keyboard? I’m not quite sure) emerges that sounds almost like spiraling. The rest of the song is equal parts a whimsical and piercing instrumental display, and each time that riff comes in, we are reminded of the spiral. Taking into account the song’s title, it could be that the narrator himself is spiraling, going through it, feeling like parts of himself are disappearing and he’s not sure if he’ll ever get them back. But it’s a hope-tinged spiraling redeemed by the creative impulse and the crisp satisfaction of the steady snare holding everything together like a mother’s love. It makes me think of how the earth must feel during Autumn. Like a sorrowful disappearing saved by its very own beauty and by the glimmer of hope that everything will come back when it’s supposed to.
“Lady Divine” by Alela Diane - I will be the first to admit that the lyrics to “Lady Divine” are abstract and slightly cryptic, but I’m hard pressed to think of a song that conjures up browning yards, colorful trees, and leaves falling like snow to this degree. The conjuring starts right out of the gate. The delicate notes of Diane’s acoustic guitar ring out and the air feels immediately a little cooler, a cloud moves to partially block the sun, and the steady, repetitive pick-and-strum pattern careening through the song perpetuates such vibes. She has the end of things on her mind, the song beginning, “When the day, when the day falls to the light / At the end, oh the end, of my time.”
It seems she also has motherhood on her mind, with children a recurring image: “With songs for children to sing” and “my children are in hiding” and “their children are all grown now.” The thought comes that maybe it’s not a coincidence that a pregnancy lasts nine months and the Autumnal Equinox occurs during the ninth month of the year. Not all women are mothers, nor need they be, but we are all children of mothers, and we are all children of the earth. And when our bones are cold—”mortar and pestle, they grind”—our mother sticks a blanket in the dryer so she can wrap us in its warmth. Our mother exhales and splotches her woods in dabs of color. Lady Divine. Mother Earth.
“Eat, Sleep, Repeat” by Copeland - I remember Copeland as band firmly entrenched in the “are they/aren’t they” conversation about whether certain rock bands were “Christian bands” or just “made up of guys who were Christians.” I didn’t care one way or another, but they were the rock band I listened to that inspired me to coin a new genre of music: “beautiful rock.” Ingenious, I know. Mercifully, the Christian-band-or-not conversation fizzled out, but listening to the music of Copeland is often still no less than a religious experience.
There’s one word you need to know to appreciate this song: tremolo. Tremolo is the guitar strumming style utilized in the chorus of the slightly emo, slyly powerful “Eat, Sleep, Repeat.” It gives the electric guitar the effect of a trembling echo. I hear it in this song and am immediately transported back to the Fall of 2006 when I was a sophomore in college walking to class on the campus of the University of Kentucky. I am listening to Copeland’s new album, their third, also called Eat, Sleep, Repeat on my Sony Discman. (See, kids, we have been avoiding each other with physical media and headphones long before the advent of the iPhone and Airpods.) I am 22, questioning everything, knowing not much for sure, and the gray gloominess of the cool Fall day makes all the walking people seem a little more subdued; somehow makes life, the unknowns and the promises and the expectations, a little more surmountable, a little less overbearing. The power of the season.
And as I’m walking the tremolo hits and it shakes me, no pun intended. I don’t think I’ve heard anything like it before. I don’t yet know what my life is going to become. I don’t know which class I’m walking to, if I’m walking to Survey of American Lit or War Poetry or Latin, but I might as well have levitated there on a hoverboard. I concur with lead singer Aaron Marsh when he sings, “All this time you didn’t know love.” No, I did not know love. I do not know love. I do not know much of anything in the Fall of 2006. I know crippling indecision. I know debilitating anxiety. I know that music speaks to me, and I know that I am a more receptive vessel this time of year. And when the unique power of each, the song and the season, hits me just right, no matter how lost or sad I am, I know that everything is going to be alright. I know that I do, in fact, know love.
“The Chill of An Early Fall” by George Strait - The king of country music needs no introduction. (If he does, perhaps that’s to come in a later post.) “The Chill of An Early Fall” is the aforementioned Autumn song that contains no thin veil of joy or hope; it just wraps its sad-as-hell arms tightly around you and begs you to marinate in how that feels for awhile. And no one, aside from perhaps Merle Haggard, sells a sad country song the way George Strait does. The entire brilliant conceit is that the chill of the title is a metaphor for distrust in a relationship. A “friend” of the narrator’s lover has come back into her life. Again. “That same old chilly wind will blow / Like a cold winter squall.” And our chilly narrator can tell that she still wants to be a leaf caught up in this other guy’s gust. Her love is just like the season—temporary: “Love and seasons never stay.”
The kicker comes in the following lines: “Now there’s no doubt / It’s gonna be cold out tonight / I’ve shivered all day.” Aspiring singers pay vocal coaches thousands of dollars in lessons, but the way George Strait delivers “I’ve shivered all day” in a way that makes you feel the pang of betrayal this man has been languishing in, is a skill that cannot be taught. You either have it or you don’t. You sell it or your song is just another drop in a vast song ocean. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go sit on my back porch as the light fades, stare out at the half-bare branches against the pale sky, and drink a bourbon on the rocks—which I don’t even drink—to keep warm. It’s chilly out here.
“Charlie Darwin” by The Low Anthem - It seems fitting to include a meditation on religion, evolution, hope, and the cutthroat nature of the world on this playlist. Autumn seems like a good time to reflect on such themes. Lyrical snippets in the song set our minds to considering what humanity has made of itself and done to the world, not a lot of it good, maybe not most of it. We look around and think Is this really where survival of the fittest has gotten us? As Ben Knox Miller sings, “Who could heed the words of Charlie Darwin?” There’s got to be more to a successful, meaningful life than winner-take-all, as scientifically sound as such mantras purport to be in order to get a leg up in this life.
The lyrics are worthy of spending time with, but it’s Miller’s haunting falsetto, grounded yet bellowing out over the band’s minimalist instrumentation that makes us take heed that the situation is dire. We are competing and advertising and profiteering ourselves to death. Good people sell their souls to work jobs for people getting richer than those good people have ever dreamed of, off of that very work. Either that’s what happens, or you’re lucky. By the end of the song, Miller’s falsetto sounds broken and resigned, yet desperately, passionately desirous for change—that might not come. The rest of the band harmonizes with him on the final lines, which take on almost biblical import: “Oh my god / The water’s cold and shapeless / Oh my god, it’s all around / Oh my god / Life is cold and formless / Oh my god, it’s all around.” An escape to sea has only turned out to be a reminder.
“Oh my god” will continue ringing out across the freezing waters until someone answers. But perhaps that’s a tree we see in the distance across the shimmering, glassy darkness. Perhaps that’s yellow, orange, and red we can make out on its branches, emerging stubbornly through the fog. Or perhaps it’s an illusion and all in our heads. But if it keeps us from giving into the inevitability of the way things are, that is enough. Just because the world can be a terrible place because we’ve done terrible things to it and its people—to ourselves—doesn’t mean that it’s not also good, that it’s not also a grace to be here. It doesn’t mean that a tree is not also an answer. In that hope we are carried to shore together.
2024 Fall Playlist:
Sweater Weather Chill Playlist (Fall instrumentals)
Loving these reviews Richard! The Fleet Foxes are so great but I hadn't heard "Featherweight" before - it's beautiful. "Lady Divine" also captures those Autumn vibes particularly well! Cheers