FatherJohn Misty – When You're Smiling and Astride Me

Being in Mumford & Sons was exhilarating.

He sang, completely oblivious of his rival and of all of us, but visibly borne up, like a strong swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate attention. He sang, and every note recalled something that was very near and dear to us all, something that was immensely vast, just as though the familiar steppe opened up before you, stretching away into

There’s a hopefulness and poignancy to the lyrics here that, to be honest, doesn’t feel like Jeff Tweedy, as if something has been born anew in him. I don’t know, but a line like this is the truth: It’s hard to see reality / when you’ve got no love at all.

After the death of my mother I noticed that I didn’t have a repertoire of off-the-shelf feelings. Sometimes I was sad, but mostly I was happy in a way unconnected to her going. Sometimes I was forgetful. When I poured her ashes off an old cast-iron bridge into the river she had lived on all her life, it seemed an intimate and friendly act, and I fe

One of them, “Wild Mood Swings,” is pictured above. I suppose it’s because I can’t help but “read” them theologically, as it were—the way the detritus and flotsam of our lives is transformed when light is cast upon it, projecting a wholeness we could never imagine up close.