Music for your Secret Balcony
Here’s some: I am completely obsessed with Nina Nastasia’s latest record, On Leaving. As you may already know, I am terrible at describing what music’s like, but I’ll venture a try. Acoustic-y and she has such a beautiful voice; singing these dangerous little stories in which women try to woo back dead husbands or convince lovers to just slow down, feel at all the beauty around them. There’s a yearning and a sadness underpinning it all, as there always must be in any honest look at humanity's regard for mortality. How we always forget and forget. The style of the music itself puts me in mind of a group like the Dirty Three. The recordings make you feel like you’re there in the room the moment this music’s being made and it’s just lovelylovelylovely.

Particular songs: “Why Don’t You Stay Home,” “One Old Woman,” “Bird of Cuzco.” Early false spring here now probably has a hand in my enjoyment. Kind. Real.

I have a secret balcony outside my own apartment. At one time years before I came to Beach Town, my kitchen sink window was no window but a door leading out to this balcony, but now it sits on the roof of the first floor, vacant, a remnant of the time this house was one home instead of seven or so apartments. The only way to really access the secret balcony is to open up my bedroom window real wide and kind of clamber over, which is just what I did late yesterday afternoon.

Went out there with my Rogue brand ukelele and sang and played, terribly, the Silver Jews song “Pretty Eyes.” Mostly, though, I just sat and sat and looked up as the vapor trails of planes filled with people who are strangers to one another, as they criss-crossed across the giant sky. The sky is so enormous, here.
The air smelled of spring and I felt lucky.