So Darling Ones,

Because I had an overnight houseguest last night I didn’t get a chance to tell you yesterday was my favorite night of the year. The overnight houseguest was Sister #4 who came in from Brookings because she had a company meeting/holiday party in town. I wrote that first sentence in such a way as to make you think I might have gotten laid and was going to dish some juicy romantic details.

Alas! You should know, getting laid would be a reason to make a day my favorite day of the year. However, I’m talking about Spotify Wrapped day, where Spotify dishes all the juicy music details of your year in listening. I love Spotify Wrapped day because I cannot get enough useless data about myself. Also, it gives me a chance to be smug, sanctimonious, and a smidge sheepish.

It’s a day where my emotions run the gamut. It bums me out because so many of the men I like had lists that were completely made up of male artists, proving for the one millionth time that men do not value art made by women. It also bums me out because people are assholes right out loud judging people for using Spotify, for sharing their Wrapped lists, and in general not appreciating music the right way.

Spotify does suck and vastly underpays artists. I cannot argue against that. However, just because a person uses Spotify does not mean they don’t listen to music in other ways. I have bought (and pre-ordered) an embarrassing number of records this year. Some through Bandcamp, others from the artist’s website, some through record stores. I use Spotify as a try before you buy kinda situation. Just like I use the library to read a book before I buy it. I’m almost fifty, I’m tired of inviting untested garbage into my house.

Because I spend a broad swaths of time completely alone and frequently in a world that isn’t entirely real, Spotify Wrapped feels like a nice check-in that the year actually progressed the way I thought it did. I went through my Wrapped list and was all, “yep, yep, sounds right, makes sense, that’s embarrassing, yep, yep. right on.”

Spotify said I listened to something like 90 hours of Frightened Rabbit, specifically the song “The Twist.” This makes sense because I listened to Midnight Organ Fight every night before bed for months on months on months.

Julien Baker made my Top 5 list. Of course. I listened to Little Oblivions on repeat to see if a song could, indeed, be too sad. And The Marfa Tapes record is in there under Jack Ingram’s name. This might be my favorite record of 2021. With the Julien Baker, the latest Liz Phair,a nd Lucy Dacus’ VBS coming up close behind.

If you are so inclined you can peep my Top Songs of 2021 Spotify Playlist, which includes, much to my amusement, “Just What I Needed” by The Cars, “Magic Man” by Heart, and “Into Your Arms” by The Lemonheads.

Always in love with that song,
Jodi

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Hi Darling Ones,

When I woke up at the crack of 9:54 a.m this morning I did not leap from bed in a panic for sleeping so late. I did not bounce joyfully out of the covers refreshed and eager to seize the day. Instead, I turned on Lucy Dacus’ new record VBS and laid in bed watching the blurry ceiling fan spin around and around. I refused to put on my glasses and wake up my eyes in case I wasn’t really done sleeping.

I’ve listened to VBS every day since it was released. This is a thing I do now, I guess, listen to new records ad nauseam until I have to go and listen to one-hit wonder from the 90s for a week because I’ve begun to annoy my own ear drums with the incessant spins of one record. Lather, rinse, repeat. I’ve been doing it ever since the COVID hit — Waxahatchee, Kathleen Edwards, Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Liz Phair, The Marfa Tapes, and now Lucy. And don’t forget that I am still listening to Midnight Organ Fight nearly every night as I go to sleep.

Sometimes this repetition makes me feel like maybe I’m a little less than sane, but really it’s probably a way of coping with low-level anxiety and also an all-consuming love of music.

This morning I kept repeating the titular song “VBS” because I’ve head the lyric locked away with jam jars in the cellar of your heart rattling around inside me all week.

As I free-associated through the song trying to shake off a particularly icky, vivid dream,** I thought about how I really like phrases about hearts being things other than hearts or having things inside of them.

Of course I thought about my own particular favorites: ice-robot heart and chicken mcnugget heart. Then the idea really picked up steam and I recalled everyone’s got a maze inside their heart from Liz Phair’s “Soberish.”

When I tried to remember the origin of this penchant for heart-things I figured it probably sprung from my love of ol’ Edward Estlin Cummings, whose poetry I fell in love with as a teenager. Specifically, the line i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it.

Those were the ones I thought of off the top of my head, though when I went to see if I had any in the note I keep on my phone of lines I love from books I also found these three:
“before I carried in my heart this broken piece of glass which I’ve been careful not to disturb lest it cut me.” Liz Phair, Horror Stories

“His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.” V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“His rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.” Sherman Alexie,* You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me

I’m sure there are more that aren’t coming to me right this minute or right that minute. Eventually I had to get out of bed because I was hungry and there were donut holes downstairs.

<3, Jodi  
*Sherman Alexie is a dirtbag. I know that, and I really wish it was easier to carve my love for this sentence out of my memory and my heart, and yet I cannot. It’s so hard when dirtbags write something really beautiful that you commit to memory and never seem to be able to forget.

 
**In the dream I was part of a sex study that involved having various women perform oral sex on me, one of whom was Betty White.

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Hi Darling Ones,

Here’s a thing that I didn’t expect to happen: I like Soberish, the new Liz Phair record. A lot. Frankly, I’m kind of shocked by this development. The singles I’d heard off the new one didn’t do much for me, and I was disappointed by that “live” stream. So I did not expect much going into this, her first new record in eleven years.

In case you are new here and haven’t memorized the 21-years worth of I Will Dare dot com archives, Liz Phair’s music means the world to me. She’s right up there with Paul Westerberg on Jodi Chromey’s Personal Mount Olympus of Musicians.*

Liz Phair is the soundtrack to my sexual coming of age. Yeah, this didn’t happen for me until I was twenty-one. I was a late bloomer because I grew up in a house where I was told men would not be interested in me because I was too tall and too fat. Because of this I missed a lot of opportunities to make out with cute boys. I also ended up in a lot of situations that didn’t work out so well for me because I wholly believed men were not sexually interested in me and did not see the sexual assault coming my way.

Some of my most significant firsts happened because of Liz Phair: First show at First Ave, first tattoo before that concert at First Ave, the first time a man bought me a drink in an attempt to get into my pants** also before that concert. That concert was a big night for me. There were other momentous occasions too. I was twenty-six and working at a gas station when “Polyester Bride” came out. I think I was just starting my relationship with the TTHM when “Why Can’t I?” was released.

In the immortal words of Neko Case (also on Mount Olympus) in “Guided By Wire,” even in my darkest recollection, there was someone singin’ my life back to me. And so often over these past 27ish years it has been Liz Phair.

She does it again on this record. Specifically the song “Bad Kitty” which starts with the wonderful line about her pussy being lazy and fat until it spies a man it wants (same, Liz, same), but is more about being someone who isn’t appreciated and is ahead of her time.

A lot of the songs seem to be about Phair coming to terms with her multi-decade career and hitting that mature woman age while also still fucking up relationships like she did in her twenties. There’s two songs “Ba Ba Ba” and “Soberish” that hit so close to home I’m not ready to write about it yet.

Make no mistake, there’s a few songs on here that I loathe. I have to skip “In There” due to all the electronic noise I call “music for robots.” I also skip “Rain Scene” which I realize is supposed to sound like rain but just sounds like forty-seven seconds of someone peeing on something. Bleh. However, she gets a bunch of gold stars for bringing back her bartending friend from “Polyester Bride” in “Dosage” where she sings, “I reach for words Dear Henry told me.”

I’ll have more to say about this record later, probably once I get my actual copy, but I just wanted to share my delight at liking something I thought would be ultimately disappointing.

Flapping my wings & flying away from here,
Jodi

 
*I just invented this and plan to give it some thought and use it henceforth to bestow greatness upon the worthy.

 
**I did not recognize this while it was happening. My friend Amy explained it to me as we drove back to Eau Claire. She would do this many times throughout our friendship. I really was (am?) that oblivious about men’s attraction to me.

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Dear Darling Ones,

It happened. I tipped over into an obsession with The Marfa Tapes. It’s like Julien Baker all over again, which was Kathleen Edwards all over again, which was Waxhatchee all over again, which was. . . you get the picture.

We all recognize that I have obsessive tendencies. I probably don’t need to illustrate them every time.

I found The Marfa Tapes when the song “Geraldene” flittered across my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. Whenever I find a song I like on that list I make sure to heart it. Last summer I lost a song because I did not heart it. I sang it in my head with nonsense words for two weeks hoping it would come back to me. It never did. Sorry, song.

When I saw Miranda Lambert was behind The Marfa Tapes along with two men I’d never heard of (Jack Ingram and Jon Randall), I put off investigating the record any deeper than “Geraldene.”

Miranda Lambert is Sister #3’s all-time favorite, and I wasn’t sure I could listen to Lambert without every note being a reminder of the hole in my life and my anger about it.

Surprise! I can and I did. Just like I once told a friend I wasn’t gonna let Ryan Adams*dirtbag ruin Beth Orton’s song “Concrete Sky,” I’m not going to let Sister #3 rob me of this record that is so fucking lovely it makes my heart race.

So, you wanna know all the reasons I am obsessed with this record and cannot stop listening to it?*

1. “You’re trailer park pretty but you’re never gonna Jolene,” from “Geraldene.”
2. The way Lambert stutter sings the name Ge-Ge-Ge-Geraldene about half-way through the song and both men laugh in delight. Then at the end, they imitate it.
3. The harmonizing throughout is so great. The blending of voices gives me goosebumps and reminds me of every single time I’ve sang a song I love with someone I adore. I especially love it on “Am I Right or Amarillo” a song where they sing, in beautiful harmony, “It won’t feel like cheating if nobody gets hurt.”
4. “You sure do play some pretty, pretty, chords,” one of the dudes says at the end of “In His Arms.”
5. The entire record makes you feel like you are sitting there on a porch with them in Marfa, Texas in the best possible way. Like you’re just hanging with your pals and their guitars and singing the songs as they come to you. It feels like who Rock & Roll Bookclub feels when Wolfdogg busts out his guitar and we all sing along to whatever songs we know the words too. It never fails to make me cry because I love it so much.
6. The cows mooing in the background of “Amazing Grace – West Texas.”
7. “It’s not trouble. It’s just dancing,” from “We’ll Always Have the Blues,” which reminds me of Jeremy Messersmith’s lovely “It’s Only Dancing”
8. “I love it when you wake me up and kiss me until the coffee is cold,” from “I Don’t Like It.”
9. “I replaced the headboard with a chiseled stone. ‘Here lies the meanest man I’ve ever known.’ Go rest in peace with every lie you ever told, because know you’re just a ghost,” from “Ghost,” which I like to think is a little bit about her dirtbag ex husband (Blake Shelton) who left her for the worst thing to happen ever (Gwen Stefani).
10. And the way that song ends? “Honey, now you’re just a ghost and I ain’t afraid of ghosts.” It gets me right in the old ticker.
11. Lambert’s voice on the song “Waxahachie.” It’s so gorgeous I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. And at the end of the song they congratulate themselves on how pretty the song is, and they are not wrong.
12. “I’m always chasing a kiss with a twist of lime,” from “Tequila Does.” Same, Ms. Lambert, Same.

I’m stopping at dozen, but I could easily come up with a dozen more reasons to be obsessed with this record. I’m stopping because it’s a good number, but also I want to take a nap before The Youths & The Olds arrive for dinner. Also, I’m a little bit into this adorable rom-com I’m reading where the female protagonist has to come out (so to speak) online as fat and she’s worried the object of her romantic interest is going to be disappointed and OH BOY AM I RELATING TO THIS SO HARD.

Talk to you later,
Jodi
 
*This record has eliminated my need to listen to “Magic Man” 88 times every day.

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Hello Darling Ones,

Around the New Year, I sent an email to a guy I know thanking him for introducing me to the music of Frightened Rabbit and being very kind to me while I nursed a broken heart.

He was all, “No problem, hope they’re not too sad for you. They are for me sometimes.”

And I laughed.

As if.

Too sad? For me? Jodi Chromey the duchess of anguish & misery? The Internet’s favorite bittersweetheart? The woman who is going to change her name to Angrboda, bringer of sorrows, and become the Witch of Ironwood?*

Is too sad a thing?

editor’s note: actually I replied with an email I thought was kind of sweet and super flirty. I never got a response to it, because of course.

This may come as a surprise, but I love sad songs. Sad songs are the best songs. Way back in the olden days when I lived in that shitty apartment in Prior Lake I used to lay on the floor and listen to Jeff Buckely’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and will myself not to cry. For fun. I want songs that crawl into my ice-robot heart and bring their own blanket, making themselves comfortable while using my own heartstrings to manipulate my tear ducts like a marionette.

Most of my favorite songs are sad songs.
Jason Isbell’s “Alabama Pines,” I don’t even need a name anymore. When no one calls it out, it kind of vanishes away.
Neko Case’s “I Wish I Was the Moon,” Last night I dreamt I’d forgotten my name cause I sold my soul, but I woke just the same. I’m so lonely. I wish I was the moon tonight.
Matthew Sweet’s “Someone to Pull the Trigger,” Cause there’s a hole in my heart getting bigger, and everything I’ll ever be I’ve been.
Lucy Dacus’ “Night Shift,” In five years I hope the songs feel like covers, dedicated to new lovers.

Could I go on & on? Yes. I could start going on and continue going on until the sun chars the other side of the world and comes back to us.**

Sure happy songs are great, and sometimes they make you want to wiggle your butt or shake your hips, but sad songs are where it’s at. Sad songs make me feel less alone. It’s like Jeff Tweedy said in his memoir:
. . . when we experience pain or trauma, we’re acutely aware that something is wrong. You want answers. “What is this? How do I get rid of this? Why is this happening to me? I don’t want this.” That’s why so much art, and music, in particular, becomes a great commiserating balm for pain. Joy doesn’t need to be audited. We’re just grateful to have had it at all. But pain, goddammit, we demand to know, Who’s responsible for this?”

Back to that guy I know and songs that are too sad. Too. Too? I didn’t think that was a thing and then Julien Baker came along with her very pain-filled, painful, and excellent record “Little Oblivions” and she said to me, “Jodi Chromey, soon to be Angrboda, bringer of sorrows, duchess of anguish & misery, hold my lemonade while I show you too sad.”

Hoo boy this record is a lot. Is it too sad? What would that even mean? Would too sad be when you find yourself singing the lyrics, I’ll wrap Orion’s belt around my neck, and kick the chair out mindlessly to yourself and then your heart stutters a little when your brain realizes what you’re saying and you think, ouch that is some dark stuff?

Maybe. Maybe it is too sad. But if it were, would I listen to record in its entirety nearly every single day? WOULD I? Could you do something like if something were too sad?

It is some rough going and beautiful in the way that makes you feel simultaneously seen at your deepest and darkest and kind of glad that it’s not you having to work through all that. But too sad? Unpossible. But damn, if Julien Baker didn’t come close.

Blue is my favorite color,
Jodi

P.S. When I was working on this letter, I listened to Lucinda Williams’ “Am I Too Blue” about 393 times, and then I realized that it comes right after “Passionate Kisses” on her self-titled record. And I decided if I were a 1-2 punch on any album of any time I would be these two songs right next to each other. Damn, Lucinda is one of the greatest of all time.

 
*Whenever I mention changing my name to Angrboda and becoming the Witch of Ironwood my friend EM hoots with laughter. Hoots. And through her gasps she says “is this before or after you become a glassblower?” And then I tell her to shut up and stop crushing all my dreams. I think I left the glassblowing dream offa these here pages, because I’m juvenile and crass and would never be able to resist the glory hole jokes, but yes for about a month there I was really bummed about not being a glassblower.
 
**stolen from the excellent and not really sad Soul Coughing song “Screenwriter’s Blues.”

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