This show was part of a wonderfully curated series by HU Presents, who continues to bring the best music possible to Harrisburg and Pennsylvania. From the first moment we understand the what of a feeling – our grandfather’s tears, our sibling’s laughter, the blurry distance of our mother’s smile; the […]
When Jeff Tweedy plays by himself, there is nothing between him, the listener, and the words. Songs that might’ve felt massive and almost-maximalist carry a soft intimacy. Lyrics that might’ve stayed behind the noise step into the spotlight. Experience is untranslatable; this one felt like a remembering joined with a […]
There are not enough words for love in English; Niall Connolly has found a way around our pretty language’s greatest deficit. With the songs of The Patience of Trees, Connolly has written a collection that explores all the sides of what it means to feel deeply: about a lover, about […]
This story ends in a hug. — — — — — We disembarked from our midnight flight into Memphis with a few thinly-packed bags and my camera, ears ringing from the pressure of a storm-torn trip. A woman met us outside the airport Comfort Inn, her tooth crooked, hips bent, […]
When I listen to music, I have at least one of a few goals: (1) to get lost (2) to get found (3) to get transported When I go to shows, I have at least one of a few goals: (1) to lose myself in the many (2) to find […]
This show was part of a wonderfully curated series by HU Presents, who continue to bring the best music possible to Harrisburg and Pennsylvania. Life is well-governed by the quietest loves and the loudest loves, with all those in-between half-forgotten. The moments when a snore tumbles onto a shoulder, a […]
WTMD has long championed the causes of up-and-comers in the indie scene and identified the musicians and acts that will capture the nation’s interest. The June 2022 iteration of First Thursday is no different, with the soon-to-be-massive Momma playing a massive set before the ascendant beabadoobee followed. Momma Momma has […]
Somewhere at the core of Al Olender’s new album Easy Crier is the important of attention. Attention to love. Attention to grief. Attention to memory. Attention to the infinitesimal moments of life as much as the impossibly cavernous ones that swallow us. She doesn’t strive to offer answers or even […]
2 years and 8 months. It had been 2 years and 8 months since the last time WTMD hosted a First Thursday concert at the Canton Waterfront Park. They’ve had plenty of time to plan and they delivered, as they always do. They celebrated local music, emerging music in the […]
Sometimes, the easy disenchantment of the music business overtakes us, its lab-grown and cut stones a little too much. Have you ever taken a fist-sized rock – maybe in your backyard, maybe somewhere in the woods – and cracked it against the ground, its hidden crystals shining on the pavement, […]
God is good and it’s understoodhe moves in mysterious ways. M.C. Taylor Back in late 2012, as the leaves shed their false selves, I traveled along the dusty and unpoliced blogosphere, finding a song on my feed with an album cover featuring a red handprint, no artist named, and the […]
Thao Nguyen came to DC with fire in her lungs, fever in her feet, and a shimmering incandescence that blasted off the stage. Wearing reflective gold for her homecoming crowd (originally from Falls Church, a suburb of DC), she rippled into and through a set that included old and new […]
Like a lot of people, I first learned about the music of Kishi Bashi from a recommendation by Bob Boilen (of NPR’s Tiny Desk) way back in 2012ish. I fell hard for 151a (pronounced “ichi-go ichi-e) and have quietly followed every album since, but never been to one of his […]
I first saw The Swell Season at the Lincoln Theater, somewhere around 2006, singing their songs as a duo while Damien Rice (the headliner) swayed on the ground behind them. My roommate, Nick and I, had listened to the album since it’d come out earlier in the year. We knew […]
BJ Barham writes sad songs. Everybody knows that, and everybody writes about it. I won’t be any different. But before I do, let me remind you of an absolute truth: American Aquarium is one of the best rock bands operating in the world right now. BJ struts, dances, and tears […]
There exists a place in me, maybe in all of us, where the sacred and the profane cohabit the soul like perfect lovers, dining and speaking, travelers of thoughts and dreams, of reality and true unreality. For me, the sacredness that shaped me – the angels and demons I’ve seen […]
We found ourselves settled on a small stretch of concrete, our own chairs and drinks in tow, staring at a small stage with a single mic. A soft-pink sunsetting sky presaged the coming show, and the suddenly chilly early-autumn air shaped it. Most of the crowd settled under blankets while […]
“I can make it, I think.” M.C. Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger) shared those words in the lead-up to releasing Quietly Blowing It, written in his journals near the edge of disaster in England. It’s a quietly prescient and subversive statement, one that betrays more about what it means to exist […]
A few lessons from a backyard punk rock show You cannot numb your anger selectively It is better to laugh You cannot deaden the expression of your love Expansion is the way forward Love is real Pain is the con I parked where I always park, as close to the […]
My car rumbled along the Maryland highways, enduring the terrors of Washington DC’s 295 to 695 stretch of road, the already poor driving of our nation’s capital apparently exacerbated by last year’s quarantine. Playing on the stereo, feet feverishly flicking between the brake and the accelerator, we sing along So […]
From the piedmont lowlands of northern Maryland, we drove into America’s oldest mountains, her ridges blue in the heat-hazed distance. My wife found ourselves settled first into an old house in Purcellville, its floors sloping with time, its windows lead-wavy, its acreage covered by a working farm. From there, we […]
For the longest time, some music has had this ineffable quality to just make me feel a certain way, to almost change my life, if only for a moment. Miles Gannett’s Meridian did this to me. I first listened to it as I walked around a just-blooming saucer magnolia grove, […]
March 14th, 2021 The reality of the pandemic settled into my heart 365 days ago this morning, every slice of information I can find promising this virus would be worse than we feared. The sudden onset of a break – schools closed, world slowed – held nearly no peace, no […]
Just half a year (or a lifetime) ago, live music stopped, the world all but halted, and we started collectively telling ourselves lies about the return of normal. And that last bit’s okay, I think, as a need for hope is sometimes stronger than the impulse for honesty.It’s why we […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
Note from These Subtle Sounds: if you like something and you have the means, please pay for it beyond your chosen streaming services. Streaming services do not provide musicians with reasonable payment for their work. While we include Spotify due to streaming’s ubiquity, we have also linked Patreon, Bandcamp, and […]
We here at These Subtle Sounds have been working to navigate the new world we inhabit as best we can, trying to figure out what we can do to keep carrying the music flame. We typically and historically have focused on covering live music – and we’ve certainly written about some livestreams […]
Barry Hannah wrote the sort of short stories that took something nearly prosaic and built it into something surreally shattering, brimming with edges of the grotesque, of a distant kind of humor, but always fundamentally human. “Water Liars” was one of those stories, its closing line, “We were both crucified […]
A mere day after the festival should have ended, Charm City Bluegrass (and a bunch of wonderful co-hosts) held a Corona-era special Digifest live from The Gordon Center. While none of us traveled to Druid Hill Park to take in the folk and bluegrass that has come to define the […]
When I still nipped at my parents’ heels, small enough to be childlike and old enough to want to not be, I discovered the unquiet joy of simple songs and dreams laid out on carpets. My dad played records and cassettes in the basement, his old collection and that golden […]
For years now, The Honey Dewdrops – Laura Wortman and Kagey Parrish – have acted as representatives of so much of what’s good in Baltimore. They adopted Charm City a half-decade or so ago and have quietly woven their songs into its tapestry. They champion community, consideration, and a deeper […]
Late February, and spring rises, carrying floods of all kinds: sunlight, rain soaked, flash, flower, hope. Winter, in all its irrepressible glory, has lightened its yoke, letting the world wake anew. When we woke, the ground had frozen. When we walked the streets of Philadelphia, we needed no coats. […]
We humans – maybe even all things on this planet – are governed by cycles, responding to light and darkness. With the sun’s rising, we awaken our souls, and with the sun’s setting, we slip into the ambiguity of dreaming. We change, but it’s the same everyday. Until it’s not. […]
When we were small – or smaller than we became – my brother and I paced paths into the carpets and hardwoods of our childhood home, each listening to CD after CD on our Walkmen (his candy red, mine bumblebee yellow). We’d trade CDs, talk about the songs, otherwise letting […]
