Let It Freeze
A mixtape for the gift of silence.
Leaving the Christmas Lights Up
Winter is my mortal enemy, but I’m trying to be a good sport about it this month. My very dear friend Dan is a huge fan, and we collaborated on a pretty spectacular mixtape for you all. It’ll help carry me through the long, cold, dark days. That and the Christmas lights I’ll leave up for another month—just for a little extra dose of warmth.
In the last month I’ve had a cold, the flu, and norovirus (lol). 2026 has no choice but to be incredible. I’m willing it for myself AND for you, my wonderful friends and lovely music fans. Some stellar music due to hit your inboxes on the first of every month, per usual!
A few cheerier slices of life for you:
Hope you continue to enjoy this project as much as I do. Always love to hear from folks! What are you digging lately? Me? Well, I’ll leave you with some assorted favorites from 2025:
Algernon Cadwallader’s Trying Not to Have a Thought - If these transcendent guitar melodies and bottom of your stomach Midwest emo vocals don’t move you, we grew up different.
Eli’s Stage Girl - Eli is my pop girly of the moment. Love you Sabrina & Charli, but these early aught throwbacks hit me where I feel it most.
Moin’s Belly Up - Moin was the best live act I saw this year. They had the worst opener (can’t be their fault) I’ve ever seen in my two decades of seeing concerts.
Rosalía’s “Reliquia” - Absolutely floored by the loveliness of her voice/this song. One of the best I’ve heard in years.
Like the mixtapes? Help me spread the love by throwing a few bucks my way via BuyMeACoffee or opting to become a paid subscriber. Thanks to everyone who has already supported me this way.
And hey, if you like it, why not share the mix or this newsletter with a friend?
Let It Freeze
Created in collaboration with Dan LoPreto for the gift of silence.
A few words from Dan:
*****
I never want to know a day
That’s over forty degrees
I’d rather have it thirty
Twenty, ten, five and let it freeze
—Snow Miser
I can’t hear myself think these days. I am reminded of what the poet Jonathan Williams wrote in the liner notes of the 1959 record Mingus Ah Um:
It is incredible that Mingus can dredge out of the contemporary slough the potency and healing grace of his music. Pieces like the ‘Fables of Faubus,’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ and others are miracles of a kind. They are there, available, God knows, for anyone of those not so bugged by the crazy barrage of the Communication of Nothing that they can still hear.
The “crazy barrage of the Communication of Nothing.” Is there anything that better captures our current moment and its deleterious effects on our nervous systems? The stream of noise and horror is endless. Gaza bombed again. ICE abducts a family. A university bends the knee. Record breaking heat. Microplastics in our balls. Fuck, dude. I just want to turn all of this shit off. Not permanently, of course, since it is everyone’s responsibility to bear witness and resist the fascist onslaught. But sometimes I want to beg for some silence.
Throughout my life, winter has given me the gift of silence. There is nothing I like more than to take a stroll on a windless, frigid winter night. This season has always meant, for me, a time of contemplation and stillness. As the world spins faster, I rely on winter to keep my feet grounded on the cold earth.
* * *
I was rooting for the White Walkers. Of all the media I consume, I prefer those books, films, songs, and TV shows that engage with winter. I recall fondly the Emmy-winning “Heart of Ice”, considered to be the most iconic episode of Batman: The Animated Series (the show itself, according to Glen Weldon, represents the best version of Batman in any medium). More recently, I was sad when they announced that The Great North was cancelled—that show ruled.
There are films that I can’t imagine without their winter settings or signature scenes: Tokyo Godfathers, Doctor Zhivago, Groundhog Day, The Thing, Night on Earth, Serendipity, It’s a Wonderful Life, Eternal Sunshine, Empire Strikes Back. Do we want Marge Gunderson tanning on a beach? Or Yukon Cornelius bending over to smell a spring rose? Or Marv Murchins sipping a pumpkin spice latte? These characters wouldn’t be the same without a winter backdrop.
Some books and authors are permanently associated with winter, for me. I think of Chekov’s “Vanka”; Fitzgerald’s “Ice Palace”; Donna Tartt’s Secret History; the science of snowflakes in Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season, the caribou migrations in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams; the early scene in Moby-Dick when Queequeg and Ishmael share a bed at a New Bedford inn, combatting the cold by burying under the covers, “like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
I love the colors of winter. Christmas colors for me aren’t plastic red and blank-page white. They are deep and dense: emerald, ruby, gold. Not the light, pastel, luminous colors of Renoir or Mettise. During this time of year I crave thick, solid-as-rock colors: Velasquez black, Twombly gray, Sophie Taeuber-Arp brown, Vermeer orange, Rothko purple, Agnes Martin white, Caravaggio red, Frenkenthaler blue, Bruegel silver.
* * *
Just because I love winter and think it is the best doesn’t take anything away from the other seasons, right? I’m afraid not. Fuck those other seasons. Especially summer: my personal enemy.
Summer is Matt & Kim; winter is Children of Bodom. Summer is an allegro; winter is a fugue. Summer is Vivaldi’s violin concerto in G minor; winter is Debussy’s Nocturnes.
You don’t want to be a hot head or boiling mad. You want to be cool, chill—don’t sweat it.
The best summer treats are actually straight out of winter: ice cream, frozen popsicles, snow cones, all served up by Mr. Frosty.
* * *
I’ll end where I started: with a poet. Here is Mary Oliver’s “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness”:
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
*****
Love you all. Hope you enjoy!
Join Me: Sugar @ Webster Hall, Monday, May 4, 7:30 PM
I bought tickets to this, and they sold out immediately, so this is half a fake invite, since tickets are reselling for close to $200. I’m sorry.
Everyone likes Hüsker Dü and knows how influential they are, but Sugar is my favorite Bob Mould project. These 90s power pop melodies are out of control. I can’t believe I fell in love with them and they decided to reunite for a very limited run of shows.
I bought 2 tickets to this, and they sold out immediately, so this is half a real invite. You want to go?
RIYL: 90s alt rock, power pop, reunions, big smiles and jangly guitars
Check out Sugar’s “If I Can’t Change Your Mind.”
Some Other Things That Dan Loves
(that you might love too!)
What I am into lately:
Books:
Black Paper by Teju Cole
As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
Films:
What I am not into lately:
As Rian Johnson succinctly put it in a recent interview, “Fuck AI.” Couldn’t agree more. I truly hate this shit. “Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.” I am no expert on the AI grift, but here are some folks who are. They are worth your time and attention: Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender, Dan McQuillan, Mary Gray, Annette Zimmermann, Allison Pugh, Mél Hogan, Abeba Birhane, Joan Donovan.
