As someone looking into the rear view at middle age*, enjoying Michelle Zauner’s latest treat feels nearly naughty.
Harp, guitars, and other strings help buoy Zauner’s lofty vocals, with the entire affair feeling cloud-like, a dream of a dream on her latest, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), released on Dead Oceans in March.
From the liner notes:
Sadness is indeed the dominant emotional key of this record, but it is sadness of a rarified form: the pensive, prescient sadness of melancholy, in which the recognition of life’s essentially tragic character occurs with sensitivity to its fleeting beauty.
References to big ideas throughout history touch each track, from John Cheever’s riff on Orlando Innamorato, an unfinished epic made up of 68 ½ cantos by the Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo to Icarus’ sunny plight, Leda’s brush with a feral fowl, and closing with Thomas Mann’s chugging engine up Magic Mountain. I once told someone, an old writer, I enjoyed Magic Mountain and was told angrily in return, “No one likes Magic Mountain!”
To my way of hearing, no one should find something not to like in For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women).
* the notion that middle age extends past 60 takes poetic license a bit too far, imo.