Truth be told, for much of the year, I haven’t been inspired to put a proverbial pen to proverbial paper (i.e., tap-tap-tap on a keyboard) and crank out reviews the way I did in years past. Sitting down and writing myself into a lather—in the immortal words of Ricky Waters, “For who? For what?” Part of it, I think, has to do with the near-instantaneous rise of AI as a “writing” tool. A few days back, for example, a singer-songwriter I follow shared excerpts from a handful of “reviews” his latest release has received. Each follows the same AI-derived pattern. Really?! Those of us who contemplate and cogitate long and hard over what to say and how to say it are being supplanted by oddly worded regurgitations of press releases?! There’s no whimsy. No heart. No personality.
I know I lean hard into hyperbole at times, but it’s an honest hyperbole. As Diane can attest, when I love something—from Sarah Power’s “Prelude in E Minor (Reimagined)” to Amanda Whiting’s Can You See Me Now?, both of which I played last night for a dinner guest curious about how our HomePod works, to most everything else featured within these pages—I’m all in. There’s nothing more exciting to me than delving deep into the grooves of a new album, of living with it for weeks (even months) prior to its release, and sharing my thoughts and feelings about it. Lillian Leadbetter’s The World to Come is a good example of that.
“Ego trips like sunken ships washed ashore/Salted galleons bold and brass you can’t ignore/Feel the rivers rise,” sings Kassi Valazza in the gently hypnotic “Watching Planes Go By,” one of the highlights of her 2023 album, Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing. She performed it when we saw her last June, while touring behind her 2025 From Newman Street long player, and plays it in a new video from the Back in the Garage channel.
Anyway, as I sometimes say, all of that leads to this: Today, as I often do, I clicked play on a YouTube video—the aforementioned Kassi clip—and then let the algorithm do its thing. The result was a cool mix of mostly new music, though a handful of much-played (by me) older videos made their way into the playlist by the time I ended it. In addition to Valezza, whose songs I could soak in for hours, the featured artists are Hayley Reardon, Rumer, Margo Cilker, Anna Graves, the Castellows, Ella Thompson, Tift Merritt, Carmen Quill, Nora Kenny, Mikaela Davis, Nina Nesbitt, and Courtney Marie Andrews.
The Old Grey Cat 