Music in March 2026

·        Yes, I did put The Dark Is Rising in largely because of its sweeping overture, but it really does sweep.

·        The New Pornographers are the only ones I can recommend – and strongly.

·        Oom Sha La La peaks in a resolution to garden that I think many of us could benefit from adopting.

·        I really enjoy the strange chorale elements of That White Cat.

·        I always appreciate how CHVRCHES sounds like how an icy beverage feels on a bright crisp fall day.

·        To call Haute & Freddy’s 2026 album Big Disgrace theatrical and operatic is perhaps an understatement.

·        I keep going back to Yellowcard’s 2003 classic Ocean Avenue to pull different songs out and feel beautifully melancholy.

·        Buck Meek’s Can I Mend It? is a beautiful song with a backing track that really fascinates me. Impossible not to sing along while driving down the highway with the windows down.

·        Put the Message in the Box, a collaboration between Mary Chapin Carpenter and The Mountain Goats is also perfect for rolling meditatively down the road.

·        Yuki no Shingun or The Snow March is a march with a fascinating history – it originated during the First Sino-Japanese War as a sort of complaint about miserable conditions and disappointment with the war; four decades later, the song was banned in the Imperial Japanese Army because soldiers were singing it to again express dissatisfaction with the war. It may sound upbeat, but here is one translation of the lyrics:

Marching in the snow, stepping on ice
We can't even tell passages from rivers
The horses are beaten, but we can't leave them
Just what is this place? It's all enemy territory
Tried to take a cigarette thinking 'Well the hell with it.'
I'll be damned. Why there is another? 

Dried fishes are not dry enough, and the rice won't be cooked enough.
It's not long before we're living half-boiled days
For this cold can't be endured with just a bonfire
It will definitely smoke but the wet wood burns.
Putting on a sour face, saying the stories of valor.
The "sour" thing here's a pickled plum 

The clothes we wear are our carefree beds
We cover under our overcoats on knapsack pillows
With the warmth of our backs, the snow thaws
Soaking wet our millet-husk bedding
We can't dream of dreaming in the bivouacs
The moon peeks into, coldly 

As we came here in debt of our lives
We charged with death resolution
If the fortunes of war betrayed us, and we survived the battle
The consolation packages entwined with loyalty
Slowly, slowly, would try to strangle us
Anyhow, the superiors won't let us go home alive 

·        Victoria Williams’ 1994 album Loose is really special.

·        I kind of can’t believe I wasn’t already familiar with the masterpiece that is Hammond Song.

·        Meat Loaf may have named himself after a tv dinner and dedicated his talent to mostly singing about teenage Boomers having sex in cars, but there’s no denying that objects in the rear view mirror really may appear closer than they are, and I find that deeply moving.