Track 7

I’ve written about this album before, and honestly I worried if I could say anything more about it. Not because I thought I’d run out of thoughts on this album, but because I thought I’d run out of words that could contain those thoughts. Because truthfully, it would probably be far easier to write about I’ll Sing if I could just crack my head open and pour everything in there out onto paper; words and sentences feel too small, almost, for everything that I’ll Sing is.

When I listened to it for not the first but maybe second or third time, lying on my couch, a weird ugly patterned thing I’ve had in my living room all my life, I cried without warning or explanation when I heard the chorus of ‘47th Street’: “If I could make something good / I would share with you, you know I would.” Something enormous that I couldn’t place hit me when I heard those words sung. Every song on I’ll Sing feels enormous, even if each only runs for three minutes or so at most; feels like it expands inwards and outwards, like you could live in it, or like you are living in it. That’s because Moser tells stories like the best of them, in her words and in her music; every scene she sets so rich and crucial.

It’s a declaration that titles the record. I’ll Sing – nothing is conditional, no question implied. ‘Immutable’ is the word I used before. These songs feel the same; almost as if they were always here, as if just as I live inside them, they too live inside me and they always have done. They feel familiar in the same way that warmth feels familiar, as anything that has been here and will be here longer than us feels familiar. If Moser will sing, then just as inevitably we will listen – we always were.

“In every town there’s a feeling like the feeling that I had when I was with you.” So Moser sings on ‘Every Town’. Everybody has a record that hits them in the same way as this one hits me, I think. What is just sounds to me could be everything to you. This record is just sounds, too. It’s what the sounds create in us that means anything. So I’ll sing. You will too.

1. Shannen Moser – I’ll Sing
2. Car Seat Headrest – Twin Fantasy (Face To Face)
3. Hop Along – Bark Your Head Off, Dog
4. Foxing – Nearer My God
5. Soccer Mommy – Clean
6. Petal – Magic Gone
7. Mitski – Be The Cowboy
8. Turnstile – Time & Space
9. mewithoutYou – [Untitled]
10. Joyce Manor – Million Dollars To Kill Me