The Sounds of Fall and the Onset of Winter with Raechel Anne Jolie

I’m so excited to bring something different today, but something that feels very much in line with the reason why I ever wanted to write, talk and think about music at all. It’s a conversation with one of my favorite writers and a person with whom I feel a great connection: Raechel Anne Jolie!

Raechel’s newsletter is called , and it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, radical as something vivid and tactile and real. Radical not as bombast or intense dynamics but a feeling raw and real that hits so close to home it will stick with you forever. When we decided to talk about fall – and I apologize that fall is rapidly shifting away but where I live leaves are still in the process of leaving and this is fall – it made perfect sense because a lot of Raechel’s work gives me the same feeling that a perfect fall does. The way the sun hangs differently in the sky, the air feels crisper as a renewed reminder that we are alive and things are changing, every smell and every distant call shifting and changing and each day is a little different. I love the fall a lot, and it was such a treat to talk with Raechel about it because she is not just a beautiful writer, but a radical believer of the true heart of all things.

I don’t often pine for a Twitter that isn’t real, and isn’t that a fun sentence to write at this point in our collective relationship to a place that was and is now not, but Raechel and I would often talk about music on that site, it’s where we first saw that our collective threads from punk rock and indie scenes intersected and crossed and it was always the best part of any day when I would post about a Weakerthans song and she would be the first to comment, leading off into a conversation about all the things that feel the most precious to me. That site isn’t the same anymore, and a lot of my favorite people to talk with about these things have shifted locations, moved elsewhere or gone silent. Lately I’ve been craving just this, conversations about the feelings and the energies of the months as they shift around us.

I’m also sharing my Autumn playlist, on both Apple and Spotify. It’s a playlist that kind of goes everywhere, and to be honest has changed with my moods as the skies turn gray or the rain gets heavy but this is what it is right now, and maybe that will change or maybe that doesn’t matter. I like a playlist as a launch pad more than anything, and this gives me a few different vibes to shift off when I need to.

The playlist ends on a song I desperately needed to make me cry today, because I have one in me and it isn’t releasing like I need it to so I can process all things but maybe it’ll work for you, maybe you need that too, and maybe that’s enough. This is why we do this, I suppose. Give each other little gifts to dislodge the hard feelings stuck in all our hearts.

Raechel’s book is titled Rust Belt Femme, you can and should purchase a copy HERE

If you’d a transcript (edited slightly for clarity) of this video, you can find it HERE