Now Playing: Part 8

Our last issue of 2017 drops tomorrow, December 15! It's been such an exciting year at Split Lip, and we're thrilled to give you a little preview how we'll be wrapping it up. Here, a few of December's contributors share what they've been playing:

Katie Welch
Played, on my hundred-year-old upright piano, the solo arrangements for Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas. I bought the sheet music about two decades ago, and I get out the increasingly yellow, dog-eared pages every year in the run-up to Christmas. Perfectly poignant, I love how this music captures the simple innocence of the holiday in devilishly complex jazz. After twenty years of not practicing it until the Christmas crunch, I'm actually starting not to suck. The hardest bit is the psychotically derivative bridge on Linus and Lucy.

Jake Sullins
The last thing I listened to is the new album from Turnpike Troubadours, A Long Way from Your Heart. It’s a brilliant album full of pleasant melodies and striking images of beauty and violence, both human and natural. “Oklahoma Stars” is a personal favorite.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Watched: Toni Erdmann. I like films that are decisively themselves. From pretty much the opening shot, I trusted this one so much that I could completely immerse. There wasn’t even a tiny bit of my brain tempted to try to guess what was going to happen next. (Even if there had been, it would have failed.)

Listened: That Jimmy Buffet song about pina coladas. It was playing in the coffee shop where I was trying to work this afternoon. I’d never actually listened to the lyrics, so I did this time, and kinda wish I hadn’t. Is that ending meant to be a happy one?

Played: About 50 moves in 40 different correspondence go games. I’ve played go for years now – tabletop once upon a time, but now that I’m a mother, mostly correspondence. I’d probably improve more quickly if I played fewer games and spent more time thinking through my moves, but hey, at least I’m keeping an oar in the water.