Now Playing: May 2021

Want to get lost in the woods or learn some five-dollar words? Our May edition of Now Playing has all that and more. Check out these recommendations from our contributors!

Lindsey DeLoach Jones

I am a podcast junkie. I listen to them on double-speed while I cook, run, drive, brush my teeth. It makes me feel like I’m always learning something, even though all that really “sticks” is a feeling of expansiveness, not the facts themselves. When my young kids are in the car, they ask why do the people talk so fast and what does ursinology mean and who is Ocean Vuong, all of which are awesome questions. Some of my favorite podcasts are ON BEING, OLOGIES, and YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT.

Sarah Lao

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched Your Name Engraved Herein, a 2020 Taiwanese film directed by Kuang-Hui Liu. My bad habit is fiddling with playback speeds, forcing dialogue to accelerate and facial expressions to shift unnaturally, but there was something about the rhythm of this film that I couldn’t bear to tamper with. The film has too many beautiful scenes to name, but this one is stuck in my head: A-han with Birdy in a small projection room, his shadow puppet hand kissing Birdy over the screen.

Rebecca Orchard

Absolutely no one I know will be surprised when I say I’ve been listening to Bonnie “Prince” Billy aka Will Oldham lately (I’ve been a massive fan for about fifteen years), but right now I’ve got a good excuse: he just released a new album with longtime collaborator Matt Sweeney. Superwolves expands the sonic and lyric universe they built in Superwolf, their iconic 2005 release. What a world, what a cosmos, they create together! I want to live inside each Bonnie “Prince” Billy album, and Superwolves is no exception. I’m in Tallahassee, Florida, which has miles and miles of beautiful trails, and my long daily walks have taken me down the twisting roads of this music over and over again. Oldham also released an album at the end of 2019 entitled I Made a Place, and it was such a blessing during the pandemic, tender and funny and domestic and wild. It made me want to simultaneously spend quiet nights by the hearth and set out into the woods never to be seen again.