🥰 Greg's Newsletter Does A Smile Thing [No. 067]
Music for your eardrums.
If you enjoy reading this newsletter on the (semi) regular, please forward along to a friend! If you don’t enjoy reading it, please forward this to someone you can tolerate but you probably won’t make much of an effort to see once we can be social IRL!
I'm not sure how it took me so many years to realize it, but when I'm not able to listen to much music on a given day, my mood is tangibly lower.
Like, I've been a pretty steady music fan my whole life, and it took until I was 30 to actually have an ah-ha "wow I didn't listen to music yesterday and I'm feeling low and I feel the same way today but how about I put a tape into the cassette player (lol Spotify) and hit play and dang I feel so much better" kind of moment.
So anyways, here's some music that I've been really enjoying lately. Oh, I also relaunched my radio show, so if you want to listen to my favorite tracks of 2020 so far and hear my awkward, not very entertaining voice in your headphones: then Hot Sauce Radio episode #1 is your jam.
Helado Negro - This Is How You Smile (2019)
Well shit, there's something very of-this-time about that album title. It's a soothing contemporary folk masterpiece and Negro's voice calmly sits so well inside the vibraphones and guitars and lushness. "Please Won't Please" is the standout opening track.
I've always been a Joni fan from afar without knowing a ton of her catalog. Late last year, I was watching Rolling Thunder Revue (Scorcese's Bob Dylan documentary on Netflix which is pretty good I guess?) and at the very end, Joni pops in and starts playing "Coyote" to a crowded room of people. And it totally transfixed me. I managed to track down a remastered copy of the album (lol nah just Spotify) and it's been on steady rotation ever since. It has a folk-jazz fusion vibe which, yes, is a pretentious thing to write, but it's true and makes so much more sense when you listen to the whole thing. Joni is a gem.
Questlove presents Stevland Saturday
Like so many artists and DJs, Questlove has been doing live DJ sets across Instagram, Twitch, and other platforms. He pulled out one of his famed Stevie Wonder sets on Saturday. It made me smile a lot.
That's it for today! Love you.
Greg