xandra

Sometimes singing along in my low chest voice feels like a hug. The reverberations of my own breath warms me from the inside out and covers my heart. I feel like I am curled up deep within myself, like I have my arms around myself, like I am both shelter and sheltered.

It’s been a second, it’s been a month! It’s been a few weeks of relentless activity, so I just want to put a few words down to recommit to this quiet little writing practice. “Do You Love Me Now” is one of my favorite Breeders songs and somehow layering J. Mascis’s creaky-creepy vocal on top

A poem about being almost 40 for Special Agent Tanya I achieved enlightenment the moment I realized that Fox Mulder was just another handsome dipshit and I should have had a crush on Scully all along.  

This song makes me want to pick up a bass guitar again. I was talking about timbre and genre with a music theorist colleague today. About the way that genre can rarely be chalked up to form or harmony or meter and about how it’s so often tied to the identity of performers in a

The best riot grrl songs are the dirges: the slow, grinding laments that just invite you to wallow in your 1990s angst. The angstiest angst.

Negative space builds suspense here. First, Marissa Paternoster sings with only a low, thrumming bass to keep her company; she sounds exposed and barely accompanied. Crunchy, heavy guitars answer her, filling the void, and then pulling back. Voice and guitar trade riffs back and forth, building anxiety until they join in a punishing duet.  But

Yes, these guys again, what can I say: when I love a band, I love a band. When I hear wave after wave of guitar distortion, it moves me the same way that 1960s pop productions do, with their walls of sound and overwrought orchestration. It grabs me in the same way as a four-on-the-floor

I’m sure it’s been 20 years since I last listened to this song but my body and my voice remember every note of it. Gather round and I shall sing every single word for you. Rasputina was one of those bands that I somehow found on Naptser or Kazaa, in the heyday of peer-to-peer file-sharing.

I cried when we went to Seneca Falls. It was a quiet, gray day and hardly anyone else was there. There was wall next to the visitors’ center that had the the Declaration of Sentiments etched on it and I stood there and I read every single word: the words of women who had had