We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Talk About New Music (A-M), Turntables, and Writing as an Avoidance Strategy Against Writing

I started the listening challenge of moving my way through every record in the collection by artist from A-Z, in large part, because I felt that I was neglecting older records always in favor of new acquisitions. Now, nine months and 13 letters into the project, I’m discovering that I am neglecting my new records in service of completing the listening challenge with my older records. The good news is that I still manage to acquire new music. The bad news is that my compulsion to get through the alphabet has meant that these new records haven’t been spun very many times. I have tried to remedy the situation by downloading my new records in my TIDAL app so that I can listen to them on the go, but sadly, my phone has become so packed with music that my storage is almost completely full–the last time I tried to download one of these albums, my telephone super computer gave me a HARD NO. Modern problems, I understand. As I won’t likely start the whole project over when I’m finished with the Z’s, I thought I would just list here the new music that has come into the collection from the letter M moving backwards, or, rather, from the letter A moving forward to the letter M, because any new music I have acquired that falls AFTER the letter M will inevitably be written about in the coming months. Here are my most recent acquisitions, without commentary, just the artist, title, label, and vintage:

• Angine de Poitrine, Volume 2, Spectacles Bonzai Records, 2026
• James Blake, Trying Times, Good Boy Records, 2026
• The Claypool Lennon Delirium, The Great Parrot-Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, ATO Records, 2026
• The Dear Hunter, North American EP, Cave and Canary Goods, 2025
• The Dear Hunter, Sunya, Cave and Canary Goods, 2025
• Death Cab for Cutie, I Built You a Tower, Anti Records, 2026
• Eels, Daisies of the Galaxy, Geffen Records (PIAS), 2025 reissue of the 2000 album.
• Mother Mother, Touch Up, Last Gang Records, 2007
• Mother Mother, Grief Chapter, Warner Brothers Records, 2024

That’s all the new music except for the new music that falls into the alphabet after the letter M. When someday I reach the very last letter in the collection, I will make a comprehensive list of all the records I’ve added to the collection that I have not written about because the letter in question has already passed. This feels right to me, will give me a sense of completion, the sense that I haven’t neglected anybody.

Meanwhile, the great listening project is interrupted by a bad sounding turntable. Either the stylus won’t come clean or the stylus needs replacement already or I need a new turntable. My people are hard at work on a solution. Most of the signs point to a new turntable, even though it would be much cheaper to figure out how to effectively clean the stylus or replace the stylus. These are things I might do anyway, if I keep the turntable I currently have, which is a Pro-Ject VT-E. But I confess I’ve had a new turntable in mind for quite some time and my people tell me that it has become incumbent upon me to turn that thinking into a reality. So I’ve been obsessing lately, agonizing actually, about which turntable to choose and how much money I’ll need to exact from the piggy bank. I’ve narrowed my choices down to three, and the inability to be more decisive is causing a little bit of anxiety. Believe me, I’ll let you know when I decide. Meanwhile, the listening challenge is on hiatus for a time, because of the aforementioned technical reason, yes, but also because I am leaving town in two days and will be traveling to Massachusetts for a writing conference. I will not be spinning records again until July 20 or thereabouts.

And that’s fine. It’s about time anyway that I returned to fiction writing. The writing conference and the turntable hiatus will in combination assure that fiction writing gets done. The goal: reach the first COMPLETE draft of the novel I’ve been working on over the last few years. Way outside the joyful window of merely generating material toward a draft, now the hard work begins of figuring out what’s missing, what needs to be cut, how the pieces need to all fit together. I have been resisting that hard work in the guise of working on another project–hence–the difficult truth that, while I am enjoying my listening challenge and the writing I’ve been able to do in response (over 100,000 words at this point), I have been in part using writing as an avoidance strategy against writing. In other words, I’ve embarked on a fun and seemingly endless project instead of doing the hard work of finishing a draft of a novel. I guess there are worse things. There are worse things than doing something you want to do in order to avoid doing something else you want to do that’s more difficult. What’s that Rilke quote, though? “Always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful.” I’m counting on Rilke to be correct about this, so in the coming week, while I will be surrounded by wonderfully talented and creative people on the beautiful campus of Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, I will discipline myself to “hold to the difficult” task of getting back to that fiction.

Cheers! There will likely be some dispatches from Massachusetts!