William 2019

William Tyler’s new record, Goes West, is the best music that he’s ever made. I’m sure of this because I know and love all of his music intimately, and this album moves me the most, and the most consistently. The first time I heard it was in the late spring in the Texas Hill Country, rolling between limestone and scrub. I was on a cleanse then—no alcohol, no drugs, no evil thoughts—and was astonished at the emotional clarity that the album held. It offered up a model for what I wanted my head to feel like. Goes West marks a sort of narrowing of focus for William’s music; it sounds as though he found a way to point himself directly towards the rich and bittersweet emotional center of his music without being distracted by side trips. Perhaps this is down to the fact that William only plays acoustic guitar on the album, a clear and conscious decision considering that he is one of Nashville’s great electric guitarists. The band that performs Goes West alongside William—including guitarists Meg Duffy and Bill Frisell, bassist and producer Brad Cook, keyboardist James Wallace, drummer Griffin Goldsmith, and engineer Tucker Martine—is the best and most sympathetic group of players that William could have assembled to play these songs.

Revolutionary drummer William Hooker leads a new trio with Mark Kirschenmann, trumpet, and Joel Peterson, bass. This set recorded live in one take at Trinosphes in Detroit MI starts at the bottom with no apparent leverage, in an hour of constant upheaval overturning the possibilities of music. Deceptively serene out of the zero code, you soon realize that your mind has been retuned to a new understanding of reality: reach into the part that psilocybin touches, without acid, and see the same tables, the same trees, the same windows and walls but now knowing that while these endure the human structures that imprison the self will fall away.

Cotillions is the third solo album by American musician and Smashing Pumpkins vocalist Billy Corgan (under the name William Patrick Corgan). It was released on November 22, 2019. The songs on the album were reportedly written in 2017 during a month-long journey Corgan took across America. There was enough material to allow for a 17-track double album. Corgan has said this album is a "true labor of love" in an Instagram post about Cotillions, expressing his gratitude towards his fans and his disdain of the mass media, while also being grateful of living in a "different world", where "an artist can speak directly to you without the filter of mass media shaping your heart and opinions before you've even had a chance to decide whether this music speaks to you."

Sweet soulful sounds from the golden age – as adored in the clubs and classic automobiles of Southern California.