His latest project is a lovely little 16-minute record: seven tracks, all performed on his “flucordion” - a flugelhorn paired with a harmonizer. The album was recorded live, and his attention to detail and skill are on full display.

The flugelhorn is a brass instrument in the same family as the trumpet, but it has a gorgeous roundness to its timbre and tone. If the trumpet is your boisterous uncle, the flugelhorn is the cool cousin in the corner smoking a cigarette.

I love this project. It moves from something akin to shapelessness into order, from slight dissonance toward glory and form. (My 7”-tracks = 7-days of creation ending in rest” antennae are up)

Mattson is a master craftsman, which is clear from the fact that the flucordion never once feels like a gimmick. He works with numerous pedals and effects, but the music still feels so right here. It’s immediate, warm, careful, and glorious.

I found the video below of him performing the album live pretty transfixing. I challenge you to watch it, and don’t second-screen it. Give it your attention.

Notice his care for every musical detail, and the way he can be so precise while also seeming utterly relaxed. I particularly love the moment after the song “Still” concludes, when he seems to come back to life after safe passage and looks, just for a second, like a man who has stepped off a tightrope.

It’s a great moment in a wonderful record.

Parental Notes:
Clean (Instrumental)

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This week I’m spending time with The Arcadian Wild’s Make It Out Alive. This is a warm and intricate folk record full of friendship, family, childhood, mortality, beauty, and jubilee. The band continues to expand its sound with rich harmonies, thoughtful arrangements, and tasteful flourishes tucked into nearly every corner, while keeping the songs rooted in the real world and the glory of ordinary life. Links to listen to the review of this record are below.

I keep a music listening journal, and I’ll often sit at my desk in my studio, put a record on, and jot down thoughts as I go. I’ll note lyrics, production choices, instrumental passages, melodic decisions, or any impression I have of a given piece that I want to remember.

For Make It Out Alive, I added something else. After each song, I used chalk pastels to give the track a small color palette. The track is listed on the side of the page, thoughts and impressions in the middle, and color swatch to the side.

There is obviously nothing scientific about this. It’s just another way of responding to what I’m hearing and paying attention to the lyrics, texture, and movement of a song. I found the practice quite enjoyable. There’s something wonderfully low-tech about sitting at a desk with a notebook open, music playing, jotting down thoughts, and putting down color on paper before moving on to the next song.

I’ve included a few photos from the journal below.

Make It Out Alive is the kind of record that rewards intentional listening. There is so much happening beneath the vocals and between the verses: little instrumental turns, changes in texture, thick bass tones, mandolin, guitar and violin, dobro, harmonies, hand percussion, and all kinds of small decisions that give each song its own color.

The new podcast episode walks through the record track by track and spends some time on the larger vision underneath it all: friendship, mortality, memory, the created world, and defiant jubilance.

Happy listening.

Featured Artist & Album
The Arcadian Wild — Make It Out Alive - Apple Music | Spotify

Listen to the podcast episode
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This week I’m talking about The Mountain Goats’ Days and Dan Deacon’s Time and Water, two records that approach time, memory, and place in different ways.

John Darnielle looks backward, turning old bands, cultural references, and half-remembered moments into songs. Dan Deacon builds spacious instrumental landscapes out of electronics, strings, and piano, creating music that works beautifully alongside reading, writing, walking, or thinking.

One record sounds like a traveling bard digging through the past. The other gives you a place to inhabit in the present.

Both remind us that good music can teach us to pay better attention to time.

Happy listening.

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A year later, only a few months into our marriage, we found ourselves at Louisville’s Brown Theatre to see Hansard and Markéta Irglová as The Swell Season. Before the show truly began, Glen walked past the microphones, fell to his knees at the edge of the stage, and sang “Say It to Me Now” completely un-amplified. It remains one of the most arresting live performances I've ever witnessed - a man giving everything he had without the slightest hint of irony.

In those early years of our marriage, my bride and I would occasionally sit together with a guitar, singing Glen's songs in our little apartments and, later, in our first home. His songs became part of the soundtrack of those simple, happy days, and I suspect they’ll always remind me of them.

This week, we lost Glen Hansard in a motorcycle accident. There have been outpourings of affection from every corner of the musical world, and it’s easy to understand why.

I've spent years listening to his work - whether with The Frames, The Swell Season, or on his own - but what always struck me wasn't just his songwriting. Long before Once introduced him to much of the world, The Frames had helped breathe fresh life into Ireland's rock scene, inspiring a generation of musicians with songs that were equal parts grit, poetry, and hope. Yet for all of that influence, he seemed entirely unburdened by celebrity.

Even after winning an Academy Award for “Falling Slowly,” he never gave the impression that fame was the point. For Glen, it seemed to always be about the songs and the connections they created - playing pubs, busking in the streets, and making music with ordinary people. In fact, the night of his death he was doing just that - playing music with locals in a small town at an Irish music session. By all appearances, he simply loved songs and loved the people who sang them with him.

Of course, I didn’t know Glen Hansard personally, so I won’t pretend to say more than I should. But from every performance and interview, he seemed to carry himself with a genuine gentleness, humility, and gratitude. Those qualities came through as clearly as the music itself.

Below are a few songs and videos worth your time, but the well is deep. Watch Once. Listen to the early Swell Season records. Spend an evening with The Frames. I think you'll come away with the same impression I did. Watch the videos below, and try not to be taken by the man.

Perhaps I’ll have more to say about Glen in the future. Tomorrow evening, friends of ours will gather for one of our regular nights of music making. We’ll almost certainly sing a few songs of his. It seems a most fitting way to remember a man who never stopped believing that songs belonged in rooms full of ordinary people.

Parental Note: Glen's catalog contains profanity, so use discernment if you're listening around younger children.

Photo by Stephan Vanfleteren for Rolling Stone.

On the surface, the concept looks simple. Perhaps, if you’re a jazz nerd, the title has already caught your attention. Then you glance at the tracklist and notice that it follows the sequence of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue exactly before moving through the pieces from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, also in order.

But you’re not in store for a simple homage.

What Payton and company have managed to do here is extraordinary. They breathe new life, fun, and exploration into songs long sealed within the jazz canon, approaching them with sincere reverence while playing them like students who have spent years learning from their teachers and are now ready to speak in their own voices.

Because of this, listeners who are deeply familiar with these two albums will be delighted at every turn. Newer jazz listeners, meanwhile, will be wooed by the freshness of this recording and sent eagerly back to explore the original masterpieces.

A Supreme Blue was a delight from the first note to the last. My personal favorites at the moment are their rendition of “Resolution,” along with the raucously joyful and mysterious “Pursuance.” This is an album that honors its teachers not by merely repeating them, but by receiving what they gave and making something new.

Parental Notes:
Clean

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When the church sings the Word, she draws the sword of the Spirit - the sword that proceeds from the mouth of Christ.

He has won the victory and the banner is raised.

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This week I’m talking about Charley Crockett’s Clovis, a cinematic country and western record full of dusty landscapes, outlaw tales, dangerous young men, and hard-earned wisdom.

Crockett draws from the great western singers of the past, but the record never feels trapped in nostalgia. It’s gritty and loose when it needs to be, and graceful and carefully crafted when the songs call for tenderness.

Well executed country music often works like a kind of American wisdom literature, giving us men and women at the crossroads and showing us where their chosen paths lead. On Clovis, a man can fall in love in one song and die in a gunfight in the next.

Happy listening.

Buzzsprout
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For Spotify, click HERE. For Apple Music, click HERE.

This isn’t a list of only patriotic songs, though there are some patriotic songs included. It is a list of American songs. It’s also intended to be kid-friendly, so while the playlist ranges widely across style, era, and mood, I’ve tried to avoid explicit content and keep it suitable for family listening.

The songs are arranged in approximate chronological order - not by the date of a particular performance or recording, but by the era of the song itself. That means the early prairie folk songs and hymns come first, even when the available recordings are much more recent, before the playlist moves through the twentieth century and into the present.

That means it ranges from early folk music and hymnody to jazz, blues, country, gospel, soul, rock and roll, punk, grunge, hip-hop, pop, and more. It ranges from America the Beautiful to Smells Like Teen Spirit, and there is something very American about the fact that both of those songs can live side by side, if you ask me.

What makes these songs American is not merely that Americans wrote them. That’s obvious. They are American because they carry the marks of this place: its faith, lack thereof, restlessness, sorrow, humor, rebellion, rage, sentimentality, innocence, and excess.

American music is not one sound. It is, rather, a mingled inheritance: hymns of simple faith, grit, homecoming and love and escape. It is church-filled harmonies as much as front-porch laments. It is field songs, fiddle tunes, blues progressions, jazz improvisation, country aches, teen rebellion, pop fun, and garage-band noise. It is earthy and heavenly, crude and beautiful, sometimes all at the same time.

That is why this playlist can move from folk songs and hymns into blues and jazz, then through rock, soul, punk, grunge, and radio pop without losing the through-line. The American songbook isn’t orderly. It is crowded, noisy, regional, sacred, profane, earnest, ridiculous, and often beautiful. It has room for songs that make us repent and others that make us dance. Some songs here may make us remember childhood - riding in the car with dad, family, work, summer, heartbreak, sin and war.

There are songs here that I love deeply. There are also a few songs here that I don’t particularly care for, but that have nevertheless made their way into the American consciousness for better or for worse. (OK…I love most of these) They belong because they have become part of the sound of this country.

This playlist is also a living list. Over the course of July, I’ll be making some changes. There are omissions I would still love to fit in, and there are probably songs currently included that may eventually give way to others. This first version is built largely from songs that came quickly to mind as I tried to trace a broad American musical folk inheritance. As I revise it, I’ll let you know about additions and changes here on Substack or on the podcast.

For now, I hope you enjoy it. Put it on in the car, around the house, on the porch, at a cookout, or wherever you find yourself listening this month.

Happy listening.

Again - for Spotify, click HERE. For Apple Music, click HERE.

This week I’m talking about two records that move in very different directions: Office Dog’s Prime Corner and Roger Eno’s Without Wind, Without Air — Rarities.

One is a punchy, lived-in indie rock record full of jangly guitars, garage-band energy, and images of light, dust, dirt, fault lines, embers, and ash. The other is a subtle and moving ambient/classical companion EP, with piano, strings, orchestra, and electronics gathering into a beautiful space for reflection.

One sounds like a band cranking it out at a house show. The other sounds like light moving through that room after everyone has gone home.

Happy listening.

Buzzsprout
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One thing I’ve always loved about music, even since I was a kid, is the story around it.

I remember being twelve years old and finding the lore of Bob Dylan fascinating. The songs were one thing, but then there was the whole world around the songs: the typewriter and cigarettes, characters and myths, the rooms he played in.

That only deepened when I later got into blues and jazz. The crossroads legends…Robert Johnson. Jazz players learning secret melodies in back rooms, passing along tunes like oral tradition. Bluegrass players doing the same thing, carrying melodies and standards from one generation to the next, not always through written music, but by standing in a circle and playing together until the song had made its way into their hands and became part of them.

So when this new record from Mick Goodrick and Fred Hersch came across my desk this week, the story added another layer to what is already a beautiful record.

Feebles, Fables & Ferns was recorded nearly forty years ago, in August of 1988, when Goodrick was passing through New York and spent time with Hersch in his studio. These two weren’t trying to make a big statement - as the long delay in release suggests. This was two masters sitting down together, guitar and piano, listening closely and laying down a great set of tunes.

Goodrick was a legendary jazz guitarist, though in a subtle sort of way. He wasn’t front and center in the jazz world, and in many ways seemed content to live a life almost in secret, preferring to teach and pass the music along. His influence, though, is no small thing. He taught players like Julian Lage and many others, serving as a hidden musical father whose fingerprints show up all over the next generation.

Fred Hersch is a master in his own right, and what makes this recording so compelling is the conversation between them in addition to their technical prowess. When Hersch reflects on the session, he talks about the listening they were doing while they were playing. He remembers the “profound listening” that was happening between the two of them.

And you can hear it all over this project.

Goodrick and Hersch don’t compete for space, and they never try to overwhelm the listener with speed or force. They are weaving, talking, and answering. They are leaving room, stepping forward, stepping back, handing themes to one another, and letting the melody breathe.

The album includes original tunes from both musicians, along with pieces by Steve Swallow, Mal Waldron, and Grant Green, as well as a suite of spontaneous improvisations called “Five Excursions.” But whatever the source material, the spirit remains the same: two expert musicians treating the music as a conversation.

As you listen, I’d encourage you to slow down and listen in layers.

Perhaps listen once straight through, absorbing everything. Then take one pass and follow the guitar. Then listen again and follow the piano. Ask where the melody is, and how they are turning around it, ornamenting it, bending it, and handing it back and forth.

Pay attention, too, to the titles. What do they have to do with what actually happens in the tune? “Falling Grace,” in particular, is worth hearing with the title in mind. How does the tune fall? How does it move with grace? How do the two players make that descent feel light rather than heavy?

This isn’t a jazz album that will overwhelm you with intensity. It’s a brief and beautiful jazz project: guitar and piano, two masters, and the sound of mutual respect.

It is simple jazz in the best sense - clear, attentive, unhurried, and deeply musical.

A lovely little recommendation to send you into the weekend. Happy Listening!

For Parents: Clean

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Death Cab has been beloved by indie-rock heads for decades, and for good reason. The band has a handful of records from the 1998–2008 stretch that are basically classics of the era, with Transatlanticism being the crowd favorite and my personal favorite as well.

So I was looking forward to hearing what Ben Gibbard and the band were up to on this new album.

You could say they are simply playing to their strengths here, and you’d be correct. But their strengths work, and have been part of giving them a distinct sound. Gibbard still has a way with words, his voice remains unmistakable, and the band knows exactly how to build the right atmosphere for him to deliver his thoughts. Death Cab does not reinvent the wheel on this record, but they do deliver a solid strike, right down the middle: good lyricism, great instrumentals, and an album that knows what it is trying to accomplish with its point of view.

The opener, “Full of Stars,” makes the subject clear. Gibbard sounds fresh and honest, and the song has that natural Death Cab build and subtlety that made the band turn heads twenty-five years ago. If this song is the opening statement, then this record is going to be about heartbreak, doubt, and the complexity and emotional severity of a failed relationship.

“Punching the Flowers” follows with fuzzed-out, muted guitars paired with killer snare thuds. You may expect the chorus to explode, but instead they pull everything back except for noodling guitar work. The bass takes over in the second verse, with punctuated, guttural plucks that keep everything driving. The big explosion finally comes in the instrumental break after the second chorus, but only briefly. It keeps the song sounding eerie. The collapse of this relationship was not merely a slow burn, but also a thing of anxiety. (A great video for this tune can be found at the end of this piece.)

Sidebar: Isn’t it refreshing to hear the sound of a tight band? Pay attention to what the different musicians are doing all over this thing. What’s happening in the foreground and background?

“Pep Talk” continues the relational collapse. Romantic relationships are failing, so he lies in bed and talks to himself to get into the new day. There’s even the suggestion that he may be a danger to himself, and needs others to pull him into a hope-filled reality. The melody on the chorus is classic Gibbard. No one else quite does this.

Then comes “I Built You a Tower (a),” the first part of the album’s title track. Here, this person has become an idol in his mind, all-consuming and impossible to escape. Notice how the guitars interact with each other on this one. It’s lovely. Gibbard has an uncanny ability to be relatable in his delivery:

“Oh how this penchant is a curse,
all the way from the cradle to the hearse.”

“Envy the Birds” is one of my favorites here. There is anxiety in the drums, guitars, and vocals, and then the song gives way with a bit of text painting into the chorus. Everything lifts, but only just a bit. He is not a bird. He envies them. He’s down in the muck and chaos, which the instrumental pictures beautifully.

There is a biblical angle here as well. Christ tells his followers to look at the birds and be encouraged by how their Father will care for them. But here, noticing isn’t gratitude. It’s envy, and envy eats the soul alive.

“Stone Over Water” finds him wanting to hold his life together, but he doesn’t know when or where he’s going. He keeps sinking as he contemplates life, aging, and death.

“How Heavenly a State” introduces one of the first truly ominous tones on the record. Somehow, Gibbard’s crystal-clear voice always makes this kind of texture punch in a completely unique way. Again, he’s dealing with anger and the contemplation of death. Consider how the guitar notes, tone, and drums undergird the lyrics here:

“Death lingered in your doorway
And then reached across the threshold
You grasped the hand extended
And were pulled into the unknown.”

Sidebar #2: This is also when I realized I would really enjoy an instrumental version of this record. The band is doing excellent work here.

“Trap Door” offers the closest thing to an instrumental breather on the album, though even here things are unstable. He cannot land with this person without everything falling apart, “like a snowflake starting an avalanche.”

“Riptides” is another standout in how the instrumental builds along the way. The guttural bass plucks in the second verse, the plucky and muted guitars, the tension… I kept waiting for a “riptide” moment musically, and it delivered. Here, he admits that he has a “fatal flaw” in his “heart’s design.”

“The Flavor of Metal” has a very nice intro: classic, steady, and assured. By this point, I was impressed with how many unique ways Gibbard can write about a tumultuous internal state. He’s a great writer, and he knows the strength of his bandmates. It all works together. I love the echoey guitars on the second verse, along with the gorgeous minimal picking patterns along the way.

There is also a twinge of ache for the past here, with the image of jumping on trampolines. He comes to the realization that it takes only a little light to break through the cracks of a broken life, but he is anguished that nothing happens when he prays.

The album closes with “I Built You a Tower (b),” the companion to track four. This one is immediately more angry and intense. He’s ruminating on this person he’s in pain over. The album ends with him declaring, over and over, how tired he is, with an instrumental underneath that is pained and driving. Driving to where? We’ll have to see.

In the end, this record is best taken as a portrait of a man in the midst of the storms and waves of life and love, who has not yet figured out where to land, or how.

I find the album enjoyable because it provides an artistic and true look at a man in relational peril. There is an added layer of contemplation in the listen as a Christian, because you have a profound sense that there are answers to some of these questions. It is not as if Christians have no taste for this stuff either, which makes the record relatable. Many of us have waded in these deep waters of melancholy and come out clean on the other side. And for some of us, those waters may still lie ahead.

I sincerely hope to see Gibbard return to the faith of his childhood and find the solid ground he’s looking for, along with covenant love and relational vitality.

In the end, building towers to anything in creation is going to leave you hopeless and empty. This album makes that crystal clear.

Well done, Death Cab. This is a good artistic statement, and it’s worth a listen.

For Parents: Clean

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As I mentioned on the podcast last year, and again in my year-end list, their latest self-titled record was one of my favorite albums of 2025. Over the last year, we have come to love it deeply, so getting to hear these songs live was a real gift.

It was also a funny night because, at 40, we were clearly among the older people in the room. The crowd seemed mostly made up of people in their late teens and twenties. But what struck me immediately was how attentive they were. In the modern concert landscape, it’s rare to be in a room where not everyone has a phone out. At any given moment, a few screens would pop up, but for the most part, these listeners were absorbed in the performance. Color me thrilled!

That matters. And I think Racing Mount Pleasant’s music calls for that kind of attention.

The band sounded unbelievable. The drums, violins, horns, guitars, and vocals were all dialed in. These aren’t simple, straightforward songs. They move in unexpected directions. They swell, break apart, go quiet, erupt, and then settle again. There’s a lot of give and take inside the arrangements, and the band delivered all of it with true excellence.

What stood out was how carefully band members listened to one another. There were smiles at beautiful moments, glances across the stage, and the sense that they were not only reproducing songs from a record but inhabiting them together. The softer moments were allowed to be quiet. I’ve been to many shows where quieter passages are swallowed up by conversations in the back of the room, and that didn’t happen here.

Lead singer Sam DuBose was fierce and raucous in the songs, but subdued between them. He didn’t come across as a flashy frontman trying to own the room. He seemed to be there to serve the songs and serve the audience. That spirit marked the whole group: humble, joyful musicians who have poured themselves not only into the making of this music, but into its performance.

I could go on and on about how good the show was. Below, you can see a few (iPhone) photos I took from the night, along with a quick video from “Your New Place.” The video doesn’t capture the loudness of the room, but hopefully it gives you a sense of how focused the band was.

If you haven’t listened to Racing Mount Pleasant yet, start with the self-titled record and listen from front to back. Take it on a walk or a run. Give it a few listens if it doesn’t land immediately. There is a lot happening in these songs, and it rewards attention.

Support them on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp.

This week I’m talking about three records that feel like fresh air: Jack Johnson’s SURFILMUSIC, Stephen Sanchez’s Love, Love, Love, and The Lemon Twigs’ Look For Your Mind!

They’re different records, but each one is great for summer listening. In an age full of cynicism, it’s good to be reminded that men and women are still falling in love and waves are still breaking on the shore.

Happy listening.

Buzzsprout
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The Audio Deacon App is a curated music streaming platform for Christian families and thoughtful listeners.

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3. Log in and start listening

   

   .

Her latest, Superbloom is filled with near perfect production from the first moment to the last. It’s incredibly balanced, warm, and spacious. You can hear everything: the strings, the bass, the horns, and the harmonies. The interplay on “Automatic,” the choir swelling through the title track, the bass and vocal fadeout on “No Consequences,” these are moments of supreme craft. Ware herself delivers these songs with pristine execution. Her band, her harmony vocalists, her production team - everyone is at the top of their game. The interlude “Chariots of Love” also suggests an artist capable of more sonic textural range than she’s revealed thus-far.

It’s a stunning record to listen to. And this is part of the problem.

The press release describes Superbloom as “an increasingly euphoric body of work” that explores “our shared craving for touch, pleasure, intimacy and connection.” Ware says it’s an album for the clubs, and she means it. From “I Could Get Used to This” to “Sauna” and on through “Mon Amour,” the album is almost relentlessly about arousal, a relentless craving for touch, the ache of desire, the heat of the body wanting something. These are songs not about love alone but about appetite and hunger.

I want to be careful here, because the erotic is not the enemy. The Song of Songs is not a mere pietistic allegory. Physical desire, rightly ordered, is a good and beautiful thing. It’s worth celebrating. Properly ordered eros is a glory. You can sing about the body. You can sing about longing and want.

But there is a difference between a love feast and the twin sexual ditches of the binge or the drive-by snack. The club, which is the setting Ware is writing for, is not a place of love, but rather a place of anonymous appetites. What gets fed there is not the soul but the drive. And an album that, for the most part, maps every feeling onto that register, track after track, produces something in the listener: a vision of desire as craving to be satisfied rather than as a gift to be given and received.

Here’s another wrinkle. Jessie Ware is married. She has three children. One of the most affecting songs on the record, “16 Summers,” drops the club persona entirely and becomes a mother counting the summers she has left with her kids before they’re grown. It’s earnest and moving. There are another few tracks here and there about her husband and her children, but they float aimlessly in the tracklist, grounded moments surrounded by walls of heat.

That contrast is the tell here, as the record lacks covenant bonds that gives the erotic it’s glorious foundation. The love songs are actually desire songs, self-focused, hot and burning. The erotic vision is almost completely about receiving, about being satisfied, about the fever of wanting without the self-forgetfulness of the marriage bed as two covenantal lovers become one.

The old Proverbs image is apt: a gold ring in a pig’s snout. The beauty is real. The craft is genuine. The production is fantastic. But beauty adorning something untethered from its proper end does not redeem the thing itself, it just makes the loss more vivid in the end.

Ware is capable of making a different kind of record. I’d certainly listen to it. An album that kept this sonic palette and production quality, kept the dance floor energy and the physical vitality, but dialed back from “white hot craving” to something more rooted, more about her husband, her children, the covenant life that presumably underlies the whole thing, would be something else. The instruments and her voice are there. The team is there.

What’s missing is the ground beneath.

Until then, Superbloom is a great record that could produce in its listeners exactly what pop music at large already creates: an imagination of desire as an appetite to be fed, music as the soundtrack to consumption, the body alone as the measure of all.

We can do even better and we should want better. Part of the work of curating a musical diet, for ourselves and for our families, is learning to hear what a record is forming in us, not just how good it sounds.

And this album sounds very, very good.

Comments are open. Have you listened to this album? If so, what are your thoughts?

🎵 Listen on Apple Music | Spotify

Looking for music that’s good, true, and beautiful without the algorithm deciding what comes next? Audio Deacon is a curated streaming app built for Christian families and thoughtful listeners. Try it free for three months with code AUDIODEACON3. Create an account HERE, download the app, and begin listening.

Artist: Stephen Sanchez
Album: Love, Love, Love

Vintage 50s and 60s pop revival could easily come off as cosplay, and Sanchez knows it. But his voice and production are modern, his musicianship is real as he plays piano and guitar across multiple tracks, and the joy here is genuine.

One of the ingredients that makes it work is restraint. Sanchez can do impressive things vocally, and he earns the big moments by not giving them away constantly. When he finally opens up on tracks like “Don’t Let Me Go Again,” the clarity and strength of the man’s voice hits hard. “Sweet Love” is immediately infectious and pure 60s-era romantic bliss. “Love, Love, Love” dips into a Marvin Gaye pocket, which sounds quite natural. “Forgetting Your Kiss” has flashes that recall the better moments in Harry Styles’ discography.

Sanchez has said he wanted to make a record without anger or negativity, and he accomplishes that. There is no knocking exes or a manufactured edge here. It’s a sweet, well-crafted and performed record from a genuinely awesome male singer - which, right now, is worth celebrating. A couple of tunes here don’t match up to others (Dance Away the Music, for example), but this album remains a breeze from beginning to end.

Enjoy the music video below for "Sweet Love," starring his cute grandparents cutting a rug. (It's worth noting that Sanchez recently got engaged to his fiancée at his grandparents' home.) A man in a suit singing and dancing with a smile, modest ladies grinning ear to ear, and the sensation that he's performing a style of music that was big when his grandparents were in their teens and 20s. It's a lot of fun, and a genuine dose of happiness on display. One thinks our age could use more pop sensibilities like this. Watch till the end.

Parents Guide: Clean. Very mild innuendo here and there.

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1. Young Original is four friends who simply love making music together from the jazz, doo-wop, and folk songbook. This cover of "Mr. Sandman" is just plain fun. Four musicians smiling, delighting in the tune, reveling in the magic of music-making together is a refreshing sight. Worth every second.

2. Chris Thile covering Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees," informal, unguarded, and all the better for it. One of the things I love about Thile is that he's in a place where he can let his hair down during his shows, taking requests or simply launching into a tune he spontaneously wants to play, not always knowing where it will go. That's the case here. He even pulls up the lyrics for the first verse, jokes here and there, and lets the song take him away. It feels like you're invited into his living room for a solo jam session. A fun way to honor one of the great bands, and songs, of the modern era.

3. Madison Cunningham is one of our greats, and here she is in conversation with the wonderful Paul Davids. They get nerdy about guitar, songwriting, tunings, and more. What I love is that these are two consummate professionals who still manage to surprise and delight each other with the little delicacies of the guitar and of Madison's melodies. (Brief language)

4. More Thile? A new Punch Brothers record is on the way, an instrumental one at that. Color me thrilled. Here is the first single, and it’s a gift. Don't look away. Watch their give and take, notice the joy in the little moments scattered all over this tune that surprise them or catch them off guard. Also, this aesthetic rules.

Andrew’s work is both ancient and practical. The Kyrial Project takes traditional liturgical chant and makes it usable for ordinary churches and families today. The work is beautiful, rooted, singable, and serious without being museum music. In the episode, we talk about why sacred music matters, how liturgical song forms us differently than music we merely consume, and what it might look like for Christian homes and churches to become singing cultures again.

You can also listen to Andrew’s Kyrial Project now on the Audio Deacon app. Information on how to sign up for the app is below.

Listen to the new episode with Andrew Dittman now on the Audio Deacon podcast.

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Happy listening!

Artist: David Moore
Album: Graze the Bell

Then a Valley opens with a thunderous left-hand roar that rocks and rumbles underneath higher notes that move from frantic to peaceful bliss. Graze the Bell slows things down. Little questions and answers, a simple conversation with a persistent undercurrent. Notice how the lower register builds toward the end, then lifts away entirely for a restful close.

No Deeper carries notes of melancholy and noticing. What strikes you here is how unhurried Moore’s playing is, as he provides slow moments of reverberation and musical reflection that don’t rush to fill the space. Offering lays a foundation, then rolls up and down through it, shifting slightly, adding strands of color and shape.

Will We Be There presents a simple melody surrounded by different beds of warmth. There are questions, and even a fearful hesitancy at moments. This is also where you start to notice something: the internal resonance of the piano itself becomes part of the soundscape. There are moments on this track in particular that are near frightening.

All This Has to Give opens with an oppressive weight as if you’re inside the piano itself (credit to the audio engineers here). Notes become indistinguishable at points, a wall of sound that slowly gives way to lower-register melodies. Consider what the title demands of the music. The piece shifts seamlessly into its closing passage. This is an instrumental representation of a life of turmoil and vanity, giving way to resurrection and peace.

Rush Creek returns with inquisitive rolling keys, which is by now a familiar aesthetic and a cornerstone of the record. It plays again with the blend of the frantic and the peaceful. Like a person on a stroll through a busy city with a mind completely at ease.

Being Flowers is inquisitive in a different way - like points of light revealing different passages of a cathedral. By this point it’s clear that this album has a sound, a point of view, something akin to a mission. Sonically it carries a sense of reassurance and peace in the midst of the realization that all is vanity - that both good and bad things pass.

Pointe Nimbus closes the record with a bit more assertion in the melody. The album ends resolute, but without resolution, leaning forward into whatever Moore’s next project will be.

Parents Guide: Clean. Completely family-friendly.

Graze the Bell earns a place in your rotation without announcing itself. It rewards focused listening, but it’s equally at home as a companion on a drive or a walk when you need your mind to find its footing. Highly recommended.

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Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) strips it down to voice and guitar and fits an entire life inside five minutes. Watch without distraction.

Eat Your Greens opens with a declaration: this is what we do, and we do it well. Mustard Sauce shows you the architecture, as everyone drops out so the organ can speak to you directly for a moment, then the guitar gets its turn, then the drums come in fast and demanding. It’s an album that trusts its players enough to let each one hold the room alone.

Drop Top slows into something slightly melancholic, sitting into the groove. Then Parlor Change brings the sass back as the drums roll on an irresistible pocket. It’s cheeky and funny and completely in control.

The title track Emeralds is where you realize what kind of record this is. The tonality and the funk remain, but the style and rhythm keep shifting underneath you. It’s a jam record.

Francisco Smack hits with a ton of attitude, the musicians rolling in and out of each other’s territory with ease and occasional dominance. The cover of Dolly Parton’s Jolene is straightforward yet some of the most fun here.

Lion’s Mane gets weird, and gloriously so. The organ chugs while the guitar presses into atonal and off-kilter territory. It works. Red Dog comes back to earth with a blues riff you’ve heard a hundred times, and it still feels right and a bit reverant.

Then comes Queen of My Heart, dedicated to guitarist Jimmy James’s mother, who recently passed. It’s a lovely send-off. The organ playing has a taste and restraint that had me closing my eyes in a pause. Unlike everything before it, this one feels like a goodbye. It’s a wind-down after a sweaty, joyful jame session. And then, almost abruptly, the record ends with what a moment between a mother and son. It fades out fast, and it’s done.

The whole project feels like an invitation to a studio session with seasoned musicians who are genuinely enjoying wherever each groove sends them. They never try to do too much, as they’re happy with a few minutes per melody, never reaching for the spectacular when the pocket is right there. This is right-down-the-middle funk, groove, and blues music. The whole family can enjoy it.

“Funk is the problem, and the solution.” - Michael Scott

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Looking for music that’s good, true, and beautiful without the algorithm deciding what comes next? Audio Deacon is a curated streaming app built for Christian families and thoughtful listeners. Try it free for three months with code AUDIODEACON3. Create an account HERE, download the app, and begin listening.