I love sharing recs, and I love trawling my Substack subscriptions for recs, but do you ever feel like it’s all just…too…much?
If so, you and me, we got one thing in common.
So, this week, one song.
I hope you’ll spare three minutes and forty-three seconds to listen to it.
“Buffalo” is from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s recently released ninth album, The Past Is Still Alive. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago as one of several new records I’m loving. It’s been a delight to see others responding crazy-positively to this record. I had a tingly feeling about it before it was released, because the singles were so strong. Around its release, Lindsay Zoladz wrote a profile of Alynda Segarra, the artist who performs under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff, for the New York Times, calling the new record “arresting, artfully autobiographical.” My friend Adam, who’d never listened to HFTRR before, is mad about The Past Is Still Alive, and so is Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, who also has a new album out later this month, Tiger’s Blood. She writes:
The other artist I want to talk about and I weirdly think y’all are gonna guess this one before I even type it because my assumption is that you are also obsessed … is Hurray For the Riff Raff’s new record “The Past Is Still Alive”. Are you guys listening? There’s no way some of you aren’t. The album is in constant rotation for so many of my close friends. It’s addictive. It’s a religion. I cannot stop thinking about the songs and playing them in my head & having a new favorite every day. Alynda and I go way back. We’ve toured together & have a song out in the world together & I really love their music a lot already but don’t think of me as biased in this case! This album is objectively special. I feel like one of my favorite songwriters just made their best record yet. Lucky me.
Crutchfield titled this edition of her newsletter “some things take time - i know they do,” which is a repeated, or should I say incanted, lyric in “Buffalo.” That very lyric, and the way Segarra sings it—or chants it, incants it, whispers it, breathes it, fogs the mirror with it—is one of the reason this song has struck me so hard, straight to the solar plexus. Boom.
Two weeks just to catch the buffalo / two weeks just to catch the buffalo / some things take time, I know they do / some things take time, I know they do / but I hope our time will never go / I hope our time will never go / two weeks just to catch the buffalo / two weeks just to catch the buffalo
In “Buffalo,” Segarra tells the story of a man camping out on a Minnesota farm with a recorder, waiting for “the rumble of the big stampede that one day magically appeared.” They contemplate extinction: “Will we go like the woolly mammoth / or the de do do.” Segarra’s vocals are wistful, velvet, weary but impassioned, and patient. Heavy on repetition, the song has the dreamy cadence of a lullaby, but it keeps you awake and feeling alive, too. One of my favorite moments is the third round of the chorus when Segarra trades singing “I know they do” to whisper that line. The whisper, when it comes like this, is a caress, something all the more powerful for its gentleness—a cool washcloth to our feverish heads.
If you haven’t listened yet, I hope you’ll pause now and do so, because my writing about the song does nothing to convey the experience of hearing it. “Buffalo” is not a happy song, but it has, to borrow Conor Oberst’s words from Zoladz’s Times piece, a “fighting spirit.” It does not deny endings, destruction, the narrow evasion of death, but it bets on survival of a kind. Like the best art, it speaks to the personal and the communal, both. It puts me in a state, a good one.
I was in my car the first time I heard “Buffalo,” and before the song played through once I was hooked by this chorus-chant, was chanting along; I might have even played it again immediately. That’s pretty big for a first-time listen. Since then I’ve floated around the city with this chant in my head: two weeks just to catch the buffalo / some things take time I know they do. The chant as a healing beat, as a metronome for living, as a balance beam. Just staying with it, on it, in it. With it, on it, in it.
The most beautiful thing about songs is the way we layer our lives onto them, anoint them with our own meaning, while at the very same time we get to feel a part of some giant, pulsing collective in listening to them, whether through headphones or car speakers or in the confines of a venue packed with other listeners—and what a salvation that sharing can be. I imagine, pleasurably, standing in the dark at the Basement East, my mouth moving to the words—two weeks just to catch the buffalo—while all around me, strangers’ mouths are doing the same, their eyes, like mine, trained on the musicians in front of us.
And at the same time I can’t help but adopt/adapt Segarra’s lyrics into some kinda message to myself about my dumb slow writing life, and particularly the path of the project I finished last fall (or did I?), which I’ve been hauling around in my brain so long that it’s embarrassing to talk about, and which may never really live outside my brain, who knows. Or will it? Some things take time, I know they do. But frankly I’m tired of thinking about that project, and am working on filling my noggin with other stuff. Some things take time I know they do is a fitting mantra for this practice, for anything valuable, for making any kind of life.
I’m a big proponent of slowness in almost any context. I despise being rushed. I can’t abide slapdash work. I loathe the way our capitalist culture is always churning, always shoving us into the next thing, valuing product over process and creating constant demand for something new. It takes time to figure things out for yourself, it takes time to make art, it takes time to take IN and fully appreciate a work of art. We all need to slow the fuck down by a country mile or ten.
But Segarra also murmurs in our ears: I hope our time will never go, I hope our time will never go. Which is the ultimate impossibility, and a most universal desire: to avoid the endings, to avoid the pain that comes with them. To cling, desperately, to what’s been good. To keep trying, to stick around. Yeah, I’m thinking about myself, but also, America, I’m looking at you—and so is Segarra, who knows better. In another song, “Colossus of Roads,” she sings, “Say goodbye to America / I wanna see it dissolve.”
At the end of “Buffalo,” listen carefully: There are birds singing.
that voice!