We asked 10 JML contributors to share a favorite song for autumn. Read about their picks and listen to the playlist on Spotify.
“Familiarity” by Punch Brothers
I was torn. I almost selected the other 10-minute song that spells Autumn-with-a-capital-A (by an indie singer-songwriter named Taylor Allison Swift), but “Familiarity,” the opening track of the Punch Brothers’ 2015 album “The Phosphorescent Blues” won out for its perennial ubiquity on my fall-themed playlists.
“The Phosphorescent Blues” is the sort of mandolin-forward bluegrass-folk that a boy genius might make, and that’s because front mandolin man Chris Thile was awarded a MacArthur Genius grant three years before this album came out, becoming the youngest person to do so. “Too clever,” critics called it on arrival, but I fell under the spell of its esoteric magic: the sort that pulls you back to school and into the stacks as the night temperatures begin to dip.
I first heard “Familiarity” in the New York spring but its enchantment lasts all year round. It’s a song imbued with loneliness — “a man among amens” — summoning up the pensive season of mists and mellow fruitlessness. A soul among the smoke, searching for unfamiliar permanence — it’s the song for the season of deciduous death and fleetingness of summer’s splendor. “I want to feel it,” our narrator sings. And when I spin “Familiarity,” I always do.
“Surround You” by WILD
This songconjures in my mind silhouettes dancing around a fire pit, warm drinks clutched in gloved hands. I see friends and strangers alike crowding together, anxious for companionship and wary of the dark and the cold. Fall is an enchanting season, but it’s a season of dying things, of lengthening shadows and fading colors and tumbling temperatures. We may have great dreams of one last adventure before the crippling cold of winter. But those dreams dissipate quickly as time slips away and what we find ourselves left with are those people huddled around that shared fire.
Fall is a time when I want to be surrounded by friends and family; it’s a season of gratitude. But the creeping presence of winter’s lonely chill is inescapable. And so, I find myself eager to be surrounded by those same friends and family so as not to face it alone.
“Long After Midnight” by Flock of Dimes
I want my autumn music to feel like a worn-in hoodie; to pair nicely with an apple cider donut on a clear Saturday morning; and to remind me gently of the transience of beauty and the death of all living things. Is that too much to ask? “Long After Midnight” fits the bill perfectly. The song is the lead single from a new album by Flock of Dimes — which is the solo project of Jenn Wasner, also the lead singer of Baltimore’s fabulous indie rock duo Wye Oak.
Sonically, “Long After Midnight” is deceptively simple — finger-picked acoustic guitar, Wasner’s rich alto vocals. Drums enter with a lovely pedal steel guitar solo halfway through. The melody is so exquisite it feels like one of those songs that has just always existed. It fulfills my “hoodie and a donut” criteria.
In the lyrics, the song’s narrator sings about supporting a loved one who has clearly made bad choices and is in a tough spot. Is her compassion purely altruistic or is it a manifestation of ego, of a savior complex? When is lending money or a car to someone care and when is it enabling behavior? Those are the hard questions the song raises. Autumn, this liminal season between life and death, these months of both beauty and decay, is a good time to sit with hard questions like these.
“As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” by Johnny Cash
One in a series of social justice songs by Johnny Cash from his 1964 album “Bitter Tears.” I grew up neighboring Kinzua Dam, about which this song centers. Chief Cornplanter and the Seneca were topics in my childhood education, and when we made class field trips to the Seneca Museum in Salamanca, New York, it was always confusing to us (as children) why the Seneca museum staff were so brusque. It took adulthood to fully understand why. Growing up with a song as a kid, and then re-listening as an adult is always an eye-opener. But at the end of the day, this is a Johnny Cash song, and that alone is reason enough for inclusion in any good playlist.
“From” by Bon Iver
Bon Iver has been one of my favorite bands since their first album “For Emma, Forever Ago” came out back in 2008. I rarely know what lead singer Justin Vernon is singing about — he’s not someone I turn to for lyrical sophistication — but there are few artists who do a better job of conveying a specific mood through their blend of atmospheric music and the sound of the lead singer’s voice. In most of their earlier albums, this mood is a sort of introspective melancholy (which, to be clear, is very much my jam), but on their latest album, “SABLE, fABLE,” the overall sound is more hope-filled and optimistic.
This vibe is best captured on “From,” which is three minutes of soulful joy. Vernon sings in his delightful falsetto, and though the lyrics mostly seem to circle around a relationship that has hit a troubled patch, the chorus repeats the line “Don’t let it trouble your mind,” and it’s all undeniably hopeful. In the last minute of the song, Vernon increases the pace of his vocal delivery, and the music and lyrics build together to a moment of gleeful release that always makes me smile, even though I have no idea what he’s actually saying. (I just looked it up; the line it all builds to is “I’m beset with what we could become” — a beautiful sentiment that makes me wonder if perhaps I’ve been underrating Vernon as a lyricist all this time.)
“Wildflowers” by The Wailin’ Jennys
Autumn is a great season if, like me, you love pondering your own mortality. It’s a season of transition, summer going out in a Viking funeral and leaving the ashes of winter. We only get all of those golds and crimsons and ambers because everything is rotting. But isn’t it beautiful? It’s the season of admitting that nothing lasts, that you have to let go of everything eventually, but that you can love it all the same and hope that someday, all of this will grow again.
No song evokes that feeling for me like the Wailin’ Jennys’ cover of Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” It’s a song about letting go, about loving someone so much that you want nothing more than for them to discover the richest, most fulfilling life they can imagine, even if it takes them far away from you. I used to sing it to my kids when they were babies, and in my head it’s now inextricably linked to parenthood. Parenthood, too, is all about letting go: You admit, little by little, that your children will live their own lives and make their own mistakes. You love them knowing that you will eventually have to say goodbye. There’s mystery and sorrow and beauty in that — and the hope that all of life’s endings, including the Big One, will lead to new beginnings.
“Boston” by Dermot Kennedy
Leave it to an Irishman to express both swelling emotion and quiet intimacy at once — and with restraint.
“Not where I breathe, but where I love — I live,” reads the exterior of the DeNaples Center at the University of Scranton, quoting the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, SJ. I doubt Dermot Kennedy has ever seen this facade for himself, but when he croons, “Take me back to places I feel loved in / Maybe failing that, take me to Boston,” I swoon with nostalgia for East Coast autumns and places that have loved me. Scranton is among them. So is Boston.
I fell in love with Boston as I fell in love with my now-husband during our mid-October weekend-long (gulp) first date a decade and a half ago. I had never been to Massachusetts, but after days spent slurping oysters and stumbling over cobblestones, I had found home in more ways than one. I moved to Boston after college, and became myself there, seasons turning alongside me.
Autumns in Boston are unmatched: the dazzling fire of foliage, the buzz of student life finding its rhythm. I would cruise down Storrow Drive along the Charles River and thank God for the gift of living somewhere so gorgeous. (This sentiment did not endure against gray February slush.)
I’ve since left Boston, and I’ve outgrown the girl I was then. Still, when this song lights its “holy fire,” I’m warmed with the memory of a place that loved me into who I am.
“Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House
Fall is my favorite season — a time of new beginnings and creative energy as daylight wanes and leaves turn brilliant colors, like bright lamps to make up for the growing darkness. It’s also a terribly fleeting season, and every year I willfully ignore the fact that it will bleed into an unrelenting winter. All too soon, pumpkins, apples and crisp breezes will be replaced by barren trees, frigid temperatures and a landscape dominated by dull brown dirt and silvery ice. Fall music for me is meditative and a touch mournful, which is why “Don’t Dream It’s Over” is my autumn anthem.
From those evocative opening chords to the somber organ riffs, this is a song full of hopeful lyrics set against a musical elegy for what is slipping away from us. You can even hear that desperate grasping in the rush to cram as many syllables as possible into each stanza before the music returns to the chorus. And yet, we are promised, it’s not over. We should hold to it as long as we can.
Every year I try to catch the deluge of fall in a paper cup before it’s gone. Every year I fail. But what a beautiful deluge it is. And how lucky I am, to stand in the rain trying to collect it before it fades away.
“Returning to Myself” by Brandi Carlile
The crispness of autumn is an invitation to look anew at beginnings and endings. Summer, with all its vibrancy, is passing and yet the beginning of the fall, with academic years and a return to more certain structure, brings new hope and focus to the months ahead.
Into this season, Brandi Carlile’s new song “Returning to Myself” invites listeners to take stock in all that life holds. With a melancholy that evolves into consolation, Carlile’s voice is a stalwart sign of the season of change. “Returning to myself is such a lonely thing to do” she repeats with each turn of the chorus, “But, it’s the only thing to do.” By song’s end, this refrain shifts from a forlorn searching for self to a beautiful testament to the home we find within ourselves and the ones who remind us who we are.
We walk this road together, Carlile reminds us: “There is no honor in the pilgrimage / Until a soul returns / To hold another’s hand / And then, and only then, it learns / That life is like a stone / Only skipping for a time / Oh, it never really holds its own / It’ll never see the other side.”
With each step, the rustle of fall leaves reminds us that to come into a new season we have to let go of what is. We must surrender our restlessness, to rest in the keeper of our souls. That means searching with intent to give ourselves away — “to be the gospel without words” — and to find peace in a love that returns us to the source of all our being.
“Dusty Old Clock” by Burke Ingraffia
The first time I heard “Dusty Old Clock,” at a singer-songwriters’ night in Richmond, Virginia, Burke Ingraffia shared that he wrote it while in discernment with the Jesuits. The song uses the metaphor of a broken clock to symbolize the speaker’s relationship with time, including feeling stuck. Because of Burke’s introduction, I was primed to consider the lyric “’Cause I know syncopation’s / Not the same thing as missing a beat,” in the context of vocational discernment.
Discernment regarding my “capital V” vocation is a refrain of my prayers. I trust in God’s plan for me, but my trust is interspersed with questions and concerns expressed to God about timing. Burke (who ultimately left the Jesuit novitiate, and who, along with his wife, I have since befriended) invites the listener, through his lyrics, to live fully but with patience. “Now is the time, here is the place / Some of it is mine, / but most of it is grace,” seems the proper attitude for living with trust and hope in God’s plan.
Autumn, with its changing leaves and shortening days, prompts reflections about time. It’s also the season, in Richmond, for folk music. Each October, my city hosts its annual Folk Festival. I told Burke he should perform there one year. When he does, I’ll be sure to set my clock so I don’t miss it.