Every week, 88Nine music director Erin Wolf shares a sonic gem she found using her nearly 20 years of new-music exploration experience. You can hear all her discoveries live on 88Nine at 10 p.m. every Monday on What’s All This: Adventures in New Music.
Brother Bird (the project of Nashville singer-songwriter Caroline Glaser) makes modern indie pop-rock full of bendy and fuzzy guitars. There are also to-the-heart lyrics that feel touching and relatable, even though they’re so very specific to Glaser and her life.
On “Pariah” from her new album, The Lodge in Miller County, Glaser’s sweet voice adds an element of kinship and confession as she chronicles moving from the pain of feeling excluded to the confidence of rejecting the need for acceptance. She based the track on a real-life experience from a now-dissolved marriage, explaining that “‘Pariah’ is more of a declaration to trust yourself. And your body. When something feels off, something is probably off.”
The full album is out now on Easy Does It Records, and “Pariah” is part of the playlist for this episode, which you can enjoy using the player at the top of the page.
Best new indie music this week
- smush, “milkweed butterfly”
- Brother Bird, “Pariah”
- The Olivia Tremor Control, “Timewaster”
- Shady Bug, “seed”
- Mia Joy, “Comet (ft. Peel Dream Magazine)”
- Porij, “Valley Kudu”
- Father John Misty, “The X-panded Universe”
- Star Moles, “Born Again”
- Phoebe Bridgers, “On Video”
- This Is The Kit, “Skim a Stone”
- Stephen Steinbrink, “I’m a Worm”
- Morphine, “Cocoon”
