Hi reader!
I’m not sure if I should greet you in each post or not. For now on my first post, I suppose it makes sense.
Welcome to the first Content Curation post. I’m starting off by sharing two guys with beards who make very different kinds of art and tell very different kinds of stories. I came across each of these fellows around the 2017-2018 and immediately did a deep dive into each one’s archive at the time, and both have remained as some of my favorite people who’s art I can revisit again and again.
I’m still finding exactly how I want to share these stories and how much of my personal experience to include in these blogs. I don’t want these to become the recipe blog where you read through a novel to get to the ingredients list, so I’ll try to keep it short and let the actual important stuff speak for itself. But this is meant to bring the personality to my recommendations so I guess we’ll figure out the right balance as we go along.
For now, here are two things I think you might not have heard of before and why I think you ought to at least give them a try:
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Johnny Flynn
Indie-folk musician
Johnny Flynn is one of those folks who are kind of just too talented.
He’s a British poet, multi-instrumentalist, and actor, both in the Shakespearian and the Netflix sense. But this recommendation is specifically for his music, which sits up there in my post-2000s indie folk pantheon alongside Bon Iver, Caamp, and Mipso. I have a personal favorite playlist of mine that I made during college for my annual fall trip to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway in the North Carolina mountains and Johnny’s music perfectly captures the feelings I had driving with the windows down from Rough Ridge to Mt. Mitchell.
American folk music, particularly that of the Appalachian area I hold dear as a North Carolinian, owes a lot of its foundation to the folk music traditions of the Scots-Irish who settled in Appalachia. Part of what I like so much about Johnny Flynn is that, as a Brit, he brings a sense of that English-speaking European folk tradition to the indie folk movement. You occasionally hear echoes of an English pub chant or a hint of sea-shanty in the melodies.
Flynn’s debut album A Larum
I particularly like that you can feel a bit of all of Flynn’s various talents at play in his music. His lyricism is poetic in it’s content, it’s inspirations, and its form. He draws from the likes of Henry David Thoreau as well as the Epic of Gilgamesh to writes on themes of death, religion, fate. The Wrote and The Writ, from his debut album A Larum, sits somewhere within my top 50 personal songs of all time.
Despite the fact that this debut album came out all the way back in 2008, I find it to be much less dated than so many other folk revival moments that came later during the “Ho Hey” stomp-and-holler of the first Lumineers record or the whole Mumford and Sons moment, both of which I was fully on board for when they hit me in high school, but I don’t think have had quite the same staying power.
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To get started, try out:
Probably still my favorite of all his music. The lyrics to The Wrote and the Writ tell the story of a man who has become disillusioned with religion and complains to an unnamed “you” (I always presumed God, maybe also people who are still believers) who has been communicating with him via letters.
It’s one of my favorite kinds of songs because there is no verse, chorus, bridge type structure. He’s basically written a poem and set it to a bouncy folksy backing. A short excerpt from NPR at the time described him as equally informed by William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan, which I find fitting.
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Tied for my favorite of his any given day. I’m not always the biggest fan of live albums, but I think it works wonderfully for this album. This particular live recording has a momentary fumble during the song that he turns into an endearing little moment.
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“Pray for the people inside your head, for they won’t be there when you’re dead”
Listen to this one and I dare you to not start bouncing your foot. It’s a bit of a slow build at first, but the final minute crescendos and climaxes with multiple layered voices descending into a frenzy. It’s one of my favorite musical experiences.
It’s like if you added synthesizer to a pirate’s funeral dirge. It rocks.
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The album title A Larum comes from notes in Shakespeare’s plays where “a larum” was written to describe noise happening offstage, because Larum was an old english word for loud noise or alarm. You can notice that A Larum is pretty close to the word alarm.
But what’s also fun is that in Danish “at larme” is a verb meaning “to make noise.” Danes once controlled large parts of modern-day England during Viking times and you still find traces of that history in the English language since Danes imposed Danish on the Old English being spoken back then. For example, Wednesday and Thursday are generally understood to come from Viking gods Wodin and Thor (Woden’s day and Thors’s day morphing into their current forms). So my I’m-not-a-linguist-nor-historian guess is that this album title and the alarm app on your phone has a direct linguistic tie to Danish Vikings making general chaos in England around the year 900.
Jon Bois
YouTube creator, sportswriter, generally lovable presence
Image by Lila Barth from the New York Times
And for my second rec of the blog, we go somewhere completely different and even more important for me.
If you’ve never heard of Jon Bois before, I’m a bit jealous. I wish I could experience the joy of discovering Jon and devouring everything he’s ever made for the first time. It would be like seeing Star Wars in 1977. Before Jon, I had no idea that what he creates could ever be possible.
He is singlehandedly my favorite YouTube creator of all time and up there as one of my favorite storytellers ever.
So what does Jon do? Well, that’s a bit hard to explain. Basically, he makes creative non-fiction YouTube videos based on sports and statistics.
His style involves pulling together reams of sports statistics from online databases, old newspaper scans, and saxophone-laden jazz music, while using Google Earth’s video capabilities (who knew it had any?) to generate slightly crude graphics. Somehow, he paired all of these to tell some of the most strange and beautiful stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching on YouTube.
This was somehow made with Google Earth. It’s like Sim City met an excel spreadsheet living on a 1980’s Macintosh. It’s perfect.
He’s gone from making 10-20 minute short stories in his “Pretty Good” video series to now having made multiple hours-long documentaries about sports teams like the Seattle Mariners and the Atlanta Falcons and has found himself featured in the New York Times.
Throughout all of his work, he brings this lovably goofy ‘aww-shucks’ affect that I find endearing, but it also sometimes masks his incredibly gifted writing. He is able to weave simple details into beautiful and strangely impactful metaphors. I wish I could write one day like Jon does.
A typical Jon Bois screencap
Even if you don’t care much about math or sports, I still encourage you to give him a watch. His style might not work for you at first, but give it a try. Throughout all of his archive, he is able to use sports and statistics as a lens to explore some of the most earnest, endearing, and human stories I’ve ever seen.
To begin your journey into Jon Bois, I have a few entry point suggestions:
Pretty Good: Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun
A man is stuck 16,000 feet in the air above Los Angeles. He is floating, sitting on a lawn chair tied to a couple dozen helium balloons, and he can’t get down. One of his few non-sports stories, it’s still got all of the wonderful eccentricities of a Jon Bois story.
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The search for the saddest punt in the world | Chart Party
A real sports statistics one here. Jon uses statistics to find some of the silliest American football situations in recent history. One of my favorite endings.
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The Bob Emergency: a study of athletes named Bob, Part I | Chart Party
This is the first in a pair of videos about the disappearance of people named Bob from sports and, more generally society. It features one of the most classic moments where Jon is able to summon beautiful humanity out of a couple numbers in a spreadsheet when Jon finds newspaper evidence of a professional boxer named Bob Cyclone who’s entire career record shows 0 wins and 13 losses, 9 of which resulted in him getting knocked out.
“I was able to dig up absolutely nothing else on Bob Cyclone… He left us nothing but this lonely little fight record hidden deep within a boxing database. Through it, he tells us two things. First that opponents absolutely painted the canvas with him. And second, that he came back, night after night, to face his certain annihilation again and again, and we will never know why. But he was a Bob. He played a note in this symphony. He mattered.”
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Or if you’re more interested in politics than sports, here is a recent interview about Jon’s latest project on the history of the Reform Party with sportswriter Pablo Torre here.
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So there you have two very different bits of media to explore. It’s already quite fun to revisit things that I hold close to me and put words to why they mean so much to me. I can also see that it will be a challenge for me to constrain myself and write only short summaries without diving into all of the small details I enjoy collecting.
Thank you for reading. If you have any ideas of something I should check out or advice for how to make this blog better, please share them below. I’ll be so happy to give it a look/listen/read!