Austin Kleon - But the music is exceptional

Hey y’all,

In honor of my 7-year-old releasing his latest album, Personality, this week’s 10 things worth sharing are all related to music. (I made a playlist to go along.)

1. RIP Toots Hibbert of Toots and The Maytals. I was a huge fan: I put Funky Kingston on my list of 31 favorite records. (Listen to how he transforms John Denver’s “Country Road” and Radiohead’s “Let Down.)
    
2. The extraordinary life of Ethiopia's 93-year-old singing nun. Her name is Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, and her lone album from the Ethiopiques series is getting a ton of play around the studio. Here’s a radio documentary about her called The Honky Tonk Nun.
    
3. Netflix has picked up one of my very favorite podcasts, Song Exploder, as a new TV series.
    
4. I remember laughing when I saw Chilly Gonzales wrote a book called Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures, but now, Enya is everywhere! (In her newsletter, Anne Helen Petersen asks, “Where does musical taste come from?” One of my favorite books on the subject is Carl Wilson’s 33 1/3 entry, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.)
    
5. Let us once again praise Garageband.
    
6. Tracing My Dad: The Life and Music of Dennis Davis is a video series in which the young son of the late drummer interviews his dad’s friends and colleagues to learn more about him. I enjoyed the interviews with producer Toni Visconti about the records he made with David Bowie, especially the isolated drums on “Look Back in Anger.”
    
7. The Winamp Skin Museum. (See also: the new app for Poolside.fm.)
    
8. A newly-digitized 1985 interview with composer Leonard Bernstein from The Studs Terkel Archive.
    
9. Singer/songwriter Emmy The Great looks to schoolchildren for inspiration in “The Green Lady in the Toilets.”
    
10. RIP critic Stanley Crouch. RIP Kool & the Gang founder Ronald Bell. (Dig these Soul Train dancers getting down to “Jungle Boogie.”)