Mid-Week Music: Ben Howard

It started with Fuel/Friends' Spring 2012 Mix (so many things start with one of Heather's mixes). She wrote about "Old Pine:"

"I love how this song starts about a thousand sonic miles from where it ends."

I don't know exactly how Ben Howard's other songs wound up on my computer, but most recently, the track I can't get out of my head is "The Wolves."

I adore his ability to build a song from start to finish. These aren't just two verses and a chorus and three chords looped round and round. His rhythms and lyrics weave a distinct momentum that carries me away every time.

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Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

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I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st

* not with ink

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