Songs I Like: April 2025

Some springtime tunes for you.

There were crocuses not long ago, I seem to recall: royal blooms I’d never seen before sprouting from the familiar ground in the woods. But yesterday I wandered back and found a single bloodroot flower, no purple in sight. More millipedes beneath the rocks I flip lately; I saw the first jumping spider of the season out on the fence this week. A few flaking leaf-remnants of winter cling to the tree outside my window. It’s starting to go up in yellow now, fresh and growing with the warmer breeze and clear sky. As ever, there is a future. As ever, there is a past.

Here are some songs for that feeling.

“Music for Indigo” is a twenty minute instrumental track by Adrianne Lenker, a genuine poet of music. I’ve discussed her work before in the context of her lyricism, but this piece shines in the lack of it. A winding acoustic guitar composition with melodies of wind chimes in the background, “Music for Indigo” feels like the scent of linens under a pale sky, half-thinking while the clouds roll from one side of the horizon to the other. It’s thoughtful; every note feels intuitive yet familiar, as though Lenker has subconsciously considered each pluck of the strings long before enacting them.

The temperature has been inconsistent lately, as it always is during these brief and endless Illinois springs. Each night sunset drags itself out a little longer, the air toying with its warmth. I lay awake in bed, too warm for my comforter and too chilly to turn on a fan. “Music for Indigo” is a good soundtrack for that half-sleep.

Insomnia has its moments of Lenker-esque poetical serenity, that’s for sure— but it’s a double-edged sword. The acoustic version of Julia Wolf’s “In My Room” is my next pick for April, and it’s a sharper, lonelier song than even I expected to resonate with this month. Wolf’s voice is a time capsule straight from my childhood— Evanescence and Paramore on the car radio, with any number of indie pop-punk whatever bands on my iPod. She sings with the pristine control and darkness I see in the juxtaposition of new buds and long-dead leaves on the same branches. It’s gorgeous, and a little concerning.

“In My Room” tells a desperate, miserable story about abandonment. I don’t relate to all of it, but the confusion and hurt Wolf presents in the song are familiar; it’s characterized by the speaker feeling as though their life has insurmountably changed while everyone around them seems to be getting along just fine, the plight of jilted lovers and graduating seniors alike. “I want your things in my room,” Wolf sings, and I don’t picture the scattered belongings of a faceless ex; I see the layout of my dorm from the last spring that spilled out over campus, the bookcase that stood facing my high school bed, the dog who sometimes snuck into my childhood bedroom even though she wasn’t allowed upstairs. The vernal pool of my life as I’ve settled into it now is once again drying up, and like Wolf laments, it’s anything but easy “leaving everything behind.”

Frustration with one’s current situation is not always so cinematic, though, and much like spring weather, it isn’t consistent. “Milk & Honey” by Billie Marten is a song that modulates between the realms of the urgent and the languid like the breeze from the lake navigates swiftly through the trees. Marten sings of two people who find shared joy in being together, but who are ultimately driven apart by conflicting expectations about the vastness of things— to be content with what is given, or to fight for more. Again I find my own meaning in the narrative: frustration not with another individual, but with the self.

I am almost done with college and mostly it has been fantastic. The reeds by the pond are green again; dragonflies are starting to return. Like the speaker in “Milk & Honey,” there are moments where “I’m just content with time well-spent”— but then I see my calendar booked through my first week of work, and I panic. A month left, three weeks, two, and I’m trying to stop the crocuses from growing just to have more time with the sprouts before they wither. “All you want is milk, more than you can drink,” Marten sings, her voice and the strings and the horns pleading in a rush, and I know what she means. I see it in muddy water, between strings of algae and ripples from the mallards I’ve scared away with my heavy steps. My own eyes blink up at me, foiled.

Spring slips quickly away; I worry about how worried I am, and worry about the time I’m spending in my mind rather than in the world. In times like these it’s good to take a break.

“Checkpoint” is the sixth track off local band Big Onion’s newest album Doodles, and sonically, it’s a leap in the opposite direction from the rest of the group’s canon. I’ve experienced temporary hearing loss as a result of Big Onion concerts, which tend to involve packed, neon-lit rooms and broken drumsticks and wild, intentional feedback from electric guitars held directly up to microphones. It’s a great time— I have known almost no better community than a room full of friends shouting “IT WAS OH SO BLOODY, IT WAS OH SO BLOODY”¹ in time with the singer, also shouting, also a friend— and it is loud.

“Checkpoint” is not so. It’s a solo piano track with a simple melody like the white petals of the bloodroot in the woods; its existence on an album full of headbangers is its own beautiful juxtaposition, the luminous yellow stamen in the center of the flower. Quite reasonably, Big Onion did not perform “Checkpoint” at their concert last weekend, but when I stepped outside to grab a breath of fresh air, I thought of that melody. An anchor in a quick-moving stream.

I went back inside after a few minutes, back to the noise, and then I went to the afterparty. Campus cloaked in evening haze like my violet crocus petals— now gone— I listened to friends convene, laughing but wistful, with graduation a slow-moving creature still miles away for some and an alarmingly close birdcall for others. There is a future, spring says, and there is a past, and they both move quickly in unexpected ways.

But there is also a present: a now in soft piano and bloodroot stalks, the robins in the trees, the perfect moment when the last old leaf loses its tether. Now is the place I’m going to hold.

New trees, old leaves. And new songs…

1. From the track “Star Spangled Blankie,” a crowd favorite off Stupid Egg, last year’s Big Onion album release.