Each month, one of CHIRP Radio’s tastemaker DJs curates a selection of vinyl specially designed to make your ears happy. This month’s installment is curated by DJ The Audible Snail:

The Audible Snail Presents: Folk, Punk, & Grit

The roots and intersections of folk music, punk rock, and hip hop, pressed into vinyl, amplify working class resilience. Wherever there is sound that breaks through the struggles and complexities of human life, that’s where the poetry begins — and where collective defiance sets its needle on a dusty groove and demands joy in the darkest hour, on the darkest days. Let these albums be a guide, a critique, and a manifestation of our own cultural survival in the days ahead. Let them be a quiet gift on a winter evening.

Tom Waits / Mule Variations / ANTI- / 1999

Mule Variations, Tom Waits’ thirteenth studio album, ululates between sweet, sad, hopeful ballads and gruff, raw, animalistic emotion. The heart of the album, “Hold On,” is a love song on a sassy, winter day: “Well, go ahead, call the cops, / you don’t meet nice girls in coffee shops.” The soft, quieter tracks on this album harken to the collective heart of a poet, and the more experimental, clunky tracks are bluesy and deeply anti-capitalist, a preview of his album, Blood Money, released two years later. A collection of shady characters, whimsically trying to survive this world, a reflection of each of us in various states of being. Relax, enjoy the seesaw of this two disc vinyl composition, arrive with all your vices, and come on up to the house.

NNAMDÏ / DROOL / Sooper / 2017

A synth serenade opens the first track on DROOL, the hip hop debut from local singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, NNAMDÏ, who got his start in the Chicago punk scene. Experimental and spacey electronic beats layered under mid-90s and early 2000s R&B. Fueled with NNAMDÏ’s self-aware and fiery rap, the album is hypnotic, hyperbolic, and delightfully crass. Released on NNAMDÏ’s record label Sooper, the album is a blend of sexiness and Black street struggle: “Never been upset with the presence of the press and the police today (More than now) / But what should I expect from a bullet-proof vest and a badge to your name? (Eagle Scout) … // … They’ll shoot you in chests / Or better yet, in the back when your head’s turned away (With a smile) / And they get acquitted (Why!) / And they’ll never quit it (Why!).” Don’t skip a live NNAMDÏ show — Fisher Price basketball nets on stage, basketball beach balls shootin’ hoops with the crowd, post-show chats about community gardening, and commuter bicycle safety tips at 2am. Enjoy!

Gillian Welch / The Harrow & the Harvest / Acony / 2011

Folk Americana from the heart of Appalachia by way of Nashville, Gillian Welch’s The Harrow & the Harvest falls under the genre of songs for laying on the floor. Bluegrass southern gothic from deep within the Blue Ridge Mountains, the strings on this album cover themes of poverty, adultery, addiction, and sex work. It’s a feminist-folk forward album rife with straight-talkin’ sorrow dashed with hope: “It’s beefsteak when I’m workin’, / & whiskey when I’m dry, / & sweet heaven when I die.” “Down Along the Dixie Line” sounds like a cover of an old folk ballad, but the brilliance of Gillian Welch is her songs are contemporary, set in the stories of working class mountain towns. “Silver Dagger” follows the same melody as “You Are My Sunshine” – the same dark wit of an old lullaby. The best line of lyric finds itself on the last track: “That’s the way the cornbread crumbles.” Cozy up to these songs, dim the lights, and soak in the sweet mountain air.

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