Cherry-Picked

“Cherry Jerry Citrus” – Hey Cowboy!

Complete and utter naivete had me believing this was about a soft drink, or perhaps the beloved mascot for the Cherry Hut restaurant (a Northern Michigan classic). I did Google to be sure, and Cherry Jerry is in fact a strain of marijuana. So whether or not these Austin/Philly-based cutie pops meant to sing about weed or a cartoon pie, I don’t care. This song floats across my cerebrum all day. Just like they sing, “I linger on the one I love,” I linger on this soooong. It’s cotton candy clouds of smoke, it’s dreamy, upbeat, and just lo-fi enough to feel like you heard it live at your favorite local bar. Hey Cowboy! Would you come back to Hotel Vegas, please and thanks? 

“Sunshine On My Shoulders” – John Denver

The most lovely line to me is, “if I had a day that I could give you, I would give you a day just like today.” A movie dad would sing this song to his small daughter, and she would listen later in life while driving down the highway and cry when it came on the radio. For me though, it does everything I want it to do. He’s not being crafty with it, not trying to layer complex feeling into metaphor or analogy, just laying out the simple pleasure of early spring warmth on your back with a pure melody in tandem with his guitar. 

“People v. Maryanne Sue,” “lover” – Devon Again

This two-pack is twangy, angsty, and delicious. Just like the cover photo of her cheetah-print kitten heels squelching into wet mud, the indie pop overtone of these songs sinks into its gritty, angry, country-laden, and emotional backbone. “People” starts off hot with embarrassment as uncomfortable as mud sliding between your toes–with the exposure of infidelity analogized to the public discomfort of taking the witness stand in a court appearance. “lover” follows much more softly, expressing the grief of losing not only someone you loved, but the year(s) of your life with them that you can’t retrieve. Devon Again is one of those artists whose streams are pretty balanced across the board, meaning everything she’s put out speaks to her listeners (myself included, I have every song saved somewhere in my black hole of a Spotify). I love you Devon, and I’m sorry I missed your opening for Maude Latour back in October 2023. I was at De Nada, and if you’ve had their margaritas, you would understand.    

“You’ve Got a Woman” – Lion

Only TWO songs on Spotify? TWO?! A crime. I feel robbed of more Lion. I’ll go so far as to say this melody is almost creepy, but in a way that you want to keep listening. There’s a new-age cool to it, a laid-back but self-assured feeling. She’s the epitome of a groovy girl. 

“Let Me Be Wrong” – Jensen McRae

Not to be confused with our girl Tate, Jensen splashed onto my radar a few years ago with “My Ego Dies in the End,” an oxymoronically ear-perking, pulse-slower. I feel like she and I share a late-blooming character arc, only falling in love later in life, with two back-to-back relationships in her early twenties that knocked the wind out of her. Better yet, her latest album’s title hails from Back to the Future, my favorite childhood movie, so once again, Jensen knows excellence when she sees it. Her avid journaling really shows through in her songwriting. I love this one the most because sometimes you just want to be completely consumed by love and screw things up, to be let be wrong. I’ve historically (and regrettably) resented friends who wanted to equip and prepare me for what I was getting into when I fell in love, and while I should’ve appreciated their having my back, sometimes you don’t want to be primed for a freefall. I don’t want to hear about skydiving, I want to leap out of a plane. The girls who get it, get it. Jensen leaps.

“Don’t Understand Love Until There’s Heartbreak” – Bickle

Bickle!! He just GETS how to layer sounds together, like a perfect, unexpected rainbow crepe cake. “Naked” 2020 has been a favorite for a while, and I’ve been trying to keep up with him since. He makes actively weird clubby music, a little oontz oontz, a little intentionally cringe, with his almost nasal-y but perfect (to me) voice bouncing atop the synth. He has a way of using notes that I wouldn’t expect, that theoretically sound off-kilter, but in practice hit just right and meld together harmoniously. This one from his new-ish album is my personal favorite. It captures the feeling of recognizing love only in hindsight, when its gone, or even when it’s toxic, with tasty falsetto to boot. A Bickle education (Bickleducation, if you will) would be complete with “Naked” (obviously), “Talk Words,” “Don’t Look At The DJ,” and “Strange Maneuver.”

“Coloured Concrete” – Nemahsis 

Palestinian-Candian artist Nemahsis is fresh on my radar, but I love her wallflower anthems, this one in particular: a nervous-system friendly bop for marching to the beat of your own drum. She mentions tooth-falling-out dreams, which are supposedly about financial anxiety, generalized loss, or loss of control (not sure who or how they researched that). I like that she doesn’t clarify which, so any other tooth-losers can relate to chaos. But this song feels very… it’s ok, slow down, you’re figuring it out in your twenties. Relevant? More than ever! I’m excited to go on a Nemahsis deep dive to better understand her vision and activism and what to listen for in her music.

“Stop And Think It Over” – Female Species

I was totally thrown off when I saw this song and album released in 2021, given the vintage quality of production (I do mean this in a good way). Turns out these are rediscovered and re-released demos by a pair of sisters and their all-girl band, Female Species. The sound of this album ranges wildly due to the era in which each song was written and recorded, spanning “60’s garage rock/girl group pop… [to] 80s pop country/country rock,” as described by the University of Houston’s Coog Radio blog.

“Stop and Think It Over” comes from the earlier edge of that timeline, with an iconic electric piano/fuzzy organ backbone that screams turquoise appliances meet orange velvet couches on split-level floor plans. I also love the content of the song, paraphrased loosely as, “I am not going to trip and fall into stereotypical American housewifery, vacuuming and cooking but eating only a single hard-boiled egg with a piece of toast every day. In fact, I’m going to stop and think it over, and look good doing it.” My favorite actual, non-paraphrased line is about how they’ll “just sit down, talk it over with [their] mind.” Internal narration ftw! This song feels groundbreaking to me, as it’s one of the earlier renditions (within the scope of my awareness) of women making the decision for themselves about how they’ll respond to poor male behavior. I don’t know if women were encouraged to think about their value this way back then, much less sing about. We love to see it. These girlies are onto something!

“Trailblazer” – Reba McEntire, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson

This is one of those girl power songs that doesn’t annoy me. Something about it feels less like, yeah, we’re girls, we slay, and more like a tip-of-the-Stetson “thank you” to every woman who came before them and smashed a glass ceiling in custom Lucchese boots.

Artist-wise, we love to see three icons–Reba, Miranda, Lainey–collaborating on a country track, each from her own era of the genre. I’ve been watching a lot of Reba to rewire my attention span and forgot how much she rocks. Also, I don’t think I listen to enough Miranda, but I recently thrifted a Roadside Bars and Pink Guitars 2019 Tour t-shirt. I definitely adore Lainey–she headlined Watershed 2023 when Luke Bryan got a headcold, and she left not one single crumb in her hot pink bell bottoms. She was a vocal and theatrical powerhouse who left us (disgruntled, stinky camping festival goers) feeling like we were better off without the planned-for headliner Bryan. In fact, that country girl went ahead and shook it for us! I’m not usually one for merch, but I manifested a great show when I bought her cutesy disco ball t-shirt the day before.

If I had a nickel for every time I owned a t-shirt for any artist on a three-person collab, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but weird that it happened twice.

“Oh No” – Biig Piig

I am both embarrassed and proud to admit this was pulled from a mid-flight watch of Turtles all the Way Down. I’ve never seen OCD portrayed in such an accessible and accurate way, albeit through the lens of young adult (emphasis on the YA) fiction. The fuzz and static interrupting Aza’s every waking moment is part of the reason I adore music so much, it’s something else to play (literally) in the background, something safer to obsess over. Anyway this one just hits nicely. Song isn’t even close to being about OCD but it has that feeling of falling deep down into your thought spirals. 

“Arrow Through Me” – Wings 

This song is so strut / sleazy / billiards core. Very poker night, red velvet smoking jacket to me. I want to sink 8-balls and trick shots to this one. I am practically chalking up the tip of my cue by time the first chorus rolls around. Apparently this album flopped so bad that Paul went solo, but I wasn’t alive to see it, so we play pool in our heads nonetheless!

“anthems “– Charli xcx

I do want anthems, late nights, my friends, New York! Everyone and their mother lives in NYC and the FOMO is debilitating, but I also know why ATX is the spot for now. This song scratches the itch instigated by the very reality of all of my best friends cohabitating on the island of Manhattan.

“SPIKY BOiz” – 1999 Write the Future, Ghostface Killah, Rich Brian, Smino, Surprise Chef

As a proud STL native, I am a sucker for any Smino feature. Honestly I bumped this one originally in March 2024, but recently revisited the album, surprised to see it hadn’t blown up any more. Personally, I want to perform a heist to this song. 

“I Love Cherry” – Medium Build, Glaves

In classic Cherry-Picked fashion, any song with any cherry reference (drug or otherwise, *ahem,* Hey Cowboy!) will make the cut. This is a revisit from 2019’s Wild, my first foray into Medium Build (Nick Carpenter), back when he was still Anchorage-based. “I Love Cherry” listens as plunky, upbeat commute music with an eerily put-together, cookie-cutter feel, a la Amityville. The end solidifies the first half’s underlying spookiness, with a haunting but yummy outro. I have to wonder if MB’s later exploration of his sexual identity is being explored here, too, with overt interest in the nebulous neighborhood assumptively female “Cherry” as something of a cover-up for a different love interest–perhaps his collaborator and producer James Glaves? Who he “cries about” and “[talks] about” in “Gimme Back My Soul” ??? Just spit-balling here…. more to come. Conspiracies aside, this is a happy-go-lucky tune if you’re willing to ignore what it could mean, what might be being left unsaid.