Sam Amidon - "Little Johnny Brown". The tide brings in different things. One day: cockleshells, sea-glass, driftwood. Another day it's seaweed and turtleshell. This morning you wake and climb the bluff and there are jellyfish, millions of them, gleaming in the sand like rubies. The tide brings seagulls, planing, and buzzards, loping. It brings stones. It brings strangers in ships, and wide white sails. It brings salt. It leaves the salt on the beach. When you lie on the beach it smells like tears. The tide does not bring her back.

Sam Amidon's album with Doveman's Thomas Bartlett, under the name Samamidon, is one of my favourite folk records of this year: strange, wild, weary. "Little Johnny Brown" is taken from the upcoming All Is Well, due in February on Bedroom Community. It was recorded in Iceland by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who produced Bonnie "Prince" Billy's The Letting Go, with brass, string and woodwind arrangements by Nico Muhly (Bjork, Philip Glass). I cannot wait to hear the rest of it. (These are Sam's favourite albums and films of 2007: R. Kelly and Verhoeven sit at number one.)

Silver Jews - "Frontier Index". Poets and comedians are in the same business. "I just want to say something true," David Berman sings, voice like a snakeskin. You can imagine him, late, drunk, standing with a microphone before a brick wall and knowing it's not going well. Getting belligerent. Poets do not necessarily make good comedians, nor comedians poets, but they are in the same business. Poems are like punchlines, or punchlines like poems. They rewire your brain, bring in cold and warm fronts. There are two jokes in "Frontier Index", and I won't spoil them for you. They are both about inevitability. Like Homer Simpson says: "It's funny because it's true." I did not laugh when I first heard them but I smiled and for a moment I forgot the cold.

[buy Natural Bridge]

(smiling bird photographer unknown.)