Get in, losers. We're yearning.

and I’m almost ready to talk about something other than The Come Apart, which is out now!

Yes yes, The Come Apart has been flitting around the big wide world for almost two weeks: huzzah! If, in time, you read the book and enjoy some aspect of it, your words on Goodreads or The Bad Place will be greatly appreciated. If you are an artist of any stripe—not just a music person!—who finds your experience reflected therein, I’d especially love to hear from you. And I’d love to come to your class, book club, bookstore, Substack live session, etc. Hit me up.

Some thoughtful words have been shared about TCA, for which I’m so grateful: BookPage says the novel is “heartfelt” and “emotionally spot-on about the human experience,” also a “shape-shifter” of a story, “one of those books that you’ll read, place back on the shelf and pick back up later in your life to derive from it a completely different meaning.” (Me being me, I’m trying my best not to interpret “shape-shifting” as a backhanded compliment. Pray tell, dear reader: what does a shape-shifting novel suggest to you?) NFocus observes that “The Come Apart emphasizes that it’s alright for dreams to take different shapes over time — and that stillness and self-acceptance are some of the best ways to return to yourself,” and the Chicago Sun-Times says (in a lovely feature) that I pay “incredible attention to detail, and similarly, Chapter 16 notes that the book is “teeming with vivid depictions of” music-life stuff. “Felts portrays songwriting not as a discrete activity, but a never-ending process, a way of life.”

Verisimilitude, baby—it’s my stock in trade. Can’t stop won’t stop.

Events-wise, two more on deck: A reading/convo (with Leigh Ann Couch, editor of SWING) in Sewanee, Tenn., at the University Bookstore on Tuesday, June 30, at 5 p.m., and a reading/convo (with Katie McDougall, my Porch copilot all these years) at Vanderbilt’s Special Collections Library on Thursday, June 9, at 7 p.m.

BIG TIME PROMO DEAL: If you become a paid subscriber to FIELD TRIP now through August, I’ll send you a signed copy of The Come Apart, a sticker, and a bookmark. If you then write a review of the book and share that with me, I’ll send you an original work of watercolor/ink illustration.

Summer 2026 is showing up for my listening ears. I’ve missed doing Songs FTW! regularly here, so today I’m bringing a small bushel. Straddlin’ the top of the heap is Any River, the new album by Nashville darlings and very good dudes Styrofoam Winos, who make the world a sunshinier place with their loose-limbed, easygoing songcraft.

This band is super special in that its three members play all the instruments, rotating bass-drums-guitar from song to song during live performances, and each contributes vocals and lyrics. (In short, they are nothing like poor old Spinning Birds. Far more liberated, one might say.) This feels like a custom-built summer record, perfect for tooling down back roads, en route to (circle one) a waterfall/beach/lake, with bevs stashed in a cooler and a tote bag full of everyone’s favorite snacks. (There is, in fact, a banger groove called “Swimminin.”) These songs luxuriate like they have all the time in the world to get where they’re going, but they manage to be bonbons of pleasure at the same time, ripe for a re-cue. The Winos telegraph a certain worldview: a coin toss of bemused side-eye at This Absurd American Life and a genuine appreciation for the bounty of everyday delights.. Some of my favorite lines:

“All of the sauce that turned our tupperware orange-y red / is watching over the house and all of the sauces ahead”

“Half of what I hear is interference / Half of what I hear is static”

“Heart is loose, wallet’s tight / Apocalypse in the fridge tonight / What’s for dinner? Eggs two ways / I wanna meet you on the gastral plane”

“There I go again / Whistling as I take a load / Down to the Green Hills Recycling Center”

“At Alice’s Place they changed / The bacon on their BLT, oh no” (Ed note: The delivery of that “oh no” is so perfect, you have to hear it to understand!)

I’ve also had the following songs on repeat, each of which supplies the magic wand of a line you can chant like a mantra or shout with a raised fist, both of which I’ll be doing all summer long, thank you very much:

1. ”Still Around,” by Friko:

The chant: “IT ONLY STARTS TO COME WHEN YOU NEED IT MOST!”

2. “Chance to Bleed,” by Kurt Vile:

The chant: “OLD TIME LO-FI DIY ROCK ‘N' ROLL NIGHTS!”

3. “Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon,” by Julia Jacklin (new album out in September):

The chant: “GET AWAY FROM ME (I THINK I’LL LOVE YOU SOON)!”

I’ve also been exploring Roses, the new album from Widowspeak. It contains several dreamy, velvety tracks primed for hot summer nights—for hookups & breakups both— and it may provoke a headswim of Mazzy Star nostalgia, don’t say I didn’t warn ya… Try “If You Change” and “No Driver.”

And then! Last Thursday, 6 pm CT! The big Phoebe Bridgers single drop. Big for me and my daughter and millions of other Phoebe / Boygenius fans. (A new album will be out in August—the day after we drop Thalia at college. Oh my.)

I emerged from a yoga class, sat in my car and tapped play. Came to the end and immediately hit play again. Two listens in, I was hooked. Almost too much so: “Lost Boys” is ear-wormy to the point of aggravation. But for me, the song works, ultimately.

It’s in the way Bridgers delivers the chorus; the melody telegraphs utter and timeless yearning, and the clarion trumpets in the background provide base notes of nostalgia, hearkening back to “Kyoto” on Punisher. (Nostalgia for six years ago? Sure!) The song takes a surprising turn about two-thirds of the way through, into a strings-drenched crescendo that’s too brief to be a bridge and feels Disney coded; then, just as quickly, we swoop down, back to the verses. (Thalia disagrees with my take that the cinematic orchestral bit lasts just long enough—i.e, it’s super short—before the song swerves back to its structure; she thinks it ought to linger longer. For me, it lasts not a half-second too long.) Soon after, another surprise tees up the chorus—this one more of a rock ‘n’ roll signaling, a count-off into a scream: one two three aiiiiiii! Throughout, there are trademark Phoebe lyrical pin-pricks, potent images with quiet power: Lunch money, and a “rifle and your papers.” A broken rib, a twin bed (my fave—ohh, the imagistic layers of the words “twin bed”).

So, yeah, yearning!

Conveniently, before “Lost Boys” dropped I’d already been thinking about yearning, how necessary it is in fiction writing. Plot is “simply yearning challenged and thwarted,” as Robert Olen Butler argues. I’ve seen that “yearning + obstacle” thrust in action in the excellent novel I spent the past week reading, Kayla Rae Whitaker’s Returns & Exchanges, a sweeping Kentucky family/ American Dream saga set in the 1980s, which I’ll have more to say about soon.

It’s maybe safe to say that in The Come Apart, Maggie Corbin’s yearning is dispersed by prism, and the thwarting of it often comes, maddeningly, from within. She yearns for agency and groundedness in her creative life; she also yearns for acceptance and respect from, ultimately, the one person who won’t be able to give these to her.

Summer ‘26 may be destined to be a “sad girl summer,” as Isabella Gomez Sarmiento wrote recently in the NPR Music newsletter. She noted thematic links between this season’s new albums from Bridgers, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams:

I think it’s safe to say we have officially entered the sweat-stained, tear-streaked glory of sad girl summer…the overlapping image that comes into focus is the aching existentialism of being a 20-something-year old woman who knows she’s making not-so-great decisions.

If this is true, well, you could say that The Come Apart’s 29-year-old Maggie, with her band Spinning Birds in the rearview, is arriving at the party right on time.

THE COME APART is out now from TriQuarterly Books.

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