music moots with rashad rastam ("emergency contact" by ian sweet)
We are extremely back with Music Moots™, the blogseries where I ask people I know either from the internet or real life to recommend me a song they like, and then I listen to the song and then write a little about it.
I'm trying to do more of these, really dig in, because I had a real lightbulb moment after reading Kyle Chayka's moderately cranky New Yorker piece about "the banality of online recommendation culture." We know the drill in 2024: taste is all we have in this algorithmic wasteland, so you express yourself through your taste in stuff, and then you recommend it to others online as a form of social currency. Cool, but that's an open-ended transaction—what happens when you receive someone else's recommendation, digest it, live in the moment with it, and react to it? That's Music Moots.
Anyway, today we have Rashad Rastam at the moots table. Rashad is one of those groovy contemporary polymaths whose bona fides I must double-check with a magnifying glass to make sure I get them all down. He has his own creative studio Dahsar, he takes photos, he makes music, and most relevant for our business here, he has a podcast called Wear Many Hats where he has conversations with people who are doing interesting things.
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I guested on that podcast recently and we had a very fun chat about music blogging, and how it's totally back and the future of music media (again), as well as things like Brooklyn Vegan's graphic design, Charli XCX changing all her album covers on streaming, and turning your online haters into your friends. So I thought it was perfect to ask Rashad for a music recommendation! He came through with "Emergency Contact" by Ian Sweet. Here's the rec:
"As you get older, you'll want to stop putting your family members as your emergency contact. You start putting down the one you call your partner as your emergency contact either at the doctor's office or entering a new country. The production of "Emergency Contact" is a melody that gets stuck in your head with the acoustic guitar played in certain parts of the song. The main melody that I talk about begins and ends. It's an indie pop song that Ian Sweet's Jillian Medford says in Rolling Stone that 'she refuses to boxed into the indie rock genre.'
At the time of writing, Jillian Medford is dating Please Don't Destroy's Martin Herlihy and he co-stars in the music video directed by Brittany Reeber. I am a fan of having your significant other, no matter how long you are dating for, be present in your projects. It shows the support that one plays in your creativity. You can see the affection between the lines and if there are any cracks in the relationship, it's brought into the scene. Jillian may be Martin's emergency contact or vice versa."
As soon as I listened to this song and the doodly little synth started wandering over the soft crunch of the guitar downstrums, my shoulders eased from their rigid posture and I took perhaps the first deep breath of the day. By the chorus, I knew this song would inspire anyone to hoist their Bic in the air...but like halfway up, not a full extension, this isn't "November Rain" or anything: it's a chill time, cruising on tasteful hesitation, cooing instead of wailing.
"Emergency Contact" is what I would call a train-roller of a song. That means it is worthy of putting on as your Amtrak pulls out of the station, and you adjust your headphones and lean your forehead against the window (because you got a window seat, nice) and ponder a medium-intensity interpersonal problem, or maybe you want to play the hits and think about a high-intensity interpersonal problem from a long time ago. Whatever you do, don't press play a fuckin second before the train starts rolling. And in fact, give it a second after the train starts rolling, you know how these Amtrak trains are. Phoebe Bridgers is my current queen of the train-rollers, though I also like Lana Del Rey and Hop Along for these matters.
I didn't know anything about Ian Sweet, so I did some cursory googling. Medford's been putting out albums under the Ian Sweet name since 2016, though there's music on her Bandcamp from as early as 2013. "Emergency Contact" is the second single off last year's album Sucker. After hearing this song, I would like to listen to more of her tunes, so Sucker is going on my ambulatory albums list.
s. moxley
Let's end with a triangulation. There are two songs "Emergency Contact" reminds me of. One is "Now, Now" by SGL, which shares its tasteful palette and wistful tone but cranks the tempo a little; the other is "End of Beginning" by Djo, aka the musical identity of the Stranger Things actor Joe Keery, who also was pretty incredible in the Pavements movie. All three are not quite ballads, not full-on rockers, but a secret third thing that offers a kinder, gentler catharsis. For the times when you don't wanna fully cry, but you do want to sniffle just a bit.
Thank you Rashad! Listen to Wear Many Hats podcast, it's great. There are even some friend of the pod / friend of the blog crossovers, like Serge from Drink More Water, and Allyson Camitta aka Shallowhalo!
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