It is springtime. Even in Minnesota, crocuses are purpling the ground, buds are burgeoning, the creek gurgles along. Days are stretching out, an ant crawls across my desk, I begin to open all the windows. A thunderstorm crackles overhead for hours; I watch potholes turn into ponds.
Emily Dickinson writes, “A little madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King”. To me, the hope endemic to spring always carries undercurrents of rebellion- not just the end of the cold and dark but a refutation of it, the decadence of light and birdsong equal parts defiant and sweet. There’s something reckless about spring- running in shorts across snow-dotted ground, people walking the streets instead of sitting inside, the rediscovery of Earth’s capacity for color. Spring is a heady tonic; we drink it and catch the fever of sensory potential.
Flowers epitomize this- sprouting delicate and hearty from roots invisible to us, bowing down after a couple-week curtain call, filling the air with themselves. Here’s a bouquet of flower-adjacent songs for your spring, both reckless and sweet.
1. “Lilacs” by Waxahatchee
This is one of my favorite Waxahatchee songs. Known for her lyrics’ eclectic insight, “Lilacs” brims with a simultaneous defiance and defeat. I love the line “If I’m a broken record, write it in the dust babe / I’ll fill myself back up like I used to do”- it feels like an exaltation of self-awareness. “Lilacs” proclaims that needing love from somebody else need not preclude the love we have for ourselves.
2. “Fruits of My Labor” by Lucinda Williams
Lavish with ripe fruit and flowers, “Fruits of My Labor” finds Williams finding her post-break up world, though tinged by tears, still brimming with brightness. “Lemon trees don’t make a sound / ‘Til branches bend and fruit falls to the ground, baby”, she sings. Love, like lemons, can ripen to a point of no return. In this song, Williams sings of a heartbreak with momentum.
3. “Cattails” by Big Thief
“Cattails” by Big Thief feels exactly like one of its lines- “Riding that train in late June / With the windows wide by your side”. It sounds like that time of the year when daylight spills over places we thought could only ever be dark, when air rushes through corners we assumed stagnant. Like most good Big Thief songs, “Cattails” offers us a portal- where death is another ride on a train to where the cattails sway.
4. “Wildflower & Barley” by Hozier (feat. Allison Russell)
I first listened to this Hozier tune biking in rural Southeastern Minnesota, and was struck by its aptness- “Springtime in the country / Each time, I’m shocked by the light / The world lying fallow / And you are apart from me / Everything in my vision is movement and life”. I’m particularly struck by the use of the word “fallow”, and its implication of land left to rest in order to restore. A reminder that an intentional lack can allow for new life, “Wildflower and Barely” is as hearty and renewing as its namesake.
6. “Scarlet Begonias” by The Grateful Dead
I was introduced to this song through road trips with my mother. The woman sung about here song could be likened to spring itself, a season “not like other girls”, reminding us we’ve been here before. “I had to learn the hard way to let her pass by”, Garcia sings. Spring is a woman who is into the blues and was never going to stay.
7. “Daffodils” by Jensen McRae
McRae cuts to her, and our, emotional cores with every track in the newly released I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! The abuse detailed in “Daffodils” is made more devastating by its duplicitousness- “He’s a mean drunk, he keeps me in his prayers. / He wants me gone, he wants me everywhere”. “Daffodils” finds McRae wrestling with herself to justify behavior from a lover she knows in her bones to be wrong. On the earlier track, “I Can Change Him”, McRae writes, “Here I am still handing out the benefit of the doubt”. “Daffodils” feels like the song right before she ceases to give it so freely.
8. “Ivy” by Taylor Swift
An “evermore” standout, “Ivy” finds the song’s speaker smothered in the proliferation of their infidelity. Trepidation- “What would he do if he found us out?… He’s gonna burn this house to the ground” – culminates in chaos- “So yeah, it’s a fire / It’s a goddamn blaze in the dark / And you started it”. But the track’s feverish longing makes one wonder if the wreckage was welcome.
9. “Wildflowers” by Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and EmmyLou Harris
The ultimate “not like other girls” anthem to trusting the wildness in your heart, the song’s speaker divulges her lack of belonging in cultivated lands; ultimately leaving her garden for the road. Beginning with the lines, “The hills were alive with wildflowers and I / Was as wild even wilder than they / For at least I could run, they just died in the sun”, Parton, Ronstadt, and Harris sing of a galvanizing discontent. Not at home in the fields where she grew nor stagnant on a hillside, the speaker doesn’t care where she grow as long as its not prescribed.
10. “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus
A response to Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man”, with “Flowers”, Cyrus refutes the idea that love must come from a lover. With a confidence verging on playfulness, a jilted partner finds solace in her capacity for self-love. Mars’ “When I Was Your Man” goes, “I should’ve… taken[n] you to every party / ‘Cause all you wanted to do was dance / Now my baby’s dancing / But she’s dancing with another man”. But Cyrus knows her independence from her ex doesn’t depend on dependence to another man. “I can take myself dancing,” she sings.
