Hi Reader ! How you been lately?

I hope you’re having the best summer of the year! June/July is always bittersweet: I juggle the excitement of making plans, seeing people, and wearing summer dresses with the sadness of saying goodbye to my students, never quite sure if I’ll see them again. Year after year, I keep forgetting how hard it is.

I’m writing to you from a café on my favourite street in the city, happy with how this summer is unfolding and fully aware of the beauty in the very ordinary life I live. I’ve been reading in the park and showing my arms and legs again. I went to a karaoke, watched movies alone on my sofa and with people at the cinema. I watched the sunrise at the beach. I changed my home decor to light colours. I had both my first ice cream and my first gazpacho of the year (the personal milestone that marks the beginning of my summer). I saw Hinds play at Primavera Sound and Christopher Owens playing at Apolo. I started a new journal. I made cartoons of my friends. I smoked weed and drank beer for the first time in years. I renovated my balcony and now spend most of my time there.

I had friends visiting. I made travel plans. I played guitar for hours. I helped a friend record a song. I started recording demos of my own songs. And I wrote things on my window that don’t make sense but are funny, and I love them. Tomorrow I’m flying out to Berlin where I’ll be writing Issue#6 and working on things I haven’t told anyone about…

I also love writing this and that you’re reading it, wherever you are in the world. I started this newsletter because I didn’t have anyone to talk about music with, or to share songs with. I long for a kind of friendship that feels so easy and familiar we could just show up at each other’s place, sit at the computer, play songs, and go through the lyrics the way I used to do with Jenny or Dano, before we all lived in different countries, before our worlds got so big.

That’s not to say this space is a consolation prize, not at all. I love when you reach out and tell me which song was your favourite, or recommend something new. Because even if I don’t know you well (or at all), I know we’re moved by the same things. That’s magical, and I’ll never take it for granted. Thank you.

I hope you enjoy Issue #5.

Now hit play and listen : ) let's talk songs #6 💌 • Fio... I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus... PREVIEW   ​ And remember you can listen to all the previous issues in one single playlist here​

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A female artist

I'd like to walk around in your mind someday by Vashti Bunyan (1970)

I bought Wayward, Vashti Bunyan’s autobiography, at Rough Trade East during Record Store Day. I read half of it in two days, then deliberately slowed down. It’s so soft and delicate I didn’t want it to end. Like one of those chocolates you let melt in your mouth instead of chewing.

I bought the book because I love her music, and because she’s always felt like a mystery. I knew she released an album in the early ’70s that went mostly unnoticed, and then she vanished. I’d heard that a critic wrote that her songs had depress him so she decided to never record music again, that's how guilty she felt about making someone feel bad.

She was an art school dropout from a family of professionals who didn’t know what to do with her. They wanted her to be a secretary. Instead, she became a nomad. For nearly twenty years she lived in nature, traveling in a horse-drawn cart she called Happiness Runs, with two dogs, a horse, and her boyfriend. Then, in 1997, she googled herself and found that collectors were buying her old records for hundreds of pounds. That was the beginning of her starting playing and writing again, more than 40 years later.

The first song I heard by her was I Want to Walk Around in Your Mind Someday.

The lyrics are short, so I’ll share them here:

For a long time, I read it as a sweet love song . But now it feels more complex. It sounds like someone longing for power or at least a sense of control in a relationship that makes them feel powerless.

The first four lines read like a dream-sequence to-do list: walk, jump, rearrange. Bodily actions applied to intangible things (words, solitude, attitude). Then comes the reasons why:

Later, she shifts the tone:

These are my favorite lines. The idea of literally walking inside someone’s mind, noticing the dark corners and then choosing to sit in the sun of the things I like about you. There’s a tenderness in sing my songs and find out what they mean to you, as if there’s been no way to know until now. Like there’s been a wall between her and their reaction.

And then:

Because ultimately it’s not a need for confrontation or connection. It’s about wanting to see, to know, to have access without giving yourself away. To slip in and out of someone’s mind without them noticing.

Either a guy or a band

Freeze the saints by Stephen Malkmus (2005)

When in the late nineties Vashti Bunyan found out that people liked the songs she had recorded 30 years earlier, she decided to make music again. The first time she performed after her long anonymity was in 2003, when Stephen Malkmus (from Pavement) invited her to a music festival he was curating in London.

I’m a huge Pavement fan, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn this. They’re two artists I would never have connected in my head, and I love knowing that musicians I admire also admire each other.

And while everyone knows and loves Pavement, I’ve never met anyone with whom I could talk about Stephen Malkmus’ solo albums. To me they feel more intimate, more poetic, less dude-ish.

“Freeze the Saints”, the way I see it, is about returning to someone from the past, even if it’s just for casual sex, and being okay with it because YOLO.

There’s this idea of not really knowing who the other person is anymore, but trying to figure it out while hoping they’re still the same as you. So the line feels like half a question and half an affirmation:

And then:

My favourite lines are:

It’s inviting this person to accept that their time together will be short-lived, because everything is, and to just go with it. In other words, nothing lasts forever, so let’s enjoy it while it does.

The verb languish is a rare one. It’s one of those words I’ve used in Spanish (languidecer) without being completely sure I was using it correctly. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means:

So the line “Help me languish here” feels like a request to make the languishing a little more bearable. Which, in its own way, is romantic.

I’ve often wondered about the name of the song, Freeze the Saints. It wasn’t until recently that I made the connection. In some calendars, each day has the name of a saint, so freezing the saints could mean freezing time. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it. Who knows.

This song is a cool kid with glasses

Presumably dead arm by Sydney Gish (2016)

I’ve loved this song for years.

Not only are these probably my favourite lyrics I’ve heard in the last 10 years, but she recorded, mixed, mastered, and published it all by herself when she was 22 and studying Music Industry. There’s bitterness, humour, tenderness, and hopelessness mixed in and expressed with a level of creativity I don’t often come across. Oh, there’s a dead arm too...

This is something Helga Pataki could have written if she hadn’t been a 10-year-old cartoon character.

The early dismissiveness in:

is justified by:

From here on, the lyrics become really honest, the dismissiveness now being:

This shows a very vulnerable and beautiful side, especially in my favourite lines:

Then it turns very cynical about the future:

I also love how, at the end, she references the zombie arm mentioned at the beginning, saying she’s been carrying it for years, and you can hear the pain when she sings:

This resentment leads to the final lines:

Every time I listen to this song, I end up asking myself the same question: How can someone write this?

All her lyrics are amazing, you should go check them out.

You know this artist, maybe not this song

Happiness runs by Donovan (1969)

Vashti Bunyan travelled across Scotland to join Donovan, whom she had met through mutual friends. She had a green car and named it Happiness Runs. I was happy to get the reference, Happiness Runs is one of my favourite Donovan songs.

It made me think about how I discovered Donovan’s music, since it wasn’t something that was played at home when I was growing up. I ended up unlocking a whole part of my life I hadn’t thought about in forever.

When I was a teenager there was a clothing brand called Solo Donovan. It was a very small brand run by two young fashion designers who made beautiful pieces mixing flower-patterned fabrics from the ’60s with ruffles and more contemporary elements. I was obsessed. I was also a reckless and over-confident 17-year-old working Fridays and Saturdays at a bar in Palermo Soho (I lied about my age to get the job) and I remember saving up whatever money I could to buy pieces from that shop.

One time my boss offered me to work on a Wednesday, a school night. The bar was just a few blocks away from the MTV studios and they had booked the bar for a private birthday party. I wanted this blue jumper so badly that I accepted immediately, despite having a biology exam the next morning. I told myself I could surely pull it off, and I told my mom I was staying at a friend’s for the night. I shoved my Catholic school uniform into my backpack and at 7 p.m. took the 141 bus to Bestial Bar.

That night I got a bit tipsy, met a guy, and we ended up passionately making out in the bathroom (he had no idea I was underage). Then he asked if I wanted to go back to his place after work, but I refused because

a) I was a virgin and

b) I was a sensible child, I had to sit my exam.

(The story with this guy is a much longer one and might or might not come up in another issue)

The bar closed at 6 a.m. and school started at 7:30, the bus ride from Palermo to Flores during rush hour could take up to one hour, so I walked to the nearest open café, had breakfast, and changed into my uniform in the bathroom. On the bus to school I revised for the exam, I always got the highest marks in my class, so I wasn’t too worried. There was no one home when I got back from school, so I took a nap and by dinnertime it was like nothing had happened. I remember being very proud of myself: in the span of 24 hours I had made money, gotten tipsy, shared a steamy moment with a man (not a dumb teenage boy!), nailed an exam, and deceived my family. All without sleeping! The next day I bought my Solo Donovan jumper, which I wore for years like a trophy.

This wasn’t a one-off, it became a bit of a double life. Now that I’m older I can see how problematic it was. I have always been convinced that there's anything I can't do, and that's a good thing now. But when I was 17, unsupervised, and eager to have a taste of “the real world” things were a bit more delicate. I felt proud that I was getting away with being both a teen and an adult making my own money, while the other kids at school just did whatever they were told by mom and dad. I was so far up my own ass, when in reality my nights of solo adventure in the big city were only possible because of neglectful parents and men in their late 20s and 30s who were more than happy to benefit from a child.

I had completely forgotten about all of this and had never really looked at it with adult eyes until now, writing this. What a thing to unpack at 10 a.m.

All this to say: I didn’t know who Donovan was until I googled him and fell in love with his music. This was in 2005, when access to music was very different. I didn’t know anyone else who listened to Donovan (except, I assume, the girls from the shop, but I didn’t know them personally), and I never introduced his music to my friends because I didn’t think they’d like it. At the time, they were listening to Placebo, Miranda, and Boom Boom Kid. I loved those bands too, but I was mostly listening to Bowie and going through a Dylan phase. In a way, I liked having Donovan to myself he belonged to my private universe, and his songs felt like they existed just for me.

A couple of years ago, my friends and I were driving up a mountain somewhere in Catalonia. It was an autumn Sunday afternoon. The trees were yellow and red, we were wearing oversized jumpers and reading about different types of mushrooms we could pick to make a risotto. Those trips were very wholesome, and the drive back always disheartening. I would get the rose tint of nostalgia in real time, knowing how beautiful everything would look as a memory. I took loads of pictures with my film camera, trying to capture it all, an attempt to hack the fleeting hours.

We would take turns playing music in the car until we got so high up the mountain we lost internet connection. I remember when Eliza played Happiness Runs while Oscar was driving, and how we all started singing along. I now know that of course everyone knows Donovan, we’d just never talked about him before so it was very strange for my brain to register all of us singing this song that had always felt only mine. The track, the winding roads, the golden leaves, it was a perfect movie moment. I felt like the universe was reassuring me that I was doing everything right.

The way I see it, Happiness Runs is about how small we are in a world that’s constantly moving and changing. How happiness isn’t linear, but cyclical. I was thinking about the lines:

I know the idea is that happiness feeds itself, but I read it more like a cycle — you know, how sometimes you’re happy and sometimes you’re not. Lately I’ve been thinking about how much agency we really have over our own happiness. I live a life where everything in it makes me happy: my home, my job, what I do in my free time, the people I surround myself with. I’ve proudly curated a life where there’s no single source of unhappiness.

And yet, I found myself in a situation recently that I wasn’t happy about. The kind of drama I left behind years ago. I came home after a long night feeling emotionally drained. A few hours of sleep later, while sipping coffee on the balcony, I had this moment of clarity: I can just choose not to be in this picture. I can opt out.

It was so simple and still felt like a revelation, the idea that I can energetically switch from unhappiness to happiness by detaching from whatever feels off. Thought is like a little boat upon the sea, and if the sea is consciousness, I can let go and float back to the things that make me feel good. The things that are always there, steady and mine. It’s like, they key to being mentally stable and not co-depending!, because if you have enough cool, grounding, healthy, gratifying things of your own in your life, if that's your baseline, you don’t look for them in external things/people. And then, when eventually something not-so-great comes along you can just go back to your own source of happiness and stability. Nothing affects you that much.

You can have everything if you let yourself be.

My discovery of the month

June guitar by Alex G (2025)

I found my summer 2025 song. The highlight of my summer playlist. The song that would play in the background when me from the future thinks of this time in my life. It’s called June Guitar and it came out in June. It’s also the second single from the new Alex G album, which comes out this Friday. I saved the date on my calendar and I really really really hope the other songs are in the same line as the two singles.

Alex G is the Elliott Smith of my generation. His songs are soft and gentle, but they fuck you up if you stay there too long. I was reading the comments under the music video for June Guitar and someone wrote:

and just like that, everything is okay again.

I couldn’t have said it better.

Speaking of the music video, I want to live in it. He’s in a house with his friends and band, they’re playing music and painting the walls, and then he plays the accordion and they end up dancing. He looks so jolly but also incredibly hot (when did that happen?).

It’s Alex G’s wholesome summer. His new album Headlights comes out on July 18th. I’m waiting for it like it’s going to save me from something I haven’t yet understood.

I like the wordplay, being at the end of your rope but swinging freely from it, like when you have nothing left to lose.

Then there's an invitation which feels almost personal:

I didn’t do this on purpose, but I like the connection with Freeze the Saints and Malkmus’ invitation to “learn to sing along and languish here.” In both songs, the narrator wants the other person to join them in a raw emotional place, to meet them there and share the weight.