Pull Back to the Key

in which I venture to correct an oversight

The Song

Title: After a Summer Rain

Artist: Fog Chaser

Album: After a Summer Rain (Single)

Year: 2023

The Story

Writing a sprawling, year-end musical retrospective is always an exercise in (mildly) controlled chaos. Sometimes that control slips a little bit (more than usual). To wit: In tracking my year-end lists for 2022 and 2023, I continually updated a playlist folder in Spotify with any new album releases that interested me. But I only tracked albums (and EPs) and I only tracked them in Spotify. And that meant that each time I gathered my notes to talk about the last two years in music, I overlooked the delightful ambient work of Fog Chaser, the solo project of Portland-based artist Matt Evans.

And that’s a shame because I have listened to a lot of Fog Chaser over the last two years.

See, Fog Chaser has released some of its material on Spotify, but only some and only in single format. That’s because Fog Chaser has embraced a novel approach to music release: the newsletter. Just as Songs & Stories arrives in your inbox once a month,¹ Fog Chaser will supply you with one song, once a month, if you subscribe here.² Which, obviously, I think you should.

New music is the primary appeal of a Fog Chaser subscription, sure. (And if you’re into ambient, naturalistic songs with a soothing vibe, this music will be very appealing to you.)³ But the newsletter also includes original photography, (implied) book and music recommendations,⁴ and selected poetry (from other poets).⁵

What I’m saying is: I should have been recommending Fog Chaser to you, dear reader, for each of the last two years. So now I’m correcting that oversight. Put on “After a Summer Rain,” which feels to me like someone pulled all the heartrending despair and gnashing of teeth out of Clint Mansell’s excellent soundtrack for The Fountain, leaving only the wonder and ethereal sense of undefined hope, and just soak it in. This is good stuff. And I’ll do a better job of remembering that this year.

I give “After a Summer Rain” four out of five stars.

1. Also available for delivery direct to your inbox: my fiction newsletter, Pack of Lies. Subscribe today so that you don’t miss my next short story, coming … sometime … this year … probably!

2. There are both free and paid options.

3. A refrain in each edition of the newsletter suggests that you might “sit with this month’s song, photo, and poem and make them a small part of your day” and that’s a really lovely thing to do! In a slightly different application, I highly, highly recommended Fog Chaser as the soundtrack for your morning work hours.

4. The newsletter notes what Matt is currently reading and listening to, but—wisely?—never actually recommends that you read those books or listen to those songs. I have taken a, uh, slightly more forceful approach with this newsletter. Matt, I admire your restraint.

5. The wonderful Mary Oliver has appeared more than once, to my delight. And the most recent installment featured “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, a lovely poem I know only because it was the namesake of a Paper Route album that I quite enjoyed.