Portions for Foxes: Introduction

For this past year, I posed one song every Monday, each from one artist from one year - neither one repeated - covering basically my life to date. (I turned fifty-four last year, so fifty-two songs is pretty close.)

That series was called This Year, and had the Mountain Goats song of the same name as its exemplar.

I liked doing that, and so there will be a new series for 2024.

This time, I looked at the list from 2023 and asked, "what's missing here?"

And the obvious answer is: women. I went to Vassar; I know that systems that aren't designed to exclude women sometimes do just that, even if there's no malice involved. Inclusion often requires active effort. And so 2024 is my tiny little bit of active effort.

This year's every-Monday post will be a celebration of female solo artists and woman-fronted bands - again, a different artist with a different song every week for the course of the year. I'm trying to avoid "chick singers," in the words of a random Okkervil River song: I'm trying to pick band leaders, not just frontwomen. But who knows if I can always tell? (I guess I apologize in advance if I guess wrong; if I assume a woman had more influence and power than she actually did.)

There's an asterisk to this series, a group of artists who could have been included, but weren't, because they were part of This Year. It's a fairly short list - seeing how short is what made me decide to do all-women for 2024 - but here it is:

• Belly
• Beth Orton
• Caitlin Cobb-Vialet
• Charming Disaster
• Grace Pool
• The Indelicates
• Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden
• Living Pins
• Liz Phair
• Low
• Lydia Loveless
• Melissa Etheridge
• The Mendoza Line
• Mieka Pauley
• Over the Rhine
• Richard and Linda Thompson
• Rilo Kiley
• Wye Oak

Those posts will start with the first one, tomorrow. 2024 has fifty-three Mondays, and I've gotten the list down to exactly fifty-three songs, so I think I'm ready - I think I've cut it down to a manageable project.

They are organized in the most obvious, dull way possibly: alphabetically. For '24, I didn't do the one-song-per-year thing; that was fun but a bit precious, and it tends to be Procrustean. This year's list comes largely from the last two decades - more than half just from 2005-10, when I guess I was paying more attention to popular music - and I don't apologize for that. Most of these women and bands are still making music; I think that's a good thing.

And, like last year, I'll have one extra song to provide the title. I'm calling this series Portions for Foxes, after a song I love but couldn't fit into this list, partially because I'd already had a Rilo Kiley song last year. 

Why that song? Why that title? The title is vague and allusive; it's inspired a bunch of random posts online by people trying to figure out what it means, which is a fine tradition to join. Mostly, I like the song, I like the opacity of it, and I'm amused that the title is an obscure reference to Psalms 63:10  - “They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.”

What does that mean? Well, in the Biblical context, it's King David threatening his enemies with death. In the song, I think it's less stark than that, and more personal. Being torn apart can happen in other ways than physically.

And why the song: it's yet another bad love song, which I'm always fond of. Big emotions make songs mean more. It's complex and circling, grappling with things that the singer can't quite articulate. And it's capacious and open enough to stand for many things, which I want as an overall label for this long, various series.

Most of all: I spent a long time circling songs with "she" and "woman" and "Monday" and "year" in the title, looking for something to strike me as the perfect series title. I didn't find it; I decided to go the other way - quirky and allusive and non-specific, a song I already love that can stand in, enigmatically, for everything else. So here it is: