"Death is real," begins the opening song on Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me. "Someone's there, and then they're not. It's not for singing about. It's not for making into art". It never feels ironic, though, that the band's Phil Elverum then proceeds to sing, in exquisite and often heart-breakingly banal detail about the death of his wife from cancer, and the life he is now left with, in the company of their young daughter. The result, a profound meditation on death and its effects on the living, certainly qualifies as art, and high art at that. The work is likely too raw and real for those in the immediate throes of grief, but it will likely offer much resonance for those further down the road. In my case, I'd been listening to it intensely in the period before my two cats - my best friends - passed away within a few months of each other. I will always be deeply grateful for how the album helped prepare the way for me. But beyond that, A Crow Looked at Me, together with its successor, the possibly even more resonant, Now Only, is one of the most powerful records of human experience that I've encountered. 

The domination of Hollywood by the Marvel Cinematic Universe has, for the most part, resulted in commercial cinema becoming even more grindingly generic in terms of plot and structure. This might also be the case for many of Marvel's TV offerings but there are some notable exceptions, including the recently concluded Loki, and the spectacularly imaginative Legion, which ran from 2017 to 2019. With much of the action taking place inside the mind of the series' eponymous protagonist, the world of Legion is unbounded by any notion of reality - and it seems, also ablissfully agnostic of commercial considerations. With nods to the wild  visual finesse of 70's-era Kubrick, Legion is like no other superhero film or series and more original than nearly anything I've seen on the small screen.

Paul Simon's Seven Psalms sneaked up on me. At first, I found the songs too low-key, devoid of the occasional punchy hooks that usually  pull me into his albums. But after a few plays, things started to shift, and Seven Psalms is already in competition with Simon's  Graceland for time spent on my turntable. A set of stirring meditations on loss and death, the seven songs are fueled by a deep sense of love and beauty. There might not be any salvation coming our way; but redemption, Simon suggests, might just be found in the way that we look at this fragile, threatened world. The result is a gentle, layered masterpiece for our times, and, counter to my initial reservations, its punch is deep and profound. 

While I try to stay above the fray on social media, if anyone disses Marie Kondo, I jump to her defense. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up really did change my life, helping me to build a system  that stems the chaotic spread I tend to generate. And if my home isn't tidy, I can make it so in an easy 10 minutes. This, I should emphasise, is not how things were before I read the book! But beyond helping to create systems and order, there is a deep zen to this hugely impactful book, which is also a kind spiritual trojan horse that smuggles in respect for the physical and metaphysical world, as well as for your own mind, under the guise of re-organising your closet. 

The first time I heard seminal alt-country rockers Uncle Tupelo, it was an instant love affair. More than two decades later - and three decades after the band broke up, subsequently forming Wilco and Son Volt - the tunes are as strong and as strongly felt as ever. I've recently been immersed in their second album Still Feel Gone, and every time I take it off the turntable, I end up putting it back on within a few hours.

Grapefruit - A book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono is one of the loveliest birthday presents I've ever received. Unwrapping it, I read the back-cover text before I'd seen what book it was. "Tunafish Sandwich Piece", it started, seemingly the title of a poem. "Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for one hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tunafish sandwich and eat". It's not a poem, though - it's instructions for a conceptual artwork, one of hundreds contained in Grapefruit. If my art-history knowledge was better, I would have known that already. But it's not, and I didn't, and the book is a delight.

Sade's Lovers Rock from the early 2000s is an album I return to whenever I'm in need of the kind of soothing only she can provide. While Sade has always exuded an effortless cool, she also radiates care and warmth, and it's this warmth that I find so healing. I'm also fascinated by the fact that she has achieved such massive commercial success entirely on her own terms - and without even becoming properly famous.

This wide-ranging account of how life on planet earth might actually have been in the lead up to that thing we call global civilisation radically shifts the goalposts, both in terms of a general account of the past and its implications for the way we think about human nature. Set against the 'big history' approach that has been popularised in the last decade, The Dawn of Everything is a monumental but highly readable and accessible work.