May 23, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic listens closely to an album with a fascinating back story, one that began with guitarist Marisa Anderson making a surprising discovery in archivist Harry Smith’s famed collection of folk songs.

Marisa Anderson performs at NPR Music's Tiny Desk in 2014

NPR

Hello fellow journeyfolk,

Sometimes an artwork comes along at exactly the right time, addressing a predicament I can’t settle for myself. Lately I’ve been experiencing whiplash, but not the physical kind. I can’t seem to absorb all the information coming at me from the Middle East and Africa and China, much less comprehend what life is like for people living through crises in different time zones. At the same time, I’m constantly witnessing online arguments about the right way to approach subjects that are, to use a word I find problematic, “foreign” to those involved in the exchange.

Maybe that’s why, on a recent Tuesday, sitting on my couch flipping through options on the Criterion Channel, I chose a film from a region much in the news lately, by a director whose mission was to get people to go more slowly — in their judgments, their attempts to approach others and really just with every step. Abbas Kiarostami’s quiet masterwork from 1999, The Wind Will Carry Us, was just what I needed to contemplate a virtue not much mentioned as the world burns: patience.

The film follows an unnamed documentarian from Tehran as he descends upon the village of Siah Darreh in Iranian Kurdistan, nearly 500 kilometers from his home base, to capture a mourning ritual that’s becoming extinct: a scarification ritual that leads women to cut their faces after the death of a loved one. The problem for our antihero is that the dead person he’s been told will make this strange sacrifice happen is still breathing when he arrives. The 100-plus-year-old matriarch ailing behind the curtain of a window at which he frustratedly gazes for weeks is not, as a relative had told him, about to expire. She’s rallying.

Waiting ever more itchily, the filmmaker (obviously a stand-in for Kiarostami) passes time by haranguing villagers into sharing details of their lives. They say they’re honored by his presence while subtly shoving aside his attempts. In a café, he inadvertently disrespects the woman proprietor by telling her he’s startled to see her in charge, given the restrictions around women’s lives he sees in Tehran; she corrects him by pointing out that women always work, and it’s men that devalue their labor. The friendship he forms with a young boy faces a challenge when the child spills a secret he never should have been asked to keep. He tries to bond with a teenage girl who’s milking a cow, but comes off vaguely predatory. In every case, the message the villagers send is clear: go slower. Don’t come into an encounter thinking you know what’s going to happen. Take the time and give the space to let it make sense on its own terms.

Absorbing Kiarostami’s wisdom, I realized that something similar flows through the music I’d been listening to all week, which I want to share with you now. Marisa Anderson’s The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music, Vol. 1 is the first step in a massive act of reclamation and empathetic illumination that the guitarist began in 2023. You can read about Anderson and the project’s backstory in this excellent New York Times profile by Will Hermes (I noticed upon a second read that Anderson’s fellow guitar innovator William Tyler tells Hermes that patience may be Anderson’s defining characteristic.) Like Kiarostami’s film, this music is an intervention, a beautiful plea for people to open up to the beauty in lives they would otherwise ignore or even scorn. More importantly, it offers an example of how to do so — by truly taking in something unfamiliar and not immediately categorizing it, but letting it reveal its contours through deep listening and a loving approach.

Inspired by a 2023 trip to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, where she was able to see the legendary 1200-volume record collection of amateur folklorist Harry Smith, Anderson realized that the highly influential anthology he’d assembled from it for Folkways in 1952 — The Anthology of American Folk Music — only told part of the story of vernacular music’s movement through American lives. Countless artists and fans have taken in Smith’s vision of American folk as a mirror of what Greil Marcus famously dubbed “the old, weird America” — a varied and somewhat surreal soundscape encompassing Delta blues and gospel, Appalachian murder ballads, Texas cowboys songs, Louisiana Cajun waltzes and much more.

What the original anthology excluded was music from beyond the nation’s borders, and specifically from regions where Americans had landed in acts of aggression. Anderson found that Smith had collected recordings from many outposts of the American military, including Southeast Asia, The Soviet Republic, Latin America and parts of Africa. “My focus,” she writes in her extensive liner notes, “would be music from countries in U.S. conflict zones, from 1970 through the present day; the wars of my lifetime.” She hoped to better understand the people who’d often been demonized or sentimentalized by Americans, even as their cultures affected ours through military contact and refugee immigration.

Anderson’s act of recovery brought Kiarostami’s film to mind because of the way she went about it. She could have been impatient like the movie’s anti-hero, simply constructing a new playlist to be pressed to vinyl, making herself the authority as curator and editor. Instead, Anderson cleared her schedule completely and fully immersed in the music she’d discovered. First, she listened for months, excluding everything else. She read as much as she could to inform her own artistic choices. Then she took up her instrument and began teaching herself how to access these “foreign” songs within her own artistic practice. An anthology of the original recordings would have opened up the world in a different, worthwhile way, but by sharing her meetings with these songs and the recorded ghosts of their makers, Anderson challenges listeners to think about what they might bring to similar interactions, and what it takes to preserve dignity within them.

I keep putting “foreign” in quotes because Anderson’s music fights against the us-and-them distancing that word reinforces. Her liner notes describe the deliberate, slow-moving attempts to absorb unfamiliar compositional and playing styles (as well as songs written for other instruments) without sacrificing their integrity. Of course, there were limitations; she did not go into the field, as an anthropologist might have, and learn these techniques from actual people. In fact, since the albums are historical, she couldn’t do so.

What Anderson demonstrates is what Kiarostami’s documentarian only comprehends only after that long, hard waiting period — that patience and the diminution of ego are the keys to making connections that resonate. One of my favorite tracks, for example, is “Taqsim for Guitar,” Anderson’s version of a Syrian improvisational piece probably first played on a Western violin. “I transcribed this one as best I could over the course of many weeks,” Anderson writes in her liner notes, explaining how she built an arrangement for guitar that follows the source as closely as possible given the limitations and conditions of playing songs made to be bent microtonally on a fretted instrument. As she plays, I can hear Anderson finding a different instrument within her guitar.

Anderson doesn’t deny her own presence as she walks through the songbooks she has assembled. But her respect is always palpable. She is performing a graceful act of diplomacy from which certain people in power today might learn. UnAmerican Folk does also sometimes evoke familiar American immigrant traditions. “Zar,” a Yemenite dance tune, feels a bit like an Irish-Appalachian jig. The Cambodian “Rop Koh” connects at its core with the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.” As played by Anderson, the Qawwali praise song “Hamd” becomes a fluid, atmospheric excursion that might have been composed by Bill Frisell, himself a great interpreter whose performances show how joyfully opening up to the ways of others can help you strengthen your own.

Kiarostami’s main character has to learn that kind of grace, and finally does so by actually listening instead of imposing his own meanings on every aspect of the village and its residents’ lives. Anderson can’t learn directly from the long-departed musicians whose examples she’s studied for UnAmerican Folk. Her patience and unwavering attention has allowed her to establish a different kind of relationship, a creative dialogue that unfolds across the space and time that separates them. The deep respect she shows this material offers a model for anyone fighting back the xenophobia that, sadly, has infected much of public discourse despite the collapse of boundaries within the virtual world.

UnAmerican Folk challenges each of us who seek out this beautiful music to relax our impulse to immediately name and claim a right to something, as many have done to that old, weird America. Approach it quietly, Anderson’s example says. Take your time. See it in the half light until your eyes adjust. You will eventually realize that whatever or whoever feels “foreign” is both more like you than you thought, and more complicated. That’s the work: to live in that space of admitting there’s always more to learn, about each other, about the world we all make in our own ways.

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Here are a few things that I think are worth your patience this week

In case you’re still thinking about it, this essay by Jaime Brooks is the best thing anybody wrote about that New York Times Greatest Living American Songwriters list.
I’m thrilled that Puja Patel, who did such crucial work at SPIN and Pitchfork, is now editor-in-chief of the gorgeous new publication Totei, which focuses on the craft, art and practice of creative work. Also very happy to see that one of my fave music writers, Olivia Horn, is also on staff there!
I haven’t had a chance to see the latest coolest movie, Is God Is, but I’m infatuated with this song from the soundtrack by Moses Sumney and Kara Jackson: “Sins of the Father.”
My international song picks for this week: Pink Floyd-ish funk rock from South Korea’s Balming Tiger, jumpy New Wave wackiness from Icelandic megapersonality Daði Freyr, and stirring folk-blues from Cameroonian-French singer Irma.

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