When I was a child, my parents would put me to sleep by playing The Woods So Wild, a suite of Renaissance lute suites performed by the great Julian Bream:

Ever since, I’ve found the sound of classical lute and guitar exceedingly relaxing. Enough so that I even purchased a nylon-stringed guitar myself some years back, and have spent time practicing at least semi-regularly since. While it’s far below the trumpet, and really even below the piano and upright bass and possibly even drums, in terms of my instrumental competence, I can still play a mean “Packington’s Pound” (track 3 above), which is pretty much all I need.

Anyway, also throughout my childhood, I spent a bunch of time on various Pacific islands. My father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, sub-specializes in ocean medicine – if you get the bends in the Pacific, there’s a decent chance you get med-evaced to him. So, during summers, he would head to islands on work trips, to meet local physicians and dive operators and the like, and I got to tag along. (Rough, I know). As a result, I also picked up an early love of slack key guitar, a style of open-tuned, finger-picked playing invented in Hawaii after the military left a huge number of guitars on the islands after WWII, and young-musicians there self-taught without knowledge of traditional tuning and technique.

For example, I’ve listened the grooves off of Keola Beamer’s Mauna Kea (White Mountain Journal) ever since it was released, and I was thrilled to see it used, a decade later, as the soundtrack for Alexander Payne’s wonderful The Descendants:

So, in the midst of this pandemic, and particularly in need of musical soothing, I was particularly excited to discover Yasmin Williams, an unorthodox finger-style lap guitarist. On her latest album, Unwind, she also uses tap shoes, a cello bow, and whatever else she can think of to make music that sounds both contemporary and timeless:

Unwind is great, as are the other albums above in this post.  Especially in these anxious times, I give all of them two very enthusiastic thumbs up.