Toh Kay
Recommended
Perhaps it should be embarrassing to admit that the music I’ve cried to most often is from Streetlight Manifesto lead singer Tomas Kalnoky’s solo project, Toh Kay. To say I was obsessed would be an understatement—Streetlight was the first concert I attended alone my freshman year of high school, and I had prepared a month prior by studying the lyrics of the band’s entire discography. Toh Kay’s tender and intricate acoustic demos album, Streetlight Lullabies, was what Freud would have deemed a “transitional object.” It’s music that makes the frantic, angsty, existential crises of late-adolescents sound soothing. For hours I’d hole up in my room listening to the musings of “Somewhere in the Between” and “A Better Place, a Better Time,” reading Kalnoky’s liner notes about moving from the Czech Republic to New Jersey, and humming in the missing horn sections. And crying. CAMERON CROWELL