Tag: 240926

Troubadour

Peter Bradley Adams makes first New Hampshire appearance

In 1999, Robbie Robertson recognized the talents of Peter Bradley Adams and brought his band Eastmountainsouth into the studio to make a critically acclaimed album. Adams went solo a few years later and has produced a steady stream of stellar music since. In the pre-internet era he would headline summer sheds, but this is now and Adams is content to have a dedicated audience that fills up places like the Music Hall Lounge in Portsmouth, where he appears Oct. 2. It’s his first time performing in New Hampshire.

Adams has a storyteller’s knack for pulling listeners into his songs. The title track of his last full-length album A Face Like Mine is a hardscrabble portrait of generational regret, a Steinbeck novella sung like a James Taylor song. Miles Away, a four-song EP released in spring 2024, couples apocalyptic allegory on the title traack with the optimism of “When She Comes” — the latter has a lovely harmony from Ruth Moody of the Wailin’ Jennys and a haunting Mayuri Vasan outro.

One of the most appealing things about Adams is his voice, soothing and understated while also utterly engaging. Which is why it’s strange that he resisted using it for a long time, until the legendary leader of The Band nudged him. Born into a musical family, discovering his dad’s Beatles records at age 5 helped seal his fate as a musician. But at the time he met Robertson, Adams considered himself a composer, not a singer-songwriter.

“I was hiding a bit in the beginning behind Kat, the other half of the duo, and he was like, ‘Man, I really want you to sing more,’” Adams said recently from his home in Nashville. “I would get off the phone and be like, ‘f-ing Robbie Robertson just told you to do this, how can you not?’ I’m really grateful that he got what I was, could kind of hear what I was trying to reach…. We weren’t close friends or anything, but I do feel very connected to him because of that.”

Adams often goes it alone in the studio, building songs track by track, but lately he’s missing the spark of playing with other musicians.

“I realized that it was just killing me, that process, trying to construct something that felt like people in the room together,” he said. “Sometimes it works and a lot of times it doesn’t.”

He’s drawn to working with others. One example is the gorgeous “Rachel’s Song,” co-written and recorded with musician and director Haroula Rose for her film Once Upon a River. In that spirit, Adams reconnected with his longtime friend and collaborator Lex Price when he began to think about making a new album earlier this year.

“I’ve worked with him really longer than anyone…. He’s one of the reasons why I moved to Nashville,” he said. “We talked about it, and he said, ‘Let’s get an incredible band and go in the studio. And it’s not like it all has to happen live, but get as much as we can live so that all the elements are going down at the same time. I know this is how you’re supposed to make a record on some level. But it was just good for me to actually do it again.”

They went into Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, with Price on bass, Todd Lombardo playing acoustic guitar, electric guitarist Jed Hughes and Jerry Rowe on drums. “These are all the best guys in town, that straddle doing really interesting, creative, independent stuff,” Adams said, adding, “I’ve got almost a full record.”

As icing on the cake, Adams is heading out to his old hometown of Los Angeles to record Greg Leisz on steel guitar for one of the tracks. Leisz is a legend who’s worked with everyone from Joe Cocker to Sheryl Crow as well as Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. He’s also produced records by Jackson Browne, Greg Copeland and others. “For me he’s like a prophet,” Adams said. “I mean, he is just my favorite musician in the world … there’s just no one like him.”

World Music for Peace – The Meter Maids, Amorphous Band w/ Senie Hunt & EJ Ouellette, and Big Blue World
When: Friday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rockingham Ballroom, 22 Ash Swamp Road, Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at coastalsoundsnh.com (21+)

Senie Hunt Trio appears Thursday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m. at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord, and Senie Hunt plays solo at the Concord Multicultural Festival in Keach Park on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

Featured photo: Senie Hunt.Courtesy photo.Photo by Christine Torrey (Birch & Fern Photography)

The Music Roundup 24/09/26

Local music news & events

• Native sons: With their doom-y anthem “Life Underground,” brother duo Hobo Wizard ushered in summer last July. Built on a thick rhythm spread under guitar riffs that equally evoke Sabbath and surf bands, it’s a smash, paying tribute to the local basement music scene. Get your taste at a show that also includes Trading Tombstones and Connecticut band VRSA. Thursday, Sept. 26, Feathered Friend Brewing, 231 S. Main St, Concord. See facebook.com/VRSAband.

• Healing music: A few years ago, Mary Gauthier published her first book, Saved by a Song. It served as both a guide for the aspiring songwriter and a personal chronicle of how the craft kept her alive after she got sober. Gauthier walks the walk as an artist; 2017’s Rifles & Rosary Beads was drawn from Songwriting With Soldiers, a project she launched to help veterans cope as civilians. Friday, Sept. 27, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $29 at palacetheatre.org.

• Big soul: Called “the greatest blues singer of her generation” by the Washington Post, Shemekia Copeland performs in support of her latest album, Blame It On Eve. The new release features a who’s who of the roots music scene, including backing vocals from Alejandro Escovedo, dobro master Jerry Douglas and DaShawn Hickman on sacred steel guitar. Friday, Sept. 27, 8 p.m., Rochester Opera House, 31 Wakefield St., Rochester, $38 and $42 at rochesteroperahouse.com.

• Drifting back: Since winning American Idol and charting with the song “Home” a dozen years ago, Phillip Phillips has risen steadily in the pop music world. He considers his most recent release, Drift Back, “a love album,” while adding the qualifier, “it’s not all happy.” Saturday, Sept. 28, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $45 and up at tupelomusichall.com.

• Afternoon songs: One writer enthused that Andrea Paquin’s voice “goes down like red wine over good conversation.” She once had an epiphany listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Helpless” and spent days learning it note for note. Her folky music has been compared to Joni Mitchell and Indigo Girls. The singer-songwriter performs an outdoor show at a bucolic winery. Sunday, Sept. 29, 1:30 p.m., Averill House Vineyard, 21 Averill Road, Brookline, $5 at eventbrite.com.

His Three Daughters (R)

Three women bristle around each other in a New York apartment as they wait out their father’s final moments in His Three Daughters, a quiet movie packed with bittersweet humor and first-rate performances.

Oldest sister Katie (Carrie Coon) comes from Brooklyn, where she lives with her family that includes a teenage daughter she is clashing with. Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is the mother to a young toddler and lives somewhere on the West Coast. They return to their father’s apartment, where he lives with Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), the daughter of his second wife, who he has raised since she was little. He is her father, she is his daughter, as Rachel explains at one point, as much as he is the father of Katie and Christina, but you can tell they’ve never entirely thought that.

On top of the difficult relationship they’ve clearly always had, they are now all dealing with grief — Rachel by getting and staying high, Katie by being angry at that and pretty much everything else Rachel does, and Christina, who we get the sense is always a little woo-woo, by what feels like aggressive meditation and forceful positivity. Katie and to some extent Christina sort of poke at Rachel about the fact that she will get their father’s large rent-controlled apartment to herself when he’s gone. Benjy (Jovan Adepo), Rachel’s boyfriend, urges her to stand up for herself and the fact that she has been with her father through his illness, taking care of him and keeping him company. And everybody seems to agree that Christina is, as Benjy said, not on this planet. These are three big personalities squished together in an apartment — big personalities with a lot of feelings they don’t know how to manage. It’s claustrophobic, it’s darkly funny and it’s occasionally throat-grabbingly sad.

There’s an almost stage-play quality to some of the elements of this movie — the mostly-in-one-apartment setting, the conversations between sisters — but with the best that an indie movie has to offer in the way it can study characters or root an insular space in a larger setting. The movie often gives us long, close shots of the women as they’re talking or just sitting and thinking. They don’t have the space to get away but we get the space and the time to really watch them — and to watch the excellent performances that Olsen, Coon and Lyonne are giving. The women give you so much with facial expressions and looks — the hard set of Coon’s face, Lyonne’s big-eyed gazes, Olsen’s ability to look quiet and neutral and also sort of crazed and at the end of her emotional rope. The movie can organically have them deliver monologues about their dad and also fight saying almost nothing and it all reads as believable. The movie also gets the balance of humor, dark humor and sadness just right. A

Rated R for language and drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, His Three Daughters is an hour and 41 minutes long and is in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

Transformers One (PG)

Before they were Optimus Prime and Megatron, the rival Transformers from Cybertron were Orion Pax and D-16 in Transformers One, an animated origin story for the Transformers and perhaps for a new approach to the franchise.

And while these Transformers are animated and lacking in the PG-13-ness of Michael Bay’s whole weird Megan Fox live-action deal, the movie is probably right at the edge of what I’d show to younger Transformers fans (think older elementary school-aged or so), what with all the robot-on-robot violence and characters being sliced in half and whatnot. I definitely heard some concerned squeaks from kids in the theater during some of the scarier parts. One of the too-cool-for-elementary-school kids I saw the movie with, while declining to call the movie scary, did say there were some creepy parts.

The animated nature of the movie does, however, allow for what feel like fuller, more complete personalities for the Transformers than some of the live-action movies. While we are still dealing with actor voices and separately generated images, these Transformers feel more, I don’t know, nuanced? We’re watching Orion Pax and his good buddy D-16 on their journeys to becoming Optimus and Megatron and I felt like the movie did a good job of showing those character arcs.

When we start out, Orion Pax (voice of Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (voice of Brian Tyree Henry) are miners looking for Energon, the Transformers’ energy source, which used to flow freely on Cybertron but has become harder to find since the Primes died during a conflict years earlier. (And if that all sounds like nonsense words, maybe just: “robots search for glowy blue stuff.”) But Orion firmly believes he and his friend are more than meets the eye, despite their lowly social status and inability to transform. To prove that, he tricks D-16 into joining a big race that only transforming Transformers have ever competed in. They don’t win, but their moxie attracts the attention of Sentinel Prime (voice of John Hamm), the big noise hero and leader of their massive city-state. He promises them that they’ll become role models, but a jealous competitor sends them to the garbage transfer room, where B-127 (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), who is called B, or maybe “Badassatron” if he can make that nickname stick, is ecstatic see other people for once. When it turns out some of the trash contains information that could help Sentinel Prime find a path to more Energon, Orion, D-16 and B think they’ve found their ticket out of the garbage room and begin a quest.

Eventually they join up with Elita-1 (voice of Scarlett Johansson), make it to the surface, learn a bunch of surprising information and are ready for a fight that eventually tears our core duo apart.

Spoiler alert, I guess? Except that Megatron v. Optimus Prime is probably the base level of information everybody has going in about the Transformers.

And if that’s all you know going into this movie, that’s probably fine. This is a pretty standard, easy-to-follow story about how people respond to discovering injustice — with a call for revenge or a call for, like, a more perfect union. If you are a bigger fan (or a parent who has had Transformer toys and cartoons injected into your life), you’ll appreciate the “hey it’s Starscream” and the “ha, the boombox guy.” And I think either way, viewers can enjoy this story that makes Transformers more individual characters than just the CGI marvels most are in the live-action movies. And I appreciated the effort put into the vocal work — Hemsworth allows you to hear that deep Optimus voice emerge from Orion’s more happy-go-lucky youngster while Henry turns D into a villain more in the Magneto vein, someone with justifiable anger who makes some good points.

Transformers One is also visually winning, adding both warmth and beauty to these metallic characters and their world. B+

Rated PG for sci-fi violence and animated action throughout, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Cooley with a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari, Transformers One is an hour and 44 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Didi (R)

Young teens young-teen it up the summer before high school in Didi, a sweet, charming, only occasionally traumatic story written and directed by Sean Wang.

Based on his background as a Taiwanese-American who grew up in the Bay Area, as he describes in various media reports, Wang seems to be riffing on his own experiences for the experiences of Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) in the summer of 2008, all MySpace and Facebook and awkwardness everywhere. Chris, called Wang Wang by his friend group, is both kind of a mess and totally fine in that very specific young teen way. He gets along horribly with his big sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who is about to leave for college. He is embarrassed by and sassy to his mom Chungsing Wang (Joan Chen) while politely semi-ignoring his paternal grandma Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), who lives with the family. Not living with the family is Chris’s father, who is working in Taiwan — a state of things that seems to irk everybody even as they are all resigned to it. Chungsing in particular seems frustrated with how this has all worked out for her. The movie spends a fair amount of time with Chungsing, a painter whose artistic ambitions have taken a backseat to raising her kids and caring for her hypercritical mother-in-law. We also in small ways get to see Vivian, her relationship with these two women and how she fits in with this family that she is moving a day’s drive away from for college.

But of course Chris is the movie’s true focus. We see him attempt to date a girl he has long been interested in, have falling-outs with his friends and attempt to impress an older group of skater kids — a lot of which plays out on MySpace and Facebook and via AOL Instant Messenger. Along the way, there is a lot of asking YouTube for advice — on how to kiss, on how to shoot a skater film. It’s all very cute and traumatizing in that “watching through your fingers” way as Chris tells a very boy-based, girl-horrifying story on a group date or fronts like he can handle various party intoxicants only to wind up puking in the bathroom. Mixed in with the standard teenage stuff are Chris’s struggles with what it means for him to be Asian — which comes with its own microaggressions even in this culturally diverse environment — and to be an American-raised kid with American desires even as his mother and grandmother have their own different (from Chris and from each other) cultural expectations and experiences. The movie does a great job of pulling this all in while still keeping the story very much on his specific life, his specific feelings and his difficult time communicating his feelings particularly to his friends. (Rather than say he was embarrassed or explain what he’s feeling he tends to just block his friends on AIM.) And all the stuff with his family seems equally well-drawn — the sibling relationship, with its horribleness and its supportiveness, is wonderfully spot-on. Excellent performances all the way around in this very solid movie. A

Rated R for language throughout, sexual material, and drug and alcohol use — all involving teens, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Sean Wang, Didi is an hour and 33 minutes long and distributed by Focus Features. It is available for rent or purchase and in theaters.

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)

With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.

Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.

Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”

Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.

A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.

“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.

But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.

He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.

Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.

The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.

“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B

Album Reviews 24/09/26

Hayley and the Crushers, Unsubscribe From The Underground (Kitten Robot Records)

You may have noticed that rock bands, particularly older ones, aren’t very good at evincing any sense of internet-savviness when they make a record whose lyrical slant is focused on “what all the kids are doing on social media and whatever.” Hayley Cain, this melodic punk band’s frontlady, defines herself as a “vintage Millennial, the last generation to remember an analog childhood before and after the internet.” Well well. OK, given that my job is playing a hypercritical jerk who’d find fault with Mother Teresa, I take that — as well as a couple of her other quotes — as an admission that she’s actually a GenXer who was never big into online culture (if you don’t know, I’ve written two books about that, so I could get really nasty about this but won’t). Bands, don’t be like this, singing about stuff you don’t know about, and don’t be like the Stones and pay Sydney Sweeney to sprawl around in your video in a cynical attempt to extract a little Zoomer cred just because “Whoa, it’s Sydney Sweeney.” Hopefully two or three of you get what I’m talking about, and mind, I have no deep problem with the music; it’s jumpy, (politely/gently) crazed and rather catchy, even if the bass is almost absent from the mix. Anyway, all the other stuff has needed to be said for decades now. B

Peter Somuah, Highlife (ACT Records)

This album would normally be lumped in the jazz category, but that’d be oversimplifying things. This Ghana-born trumpeter isn’t the Miles/Hubbard disciple some will paint him to be; in fact, he grew up playing Ghanaian “highlife” music (think Afrobeat/ska-tinged reggae or vice versa to grok the basics), and, among other sounds, this record is something of a homecoming to those musical roots, when he’d play all night until no dancer could still stand erect. The album opens with some heavily accented words from highlife legend Koo Nimo on the origins of the genre (“highlife” refers to the style that evolved from the waltz, samba and Western popular music that wealthy British colonizers forced Ghanaian locals to play). “We Give Thanks” fuses ’60s Beatles-booted organ to samba in a tune that evokes both Lawrence Welk and the early James Bond movies; in “Bruce Road,” Somuah’s horn drapes itself over a “Superstition”-like bass beat that touches on bossa nova. “Feel-good stuff” would be one (woefully inadequate) way of describing this. B

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• You have to be kidding me, the next major album-release Friday is this week, Sept. 27, slow your roll, there, calendar, think about the children! OK, children, if you’re reading this award-winning column in your favorite sub shop on Saturday the 28th, grab your uncomfortable molded-plastic desks and gather ’round, so we can learn about experimental punk band Xiu Xiu, whose new album, 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips, just came out yesterday! The band is based in San Jose, California, and over the past 22 years of their existence they’ve undergone some personnel changes. The band is still led by Jamie Stewart, the nepo-baby son of one Michael Stewart, who, back during the days of the American Revolution, won two Grammys for producing such albums as Billy Joel’s breakthrough LP Piano Man. Nowadays the group prominently features longtime member Angela Seo, a singer/multi-instrumentalist, and also they have Tried Unusual Music Things, such as releasing a tribute project to singer/civil rights activist Nina Simone in 2013. As well, their albums usually end up at Pitchfork’s unlistenable music desk, where they always garner rave reviews except when the reviewer didn’t get whole oat milk in his flavorless latte. What does all this mean? It means that this new album will be strange and unusual and will have a lot of girl vocals, duh, so let’s go listen to it for as long as my stomach can stand it. The test-drive track is on their Bandcamp space; it is called “Common Loon,” a loud punky thing that begins as a discombobulated emo tune a la Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy.” Whoa, then it gets really muddy and heavy, and the nepo baby is singing like Buffalo Bill on Silence Of The Lambs, this is getting pretty edgy, folks! Huh, then some epic goth-pop synth comes in, and the whole mess becomes quite listenable, I’m surprised Pitchfork likes these guys at all, but then again, people do eventually grow up a little.

• One of the new albums coming out this week is titled EELS, but funnily enough it wasn’t recorded by the Eels; it’s from an Austin, Texas, band called Being Dead, don’t you hate it when these things happen! Odd, I probably have this album somewhere in my stack of new releases; they are represented by my favorite public relations firm, which only rarely sends me crappy albums, so I am anticipating a pleasant-enough listening experience. Mind you, their songs are said to be always adventurous and genre-bending, so this will be like my taking some random piece out of a generic box of chocolates, and you know how that goes, you always end up with the cherry one and immediately throw the whole box in the trash. Wait though, the sample track, “Van Goes” is post-punk in a very classic sense, combining the rawness of Exene with B-52s-ish poppiness. It is OK!

• Great, jog my memory why don’t you, new release list, the last time I remember even thinking about Maxïmo Park was when they were mentioned every time someone was talking about metrosexuality, do any of you people even remember that nonsense? Good, count your blessings, let’s just skip that and talk about the band’s new album, Stream Of Life! The single, “Your Own Worst Enemy,” is the worst song I’ve heard this year, a hooty, Morrissey-nicking waste of notes. Absolutely awful.

• Lastly, let’s have a look at White Roses My God, the debut solo album from Low co-founder Alan Sparhawk! “Get Still” is Nintendo-driven slowcore, like Figurine on head drugs he’d ingested just to be even more annoying than usual.

The unexpected comfort of Cheese Soufflé

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, plus enough to grease a soufflé dish

¼ cup (30 g) all-purpose flour

1½ cups (340 g) warm milk

A pinch of an herb or spice that you feel like adding – Aleppo pepper is a particular favorite of mine

6 eggs, separated

salt and pepper to taste

½ cup (72 g) grated Parmesan cheese

½ cup (72 g) grated cheese — if you have nubbins of several left-over cheeses, this is an excellent way to use them up. If the Universe has stepped on your last nerve, and you can’t even, feel entirely free to pick up a bag of pre-shredded cheese at random and use that. If you want to get fancy at some point and invest in a half pound of Peruvian llama cheddar, you can do that someday when you aren’t so emotionally fragile. Believe it or not, a soufflé is comfort food, and right now let’s concentrate on getting this bad boy in the oven, so you can drink a beer in the shower while it bakes.

Preheat the oven to 375°F and grease a soufflé dish. If you don’t have a soufflé dish — and seriously, why would you? — try to find something oven-safe that is deeper than it is wide. Round is better than square. Straight sides are better than curvy. A large coffee can might work in a pinch.

Melt your half-stick of butter over medium-low heat, until it stops sputtering and foaming, then add the flour. Stir it until the flour is slightly cooked and darkens a little. This is what’s called a roux — it’s used to help thicken sauces. Whisk in the warm milk, which will do funny things to the roux’s texture, but don’t panic; that’s normal.

Keep stirring the milk sauce until it thickens, then remove it from heat and leave it to cool for a while.

With your stand mixer or hand mixer, beat the egg whites until they reach fairly stiff peaks. This means that when you pull the beater out of the creamy egg whites they will leave little stalagmites behind.

Wash your hands, then stick a finger into the milk sauce. If it feels like a very warm bath, add the rest of the ingredients in — the egg yolks, seasonings and the cheeses. Whisk them together, then transfer the orange-colored sauce into a bowl.

Use a rubber or silicone spatula to beat in about a third of the stiff egg whites into the yellow mixture to lighten it up, then fold in half of the remaining egg whites, followed by the last of them. If you’ve never “folded” anything with a spatula before, here’s what’s going on:

When you whipped up the egg whites, you were beating air into them and creating hundreds of thousands of tiny bubbles. Because egg whites are very sticky and protein-y, they will hold all those bubbles in a foam for a while — not weeks or anything, but long enough to make a soufflé. When you “fold” that foam into your other mixture, the eggs are really happy about being reunited with their other half, but you want to do this gently, so you break as few of those micro-bubbles as possible.

When everything has been (gently) mixed together, and there aren’t any dramatic white streaks of egg white, use your rubber spatula to gently turn the batter into your greased dish. Put it in the oven and bake it for about half an hour. My particular oven takes 35 minutes, but check on it at 30. This is a good opportunity to take your beer shower.

When your soufflé looks ready, test it with a skewer, like you would a cake or brownies. If the skewer comes out clean, the soufflé is ready to come out of the oven. This is when it will look the puffiest and most Instagram-worthy, so take a picture now, but give it five minutes or so to cool down before serving and eating it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

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