There is a version of grief that doesn’t announce itself — it just shows up one afternoon while you’re doing something ordinary, and you have to decide whether to let it in.
Michelle Zauner knew this before she made Psychopomp and Soft Sounds for Gentle Giants, but by the time she completed Sometimes, It Snows in April — her 2023 live album, recorded across a residency at First Avenue in Minneapolis — she had already written the book on it. Literally. Crying in H Mart had made her a household name in a way that no indie guitar record quite could, and this document catches her at a strange, particular moment: beloved in a new way, on stages that were suddenly larger, playing songs that were written in a much smaller room.
The Room That Night
First Avenue is the right venue for this. Not because it’s famous (it is), not because Prince played there (he did), but because it has a ceiling height that makes a mid-size room feel both intimate and consequential. Engineer Adam Cichocki captured the band with a directness that suits Zauner’s playing — her guitar sits right where it should, upfront and slightly dry, the way a Telecaster sounds when someone really knows what they’re doing with one.
The band on stage that week was tight in the way that only comes from years of touring the same material. Craig Hendrix on guitar, Percy Jones holding down the low end — the rhythm section doesn’t oversell anything. When the dynamics pull back on “Everybody Wants to Love You,” it’s genuinely delicate. When they surge on “Boyish,” it earns it.
What a Live Album Actually Does
The best live records don’t replicate the studio version. They argue with it.
On “Soft Sounds from Another Planet,” Zauner stretches the space between phrases in a way the studio recording doesn’t quite allow. You can feel her deciding in real time. That’s the thing a live album catches when it’s working — not the spectacle, but the small decisions, the places where a performer is still figuring something out even after a hundred shows.
“Heft” is the moment here. It was already one of her best songs, this specific portrait of her mother’s weight gain during illness, drawn with a precision that should be uncomfortable but instead is devastating. Live, with the room breathing around it, it becomes something close to unbearable. Not in a bad way. In the way that a song sometimes feels like it was written directly at you.
Zauner has said in interviews that the First Avenue residency was partly about reclaiming something — finding her way back into these songs after the memoir had changed how everyone heard them. You can hear that happening in real time on this record. The songs don’t sound like artifacts of grief anymore. They sound like something she still lives in, which is both sadder and more honest.
The record closes with the title track, which is of course the Prince song, which is of course the song she’s been singing with her father’s death implied in every syllable for years now. It’s a choice that explains itself without explaining anything.
Put it on after the kid is in bed. Give it your full attention for forty-something minutes. Let it do what it’s going to do.