Hello and welcome back to Three Songs to the Head where we share three songs that moved us, three songs we love, three songs we can’t get out of our heads! Today, we’re featuring Mindie Lind, Gems and Owuor Arunga. Enjoy!

Mindie is a longtime love of The Monarch. So when she releases new music, we perk up. She’s an energetic human whose lyrics are spare and mysterious. She is the wind rushing through a falling barn. She is the breath that puts out the candle and moves on to the next. On this tune, she is joined by fellow spelled singer, Katie Blackstock, and their woven voices resemble the tearing of oiled silk, microphoned. “Ain’t Going Nowhere Blues” is their transference of that bleak, yet-wide-eyed, near-dusk feeling of winter lonesomeness.

GEMS is a spaced out, bleary-eyed fathomless swirl through icicle synths and sunshower cymbals. And their record, Night Music, is example #1 – especially on the opening track “Half of “Half.” It dives and sprints. It flies and calls back for you. It smiles, missing teeth, and does math equations until a star shoots through the sky. It goes on forever and then is over.

Owuor Arunga is magic. When the trumpeter gets in his stance, shoulders bent, lips pursed in the horn, head tilted just right, the fellow can play so crisp the birds stop and pay attention. The Seattle-native also seems hella busy, traveling all over the globe to play and create music, often stopping in Africa to work with artists from all over the continent. On his latest, “The Sweeter the Juice,” Arunga collaborated with Camila Reccio and the epic, rings-around-Saturn-voiced Otieno Terry. As you play the track, you realize you’ve missed it all along.