Calling All Angels

In the middle of mundane tasks, I put on music. The hiss of the iron, the quiet shuffle of laundry, all faded as the first notes filled the room. Sometimes it’s an album that suits the day, sometimes a random playlist, sometimes a forgotten list of favourites I made long ago. But that morning, the songs came in a particular order, a trio that stopped me cold. I had to sit down, to let them wash over me, to absorb them fully. They entranced me, reminded me of who I had been, and traced threads that still connect to who I am today.

Now, this is a personal thing. Everyone has their own list that would not touch me in the same way, but indulge me for a moment, please:

John Grant – Queen of Denmark
K. D. Lang – Calling All Angels (with Jane Siberry)
Martha Wainwright – Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole

Seemingly quite different. But for me, there’s a clear emotional through-line, more existential than stylistic. All three songs are confessions of wounded idealism, voiced from the edge of disillusionment yet still reaching for transcendence or self-respect.

They share a radical vulnerability. Each strips away performance and pride to reveal a bruised, yearning self. In Queen of Denmark, John Grant mocks his own delusions, turning bitterness into wit and beauty. Calling All Angels pleads for mercy and guidance in a world that has lost its bearings - a prayer that refuses to give up on grace, even amid exhaustion. Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole is Martha Wainwright’s howl against patriarchal dismissal, a demand to be seen, to be heard, and to stop shrinking.

There’s a tension between shame and transcendence in all three. Each wrestles with humiliation - self-inflicted, inherited, or imposed - and transfigures it into art. They don’t tidy the pain away; they sing through it, giving their words moral and emotional authority. Redemption isn’t in overcoming, but in articulating the wound so fiercely that it becomes a form of power.

And finally, a queer or outsider sensibility pulses through each song. Beyond sexual identity, they all convey a sense of being on the margins, emotionally literate, self-conscious, craving connection yet scorning conformity. That tension, the longing for connection complicated by pride and self-awareness, is the lifeblood of the music.

Calling All Angels struck me most sharply. I’m not religious in any institutional sense, yet the song feels spiritual in the truest sense. It reaches the part of me that longs for connection, meaning, beauty, and mercy, even when I no longer believe anyone is listening. Its power isn’t that it provides answers, but that it permits us to hope while knowing how fragile hope is. The repeated invocation - “calling all angels” - feels like a reach into the void, and what comes back isn’t an answer, but music itself. The act of calling becomes the connection.

In conversation with the other songs, Queen of Denmark offers that same fragility as a sardonic armour, wit that protects the ache, while Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole channels it outward as a battle cry for self-respect and liberation. Together, they form something close to a spiritual practice - not in doctrine, but in honest feeling. They let me inhabit despair, defiance, tenderness, and even ecstasy, all at once. Songs that open the heart wide enough that everything, joy and pain alike, pours through.

These songs are tied to a former me. Someone who drank, struggled with meaning, and flirted with self-destruction. Sometimes I think I drank to prove I existed, not to forget, but to force something to crack. Thoughts flickered through me, dangerous and electric, hints of betrayal, little signs that I could be untrustworthy, that I, like anyone, was vulnerable to lust and desire. When I drifted through work or walked down a crowded street, feeling I could do anything and it wouldn’t matter, it was that same echo, that same blankness.

My mind, wandering, made a strange connection with Patrick Bateman, the hollow protagonist of American Psycho. He screams his sins into the void, and no one hears him. The true horror is not the violence, but the indifference. The wish to be caught, to be known, even if it means being condemned. Perhaps that’s why I return to these songs. They flare in the dark, proof that someone else once felt the same distance from themselves and managed to sing through it. They remind me that invisibility isn’t an end, but a beginning, the place where feeling starts, if you let it. And if I let it, I feel everything at once: joy and despair, fragility and defiance, emptiness and an aching, thrilling aliveness.

Links to YouTube for the songs

John Grant – Queen of Denmark
K. D. Lang – Calling All Angels (with Jane Siberry)
Martha Wainwright – Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole