I like to joke that there are two kinds of people in those world: those who don’t mind being lumped into a group based on some arbitrary measurement and boring stick in the muds. Boring sticks in the mud? Yeah, probably the sticks is plural. We’ll get back to this in a paragraph or so. Over the summer my friend Atom had the extreme misfortune of having to spend a weekend passing a kidney stone. When the stone first attacked…
In “The Breakfast Club” Ally Sheedy has that famous line about how “when you grow up, your heart dies.” For a long time I worried that because rock & roll has become super boring in the past fiveish years that my heart, had in fact, died. Then I stumbled upon things like Wild Flag or Passion Pit or (this week at least) the Prissy Clerks and I’m all “it’s not me, it’s rock & roll.” Boring. I’m sure you’ve read…
Once upon a time I wrote a post on the old blogging platform Vox about things I always wanted to do because of certain songs I love. For instance, when I was in high school I searched out and read “that famous book by Nabokov” because of the line in the Police song. Some of things, if memory serves me, included knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them, and building a city on rock and roll….
One of the things I learned in the bajillion writing classes I took at The Loft is that when fiction is really good it can teach you things without ever seeming like a lecture or that you’re taking a class. Like, real actual factual things and not just about the tenderness of the human heart. I learned a lot reading Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. Sure I learned about human hearts and darkness and spirituality, but what stuck with me…
I can’t quite make the argument yet, because my Twitter Pal @Winnerbowzer suggested I also make sure it investigate 1982, 1989, and 1991, but 1993 was, quite possibly, the best year of music in GenX’s life. I haven’t quite gotten to the investigation yet because I decided to take a bath and listen to Pete Townshend’s autobio and then make a delicious Chicken Chick Pea Stew. However, earlier this afternoon I noticed that both Uncle Tupelo’s “Anodyne” and Matthew Sweet’s…
There’s this thing I have that is sort of compulsion when it comes to listening to music. There are certain words and sounds that scratch a perfect spot in ear I didn’t realize was metaphorically itchy until I heard the song. Then I will listen to the song a bajillion times in a row until the itch is gone. Or I something shiny distracts me. Now, this isn’t the same as just grooving on a song or having to repeat…
