There is a difference between a gatekeeper and a guide, and we have spent the better part of the algorithmic age confusing the two.

A gatekeeper hoards. A gatekeeper decides who gets in and who doesn’t, who deserves access and who should wait outside. Gatekeeping in music is real and it is corrosive — the velvet rope mentality that turns taste into a weapon and enthusiasm into a qualifier. Nobody should have to pass a test to love a record. Nobody should feel stupid for not knowing who produced it or what label pressed the first run. Music belongs to whoever needs it.

But a curator is something else entirely. A curator has done the work — the obsessive, unglamorous, deeply personal work of spending time with music that most people will never sit still long enough to hear. They’ve read the books, seen the biopics, followed the threads back to their sources. They know things not because they want to hold those things over you, but because they couldn’t help themselves. They fell in. And having fallen in, they reach back a hand.

We need curators. We need them more than ever, actually, in an age when algorithms have become the default recommendation engine for most people’s musical lives. Spotify knows what you’ve listened to. It does not know what you need to hear. It cannot feel the difference between a song that confirms your existing taste and a song that cracks something open in you. It has no heartbeat. And music — real music, music that matters — should always have a heartbeat. So should the recommendations behind it.

One of the threads that runs through nearly everything published here at Playin’ in a Traveling Band is the idea of transmission. Whether it’s a mixtape passed hand to hand, a dubbed cassette, a burned CD riding shotgun on a long road trip with your best friend, or a playlist published for the world to see — music exists to be shared. It has always relied on a grassroots exchange, that ancient and essential hey, you need to hear this, it’ll change your world moment passing from the hardcore devotee to the second-tier fan to the casual listener and back again.

This is the unseen infrastructure of music. For an artist to travel from garage band heroes to selling out stadiums, for the world to fall in love with the people on that stage, a dedicated corps of music lovers must exist in the undergirding, unwittingly ensuring the continued flow of discovery. They are not famous for this. They are rarely thanked for it. But without them the whole thing collapses.

I consider myself one of those people.

To be a music geek means more than a casual listen. It means reading the biographical books and going to the biopic and obsessively knowing the details that most people will never care about. I knew what halos were before most people knew who Nine Inch Nails was. That is not a brag. That is the passion and the vocation of a fan far left of the casual.

Vocation comes with obligations. The obligation, in this case, is to keep doing the homework. To keep listening with intention. To resist the comfortable groove of returning to the same records you already love and to remain open to being surprised, challenged, even uncomfortable.

So I have decided to embark on a journey.

The fine folks at the 1001 Albums Project have built something quietly remarkable. The premise traces back to 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, edited and curated by Robert Dimery, a freelance writer and editor who has contributed to numerous music publications. You sign up at their website. They serve you a random album from the list. You listen — maybe once, maybe two or three times. Four listens is my personal rule before I render a verdict. Then you write a short review and rate it, and only then does the next album unlock. You cannot skip. You cannot cherry-pick. You surrender the choice to the node and you stay until you have something true to say.

That last part matters more than it sounds. The generator is not just a randomizer. It is an accountability mechanism. It is saying: prove you were here.

I will be working through this list and sharing short reviews — a few hundred words, a star rating, an honest account of what happened when I actually listened. Some of these records I will love. Some will challenge me. Some may not land at all, and I will say so. What I will not do is phone it in.

I would love to hear your thoughts as we go — on the albums, on the project, on whatever the music dredges up for you.

Keep Listening,

Mr. B

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I used to think Iraq was the edge of the world. Seventeen or so miles north of Baghdad, Camp Taji felt like the last outpost on your way to Hell. Then I deployed to Guantanamo Bay. I know it seems counterintuitive but there’s something far more isolating about seeing the city lights, hearing the rich, vibrant thrum of life just outside your reach that is far more isolating than anything the Sunni Triangle threw at me. When you’re dying of thirst, is it better to have no water in sight or an oasis just beyond your grasp?

Remember back in the day when you could call into a radio station, speak to a live DJ and request a song? Maybe it was someone’s birthday, an anniversary, whatever – you called, somehow you got through, you nervously talked to that famous voice on the other side and then you waited.

Coleman was sitting at his desk across from me, my deputy there in Guantanamo. We were arguing about something inane as Soldiers and Sailors are want to do when we got on the subject of music. My routine in the morning, once I got into the office, was to connect to Seattle’s KEXP and let the calming voice of John Richards and his incredible The Morning Show fill my late morning and early afternoon.

“You’ll never get through,” Coleman said as he shot a look of smug assuredness pointed in my direction.

“Fuck you,” I shot back “Watch me.”

Picking up the phone, knowing I was about to violate several federal laws as well as play a game Russian roulette with our notoriously bad phone service, I dialed the code to get an outside line, I dialed the number – busy signal.

“Told you.”

Daggers.

I tried again, this time a tone.

“KEXP, this is John with the Morning Show, whadda wanna hear?”

A smile slowly made its way across my face as I turned to face Coleman.

“Hey John, good morning,” I stammered. “Listen, this is Ben, I’m calling from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and I was hoping you could play “Dry the Rain” by the Beta Band for all of us here in GTMO, maybe sell a record or two.”

“Cuba?” the voice replied. “Wow, ok – we’ll see what we can do, thanks for calling.”

And I waited.

About an hour or so later, we’re all getting ready to head to the chow hall for lunch. I think I hear the unmistakable shuffle drum beat and the slow guitar strumming and then the words “This is the definition of my life/ Lying in bed in the sunlight” I glance over at Coleman, a shit eating grin spreading over my face, give him a friendly smack on the arm and we make our way out the door.

For better or worse, radio has always been a huge part of my life. Growing up in rural Alaska, our mornings were filled with the news and country music sounds of 970 AM, KIAK. As soon as I was old enough to have a preference, my love became KSUA – the quirky and off-beat college station broadcasting from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Here was where I heard Rocky Horror for the first time and learned of Sweet Transvestites and would stay up into the wee hours of a Friday night listening to the station’s three-hour metal program that kicked off sometime around midnight.

The Marine Corps was my ticket out of the frozen hinterlands and the culture shock going from Fairbanks to San Diego in late January of 1993 is hard to overstate. Marine Corps bootcamp has undergone major changes since I stepped foot on those golden footprints but back then your final week before graduation was spent in what they called service week. Essentially it was free labor for the Recruit Depot as recruits worked in the chow halls, mowed lawns and cleaned common areas of the barracks. I was assigned the barracks detail.

For the last 80 or so days I had been completely cut off from any culture so when I heard music coming from someone’s room it was like a moth being called to the flame. The song was magic, crushing and ear splitting at the same time delicate and all I would remember for the next few weeks was “But I’m a creep.” And the words “Equis tay erre ah efe eme Baja California Mexico – 91X.”

Back from boot leave and on to my first duty station, Camp Pendleton, I had a mission – find that song, find that radio station. Neither was hard, Radiohead’s “Creep” was blowing up across the nation and 91X was a San Diego institution going toe-to-toe with Los Angeles’ KROQ. In the early 90s San Diego was still pretty proud of its anti-LA character and hadn’t fully embraced it’s “America’s Finest City” identity. Los Angeles was spit and polish, San Diego was scrappy and edgy, Los Angeles had Richard Blade, San Diego had Michael “Hooligan” Halloran. Sandwiched between the two metros areas, I had them both.

In my car and in my office, the radio dial lived on 91x. And yet, a friend of mine from LA and I would, most nights, find ourselves parked on the beaches of San Clemente in Richard’s Dodge Neon, the better to hear Dr. Drew and Riki Rachtman give sex advice to an eager and young KROQ audience. For four glorious years, those two stations were the soundtrack and social calendar of my life. Concerts hosted by both consumed my free days and the in-between moments were filled with DJs electrifying my ears.

Near the end of my Marine Corps tenure, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While I was busy preparing to separate from a life of military service, Congress was busy separating radio stations from the local communities they served. Was this what they intended to do? I’m just jaded and cynical enough when it comes to national politics to believe that, at least at some level, enough of those casting votes knew exactly what the score was and how this would all go down. How else does one explain a law having the exact opposite effect of its stated goals? As stated, the act’s purpose was to promote competition by deregulating the telecommunications industry throwing off the yoke of ownership limitations and allowing anyone to enter any communications business.

In 1996 the two largest radio groups owned fewer than 65 stations each. Six years later Clear Channel alone owned 1,200. One third of all independent radio owners disappeared in that same window. In a short 25 years, KROQ went from a single-owner independent to a corporate asset inside a company owning hundreds of stations nationally – I heart radio, indeed. The station that knew your name, that played Creep before you knew what Creep was, that soundtracked your years was now being centrally programmed out of a warehouse studio thousands of miles away.

Thousands of miles away from my son, Kerouac, was where I found myself many years later – he in California, myself in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba the last long-term deployment of my military career. Kerry, as we called him, was a veteran of my deployments but this one was particularly hard – his mother and I were engaged in a nasty divorce.

As the senior enlisted member of my unit, I tried to make a point of staying out of sight from my troops during the off hours. In their infinite wisdom the Navy saw fit to stack nearly everyone in the same barracks area, so senior enlisted was living directly next door to junior enlisted – no one felt comfortable relaxing. So, I stayed behind closed doors as much as possible and listened to the radio streaming in over purchased internet connection. More often than not, my little computer speakers were pushing KEXP.

Unlike KROQ, KEXP forged a different path, one that made them functionally invisible to the buyers following the passage of the Telecom act. The station that is the heartbeat of Seattle started life as a plucky little college radio station with the call letters KCMU – 10 whole wats broadcasting from atop McMahon Hall at the University of Washington. What followed is a series of “they never gave up” type scenarios, any one of them could have been the stations death knell.

In ‘81 budgets forced them into a community supported, listener powered model. By 2001 KCMU had been through a decade of internal conflict and institutional drift that had left it in an awkward position. Somehow Microsoft becomes the hero in this story?! Well, not Microsoft but Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder.

Allen was a huge fan and didn’t want to see the station disappear. He worked with station employees to help navigate the process of leaving the university and becoming an independent station. The call letters were changed to KEXP in 2001 following the launch of a ten-year partnership with Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project. Ten years later, they’re keeping a lonely Soldier in Gitmo company.

Then the final, structural move that made KEXP permanently unconquerable? In 2014 the UW Board of Regents voted to formally transfer ownership of KEXP 90.3 FM’s broadcast license to the Friends of KEXP 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization.

While Clear Channel and Infinity were busy buying anything with an audience and a broadcast license, I was busy keeping to my Guantanamo room looking for ways to connect with my son while keeping a low profile with my Soldiers. My mom would have said I should write letters and I did some of that but that never felt right – what eight-year-old kid wants to read a letter? Maybe a postcard with something quick and snappy, but a full-on letter? Sorry, Mom.

When we lived in Ohio, most days I would take him to kindergarten about 15 miles away from the house. I used this time to amp my little man up, get him in the right headspace for school and to me, amp up meant music! We’d kick the drive off with the Dropkick Murphys’ Cadence to Arms, a smattering of the Ramones and, assuming time allowed something current, whatever that may be. Fist pumping, steering wheel tapping, making the car dance between the lanes amp up. There may have been one or two mornings where he got to school slightly disheveled, shirt askance, hair needing a comb - looking like he’d just left a concert.

Darek Mazzone, KEXP’s evening DJ at the time was saying something through the speakers but it barely registered as I thought through some way to stay connected to my son so far away. My brain squirreled for a second and landed on how cool it was, that all the way here in GTMO, I could hear a Seattle DJ talking to me, damn technology is amazing. Wait a minute, holy fuck! This DJ is talking to me … I can talk to my son like this. WKRY was born.

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And so it began – over the next 8 months I would sit in my room microphone, headphones, computer and an early edition of Garage Band recording everything. Two songs and I would talk to him, tell him about my day, what I saw in the water, three songs, how things were going, what we were going to do when I got home, three songs, you’ll never believe what happened, dad advice of some sort, three songs, do your homework, listen to your mom, three songs, I love you, bud.

My biggest challenge was keeping my words to him in something that felt more like an overzealous DJ, excitable, maybe talking a touch too long but you felt his vibe and granted him the latitude and not turning the whole experiment into a long-winded audio book from Dad. A famous author once wrote that the only people for him were the mad ones, the ones who burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles. Speaking into a microphone in my 10x10 barracks room in Guantanamo — an oversized Clash poster looming over me — to my son in California. That was burning. It was the only thing I knew how to do.

Some of them made it to him, some of them didn’t; all of them were mailed into a divorce. Even in physical format, sometimes a broadcast suffers interference. KEXP kept me connected to the world in a place that made a habit of turning people into alcoholics, gym rats, bible thumpers or all of the above. And then it gave me the most important thing in the world, it gave me a way back to Kerouac.

The road not taken, while fun to speculate is something we can never know. What would have happened had KEXP not gone listener supported, had Paul Allen not infused his clout and cash into the system? Would there have been a phone call from Guantanamo to the Morning Show? Had the UW Board of Regents not transferred the broadcast license is there a WKRY? I have no idea and honestly, it’s something I prefer not to dwell on, the road taken was hard enough.

I got sole custody of Kerouac and to say things were difficult is putting it lightly. One little human fighting so hard to grow up while everything around him was imploding. Even if it’s a “good one” divorce is hard on kids, and this one was not good. We fought, we fought over the mundane and the important, over grades and girlfriends. At seventeen he dropped out of high school and moved in with a friend, at 18 he moved back to Ohio to be with his maternal grandparents, at 19 he joined the Army. Somewhere between bootcamp and advanced training he gave me a call.

“Hey Dad … you remember those radio station CDs you made for me when you were in Gitmo?” his voice filled with a new confidence, GED acquired, bootcamp conquered, tanker school on deck.

“Yeah of course,” I replied somewhat taken aback at the left-field inquiry. “Why?”

“Do you still have them anywhere? I’d really like to have them again.”

Four notes.

Four notes of the new All Them Witches album was all it took to hook me.

Chit chatting with Patrick over the phone, we’re talking about some recent vinyl purchases – him from Time Machine Records in Grants Pass, me from the Vinyl Vault here in Sonora. We both spend way too much on records but after giving up smokes and booze this vice is acceptable.

“And then I picked up this one Hannah recommended – All Them Witches, never heard them but I’m going to give them a listen.” He said.

“Hmm, never heard of them either,” I responded. Any idea what they’re like?

“No – I just don’t want to be that guy,” Patrick says.

“What do you mean?” I inquire, having a sense I already know what he means.

Hannah is significantly younger than the both of us, so she tends to highlight things that might otherwise be off our collective radars. Such an already refined ear is an absolute joy to see in the younger generation.

“That guy who stopped listening to new stuff. I look at my collection and it’s mostly ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s – I don’t want to be that guy,” he says.

“I feel that!” I said.

We disconnect and I slink back into my chair.

I’m not that guy but I don’t want to be that guy either.

I open Apple Music, look up the band – House of Mirrors, just released a week ago. Fuck it, let’s do this.

Four notes and chills run up my spine as the haunting opening riff from “Red Rocking Chair” begins. Charles starts singing and then it hits. Acid Bath, Black Sabbath, Black Angels.

Something primal deep within me stirs and I stand up, launching out of my chair, reach over for the dial and crank it up… oh my… This. Is. Good.

This is what should have been playing when Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda were traipsing through a New Orleans cemetery hopped up on psychedelics – that’s where it takes you. But don’t you fucking dare decide to take a nap, we’re just getting started. This is a party pressed onto vinyl and you will be here till we kick you off the porch.

I pop Pat a text – Dude…this is fucking amazing – the first in a rapid-fire stream of consciousness reactions as the album unfolds.

Track three, “Aethernet,” moves us out of the cemetery and along the riverbanks. Muscle shirts, Daisy Dukes, cowboy boots and BBQ. Humid, languid, nasty in all the right ways as folks strip off their clothes and head down to the river for a dip in the water. There’s an unsettled menace in the air like a low-pressure system moving in, a storm nipping at its heels.

The texts continue in a flurry to Patrick, who finally throws up the white flag and tells me it’s in his rotation for tomorrow.

“Tomorrow?! There is no tomorrow,” I respond, no longer in control of my mind or words as I’m transported to wherever these guys want to take me.

Somewhere between track four and track five I pop over to the band’s website and order the vinyl, rush delivery. The party’s moved to no one’s house and it’s a rager as someone lights a bonfire out back and the whiskey is freely flowing.

Around what I tell myself would be the second side (Track six, “Starting Line”), the record’s arc bends back toward Earth and starts to reenter the atmosphere. That raging party has turned into your four best friends on the porch, slightly drunk but hanging on, the moment’s not done. “Starting Line” locks into a riff that pulses and coils like Lennon’s coda on “She’s So Heavy” — except McLeod lets it finish. No rug pull. Just the groove riding all the way home, and somewhere in there Ben McLeod is smiling, hoping you catch it.

By the time “Angel on the Wayside” comes around (Track 8), the party has dwindled to a select few, but damn are they still at it. Dancing, grinding, not as much enthusiasm as earlier but all good things have to come to a close and one by one folks are stumbling to their cars, calling it a night.

“The Welterweight” gets you home but “Saturn Song” tucks you in, gives you a kiss on the forehead as it pulls the covers up under your chin. It’s been one helluva night but now it’s time to shuffle off to dreamland. Tomorrow’s another day, another band, another party.

The best albums take you for a ride. Sometimes the trajectory is a slow on-ramp, merging as the music accelerates till you’re moving full speed down the road. And then there’s House of Mirrors, which goes from 0-whatthefuck without even checking to see if you buckled your seat belt, tossing cigarettes out the window as it cracks a beer.

Ten minutes and a stream of unhinged texts later, a photo lands in my messages. Patrick, needle down, album spinning.

Some records don’t wait for tomorrow.

Heading west toward San Francisco, we’d just come down out of the Sierra Nevada foothills as Highway 108 stretched out in front of us. Still about 100 miles from our destination, California’s vast Central Valley sat between us and the Coast Range.

“So you thinking Portugal?” K asked as the monkeys, absorbed in their own storybook worlds, played in the backseat.

“It’s got to be something similar to where we are now,” I said as I quickly glanced over to her, our concerned eyes locking for a second before mine returned to the road.

This had been an ongoing conversation between the two of us the last few years. Nothing felt safe in our native country and more and more the “cruelty being the point” was living up to its ideals.

Leaving. Leaving everything we loved about this nation, packing it all up and just going somewhere, anywhere else. We were married in one of this nation’s National Parks. My twins spend most of their days on one of the nation’s oldest national forests. To give it all up, to start over…

As I pondered all of this, a song came back to me, a song that seems like it’s always there, just at the edge of a waking dream ready to reassert itself when the moment calls. This stretch of open, golden expanse dominated by oaks always reminded me of the drive out to Jamul and I was back in our San Diego home, to a time before the twins were born.

It’d been a long day. Working all morning on the farm then hurrying home to do some work around the house, exhausted, K and I slipped off to our bedroom to veg out for a while before calling it a night. We were knee deep in the modern western series Longmire, having recently returned from a Wyoming trip and feeling a bit of cowboy nostalgia. K’s head resting on my shoulder, laptop nestled on my legs, we kept each other awake through the episode bone-tired though we were. And then I heard the opening lines of a song as the credits rolled and it stopped me cold — the first time a song had done so in many years.

Exhaustion temporarily hijacked, I immediately took to the internet to figure out what that song was, with its dreamlike sequence opening and the comforting repetition of the main guitar line. The soothing voice that carried a song of sadness like a southern gothic magnolia both blooming and wilting before your eyes.

“The Dark.”

The Bones of JR Jones?

Who are these guys and why had I never heard of them?

When I say these guys, what I mean to say is guy — as in singular. There is an interesting phenomenon in music, call it the punk to folk pipeline. Young kids the world over, eager to play in a band, pick up a guitar and suddenly wake up to the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, or Joy Division. Many stay on this well-worn path but for a select few, the journey leads them down roads they didn’t expect. For Jonathan Linaberry, the JR in The Bones of JR Jones, steeped in the punk aesthetic of the early 2000s, the path diverged when his father gave him a collection of music that harkened back to a different era.

“I grew up listening to punk rock. I fell in love with the blues and folk music when I was 18 or 19 years old after my dad gave me a collection of American roots music, and it totally changed the landscape for me,” Linaberry said in a 2016 interview with Mother Church Pew.

One can claim lineage through one of two ways — earned or given. Most of us know the story of the given: the kid who receives their parents’ name and fortune only to squander it away, no understanding of what it took to get there. Then there is the earned, where the roads less travelled are taken, a light shone on those darker passageways. Linaberry, a classically trained pianist who cut his teeth playing punk rock in bands outside of Syracuse, New York, armed with a collection of Americana music, headed off to New York City and the Pratt Institute to study art and design. Here is where the lightning would strike — in the form of a chance listen in a friend’s dorm room.

“I was in a friend’s dorm, and they were playing a guy named Blind Lemon Jefferson, this old Texas bluesman from the late ‘20s,” Linaberry said in an interview with Salt Lake Magazine.

Raw, ugly, emotive — this recording of the legendary bluesman was more authentic, more punk rock than anything Linaberry had ever heard and it struck something inside him, something deep that would lead him on a path to find the field recordings of Alan Lomax.

In 1933, Alan Lomax set out across the American South and Midwest alongside his father John, determined to document and preserve the traditional and folk music of the region before it disappeared entirely. Working with a portable recording machine, Lomax captured anyone willing to sit for him — one Saturday recording Jimmie Rodgers, the following Sunday the Carter Family. The resulting archive, now housed in the Library of Congress, includes some of the earliest recordings of Lead Belly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie. The Lomax recordings are both invaluable and complicated — questions of consent, compensation and a white Northern academic extracting cultural material from poor Black and rural communities without meaningful reciprocity have followed his legacy ever since. But what they preserved changed Linaberry permanently.

At first blush, punk to Americana seems counterintuitive. Blow the dust off and it becomes immediately obvious — the connective tissue is authenticity. The bootleggers running ‘shine through Appalachian hollers and the punk kid playing basement shows are animated by the same spirit — raw, unmediated, outside the sanctioned channels of polite society. It’s both lived experience and aesthetic that shows itself in the lyrics of the music. That thread runs from “Which Side Are You On” echoing from the hills to Dylan’s protest folk and John Prine to the Dead Kennedys’ “Police Truck” without ever losing the plot.

Whether it’s instinct or training doesn’t really matter. Not content to solely abide the folk or punk traditions, Linaberry adds a dash of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic weight both lyrically and musically — the beauty and rot sitting side by side, the past refusing to stay buried. Put all of that into a band and you have the world Jonathan Linaberry is working in.

But it wasn’t right away. The love of American roots music came to him in his late teens and early twenties. Linaberry would need to go on, start building a life — bartending, teaching preschool, playing in an acoustic group called Feverfew. Taking a page from his punk background, absorbing the music fully, coupled with hard-earned experience, before being ready to put his own touch on it. He released his first EP in 2012 with The Wildness, his first full length, Dark Was the Yearling, in 2014. Twelve years of walking the walk before The Bones of JR Jones was fully ready to make its entrance on the world’s stage.

How you hear Linaberry has everything to do with how you’ve experienced him. His live performances and what’s captured on his studio albums are, at times, two completely different animals. Linaberry himself has acknowledged the gap — the atmosphere created in the studio just isn’t there at a solo performance level, which is to be expected. Lower the tone arm on side one of Dark Was the Yearling and “Dreams to Tell” fills the speakers, the staccato of the guitar setting the mood while Linaberry’s voice stands in for a harmonica on the song’s opening wails. Contrast this to his live performance of the same song — just the man on stage with only his banjo, the tempo brought significantly down. What shows up as a Saturday night rocker on the album is turned into a Sunday morning hymnal when performed for an audience.

As the album unfolds across 41 minutes and 12 tracks, all of America’s musical ghosts are on display holding space for their newest acolyte — the chain-gang hum that opens “Ticket Home,” the Doc Watson-like guitar picking on “Hearts Racing,” the echo of every Delta Blues singer long forgotten on “Fury of the Light.” The casual listener will find something deeply comforting and familiar within the album while the more serious listener will find themselves compelled to take a journey — a journey that is the songbook of this nation so many of us call home.

And then there is “The Dark,” the song that forever set me in Linaberry’s orbit like a moon to the Earth. I’ve always preferred my music on vinyl — “The Dark” breathes life into side two of the record. The opening sequence transports you through a haze of humidity and clouds to a land of Linaberry’s making. “All our sweetest sins, carry them to our end.” And you’re there, walking among the dilapidated house watching a family keep its secrets inside like a narrator in a Faulkner novel, taking notes to carry back to the world. The music soothing, the lyrics unsettling, the image painted something all of us carry — lived or inherited.

Somewhere between the Delta and doling out juice boxes, K and I return to the expat conversation.

“Only American hubris would call it expat-ing and not immigrating,” I say, the disgust just on the edge of my words.

K snickers at the observation before responding.

“I don’t know, I don’t want to give up just yet and I also don’t want to wait until it’s too late,” she says, her eyes turned toward the landscape outside the window. “This is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been in and I really don’t want to give up on it.”

“Me either,” I say, realizing my fears are the same as hers — not wanting to leave too late but not yet willing to give up. “I just wish there was some sort of a speck out there right now that felt like hope.”

The speck is already there. It’s been playing on my turntable for years.

Tilting the rearview mirror to better see the monkeys, I stare for just a minute at those two little miracles sitting in the back seat. I bring my gaze back up to the road, K is still looking out the window. I take her hand, bring it to my lips and gently kiss it as I’ve done so many times before.

“It’s not time yet, my love,” I say to her. “And what we’re building will give us some leeway should it come to that. All of this, everything before us, it’s worth fighting for — and you and me and those two munchkins in the back, we’re fighters.”

“I know,” she whispers as she squeezes my hand, gently releasing pressure but not my hand.

What is a place? There’s the obvious right? The corner of Winslow, Arizona or Sweet Home Alabama — but place can be, and for most of us is, so much more. That corner of 5th and Main where everything felt right as you walked down the street and suddenly it became your place. Or that long road trip from New Mexico to Los Angeles, the Arizona desert in front of you and your favorite song on the stereo, and suddenly the road itself became magic. All of the songs on this mixtape are of a place — one of my places. I hope you enjoy. Tell me in the comments what’s a song that reminds you of your place.

The Rules of the Road

This mixtape is built on a simple but unforgiving ruleset modeled on the gold standard of blank tape — the 90 Minute TDK MA-XG. Two sides, 45 minutes each, no exceptions. No artist appears twice. Every track earns its place not just on its own merits but in relation to what comes before and after it — the music has to flow, one song finding the next the way a good conversation finds its next subject. A loose thematic thread runs through every volume, though loose is the operative word. Think of it less as a concept album and more as a road trip with a general direction and no fixed destination.

That’s it. Those are the rules. Everything else is feels. Let’s get to the music!

The Sound of Somewhere Mixtape

Youtube | Apple Music

SIDE A

1. Lágrimas Negras, Hermanos Gutiérrez – Driving through the Sonoran Desert, top down on your Cadillac with the sunset blazing the path ahead.

2. Anything, Anything, Dramarama — Nothing captures late ‘80s LA quite like this song, hot, driving and loads of fun.

3. Never There, Cake — Camp Pendleton, surreal estate. Home of the Marines and every bad decision that started with “Hey Doc, watch this.”

4. Oakwood – Angus and Julia Stone — top down, Dana Point to Malibu, the sun doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

5. You Look Like Rain, Morphine — That moment you look across the distance at them and realize they’re the one.

6. Sweet Depression, Deadweight — The raw San Francisco that’s pulsating and alive when you wonder into a music hall and discover your new obsession.

7. Sour Times, Portishead — the Valley Drive-In, Mission Avenue, Oceanside. Four screens. Gone since 1999. Still plays in my head.

8. Outta Me, Onto You, Ani DiFranco — a breakup gone horribly wrong, ‘nuff said.

9. Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day — Pine Bluffs, Wyoming. A desperation move and the beginning of an end.

10. All My Mistakes, The Avett Brothers — Wherever you are, when I’m with you its home and all my mistakes brought me to you.

SIDE B

11. Woodpeckers From Mars, Faith No More — Let this one take you on a journey, a trip beyond this universe into something else entirely.

12. Where the Streets Have No Name, U2 — Growing up in Alaska meant a significant amount of your time was getting ready for winter. Around 1987, U2 dropped “The Joshua Tree” I first heard this song laying in the bed of Dad’s truck and was never the same.

13. I Want You So Hard, Eagles of Death Metal — How you ever been to Arizona? Specifically Phoenix, it’s a place that is trying too hard, trying at what I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it’s trying to hard.

14. Take Me Out – Franz Ferdinand — This album dropped around the time I deployed to Iraq and was on constant rotation, it was a connection back to a world that felt millions of miles away.

15. El Picador, Calexico — Six weeks on a field operation in 29 Palms a night out across the border in Tijuana to blow off some steam and this one feels like making that crossing from one world to another.

16. Back to Black – Amy Winehouse — We’ve all been there, somewhere way above our station, not sure how we got there but here we are, designer cocktail in hand the world before you, taking it all in, knowing in won’t last.

17. Marvin and Miles – Gare du Nord — Sexy, smooth, sensuous, a night out dressed to kill, the one you love looking like a million bucks, the glamour in front of you, the promise of more to come yours for the taking.

18. Gentleman – Afghan Whigs — Somewhere around 25 or 27 years of age, we have all had that moment where we felt like we’ve got it figured out striking out from your Hoboken apartment, catching the train to NYC; absolutely bulletproof.

19. The Funeral – Band of Horses — This song drenches you in a blanket of sound reminiscent of the light humidity of early Ohio summer, it’s comforting right now, but give it some time.

20. Jaan Pehechaan Ho – Mohammad Rafi — People talk about moments where they felt just above themselves, looking down like an observer, this one puts you in that state.

21. End of the Innocence – Don Henley — Not all places are good, like that hot summer day when as a kid you where at the swimming hole down Grange Hall Road and off in the distance someone was screaming and this song was playing.

There is a moment in every serious artist’s career where they decide, consciously or not, to burn the old version of themselves to the ground. For Tom Waits, that moment didn’t arrive all at once — it came in stages, a slow immolation that began with 1983’s Swordfishtrombones and found its scorched, magnificent conclusion nine years later with Bone Machine. By the time the last note faded on that 1992 release, the lounge-lizard piano man — the rakish, Rain Dogs-era romantic — was gone for good. What replaced him was something far more unsettling and, in its own way, far more extraordinary.

Consider what Bone Machine accomplished in a single release. It served as the closing chapter of a trilogy that began with Swordfishtrombones and continued through 1985’s Rain Dogs — three albums that collectively rewired what a Tom Waits record could be. It handed Island Records its walking papers, ending a relationship that had run its course. And in 1993, it delivered Waits his first Grammy, winning Best Alternative Music Album in a category that had no business containing something this feral. The Grammy voters probably didn’t know what they were approving. They were right to approve it.

The album announces its intentions immediately. And the Earth Died Screaming opens not with a piano, not with a chord, but with the pulsating beat of bamboo rods being struck. In an interview, Waits explained that he moved the entire recording studio outside to capture what he called his “pygmy percussion unit” — the band striking concrete with sticks in the open air, a sound that is simultaneously ancient and industrial. It’s a technique he’d return to decades later, showing up most recently on “Boots on the Ground,” his 2026 collaboration with Massive Attack, where that same primal percussion logic anchors an entirely different kind of darkness. But here, on Bone Machine, it serves as a threshold — cross it, and the almost hypnotic thrashing erupts into Waits’ bark and growl, and suddenly you’ve awoken from a dream into a nightmare. You’ve been warned. You’re in anyway.

The production throughout is deliberately primitive, and not accidentally so. Waits recorded much of Bone Machine in a warehouse, using found percussion, metal scraps, and unconventional microphone placements to achieve a sound that is less rock album and more field recording from the end of the world. Drums were recorded in a corrugated tin shed specifically to get a particular hollow clang — that specific resonance of something struck inside a container that was never meant to hold music. The overall effect is cavernous and decayed, a record that sounds like it was unearthed rather than made.

And then there is the Conundrum.

Among the instruments Waits employed is a custom-built percussion rack: a large iron cross with various found metal objects hanging from it — crowbars, farm equipment, the detritus of a working life — whacked with hammers and mallets to produce a sound not unlike a jail door closing. This is the instrument of Bone Machine. This is the philosophy of Bone Machine. Tom Waits didn’t just write songs for this album. He built the machines that made the sounds that became the songs.

Clocking in at 54 minutes across 16 tracks, Bone Machine covers more emotional and sonic territory than most artists manage in an entire career. Waits has always maintained that he writes one of three types of songs — a brawler, a bawler, or a bastard — and all three are present here in abundance.

The brawlers announce themselves without apology. Going Out West is Waits’ most well-known song for good reason — a blues-drenched, all-out rocker that became famous to a generation through its prominent placement in Fight Club, covered by artists worldwide, and still capable of rearranging the furniture when it comes through a decent pair of speakers. In the Colosseum belongs in the same category, a track that sounds like the Roman arena it references brutal, spectacular, and faintly obscene.

The bawlers provide the emotional center. Dirt in the Ground is the album’s beating, mournful heart — Waits contemplating life, death, the meaning of it all, and arriving at the same conclusion every honest reckoning arrives at: we’re all going to be dirt in the ground. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to call someone you haven’t spoken to in too long. Whistle Down the Wind and A Little Rain offer moments of the older Waits, the piano-driven melancholy that built his early reputation, now seasoned with something harder and harder to name.

The bastards are where Bone Machine does its most disquieting work.

Black Wings tells the story of a Constantine-type figure in an avant-garde folk melody replete with haunting vocalizations — the kind of song that feels older than the man who wrote it, as if Waits merely transcribed something that had been floating in the dark for centuries. Jesus Gonna Be Here is an unemployed carnival barker, down on his luck, slightly drunk, plucking the last working string on his guitar as his final hopes curl and fade. These are character studies so specific and so strange that they feel more like encounters than compositions.

Perhaps the most disquieting of the collection is Murder in the Red Barn — a nearly spoken-word affair that seems to find Waits channeling the psychotically insane Renfield from Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, released the same year. The coincidence, if it is one, feels too perfect to be accidental.

And then, sandwiched between this menagerie, sits The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me — a spoken word track that is either the album’s most darkly comic moment or its most genuinely unsettling, depending entirely on where you are in your life when you hear it. The musings of a man on the edge who cannot accomplish what he came to do, because the ocean, for reasons of its own, keeps spitting him back. I’ll go in up to here / It can’t possibly hurt / All they will find is my beer / and my shirt. It’s funny until it isn’t. It isn’t for very long.

Waits has always been a writer who understood that the space between genres is more interesting than any genre itself. Bone Machine lives entirely in that space — too abrasive for country, too literary for rock, too American for avant-garde, too strange for any category that needed a Grammy name to hold it. It is raw in the way that things are raw when someone stops caring about the finish and starts caring only about the truth of the thing underneath.

This is not the album you begin with. That task is left more comfortably to the slightly adventurous Rain Dogs or the accessible warmth of The Heart of Saturday Night. But for the initiated — for those who have already followed Waits through the carnival and the bar and the dark street outside — Bone Machine is the destination. It marked the beginning of a stellar second act that found its current conclusion in 2011’s Bad As Me, a run of records that collectively constitute one of the most extraordinary late careers in American music.

They say live fast, die hard, and leave a good-looking corpse. Bone Machine is the personification of that idea — 54 minutes of controlled demolition, a man tearing down everything he built so he could see what was underneath.

You’ve been warned. Give it a listen anyway.

Do you know what chill hours are? They’re the amount of time a fruit tree needs to stay in a state of dormancy, somewhere between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit to produce fruit. Honeycrisp apples need about 1200 or so, Bing cherries want in the neighborhood of 800 and the delicate Blenheim apricot gets by with about 400. The tree of rock and roll apparently needed 20 years but it’s finally starting to wake up.

Maybe we needed 2016 and a real-life monster manifesting in the form of a reality television star turned president with an administration whose corruption made Nixon’s look like saints. Maybe we needed the ennui and passivity of a Biden administration and their lackadaisical, milquetoast passivity that did nothing to ensure protections into the future enabling the orange monster to come screaming back in 2024. Paw-paw shuffling toward the Oval Office when he should have been shuffling toward the porch and his rocking chair. Maybe that mix of servility and malice was exactly the fertilizer the tree of rock needed to start rooting again.

I’d like to introduce you to Dexter and the Moonrocks. While some acts were busy manufacturing their moment — fake accounts, algorithmic manipulation, thousands of phantom fans conjured from a marketing firm’s server farm — four guys from Throckmorton, Texas were playing to a bartender who asked them to keep it down.

They coined the term western space grunge– while their music is serious, irreverence is a streak that runs a mile wide down these boys’ back. Sad cowboy music is another way they’ve described what they make but they’ve been quick to ensure all of us understand what they mean. On the band’s official TikTok, drummer, Ryan Fox explained:

“We don’t mean six-hundred-dollar pairs of boots and songs about tractors and patriotism. We mean ‘The government does not care about me. I am an abused member of the workforce, and my body is broken even though I’m twenty-three.’ Please stop confusing the two.”

If you’d never heard of Throckmorton, Texas don’t worry no one in the blessed world minus the 730 souls who call it home have. For the four guys making up this nonsensical sounding band – we’ll get back to that – their closest paying gig was 71 miles to the north in Abilene which unless you’re from Texas you’ve probably never heard of either!

“There’s one traffic light in town, and it’s just a blinking red light,” Tuffs said of his hometown of about 730 residents in an interview with Texas Monthly. “There’s no grocery store. You have to drive thirty miles to go grocery shopping... Your neighbors probably have pigs. It sounds like I’m talking bad about it, but somehow, I like it.”

Before there was a band there were four young men doing what young men in small town Texas do — making a living with their hands and their backs. James Tuffs was a fry cook. Ryan Anderson was working oil fields. Ty Anderson was decorating concrete surfaces. Ryan Fox was coaching kids baseball. Between the four of them they covered most of the ways a man can wear himself out in rural west Texas before thirty. These are not men who grew up being told they were special. They grew up being told to show up and do the work.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what they did.

The more you peel back the layers of this band the stranger, or depending on your view, glorious it gets. These young men were just busy scratching out a life in a small Texas town whose biggest claim to fame was being one of many waypoints on the Great Western Trail cattle drives.

Following high school, Tuffs entered Cisco College seeking a degree in kinesiology – the study of human movement – all while working in a restaurant kitchen. Music was Tuffs’ thing – he begged his buddy Ryan Anderson, a childhood friend, to teach him guitar which he eventually did. Tuffs was penning lyrics on the regular and found himself one evening sharing a few originals with his parents. Duly impressed, Tuffs parents entered their son into a songwriting contest (without his knowledge) and while he didn’t win, he came damn close, making it to the finals.

“After I made the finals,” Tuffs said, “this dude walked up to me, and he was like, ‘Yo, man, I’m trying to start a record label. I really think that one day you could work in music.’ And I was super stoked. I think I was nineteen at the time, and I just called Ryan, and I was like, ‘Yo, dude, drop out of college. We’re starting a band.’ And he literally dropped out of college. We literally started a band.”

So now a fry cook, an oil field operator, a concrete surface decorator and a kid’s baseball coach were in a band. They just needed a name.

Tuffs has mentioned hearing Death Cab for Cutie on his parents stereo while growing up and here’s one of those cosmic jokes come to life. When Death Cab for Cutie lead singer, Ben Gibbard was asked by Time Out Chicago how they came up with the name, he responded

“The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name.”

Cut to Tuffs being asked a similar question – their name came about simply because James Tuffs thought Dexter and the Moonrocks sounded cooler than James and the Moonrocks. There wasn’t much thought put in. It was about that quick. They’ve joked that Dexter is someone they kidnapped years ago and keep in the basement stealing his musical superpowers, surviving on a diet of cat treats and yogurt.

Whether Tuffs knew that story about Death Cab and their name or was just walking down a well-trodden path, we may never know. History rhymes, history repeats and the universe gleefully laughs.

And now these kids are selling out shows in Los Angeles. But they did it the old-fashioned way, they earned it touring across the country, building a fan base who adores them.

Three shows in 2021, 18 shows in 2022, 53 shows in 2023. 62 shows in 2024. 50 shows in 2025 and still going.

They toured with Mitchell Ferguson, Red Leather, Cigarettes at Sunset and kept building their network, kept grinding, kept honing their craft ‘till 2025 when they played the Vans Warped Tour in Long Beach.

Night after night they just put their head down and played – any market, any town regardless of cantankerous bartenders or being in someone’s basement. That’s not a band gaming an algorithm, that’s a band logging miles - 73,381 to be exact. More than 70,000 miles of blood, sweat and tears – I can only hope with each mile another entry is made in the bands songbook, oh the stories it will tell.

As Ty Anderson, the rig worker, has said - beats the hell outta a pulling unit.

In Dexter and the Moonrocks you can hear the influences of the past. You hear arrangements a ’la the Kings of Leon, of the trademark storytelling musings of the Turnpike Troubadours, the infusion of grunge and indie courtesy of Nirvana and Death Cab for Cutie. The cynic might choose to see derivative, the romantic optimist, of which I count myself instead sees DNA. The thoughtful sees it for what it is – another scion harvested from the tree of Rock and Roll and grafted on to the current era.

“We realized that oil workers like to listen to Alice in Chains, and the goth kids like Tyler Childers so why couldn’t we do both? And so we did, and it worked so well,” Tuffs has said.

Take the song “Ritalin”: “I’m not myself without my medicine/I took some Ritalin, wasn’t a little bit.”

Of course a kid from nowhere Texas in 2026 would write an ode to one of this generation’s most over prescribed pills. James Tuffs - 26, Ryan Anderson - 26, Ryan Fox - 24 — solidly Gen Z, grew up as the most medicated cohort in history — many of them were put on stimulants as kids, some diagnosed, some not. It’s normalized in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 80s when “Ritalin” was considered controversial and slightly sinister. Ritalin is to today’s younger generation with its nod to losing oneself via ADHD medication what Nirvana’s “Dumb”, with its talk of opiate-induced haze, physical sluggishness and detached euphoria as wink and a nod to heroin was to the kids of the 90s. Young adults have long channeled their generational trauma through guitars, Dexter is just writing the current soundtrack.

And here’s the rub – they don’t even have a full-length album out yet, nor are there any stated plans. The best fans of the band are going to get is the occasional single drop – “12 Steps” is slated for May 27 -- and the continued string of EPs – clearly these boys are not following a playbook. Or maybe they are, a playbook written on a dusty cattle trail by a 23-year-old whose body is already broken from a life baked in the west Texas sun and the type of labor that puts calluses on your hands, labor that leaves marks that doesn’t wash off.

In horticulture there’s a lot of truths, rules that will burn you if you try to break them one such truth, a truth these four men from Throckmorton, Texas have woven into the fabric of their being - you can’t fake the cold, you can’t fake the hard times. The tree either goes through winter or it doesn’t bear fruit.

Dexter and the Moonrocks’ 2025 Tour Set List on Apple Music

Something is in the air.

Aaron and I circled Harlow’s in Sacramento looking for parking, having just made the two-hour trek to see this show. I had convinced Aaron to make this trip with me, he wasn’t overly familiar with the night’s lineup of Faetooth, Iress and Nightosphere but we’ve learned to trust each other’s taste in music and he’s become my de facto concert companion.

We gave ourselves plenty of time to make the two-hour drive so of course we were extremely early. And that was when I first felt it. At 615 or so on a show that didn’t even begin until 830 there was already a line forming outside the venue.

“That’s odd,” I commented to Aaron “wouldn’t have expected that.” He agreed. I chalked it up to the warm spring evening. We found somewhere to park and made our way around the block, ostensibly looking for something to eat, mostly to just stretch our legs after the car ride.

Somewhere along Highway 99 just before we exited for surface streets, we’d started talking about the current state of music – the conversation picked back up as we ambled through Midtown – I pointed across the street to the park where one of my twins and I had spent hours playing while the other was in surgery just up the road.

“That was an interesting day,” I said as a moment of real fear washed back over me – I held it for just a second and moved on.

“Think about it,” I said to Aaron “they killed their golden goose and now they don’t know what to do about it.”

Our conversation had taken a turn toward the corporate greed of the music industry that ran headfirst into the streaming model at the expense of the artists. Did you know the average band on Spotify makes .003 per stream? Somewhere around the late 2000’s bands realized the only way to make a living was to hit the road.

“Yep,” Aaron replied. “Concerts became the go to and now no one can afford the damn ticket.”

We’re not breaking any new ground here — anyone who’s gone to a show in the last few years has uttered some version of those exact words. It all seemed to reach some kind of peak with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. That tour burned so brightly it blinded us to everything happening in its shadow. When a star that large finally burns out, you start to see what else is in the sky.

Do you think the kids watching the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in June of ’76 had any idea they were witnessing history? When you’re busy being in the midst of something that notion doesn’t really occur to you. We all have visions of grandeur from time to time but there’s no way Bernard Sumner had any idea he and his friends would go on to form one of the most influential post-punk bands.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves -- as at this point the history is still to be written. Over the years I’ve found myself at the forefront of plenty a monumental occasion, so I will say at some level, I’ve got a gut for these things. There’s a revolution underfoot in the music scene and it’s being led by women.

But the parallels.

In 1973 economies the world over were crippled when the Arab members of OPEC imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War. This isn’t a history lesson, but we need something of a framing to see history rhyming. This oil crisis caused crippling stagflation across the western world as a nearly 300 percent price hike trickled into all sectors of the western economy. Historians call this the lost decade for the British economy and on this side of the pond, the consequences were much the same. Any of this sounding vaguely familiar?

Social unrest caused by widespread unemployment fleeced what little remained in people’s pockets. And what was the establishment’s response? Doubling down in the form of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher who came to power with a conservative outlook and an austerity gameplan. The economic misery of the mid-70s didn’t just create hardship — it created a generation with nothing to lose and nothing to believe in. The counterresponse was inevitable. You can only tell people there’s no future so many times before they start building their own.

The music industry didn’t need a conglomerate of oil producing nations implementing an embargo for its economic woes - this was a self-inflicted wound. The funny thing about making a deal with the devil is you always walk away thinking you got what you wanted. It’s always the devil who wins – Lucifer Morningstar is undefeated. Streaming was the devil’s bargain but deep in that contract was the algorithmic commoditization of art, the collapse of a fan driven support infrastructure, generative AI, and platform fatigue. The working musician didn’t just struggle — they nearly ceased to exist.

But no one told the underground musicians or the music lovers that such a diabolical deal had been struck. The message began reverberating out; the infrastructure is gone, your livelihood in jeopardy -- save yourself. Many a calamity facing our world today can be laid at the feet of the Covid pandemic but there is an interesting footnote – physical media sales began increasing and with it, the desire for something real, something beyond the algorithm. The message heard, scenes began reacting, coalescing, consolidating. Some version of this argument had been playing in a loop in conversations between Aaron and me -- tonight was no different.

“So what are you drinking tonight,” I asked Aaron as we stood at the bar. I had initially confused the line for Faetooth’s merch table for the bar line and had to ask a young man which was which. Directions received, I disengaged from the one to step into the other.

“Are you seeing this,” I asked Aaron as I handed him his drink. The merch line was across the bar. I spotted the man who had clarified things for me, in front of him was a young girl, she couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12. I walked back to him.

“Excuse me, is this your daughter?” I asked.

A hesitant look in his eye he gave me a nod and an affirmation.

“Dude, you are the coolest fucking dad in the world,” I said and walked back to Aaron.

By seven or so the place was mostly full as bodies jockeyed for stage position – Aaron and I had found a table and were sitting down for a minute somewhat in disbelief at what we were seeing as people continued to flow in. The spell was broken when a waitress came over and asked us if we’d like to purchase the table – um, no, so sorry, we’ll be moving along now.

By eight, moving from one side of the venue to the other had become a series of starts, stops, excuse me’s and finger gestures.

“How did you discover music when you were a kid,” I ask Aaron leaning in close to his ear the better to be heard over the din.

He thinks about it for a minute and while we’re twenty years apart in age, the answer is strikingly similar for the both of us.

The coolest friends were the ones who always had something amazing you needed to hear or you caught them lost in the music and you interrupted just long enough to ask them what they were listening to. After they got past their annoyance at the disturbance they would typically tell you with more detail than you could possibly imagine. Around my sophomore year of high school, I received a package from a friend of mine living in Seattle at the time - it was a TDK cassette tape with a note that read simply - LISTEN TO THIS. Scratched across the cassette tape were the words BLEACH. The closest we have today is the music we chose to accompany a social media post most notably on Instagram or TikTok. I was scrolling along one night and was stopped by an entry from my friend, Niki. We had recently become friends working together with the Sierra Mutual Aid network, a loosely formed group of like-minded individuals working to support each other in damn-the-man type stuff. I don’t even remember what Niki’s post was about, what I remember was being stopped cold when I heard the sounds of “October” by Faetooth coming from my phone.

The next morning I went to the bands webpage and ordered the vinyl of Labyrinthine. A few days and many streams of the album later I was looking up their upcoming shows – Sacramento, May 16. I immediately texted Aaron – whatcha doing on the 16^th? Wanna go see a fairy doom metal show? In Aaron’s typical deadpan the response was “Um, sure…”

Nightosphere was wrapping up. The three piece from Kansas City plays an interesting sleight of hand on the audience — members Claire Delaney and Brittany Sawtelle trade bass and guitar throughout the set, and the rule is simple: she who holds the guitar wrote the song. As the opener I came in, like many others I suspect, not knowing who they were. I went home with one of their CDs.

I am of the mind that concerts are best experienced with just a bit of intoxication – not stumbling drunk, not even slurred words drunk, just a slight letting down of one’s guard to better appreciate what is often new. I slide into the end of the bar, order another drink and watch as the band disassembles their set.

I am somehow both surprised and completely unsurprised when I look over and see Niki. She recognizes me as well and we both hug each other in something akin to deep recognition. She utters her disbelief in me being here – why do the cool kids never realize they’re cool? We talk for a few minutes, she introduces me to her partner and we separate, melting into the crowd.

Iress took to the stage.

Michelle Malley, Iress’ lead-singer and guitarist, is often cited as the Adele of Doom and the comparison holds. Commanding in presence and demanding in delivery, Malley forces you to hear her going from lilting and delicate to confrontational and powerful within a few breaths of each other. This was a band that had spent 16 years building their chops together. That cohesion and familiarity wrapped the crowd in a spell, drawing them closer with Malley’s delicacy before exploding them backward in a sonic assault.

Iress done, Faetooth in the wings, I made my way through the crowd to the bathroom. Maybe it’s cause I’m 52 and kind of just don’t care all that much anymore but coming back from the bathroom I spotted a concert poster of the night’s show on the wall. Quick look left then right, pulled it down, rolled it up, stuck it in my pocket and made my way back to the side of the stage.

All three of the acts on that Friday night stage at Harlow’s were amazing. Every single one of them deserves your time. They deserve your money so they can keep doing this.

For the uninitiated doom metal carries a significant amount of weight and most of it wrong. What comes to your mind? For many, it brings forth images of Phil Anselmo – esque guys, shirtless, sweating, guitars screaming in an unabashed display of testosterone. In the hands of the women, it becomes something else entirely. To be sure Faetooth is heavy, they can grind with the best of them but if the boys bring the obvious, the girls bring the suggestion – the suggestion of menace, of an atmosphere that will transport you to the land of nightmares. The play here is not to intimidate you with a vulgar display of power but instead to merely whisper something in your ear and let your imagination do the rest.

Aaron and I make our way toward the front of the stage. At the edge of my awareness I feel a presence and turn to see Niki’s partner next to me, Niki next to him. We all embrace, talking over each other about Iress, about what’s coming. My triangle is complete — to my right the one who brought me, to my left the one I passed it to. A woman, Niki, started this as we all marvel at the women on stage. Nascent though it may be — the gauntlet has undeniably been thrown down — it’s our turn.

Faetooth took to the stage opening the set with the album’s initial entry – Iron Gate. As strong a show opener as it is on the album, the song begins with a slow, chugging bassline and a meditative drum rhythm that establishes a hypnotic and chant-like energy. From this very moment you feel it in your bones — these three women are channeling something ancient, something ritualistic. Whatever misgivings you had when you walked through the door slip away as you come under the band’s charm. For more than an hour they lead you on the journey they want you to take, let us pray you have Charon’s obol in your pocket.

While the team of Ari May and Jenna Garcia are both credited with vocals on the album, it was Jenna who drew me in – her voice was the scream of a fae scorned and hell was in her wake. This is a doom metal outfit after all and doom metal is anchored by the bass guitar. Rah Kanan drove the whole thing from behind the kit, buried behind the amps and stacks the way drummers in small venues always are — felt more than seen, the invisible architecture everything else is built on. Holding her Dunable Gnarwhal Jenna’s presence feels almost impossible, this tiny, petite woman screaming with a fury that summons demons while driving the band forward with an instrument nearly as long as she is tall. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that such a person could bring forth such Valkyrie like power.

The set ends and I feel I’ve been released from a trance. Exhausted Aaron and I make our way back to his car. In an ultimate, embarrassing call back to my younger days through a series of events for the both of us, we’re taking Aaron’s Mom’s car. Aaron unlocks the door and I turn, stretching one last time before the journey home. About 50 feet in front of me I see the young father and daughter walking away. I don’t know what to yell out but an impulse is pulling me so I yell out DAD and he stops and turns. I run up to him, pull the slightly crumpled poster from my pocket – I look at him, I look at her.

“For your daughter, man – have a good night.”

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Is there a direct connection between quality and satisfaction? I think if one is to honestly engage in the vinyl versus CD conversation then this framing must be considered. Compact Discs reproduce sound at a higher fidelity than vinyl records – that fact is indisputable.

I’m the type of person who likes to gaze upon a sunset and still have my breath taken from me by the sublime natural beauty. I have an understanding of how the properties of light refraction impact the hues performing their symphony as colors blend into each other, the sun slipping beneath the horizon. That knowledge neither adds to nor subtracts from the wonder. The wonder simply is. I think vinyl records are of higher quality. Let’s get into it.

The vinyl versus CD debate is just the latest iteration of a conversation that has been happening since humans first tried to reconcile what they could measure with what they could feel. Nietzsche framed it as Dionysian versus Apollonian, Pirsig shifted things around slightly and developed the romantic versus classical. In our more common vernacular, we might think of art versus science — you and me, we see it as vinyl versus CD.

Pirsig’s argument probably serves us the best in this conversation, but this is a landscape we must tread through carefully. Pirsig wrote what is arguably one of the most important, accidentally philosophical, novels with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Published in 1974 (coincidentally, the same year I was born), Pirsig’s novel was deeply polarizing, initially drawing extravagant praise from literary heavyweights before facing academic backlash and mixed reception from later readers — where have I heard this song before? Over the course of more than 400 pages Pirsig guides us through a conversation that focuses on the pursuit of quality through his alter ego, Phaedrus. Named after a figure in Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus was a ruthlessly logical philosophy professor whose obsessive pursuit of the definition of quality drove him to insanity. As Phaedrus, Pirsig lost his mind — as the book’s author he found his way back.

Pirsig writes: “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”

And here is where a motorcycle becomes relevant to our conversation. Pirsig’s novel unfolds as the story of two characters — one, our narrator who lovingly maintains his bike through a cross-country journey, the other, Phaedrus, who loses his mind chasing an idea. I don’t know about you, but before I drop the needle, I wipe down my record removing the dust, visually inspecting it for anything that could impede playback. The vinyl listener is the narrator. The audiophile chasing ever higher resolution digital formats is Phaedrus. Compact Discs are just one milepost on Phaedrus’ march toward insanity. If we continue down this road then we must consider high-resolution digital audio — demonstrably superior to the CD — thus leaving vinyl in the dust. The pursuit for quality, for perfection consumes us and we keep marching as technical advancement improves quality while ultimately subtracting from what got us here in the first place — the music.

Pirsig eventually found his way to the ancient Greeks but may have arrived too late — had he encountered H.D.F. Kitto’s concept of aretē earlier, he might have saved himself considerable anguish. Pirsig can be forgiven for not coming to Kitto sooner — renown in academic circles does not always equate to cultural relevancy, a consideration we deep lovers of music are all too familiar with. Throbbing Gristle, anyone?

According to Kitto, aretē implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency... or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

Compact discs are man in service of the machines chasing a zero-sum game of an ever-dwindling, quantifiable definition of quality where 1s and 0s capturing dynamic frequency ranges become the singular defining characteristic. Vinyl is machines in the service of man that in its own imperfect reproduction of a moment in the studio is quintessentially more human. Who doesn’t have flaws? We fool ourselves in the impossible pursuit of perfection — our humanity is found in those moments where we embrace those imperfections and more fully become them.

The house is impossibly quiet, only the hum of the HVAC system and the shuffling of my feet disrupt the silence. My feral monkeys are with the love of my life, their mother, on a road trip to Wyoming, so it’s just me. Flipping through my records, I land on my father’s copy of L.A. Woman by The Doors. Pulling it from the dust jacket, I can’t help but wince slightly as the light, surface scratch caused by my brother and me many, many years ago comes into focus — I know from experience it won’t affect the record but it’s a reminder. I wipe the record down, slip it onto the turntable and drop the needle. The crack and pop, even after the deep cleaning, fill the speakers before ‘The Changeling’ breaks on through. I know I could sit down at my computer, open Amazon or something similar and tomorrow have a brand-new CD of this recording. Not a doubt in my mind the quality would be better but as I slip into my chair and let the music surround me, I am deeply satisfied.

Ever wondered what Radiohead might sound like if they’d grown up playing in Dublin pub sessions and the music was four hundred years old? Let me introduce you to Lankum. More specifically, let me introduce you to 2023’s False Lankum.

But like Radiohead, the version of Lankum that made False Lankum had to be earned. The four piece band consisting of brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada, began in 2014 as Lynched — named after the brothers’ surname until the word’s darker associations made the name untenable — releasing Cold Old Fire before becoming Lankum proper in 2017 with Between the Earth and Sky -- each record darker, heavier and more ambitious than the last.

Pathways mean something here. How can they not? At their core, Lankum is an Irish folk band breathing new life into music handed down from generation to generation. There are rules involved here and Lankum works to break every one of them -- how else do you make an album that aspires to heavenly beauty while reveling in devilish cacophony? If you’re thinking happy-go-lucky Irish jigs, disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. The band holds kinship closer to the likes of Sunn O))) than The Dubliners.

Like so many in our current era, Covid lockdowns became a defining moment for Lankum. Preparing a performance to be livestreamed from Ireland’s historic Abbey Theatre titled A National Disgrace, the band hit upon an epiphany — weave all their songs together into a single continuous piece.

“Figuring out how to make a song slowly morph and grow into another, even if there was nothing matching it,” said guitarist Daragh Lynch.

That revelation became the cornerstone of False Lankum — twelve interconnected songs unfolding across an epic seventy-minute duration, less a collection of songs than a symphony imitating the sea: crashing waves punctuated by deceptive moments of tranquility.

And then there are the fugues – three short, abstract soundscapes serving as intermissions. Recorded as one continuous improvisation and then dissected, the fugue is allowed to serve double duty as musical interlude and that psychological state in which a person loses all sense of identity.

If the fugues dissociate you, then Radie Peat’s vocals ground you. The accolades laid at Peat’s doorstep almost certainly would make her blush. Otherworldly, fierce, like moonlight playing on swirling dust … the Irish Examiner called her one of the great modern voices in folk or any other music. While the cynical listener might scoff at this, the album’s opening track forces you to see the error of your ways. Peat’s voice stands alone for the song’s first sixty seconds demanding you follow her on a journey into the story of a young girl who died for love, four hundred years in the telling.

“Go Dig My Grave” arrives in Lankum’s songbook carrying centuries of grief. A traditional ballad that travelled from the British Isles to the Appalachian Mountains and into the hands of Jean Ritchie, who recorded it memorably with Doc Watson at Folk City in 1962. Peat, who learned the song by hearing Ritchie’s recording, carries that lineage forward into something altogether darker. Where Ritchie’s version is an Appalachian folk ballad, Peat and Lankum turn the song into a nine-minute, doom-folk dirge filled with Irish keening (a vocal lamentation for the dead) and a chilling mix of traditional instruments used in nontraditional methods to create a terrifying wall of sound. And just like that, the stage is set for everything that follows.

Of all the considerable baggage this album carries, perhaps none is more insidious than its method — the way Lankum excavates the darkness buried inside these songs and refuses to let you look away. In an interview with The Attic, Ian Lynch described what he feels as the band’s manifesto.

“In the past, Irish music was misrepresented in a way that it was all really happy, upbeat and frivolous. But there is another aspect to it — very dark and much grittier, which usually people don’t realize — so we really enjoy finding morbid dolls buried and bringing them back to show to people.”

Dark, foreboding, haunting -- not words most people reach for when describing Irish folk music. False Lankum is like a Rorschach test where the beautiful butterfly slowly turns into something horrific upon deeper reflection – it was always there -- you just missed it on casual observation. This album demands you sit with it -- and let me state this plainly – if you are one who prefers their music easy, accessible and radio friendly, this album is not for you. But if you are of the other sort, one who enjoys following the breadcrumbs a band leaves even when they lead to a witch’s house, then you will be rewarded handsomely. This is an album that will be talked about twenty and thirty years from now.

Lynch is unambiguous about the stakes involved: “We have a bit of a personal mission to try to redress the balance.”

The album’s liner notes tell the story of those morbid dolls’ excavation, as in the case of “On a Monday Morning” – “On a Monday Morning” was written by Cyril Tawney. We learned it from Beanie Entwistle of the Manchester based band Sallows. With the liner notes, Lynch and his bandmates are making an artistic declaration -- gone are the individual band member acknowledgements, in its place, the song’s lineage and pathway to the band. The band is saying directly to you, we didn’t create this darkness, but we refuse to bury it.

And so then the question – did they succeed? I have already made plain this album isn’t for everyone. But for me, it is a magnum opus, a musical achievement that anyone with more than a passing fancy for music should know. And so then the question can only be answered by you. In whatever way you choose to hear your music, give this album a listen, then listen again and realize you might need more than two or three listens to come to your conclusion. Understand this, False Lankum opens new pathways in your musical brain, and it may take several listens before the construction is complete.

If Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros Up from Below were a movie it would be The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai — gleefully weird and weirdly cheerful about it. A rotating cast of ten to thirteen musicians anchored by frontman Alex Ebert, the band released their debut album in 2009 drenched in analog warmth and the Laurel Canyon spirit of the 1960s.

But let’s back up a minute as perhaps we need a bit more context – you’ve never heard of Buckaroo Banzai you say, you’re forgiven and, well, I’m glad you asked. The movie centers on the efforts of one Dr. Buckaroo Banzai, a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot and rock star. To make a long story short, Banzai saves the world from inter-dimensional aliens and then goes on to play one helluva rock show. So … wonderfully weird, God-like figure saving the world, frontman in a rock and roll band … Check, check and CHECK!

Let’s get back to Edward Sharpe.

After years of the Los Angeles party life and subsequent drug addiction, Ebert, the then frontman of Ima Robot, broke up with his girlfriend, moved out of his house, and spent time in rehab. During this time he began writing a book about a messianic figure named Edward Sharpe who was “sent down to Earth to kinda heal and save mankind, but he kept getting distracted by girls and falling in love.”

The nascent book eventually became lyrics as Ebert started assembling close friends. The foundation of the band began to take shape – what was one man’s vision of a worldly savior became a full-fledged desert choir singing hymns of brotherhood and devotion.

Drop the needle on “40 Day Dream”, the record’s opening track, and the hypnotic clack-clack-clack instantly draws you in as the sweeping orchestration takes over and suddenly you are under the spell of this band. In an interview with Jonk Music, guitarist Christian Letts talked about the recording sessions and the genuinely organic nature of the band’s process.

“It never felt like a grueling task,” Letts, who’s known Ebert since childhood, said. “This is a case of a group of people coming together at the right time. I don’t even think of it as a band, I think of it as a family.”

Every family has its heart. For Edward Sharpe, that heart had two chambers.

Buckaroo Banzai had Penny Priddy and Dr. Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel; Ebert had Jade Castrinos and Heath Ledger.

This is one of those once upon a time in Hollywood type scripts. Ebert recounts seeing Castrinos across the street at a Starbucks and knowing immediately that he needed to have a relationship with her. Castrinos quipped they were both on their MacBook Pros, she looking at a L.L. Bean catalog. Whatever the circumstances, their relationship would become the emotional heartbeat of the album with their duet “Home” becoming not only the album’s signature track but also one of the most charming love songs ever written. And here is one of the few places I would quibble with the direction of this album. Home is track six on the album buried as a deep track. Carries On, which in my mind should be the exclamation point on “Home,” comes before it, sitting at track four. “Carries On” is a devotional of longing, a plea for love’s continuation that feels like the natural emotional aftermath of “Home.”

“Jade” is track five, the bridge of the trilogy. I would have rearranged these, Jade, Home, Carries On … the object of affection, the coming together, the deeper reflection, truly a hero’s journey of the classic Jungian framing. The couple eventually split, Castrinos left the band under difficult circumstances, and the song that sounds like the purest expression of love was written by two people whose relationship didn’t survive. Ebert later wrote a companion solo song called Truth, opening with “the truth is that I never shook my shadow.”

And then there’s Heath Ledger.

Around the same time that all this shit is going down with Ebert, Ledger had become involved in a project known as The Masses. Founded by Matt Amato and Jon Ramos in a Manhattan loft in 2002, the outfit moved to Hollywood in 2006, where Ledger got involved channeling money and energy into the project. But this wasn’t a company in any traditional sense, this was a creative commune. Ledger and his peers came together around a shared notion, taught each other how to shoot, light, and edit, plotted out music and record labels all in an effort to develop a little engine of creativity. And here’s the glue - Amato had already directed a music video for Ima Robot — Ebert’s previous band — meaning Ebert was already part of The Masses orbit before Edward Sharpe existed. When Ebert got sober and started building something new, he wasn’t walking into a stranger’s world. He was coming home to his people.

But it gets deeper.

In interviews, Ebert has revealed the band was to release their first album through The Masses, with Ledger advising them artistically — specifically telling them to stay true to their demos and not “re-record it better.” Ledger helped shaped the album's philosophy. He died in January 2008, the album came out in July 2009. He never heard it finished.

And deeper.

Ebert and Ledger had been developing a musical together, and Ebert has said they were talking about it in depth the night Ledger died — and that Ledger was genuinely excited about it. Ebert has said he still wants to finish it someday in Ledger’s memory.

I am an unabashed fan of this truly sublime album … the same cannot be said of subsequent Edward Sharpe releases. The magic just simply isn’t there. This wasn’t a case of catching lightning in a bottle -- this was planetary alignment. A man had to hit rock bottom and reinvent himself as a fictional messiah. He had to spot a woman on a street corner at exactly the right moment in both their lives. A Hollywood star had to decide to become an arts patron and then die before the music he helped fund ever came out. Twelve people had to pile into a Laurel Canyon house with a 1979 tape machine and play like they had nothing to lose. Mercury in retrograde indeed.

When Portishead dropped their debut album Dummy in 1994, little did they know they were about to start a revolution while laying the groundwork for a whole new genre along the way. This was the same year Oasis released Definitely Maybe, Green Day pushed out Dookie, Weezer was pulling on sweaters, and the grunge scene was in full force.

Dummy was different from anything coming out in that era. Where Soundgarden’s Superunknown (1994) was loud and crunchy — the sound of a band solidifying their walk towards rock legend status — Portishead’s release was brooding, moody, deeply atmospheric and the near opposite of everything flowing out of the alternative radio airwaves at the time.

Comprised of Beth Gibbons (vocals/lyrics), Geoff Barrow (producer/multi-instrumentalist) and Adrian Utley (guitarist/multi-instrumentalist), the group formed in Bristol, their iconic name arriving by happy accident. In an expansive interview with KEXP celebrating the 25th anniversary of the album, Barrow described the moment their eventual A&R man, Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, was sitting on the toilet reading a copy of Music Week and noticed a line explaining that Neneh Cherry was working with the guys from Portishead — the small coastal town where Barrow grew up.

“We didn’t have a name then, and that’s how we got the name Portishead,” Barrow said.

A music trade publication had jumped the gun and named them after their hometown before they’d settled on anything themselves, and it stuck. Not quite the glamorous origin story you might expect for such an evocative name, but it has a certain charm to it. More importantly, the name ended up suiting the music perfectly — that sense of a grey, coastal, slightly melancholy English town feels entirely fitting for the atmosphere of Dummy.

But what made the album special in a year of special albums? Even having lived through that year deeply immersed in music, it’s hard to wrap one’s head around just how many records were coming out that would go on to become iconic in their own right. While one could draw sonic parallels between many of the releases that year, absolutely nothing sounded like Dummy. Much of that uniqueness can be traced to the painstaking recording process the group undertook while working on a shoestring budget.

The album famously built its sound by sampling obscure library music, film soundtracks, and jazz records — but with a twist. Rather than sampling directly, Barrow and the team would often re-record the samples live, then sample their own recordings to get that degraded, worn quality. This gave the album its distinctively dusty, aged texture. To achieve that lo-fi, haunted feel, they deliberately ran recordings through old equipment, added tape hiss, and used filtering to make things sound like they’d been played off a battered vinyl record. The crackle and warmth is largely manufactured rather than incidental — but damn does it sound good.

The band also had an unusual origin story of their own. Barrow had been working with Neneh Cherry on her second album Homebrew (1992), hired by her husband Cameron McVey. It was in Cherry’s London kitchen, of all places, that Barrow and Gibbons first began sketching out what would eventually become Dummy — stealing time between sessions to develop their own ideas. Bristol’s music scene in the early nineties was small and deeply interconnected, and that proximity to Cherry’s world, to Massive Attack, to DJ Andy Smith’s extraordinary record collection, fed directly into the DNA of the album.

And then there is Beth Gibbons. To understand what makes her remarkable, it helps to remember the landscape she emerged from. At the same time Dummy was released, female artists were staging a full-on coup in the music industry, smashing through in ways they hadn’t in the past. Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star was brooding her way through So Tonight That I May See (1993). Tori Amos was lighting the world on fire with Under the Pink (1994). PJ Harvey had delivered the ferocious Rid of Me (1993). Liz Phair had rewritten the rules with Exile in Guyville (1993). These were extraordinary, distinctive voices — and yet Gibbons sounded like none of them. Her delivery combined raw, slightly fractured vulnerability with a kind of torch song theatricality that felt like it came from an entirely different era. To find a true analog you have to travel back to Billie Holiday or Nina Simone — singers for whom the performance cost something, where every note felt like a confession. Two songs in particular show exactly what Gibbons brought to this record.

Glory Box is, in this writer’s contention, Portishead’s signature song. While not the biggest commercial hit on the album, if you were to ask a hundred random people about the band, this is the one they’d probably come up with. Built around a smoldering Isaac Hayes sample, the track is one long slow burn, and Gibbons’ performance is absolutely devastating. From the coy, slithering opening to her full-throated delivery of the line “For if this is the beginning of forever and ever, it’s time to move over” near the denouement — if you have a romantic bone in your body, this song will leave you on the ground, exhausted from the emotional journey.

If Glory Box is the signature, then Roads is Dummy‘s heart and soul. The song was never released as a single — a deliberate choice that speaks to everything Portishead valued as artists. Releasing it, remixing it for radio, marketing it as a hit would have compromised the very quality that makes it extraordinary. By leaving it as an album track, they forced listeners to find it themselves, to discover it in context, which may be precisely why it has endured with such emotional force. Roads is also unique in the Dummy catalogue in that it contains no samples whatsoever — unlike virtually everything else on the record, it was built entirely from live instrumentation, stripped down to sparse piano, strings, Adrian Utley’s weeping guitar, and the power of Gibbons’ unsettling, forlorn voice. For this writer, it is the song that brings her vocal talent to its greatest use. From the moment she begins singing, her vulnerability is palpable, her need urgent and deeply sincere. The lilting vibrato only adds to the emotional impact — is she scared? Anxious? None of that matters. You’re left absolutely wrecked, and somehow ready to slay dragons for the person singing.

When they say they don’t make them like they used to, that is especially true of Dummy. More than thirty years in the rearview mirror, the album continues to resonate — perhaps even more so with today’s audience than when it was first released. Authenticity, passion, and genius never go out of style, and Portishead’s debut remains living proof of that every single day.

Sitting here firmly in 2026, it’s almost too easy to forget just how amazing, musically speaking, the 1990s were. Grunge had finally defeated glam metal, alternative was becoming mainstream and metal came out of the darkness having survived the satanic panic of the 1980s. This was the beginning of the large music festival scene with Lollapalooza dominating ticket sales as acts from Nine Inch Nails to Rage against the Machine played on the festival’s stage. Radiohead began their march toward legendary status and Tool was showing us that math rock could also have a following.

Amidst all of that, the slew of one hit wonders from the era are themselves a marvel to behold. Ranging from the truly one and done bands (New Radicals) to those who finally broke through their underground status to land a hit (Butthole Surfers) to the truly tragic leaving behind memories and a sense of grief for what could have been (Blind Melon). And then, in my mind at least, there is the case of Sponge – I still don’t understand why they didn’t become bigger names, Plowed is an absolute banger of a track and the rest of the album, while not as solid as Plowed is still a damn good initial album, the track Molly stands out to me!

As a young adult at the time, I turned 21 in 1995. The music of this era is still absolute magic for me and as I look to create a series decadal one hit wonders collections, it made absolute sense in my mind to start with ‘90s alternative.

Give it a listen and tell me what I missed in the comments – which of your favorite one hit wonders did I miss?

Rules: Structured like an actual 90-minute mix tape – approximately 45 minutes per side, no repeats allowed!

Gimmie the Links!

YouTube | Apple Music

Side A

1. Primitive Radio Gods - Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand

2. Sponge – Plowed

3. Marcy Playground – Sex and Candy

4. The Breeders – Cannonball

5. Deep Blue Something – Breakfast At Tiffany’s

6. Fastball – The Way

7. Spacehog – In the Meantime

8. Nine Days – Story of A Girl

9. Hum – Stars

10. Seven Mary Three – Cumbersome

11. New Radicals – You Get What You Give

12. Verve Pipe – The Freshman

Sibe B

1. Tal Bachman – She’s So High

2. Blind Mellon – No Rain

3. Local H – Bound for the Floor

4. Nada Surf – Popular

5. Dishwalla – Counting Blue Cars

6. Toadies – Possum Kingdom

7. Spin Doctors – Two Princesses

8. Lit – My Own Worst Enemy

9. Edwyn Collings – A Girl Like You

10. Vertical Horizons – Everything You Want

11. Butthole Surfers – Pepper

12. Semisonic – Closing Time

Record Store Day was supposed to save the little guys. Somewhere along the way, it forgot about them.

Before I unload, let me be clear — I’m not coming after the more than 1,400 record stores that participated this year, or the thousands of fans who lined up before dawn and braved the cold to get their hands on a sought-after release. I hit three stores myself on RSD 2026. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to fellow record seekers outside of Rock Cellar Records in Truckee, and at every stop — Rock Cellar Records, Discology and Recycled Records in Reno — the staff was kind, organized, and genuinely happy to be there. This is also not the piece where I complain about the secondary market. That’s a whole separate conversation.

What I do want to talk about is the store I drove past to get there.

I live in Sonora, California, in the Sierra Foothills. Sonora to Truckee is a three-and-a-half hour drive. I have a record store in Sonora — the Vinyl Vault, a plucky little shop run by Rosemary Fields, who is working her ass off to build something real in a small rural town. She didn’t qualify for RSD 2026. Not enough volume. Not enough years in business. Not enough square footage.

Are you kidding me right now?

Record Store Day’s own mission statement reads: “conceived as a way to celebrate and spread the word about the unique culture surrounding nearly 1,400 independently owned record stores in the US and thousands of similar stores internationally.”

So why are we leaving out exactly the kind of store that mission describes? I love Amoeba Records, but how much help does Amoeba really need? I get that music is a business — we can hate on that all we want, but it’s the reality we live in. Fine. But the people running this nonprofit are smart enough to know that more record stores means more record fans. Are you telling me they can’t put together an Emerging Locations package that brings smaller shops into the fold? Why aren’t we giving every opportunity to that 16-year-old in a small town to get turned on to the music? That kid isn’t driving three and a half hours.

Now let’s talk about live releases, because this is where RSD is also losing the plot.

Give or take a nickel, there were 355 releases for RSD 2026. Of those, 47 — more than 10 percent — were live recordings. And look, I’ll catch heat for this, but: how many more Grateful Dead concerts does the world actually need on wax? Another Pink Floyd live album? Pink Floyd has officially released seven live albums, plus 30 archival streaming concert releases, plus the Pompeii film. They are one of the most thoroughly documented live bands in rock history. At some point the argument “but it’s never been on vinyl” stops being sufficient justification.

Here’s the thing — I actually wanted a live release this year. The Jeff Buckley Live in L’Olympia was at the top of my list, and I paid around $40 for it. This was a breakthrough concert, one of the shows that established Buckley as an international sensation. It’s a 2-LP set.

It’s not a gatefold.

There’s no liner notes, no essay, no photos, no artifact of the moment. The dust jackets double as lyric sheets and that’s it. Two black vinyl records in a standard sleeve. For a release that should feel like an event, it feels like an afterthought. And it wasn’t alone — several other releases this year, live and otherwise, had the same problem. The music deserved better packaging. So did the fans who drove across the state to find it.

I hope the RSD nonprofit hears some of this before 2027. The small stores need a pathway in. The live release count needs a hard look. And the flagship releases need to be treated like the artifacts they’re supposed to be.

Happy Days never recovered after Fonzie jumped the shark. But Record Store Day isn’t Happy Days — it’s still genuinely great, and still worth saving. So tell me: has it jumped the shark, or are you still happy with the way things are?

Every year, thousands of vinyl newbies and old school collectors alike line up outside record stores at 8am (5 a.m. for the really busy stores), clutching coffee and a vague sense of excitement, only to blow $60 on a limited-edition orange pressing of something they could’ve grabbed in any used bin for $4.

We’ve all been there. Here’s how to not be that person come.

First, ignore the hype list — then read the hype list

When RSD drops its official release list (usually a few weeks before the event), the internet loses its mind. Limited! Exclusive! Only 500 pressed! Cool. But here’s the thing: scarcity isn’t the same as quality. A badly mastered record pressed on bubble-gum pink vinyl is still a badly mastered record. Look past the novelty and ask yourself: would I want this if it came in plain black?

Pressing plant > everything

Here’s the nerdy stuff that actually matters. Not all records are created equal — where a record is physically pressed makes a huge difference in how it sounds. Plants like Quality Record Pressings (QRP), Pallas in Germany, or Record Industry in the Netherlands have reputations for clean, quiet pressings. If that info is listed on the release (check Discogs forums or r/vinyl in the weeks leading up to RSD), it’s a good sign someone cared about the product beyond the color.

Who mastered it?

This is the question most beginners skip — and it’s arguably the most important one. A great master from the original analog tapes, cut by someone like Kevin Gray or Bernie Grundman, can make a reissue sound incredible. A lazy digital transfer from a streaming file? You’re basically paying $40 for an MP3 you could’ve just... streamed.

Look for AAA (analog all the way through) in the descriptions. If the mastering info is suspiciously absent, that’s a red flag.

Is this actually hard to find otherwise?

Before you queue up, spend five minutes on Discogs. If an original pressing of the album is sitting there for $12 in VG+ condition, ask yourself why you’re about to pay $35 for a reissue just because it has a sticker on it. RSD shines brightest for genuinely out-of-print titles, first-time-on-vinyl releases, or records that routinely sell for way more than the RSD price.

The releases worth skipping (almost always)

• Picture discs. They look incredible on a wall. They sound like a plastic bag.

• Anything that’s been an RSD release three years in a row. That’s not a collectible, that’s a product.

• Color variants of albums already available everywhere in black. You’re paying for aesthetics, not audio.

The move

Make your list weeks ahead. Prioritize by what you’d genuinely listen to, not what you think will flip well on Discogs (spoiler: most RSD releases don’t flip as well as people hope). Know your #1, your #2, and your “if there’s nothing else” pick.

And if you miss out? The used bins will survive. The hobby is long. There will be other records.

Happy hunting — and may your stylus stay clean and your pressing plant be German.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- You wouldn’t know watching him bounce between two different stages for a nearly two hour set on March 16 at Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center but Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails, is 60 years old.

Normally age isn’t worth noting in a concert performance except when it becomes yet another thing the legendary front man seems to defy. The energy from Nine Inch Nails on display in Sacramento resembled more a teenaged punk rock routine vs a collection of aging rockers performing the last show of a 60 plus date tour in what was rumored to be the last Nine Inch Nails show ever. Nearly 50 yards apart the band performed on two different stages, beginning on what was labeled Stage B sprinting over to the Main stage and back again multiple times throughout the performance – take that Mick Jagger!

Reznor and Nine Inch Nails are legendary performers known for elaborate set designs from their frolic in the mud at Woodstock in 1994 to their tour with David Bowie in 1995 as the opening act, a performance noted by a 2012 Rolling Stone reader’s poll as one of the top 10 opening acts in rock history. But back to 2026 and Sacramento where screens surrounding the band projected the performance to the more than 17,000 seat venue in lieu of the typically present jumbotron.

All of Nine Inch Nails’ considerable musical tools were on display from the very beginning of the show which featured Trent Reznor, alone at his piano for a rendition of “Something I Can Never Have” from 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine. Slowly ratcheting up the intensity as more band members came on stage, the initial Stage B performance ended with “Piggy” from The Downward Spiral.

The audience, now fully primed, exploded into chaos as the opening, pounding bass drum notes of one of Nine Inch Nails most outwardly aggressive tracks, “Wish” from the 1992 release Broken rattled the rafters erupting from the main stage. There is just something absolutely life-affirming in witnessing thousands of bodies pulsating in rhythm to the music as mosh-pits emerge and dissolve within the crowds like jetties on a river. For some people that moment comes when cell phones replace lighters for the slow/slower tracks, for me it comes in the form of raw, sweety, sensuality as Reznor growls “Wish there was something real, wish there was something true, wish there was something real in this world full of you” his minions for the moment below paying worship to their king above. No instrument or computer was spared in the performance!

Reznor has cited a multitude of influences in his career ranging from electronic music pioneers such as Brian Eno, Gary Numan, and Kraftwerk; the heavy guitar influence of industrial rock luminaries, Ministry and Skinny Puppy; the art of artists such as David Bowie and Pink Floyd and performance as art aesthetic of Queen. Most notably, Reznor places David Bowie as one of the most influential artist to him, in an interview with FarOut Magazine, Reznor said:

“After getting to know him and becoming friends with him, it’s been an inspiration not only in his music and his career but also his life… I met him when I was about to bottom out, and it was somebody that had bottomed out, and I saw that there was hope on the other end. Life wasn’t about sitting around AA meetings, smoking cigarettes, reliving the glory days. His life was a shitload better than it was.”

In this current era of exorbitant ticket prices where each concert can be an exercise in questioning your life choices, catching a Nine Inch Nails performance will never fail you. Over the course of more than 30 years, Trent Reznor and company have yet to land a dud with no indication that future performances will be anything less than the continued march toward legendary status.

The list dropped a few days ago, and like clockwork, I’ve been spiraling ever since.

Record Store Day 2026 is officially on the calendar, bringing roughly 350 exclusive releases with it. Sure, there’s the usual quota of live albums, remixes, and picture disc gimmicks that feel more like filler than essential vinyl, but buried in there? Pure gold for those of us willing to dig.

It’s wild to think RSD started as a scrappy marketing push to save dying indie record stores. Now, nearly 20 years later, it’s a global phenomenon—over 280 participating stores, millions of collectors marking their calendars, and vinyl sales that eclipsed CDs back in 2022. We went from under a million vinyl units sold in 2006 to 43.6 million in 2024. The format that was supposed to be dead is very much alive.

After comparing notes with my brother (fellow vinyl junkie) and cross-referencing want lists, I’ve landed on 11 to 13 releases I’m chasing this year. I’m already funneling money into my RSD savings account because April 18 is coming fast, and this isn’t the kind of event you wing. Limited quantities, uneven distribution—you need a plan.

Here are my top five, the ones I’m willing to fight for:

1. Jeff Buckley, Live A L’Olympia, Legacy Recording, 2 LP, Exclusive RSD Release, 15,400 copies

   

   This live album captures Jeff Buckley and band across two nights in Paris July 6th & 7th during his 1995 European tour in support of the release of his Grace album. Captured at the legendary Olympia, it found Buckley before a rapturous French crowd performing half of the songs from his beloved debut album ( including favorites like “Lover, You Should Have Come Over” and “Hallelujah”) plus covers as varied as the MC5’s “Kick Out The Jams,” a Led Zeppelin parody and songs made famous by Nina Simone and Edith Piaf. In addition, the album features an additional live performance of Buckley and Alim Qasimov in a competitive Qawwali singing duet from a festival of sacred music also captured that year in France. Originally released in 2001

2. Caamp, Caamp 10th Anniversary Edition, 2 LP, Exclusive RSD Release, 3,500 copies

   

   Caamp is celebrating the tenth anniversary of their self-titled debut album with an expanded 2xLP remastered version for Record Store Day, which features three previously unreleased demos, four live tracks, in a double wide sleeve with two inserts, pressed on coke bottle clear vinyl.

3. Flat Duo Jets, Boogie on Your Head, LP, RSD First Release, 1500 copies

   

   Few bands embodied the raw spirit of American rock & roll like Flat Duo Jets. Fronted by the late, great Dexter Romweber, the North Carolina duo’s frenetic energy, primal guitar tone, and unfiltered swagger became the missing link between Gene Vincent and Jack White. Recorded in 1989 during sessions for their iconic debut album, the 13 tracks on Boogie On Your Head! capture the Flat Duo Jets at their peak, being loose, wild, and unstoppable. These aren’t outtakes but alternate realities of that debut: equally vital, equally ferocious, and left unreleased only because there was simply too much fire to fit on one LP. Originally issued in a limited deluxe box set pressing for RSD 2017 and out of print since, these recordings return for Record Store Day 2026 as a limited-edition RSD First pressing of 1,500 copies on rose-splatter colored vinyl, complete with an exclusive fold-out poster. This release marks the first standalone vinyl edition of Boogie On Your Head!, lovingly curated by Propeller Sound Recordings as a companion to the band’s self-titled debut. For collectors and fans alike, it’s a chance to experience the full scope of the sessions that launched one of the most mythic cult bands in American garage rock. Dexter Romweber’s passing in 2024 reignited appreciation for his seismic influence, spanning from Jack White’s early sound and ethos to Cat Power’s haunting minimalism to Neko Case’s fearless individuality. Boogie On Your Head! serves as both a tribute and time capsule, capturing the essence of a band whose rawness inspired a generation of artists.

4. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Some Candy Talking EP, 12” Vinly EP. RSD Exclusive, 2000 copies.

First ever US pressing of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s legendary Some Candy Talking EP, originally released 40 years ago, hot on the heels of the seminal Psychocandy LP. Releaed now as an expanded 12” that include all seven tracks from the 1986 2x7” UK edition and adding the previously unreleased acoustic version of “Taste Of Cindy” that will only be featured on the Third Man Records edition. Housed in a reproduction of the iconic original B&W 12” artwork with full color frameable insert featuring brand new and original artwork by Mel Butler.

5. Bring Me the Horizon, Lo-Files, 2 X LP, RSD First, 1500 copies

Bring Me the Horizon expands their sonic universe with the release of ‘LO-FILES’, a 23-track album of lo-fi reinterpretations from across their celebrated catalogue of music. This unique project sees tracks from every era including 2013’s Sempiternal through to 2024’s POST HUMAN: NeX Gen, transformed into laid-back, atmospheric reinterpretations by some of the most respected names in the lo-fi space, including No Spirit, Drxnk, HM Surf, and more.2 x Black Re-vinyl, with a Die Cut Cover Sleeve and 4 page folded insert.

Tom Waits is a musical god. Full stop. And like most gods when they interact with us mere mortals it is, at times, a bit hard to comprehend. This guy smashes together blues, jazz, industrial, experimental and theatre into a single album like some half-crazed recovering mad-scientist turned carnival barker and then leaves it for us to sort out. This is not a task for the faint of heart! But let us attempt to make sense of Wait’s mad, mad landscape, filled with drunks, bastards, brawlers, and bawlers into something we might be able to hear.

This project started a couple weeks ago. I was talking to my oldest son, Kerouac who knew how much I loved Waits. We share a lot of similar musical interests, and he decided he was finally ready to give Waits a shot.

“So where do I begin, Dad?”

Now that’s a loaded question. To know Tom Waits is to know there are very different periods in a career spanning more than 50 years and 17 studio albums. There’s the San Diego folk scene period of Closing Time, and The Heart of Saturday Night that showcases Tom’s vivid characters and storyteller ability but placed in a softer, jazzy-piano bar setting. There’s the period after 1980 when Waits married Kathleen Brennan who would go on to be Wait’s main songwriting collaborator (move over Lenon-McCartney!). Around the same time, he moved from Asylum Records to the Island Records label where Tom would begin experimenting with pretty much anything he could get his hands on to make sound.

Swordfishtrombones, Wait’s first album on Island Records was a massive departure from anything he’d done prior, his Island years culminated in Bone Machine which won the 1992 Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. Jon Pareles wrote that “On Swordfishtrombones, Waits has made a breakthrough–he’s found music as evocative as his words. Waits’s grumble of a voice now bounces off a peculiar assortment of horns and percussion and organ and keyboards, as if he’d led a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco.”

From this point, Tom moved to Anti Records (an off shoot of Epitaph Records), releasing Mule Variations in 1999. “Epitaph is a label run by and for artists and musicians, where it feels much more like a partnership than a plantation... We shook on the deal over a coffee in a truck stop. I know it’s going to be an adventure,” Waits said of the move. Tom’s, as of right now, final studio album, “Bad As Me,” was released in 2011 and would go on to become his first top 10 album in the U.S., peaking at number 6.

That was a lot and was, in no way, even trying to be exhaustive. So where do you begin with someone has wide-ranging as Tom Waits? I told Kerouac, that while it was probably my absolute favorite Waits’ album to stay away from The Black Rider initially. He of course didn’t listen to me and a few days after our initial conversation sent me the following text.

“I don’t know how I’d even describe this album …its so far outside my comfort zone I almost can’t even judge it!”

I warned you.

I’ve attempted to not only create a solid introduction to the artist, but one that also looks to showcase his different eras. Much like the little biography above, this is not intended to be exhaustive, there’s a couple albums not represented as something from each album was not my goal. Give it a whirl. What did I miss? What’s your favorite Tom Waits album or track? What song do you think I should have included as an introduction? Tell me in the comments below!

Mixtape on Spotify

Side A

1. (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night – The Heart of Saturday Night

2. San Diego Serenade – The Heart of Saturday Night

3. Tom Traubert’s Blues – Small Change

4. The Piano Has Been Drinking – Small Change

5. Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard – Blue Valentine

6. Blue Valentines – Blue Valentine

7. Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis – Blue Valentine

8. Frank’s Theme – Frank’s Wild Years

9. Way Down in A Hole – Frank’s Wild Years

10. 16 Shells From A 30.6 – Swordfishtrombones

11. Singapore – Rain Dogs

Side B

1. Rain Dogs – Rain Dogs

2. Goin’ Out West – Bone Machine

3. Black Wings – Bone Machine

4. Chocolate Jesus – Mule Variations

5. Filipino Box Spring Hog – Mule Variations

6. Make it Rain – Real Gone

7. Green Grass – Real Gone

8. God’s Away on Business – Blood Money

9. Flowers Grave – Alice

10. Just the Right Bullets – The Black Rider

11. Down There By the Train – Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before – “But you have to listen to it on vinyl, it sounds SOOOO much better.” If I’m being gracious, there’s no doubt in my mind the individual making such statements are well meaning, but that trope is played out. There are plenty of us that believe the sonic signature of vinyl is superior but don’t worry, you won’t get any of that here. I’m also sure there are more than three reasons and maybe I’ll dig into those more later, but for now, here are my top three reasons why I think you should start buying vinyl records now!

Intentionality – Slowing Things Down

Can we all agree the world moves just too damn fast these days? Everything comes at you a mile a minute, our lives inundated by ads, social media induced rage, actual rage and that just barely treading water feeling we all have trying to keep up with the frenetic energy that is life in our modern age. Even our playlists are an unholy jukebox of musical psychosis cobbled together by the random songs we heard on TikTok, that song from that commercial, and that one that was playing during some YouTube video. Vinyl forces you to reevaluate your relationship with music and more importantly, it forces you to slow down.

First you must select a record from your collection. Maybe you’ve alphabetized them, maybe you haven’t, either way you have to go to your collection, sift through it and pull out the one you want. This process alone is meditative, take deep breaths while you’re doing this and tell me if you don’t already feel better. You’ve got your record, slip it out of the jacket, give it a twirl - ‘cause why not – and place it on the turn table. If you’re somewhat obsessive like me, you’ll give the album a light dust wipe-down before moving the needle over and dropping the tone arm to start the music. It’s a ritual, its intentional and know it or not, your heart rate is already slowing down.

The average side of a record contains 18 – 22 minutes of music. That’s not a huge commitment, right? You can give 20 minutes to something. Want to skip to a different track? Technically, you can – you have to lift the tone arm, position the needle over the track you want, drop the tone arm … but why bother? Just let the whole thing play. Check it – there’s that song you love that caused you to by this damn thing in the first place. But what’s this? You’ve never heard this track before and man-o-man, its good! The slight popping of dust alerts you Side A is done, time to flip the record, the ritual repeats itself. Maybe you danced a little during your favorite track, maybe you just sipped your morning coffee while the music softly resonated from your speakers, maybe you got dressed for the day while the record spun. Whatever you were doing, you just spent 20 to 40 minutes disconnected, in your happy place intentionally interacting with something you love!

You Own the Media

This one might be bigger than vinyl’s ability to slow things down. In today’s digital world of subscriptions and impermanence, you own nothing and it could be gone in the blink of an eye. We’ve seen streaming services remove albums without warning (licensing disputes, artist requests, corporate decisions), entire services shut down (like Google Play Music), or content get region-locked. When you “buy” digital music or movies, you’re often just licensing access that can be revoked. Physical ownership means no company can take it away from you. And then there’s the never-ending treadmill of new and constantly increasing subscription fees.

On a monthly basis, streaming feels affordable, but you’re perpetually paying for access without ever building equity. Stop paying and you lose everything. Over a lifetime, you might spend thousands with nothing tangible to show for it. Physical media means once you buy it, it’s yours permanently without ongoing costs. And now we’re going to move into the Terminator-esque, the-machines-are-in-control-of-everything of you owning it.

Streaming platforms curate what gets surfaced, what’s on playlists, even what order songs appear in albums. They’re intermediaries between you and the art. Owning media means experiencing it on your terms, not filtered through corporate interests or engagement metrics. Walk into a record store and on the first things you’re going to notice if the recommendations of informed curators – the staff. Handwritten cards or face-to-face conversations with knowledgeable store employees create a mentorship dynamic that doesn’t really exist in streaming. You’re getting filtered through someone’s taste and expertise rather than aggregate data. And the genre/artist deep-dives that happen naturally when you’re flipping through a section - you might discover a whole label’s catalog or a producer’s body of work just by physical proximity on the shelf, which reveals connections streaming interfaces often hide. Vinyl is the antidote to algorithmic isolation - you’re getting human curation and serendipity instead of being in your own personalized content bubble. This naturally leads to my third reason you should start collecting vinyl and that is for the community.

Community

Missing from so many of our communities these days, especially in more rural communities, as where I live, are those third places - record stores are a third place. Record stores function like coffee shops or bookstores used to, as communal gathering spots where people with shared interests naturally cross paths. You strike up conversations about what you’re holding, get recommendations, debate pressings. It creates social ties in neighborhoods that might otherwise lack them, which research suggests is important for wellbeing and community cohesion. It also serves as a severely lacking generational bridge.

Vinyl culture is one of the few hobbies where teenagers, middle-aged collectors, and older folks interact as equals. Younger collectors learn from people who bought these records new, older collectors discover contemporary music through younger fans. It breaks down age segregation that’s pretty pervasive in modern life. Unlike online music communities that are diffuse and global, vinyl brings you into relationship with your physical community. You’re supporting local businesses, meeting local people, participating in something rooted in place. All communities have a learning curve with their rituals and language, and vinyl collecting is no exception. It’s easy to think of Jack Black’s obnoxious character in Hi-Fidelity when you think of your typical record collector, but I assure you most of us are welcoming and want to share your knowledge with ours!

Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that vinyl records specifically and physical media more broadly is where all of us need to be. We need something that slows us down in our social-media driven, 24-hour news cycle world. The world is going to continue to change in ways we are just starting to understand and if we are to survive what is in front of us, we’re going to need community and dammit … I refuse to lose one more album by my favorite band because Apple or Spotify lost the rights. So what did I forget? What do you think is a major reason folks should collect records or do you think I’m off my rocker and digital is the way to go? Tell me below in the comments! Hope to see you at the record store!!