Smoking a cigarette outside Borderland Books in San Francisco, Michael walked up to me.

“Do you own any other shirts?” he asked, matter-of-factly.

I’d recently moved to the city and was very much in the process of finding somewhere to live, couch surfing at my friend Jason’s place. Michael was right, I didn’t have much in my inventory at the moment, most items packed in a rented storage shed.

“I do, just most of it’s in the bottom of a bag somewhere,” I replied, somewhat embarrassed.

To be fair, we’d run into each other three or four times over the last couple of weeks and I was probably wearing that Front Line Assembly shirt each time. I’d scored it from the legendary industrial music mail order store Isolation Tank — not only was it my favorite shirt at the time, most of my stuff truly was at the bottom of a bag somewhere.

“OK, so I know you like FLA, what else you listen to?” he inquired.

At the time I was knee-deep in my goth industrial phase and still believed that knowledge of obscure bands equaled coolness. I rattled off a few bands I was into at the time — Haujobb, Wumpscut, Velvet Acid Christ — hoping the name drops would give me a few points in the cool guy department.

“OK, so a lot of German industrial stuff, anything else?” he asked.

I sort of stammered for a bit, my brain deciding that was the moment to stop working as I stamped out my smoke.

Depending on which angle you looked at him, Michael looked like Chris Cornell or Kirk Hammett. He’d grown up Bay Area and radiated an effortless cool manifested in a flip of his long black hair. Was I trying to impress him? Yes. Did I have a slight crush on him? Also yes.

We wandered back into Borderland Books, the after-hours party underway in earnest at this point. It might have been Halloween, it might have been a Tuesday night — I don’t really remember other than that night was an epic party that eventually found me waking up on the backroom couch, sneaking my way out the back door and fumbling up Hayes to Jason’s apartment on Scott Street.

And somewhere along the way, Michael and I would become friends. We’d talk about music — he was as deep into music as I was — go to concerts together; either one of us was almost always up for a show, always gravitating toward each other whenever our large group of friends got together. He was loud and obnoxious in social settings — a defensive skill he’d acquired after years of being the picked-on outcast — and he was vehement in his opinions on bands, books and politics. Say what you will about Gen X, at least we knew how to have an opinion.

He grew up in Vallejo and held no love for his home city. Vallejo is the kind of Bay Area city that peaked when the Navy yard at Mare Island closed and has been trying to figure out its personality ever since, acting like it’s a rugged urban powerhouse while everyone else just uses it as a cheap bridge to Napa.

After an ill-fated attempt to reconcile with my then girlfriend and mother of my child, Michael, Pandora — my half-rottweiler, half-lab puppy — and I became roommates once I moved back from Ohio. We settled into a third-floor, two-bedroom apartment off Scott Street overlooking one of San Francisco’s most beautiful and iconic Victorian houses at the corner of Scott and Fulton. Local legend holds the house has been everything from a Russian tea house to the home of Satanic Church founder Anton LaVey, his incantations bouncing off the walls as furiously as the orgies the home is purported to have hosted. A quick Google Maps inquiry lists it as the William Westerfeld House — it’s truly a marvel.

Even though he worked in the technology field, Michael despised all the recent transplants to the city and took an extremely punk-rock/anarchist approach to voice his disdain. We were walking home one night from a lower Haight pub crawl, having just participated in a communal Simpsons viewing at the Toronado, when we approached our apartment to find someone had decided the answer to San Francisco’s notorious parking problem was to park up on and block the sidewalk. As we maneuvered our way past the newer model car, Michael whipped out the keys to his own ‘80s-era Bronco II and raked it from bumper to bumper, his fury at the driver now a clear disruption in the shiny paint job. How I didn’t make his shit-list is beyond me, but I was thankful I was his friend and didn’t have a car.

Eventually I would reconcile with my ex, she would move out to San Francisco for a spell, ultimately leading to us moving back to Ohio. Michael and I kept up with each other mostly via email. We both loved to write, so massive screeds back and forth circling an insanely wide range of topics kept the conversational fires burning. Here’s one such example — a note from 2014, Michael writing to me after I’d been watching a Salinger documentary and wanted to talk about it:

I’ve been meaning to write you for ages, and I’m sure I’ve started to a half dozen times already, but, as always seems to happen to our correspondence, something keeps happening in between. It’s been that sort of life recently. I noted to myself that yesterday already seems so far away, and the day before even further, and yet tomorrow seems to keep coming far too quickly.

It would be nothing for us not to talk to each other for weeks, months at a time, to suddenly engage in a conversation that lasted weeks — this went on for several years.

Bouncing from Ohio to Arizona and then Wyoming, I was closing the door on that chapter. The former ex-girlfriend, now soon-to-be ex-wife, was in San Diego. Kerouac — our son — was spending the last bits of summer and early fall with my sister in Arizona. In addition to ending the Wyoming chapter, I was preparing for what would become my last long-term military deployment, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Leading up to the final days I had planned a trip to Arizona to pick up Kerouac, spend a moment with the family there, drive him to San Diego, a moment there, and then up to San Francisco to say goodbye.

This was the fall of 2010. In addition to all of the shared interests I’ve mentioned, Michael and I were both also huge baseball fans. I’ve been a Baltimore Orioles fan since the days of Shelly Nesbit — different story for another time — and Michael was a lifelong Giants fan. Having lived in The City for so many years, catching them first at the ‘Stick and then being there when PacBell Park (now Oracle Park) opened, the Giants were easily my second favorite team. And that fall, the Giants were in the World Series, squaring off against the Texas Rangers. All while I was in San Diego I would slip away to catch a score, see an inning, rooting on the crew of Lincecum, Bumgarner, Posey, Huff, and Renteria. As I made my way north, as soon as I was able I picked up KNBR, AM 680, and listened to the familiar voices of Kuiper and Krukow calling the game.

Sometimes the universe finds a way to line things up in perfect sequence. Lincecum had pitched a hell of a game, allowing just one run over eight innings, but at 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth, nothing was promised. As I eased off Highway 101 in The City, Brian Wilson was on to close out the ninth with Nelson Cruz at the plate — and just as I pulled onto Laguna, Cruz struck out and the Giants won their first World Series since 1954.

The. City. Exploded.

The streets were absolute bedlam as I struggled to find a place to park anywhere near Michael’s Fell Street apartment. I ended up far away — I don’t even remember where. I called Michael and we met at some corner bar, smashed each other in a massive hug and entered the fray. We tried to catch up but the noise and celebration of the bar made it nearly impossible, so we wandered out to find food, stumbling into a sushi bar down the way. The sushi joint was a little less chaotic but still in a raucous mood as the owner introduced us to his new world champion rolls. We finished eating, hit the corner liquor store and made our way back to Michael’s third-floor apartment where we camped out on his roof, smoking cigarettes and engaging with the crowds below.

“Dude, you’re making me nervous,” a half-drunk Michael called out to me.

I’d taken to pretending I was a tightrope walker, going back and forth along the edge of the roof as I yelled down at the crowds.

“Oh fine,” I said as I jumped down off the ledge, laid down with my head over the edge and continued talking to a giddy San Francisco below me.

We talked for hours, just catching up — where our lives had taken us, what we’d been up to.

“Can you believe Kerouac is almost eight,” I asked him.

“Man, I’m having a hard time believing he’s five, let alone eight!”

Eventually we both crashed. Michael had to get up for work the next morning, so he was up and out pretty quick. I had to get going back to Wyoming but on a little less of a tight schedule. I made my way back to my car, jumped in, stared out the window for a moment — only to find the most San Francisco of artifacts attached to my windshield: a parking ticket. Seems my perfect parking spot wasn’t so perfect after all.

It would be a few years before I saw Michael again, this time with K by my side. We were up in the Bay Area visiting her high school best friend and I desperately wanted to introduce her to him, so we met at a local bar. Somewhere during the night, K and I slipped off to grab a series of photos in one of those three-picture photo booths. That strip still hangs on our fridge — I think I can do a better monster face these days.

“I really like her,” Michael said to me as we parted ways for the night. “And she clearly likes you, much better than…” His words trailed off, both of us knowing what he meant.

The last time I saw Michael was somewhere just before the twins were born, around 2017. He was down in San Diego for Comic Con and dropped in to our home for a visit. Again we caught up like old friends, but something was just slightly off. The election of 2016 had weighed heavily on both of us and it’s hard to overstate just how vitriolic the fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had been. I refuse to relitigate that whole debacle, but if you were any sort of progressive or leftist during that primary season, a part of you died when Clinton took the primary and Trump took the election.

Michael used to say you could tell how loved a person was by how many people showed up at their funeral. It was a chilling line, and whenever he dropped it, it was leveled with such certainty and clarity that I often felt slightly perturbed when he said it.

As per the norm, we dropped into communicating via email and the occasional appearance on each other’s social media feed. I feel strongly that historians will one day mark 2016 and that election cycle as the year Facebook committed to its own demise via the now well-known process of enshittification. Michael showed up less on my feed until it finally occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him in some time.

I fired off some emails — Hey man, you still out there?

Life had gotten the best of me — new twins, retiring from the military, leaving San Diego for the Sierra Foothills. I pinged a few of our mutual friends — Heard anything from Michael?

The replies were all the same: haven’t heard from him in a while, he said something about dropping out.

This really wasn’t surprising. Michael talked about that often — about just one day packing it all up and moving to Europe or some far-away country and putting everything else behind him.

Every so often I’d fire off another email, convinced I’d either done something to offend him (I often assume I’m at fault) or that he was living it up somewhere in France or Amsterdam. All of the messages went unanswered and I continued with life.

Fast forward to just a few days ago, sitting outside the local grocery store. Tristan, one of my 8-year-old twins, is crawling all over my lap as his brother Lucien is in the passenger seat, half hanging out the window. Michael had been on my mind a lot lately for some reason, and I was determined this time I was going to figure out where he’d gotten off to. I’d done a few internet searches in the past, to no avail, but this time I got a result.

“Michael Alan ‘Mike’ Heins, 49, passed away suddenly on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2018 at his home in San Francisco.”

I’m sorry it took me so long, my friend. But I’m here. I showed up.

For a while there in 2026 it seemed like you couldn’t open TikTok without being asked if you wanted to eat chips and talk shit. The simple yet cathartic idea came from the power-punk duo of Mac Rettig and Rocco Ramos, recording under the moniker Mr. Dinkles — which honestly sounds like the name of a clown with a starring role in a yet-to-be-written Stephen King novel. Move over, Pennywise.

The song was catchy and cool yet somehow my jaded brain glommed on to the idea that it had been custom built for the algorithm and I moved on. Fast forward a few months and finding myself doom-scrolling in lieu of actually watching the world burn to the ground, my ear catches the line “Why can’t you tell me what I’m doing wrong to my face.” Oh, now this is intriguing as the fuzzed-out guitar punctuates the lyrics. I look at the screen, Mr. Dinkles… wait a minute this is the eat chips band. Boy was I wrong.

I mean not actually wrong, it was the eat chips band but god-damn was I wrong to dismiss them. Oh and it turns out Mr. Dinkles was a cat, sorry Pennywise.

Alright, well let’s eat chips and talk shit.

Released as an EP on Futureless Records on June 5, 2026, R.I.P.T. proves the two-piece can both write and play. It can be easy to dismiss two-pieces as a novelty, but the power duo quickly makes their argument across five punchy, Big Muff fuzzed-out tracks that nod to a host of influences including the likes of the Dead Kennedys and New Model Army with a deep sense of southern rock.

“Socialism Ditty” is the first half of that argument. It’s funkier than it has any right to be — and it pulls that off with no bass in the room to anchor the groove, Rettig’s guitar and Ramos’s kit splitting work a whole rhythm section usually carries and somehow still finding the pocket. This is the one I’d hand a skeptic. It’s two people doing the job of four and making you forget to count. I’ve often wondered if Gen Z was going to have their Rage Against the Machine, a politically minded band that wrapped their message in a sound you could get down to. Mr. Dinkles seems to be making a case for themselves, with “Socialism Ditty” the most obvious entry.

“Letter to Elon” is the other half. It screams Rivers Cuomo — and I mean the good Rivers, the one writing songs about playing Dungeons & Dragons in his garage, before he lost the thread and started trying to sound like himself. And while the track contains all of the slightly awkward phrasing that made early Weezer so relatable, “Letter to Elon” adds an element of social awareness — “Elon, get out of my phone / Stop watching my porn!” This is where Rettig’s writing stays vulnerable in a way seemingly only available to the young while simultaneously critiquing the world around it, both done with a scalpel’s precision.

One song proves they can play. The other proves they can write. A band that only manages one is a gimmick with a good night in it. A band that does both on the same short record is just a band — and R.I.P.T. is the sound of two of them figuring out they’re the real thing.

I mentioned earlier while I loved “Eat Chips and Talk Shit” I had originally dismissed it, catching it while still deep into my own ennui about the state of current music — this is way more on me than the band, getting old is dumb. Popping over to Mr. Dinkles’ Bandcamp homepage, my mistake manifested in two sold-out vinyl pressings of R.I.P.T. Being a massive vinyl nerd, that hurt. Trust that I won’t make the same error a second time. Let me be the first to assist you in not making the same mistake.

Not ones to slow down, the band is set to release their new single “Brain” Oct. 30, and I can only hope this is the beginning of either a new EP or, dare I dream, a full album. You can pre-save “Brain” now and I’d highly encourage you to follow them on Bandcamp and every other channel they’ve got. The band is playing a series of shows and is quickly building a following, moving steadily toward critical mass. Catch them now at the small venues while you still have the chance.

Check them out: BandCamp | Instagram | TikTok

There is a moment within certain songs that moves them from great to sublime. I first came across the idea of “The Six” sitting in the rear of a 1982 Jeep Cherokee, my parents pulling into Fox Natural Springs on our way to get water for the week.

One of Dad’s favorite bands was The Doors, and a copy of their greatest hits album was playing on the car’s stereo. Being one of his favorite records, both Patrick and I knew it well – or at least as well as any 10 and 11 year olds could, so as “Love Her Madly” finished we both tucked our ears to the speaker waiting for “Riders on the Storm” to begin.

The song opens with the sounds of a driving rain – is that a car driving down the road? In the distance lightning strikes and thunder rumbles, drawing you into the scene. Ray Manzarek opens the song, the sound of his Fender Rhodes electric piano, its brightness establishing a tension that stays with the song throughout – a counterpoint to Morrison’s lyrics and Robby Krieger’s guitar. And that space, those six or so seconds of Manzarek’s piano between the storm sounds and Morrison’s first words, is everything in that song. This is where the whole song lives. If you played nothing else, a person who’d never heard it would understand exactly why it matters. This is The Six.

I couldn’t have told you then of any developed idea on this but deep in my body I felt it – and this is critical – the reaction is visceral. If you’d asked me to hum that song, this is where I would have started.

I must have heard Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” a hundred times before I finally heard The Six. When the album was released in 1988 it was impossible not to hear this song nearly everywhere – it really was that big when it dropped. But this was the late spring of 1990 – I finally had my driver’s license, my ticket to freedom and a stereo ready to play whatever I wanted to hear. I don’t remember why Patrick wasn’t with me, but I was alone on that trip to North Pole High School. I’d cleared the wooded landscape of Badger Road, coming to Badger Flats, a wide, five or six mile stretch of anomaly against the otherwise darkest of roadside thickets. The song must have been a minute or two into its playing and suddenly I heard Izzy Stradlin’s rhythm guitar underneath it all. Reverby, a slight echo in the phrasing that added a whole new dimension to this song I thought I knew well. Suddenly “Sweet Child O’ Mine” transformed from a straight-ahead rock song to something deeper. Stradlin’s line gave a melancholic weight to Slash’s punchy, aggressive guitar and clearly I saw man’s rage as a product of his sadness. The song was never the same for me again.

Some you feel without ever knowing what they are; others find you when the time is right. I have a deeply held belief that music finds you when you’re ready and not a moment sooner. I could go on and on about how long it took me to come to several artists I now consider desert island staples. And then there are those artists and songs that hit you the moment you hear them.

The summer of 2013 was a transformative year in my life. K and I were getting serious, having navigated a divorce on my side of things and the death of her father on hers. K’s father was a beloved man by many, a college professor who’d touched the lives of countless people, and the memorial service and subsequent after party brought people from around the world to our little neck of the woods in east county San Diego. I fell in love with nearly all of these wonderful people during the extended period they were with us and knew I had to find some way to stay in touch with them once they departed. From this, I created a radio program I dubbed Sonic Sundowner – a tribute to a by then defunct radio program, Big Sonic Chill, that played on 94.9 KBZT. I would create an episode based on the program’s format of chill, downtempo, and alternative music, lay in some happenings around the home like a love letter, post it and let the online conversation continue.

I don’t remember exactly which episode I was working on but suffice to say I was knee-deep in finding tracks that fit the format I had given myself. Headphones securely atop my head, sitting out by what had been a pool and was now a koi pond, slumped deep into a larger-than-life chair, I was searching. In that search I stumbled upon Frou Frou’s “Breathe In.” The clean, shimmering guitar that opens the song caught my attention, giving the track a few more seconds of listening as I made my judgment. Breathy, languid, the song floats along like a fluffy cloud until Imogen Heap comes in matching the tone with her vocal phrasing, continuing that light, breezy feel. She moves to the chorus and like a sledgehammer The Six walloped me — a light, bouncy bass line punctuating her words in a manner that just felt joyful, like I was in love with the world at that exact moment.

And I was.

I do think it’s important to acknowledge for a moment that the absence of The Six doesn’t mean a song isn’t great. There is plenty of music out there that I adore that doesn’t carry those moments for me. Nor is the Six exact — maybe it’s two seconds, maybe it’s ten. That’s the beauty: it’s deeply personal, as music should be. But the Six does make demands of you.

The Six isn’t a technique or a theory. It’s what happens when you’re present enough to be ambushed by a slice of music. It doesn’t belong to a genre or an era. It belongs to attention. And once you’ve heard it — really heard it — you can never unhear it. The song is never the same again.

I can’t be alone in this. Fact is, I know I’m not — I’ve spent so much time with fellow music lovers dissecting songs and then going back to listen with fresh ears, finding a new Six. So tell me: what’s the song for you that has that section, that slice, that Six that forever changed how you heard it and became a core piece of who you are?

Is there such a thing as music lovers’ music? Within the niche corners of the internet where music geeks gather, there’s a handful of bands we all know and love. That echo chamber can make it seem as though they’re bigger than they are – Elliott Smith, Say Hi, Morphine, Robin Trower, but when you mention them to the casual listener, you’re met with blank stares.

Into that canon I would like to include The Jesus and Mary Chain.

I remember not too long ago when Third Man Records released the 40th Anniversary edition of the band’s groundbreaking noise-pop debut Psychocandy on Hot Honey vinyl. My social media feeds, comprised mostly of my fellow vinyl nerds, were alight with fans breathlessly waiting to get to their local record store for a copy. To the mainstream – meh. Can you imagine a Taylor Swift release getting a meh?

Now, as good as that album is — and it’s truly a masterpiece — the Jesus and Mary Chain album for me has always been Automatic, the band’s third release via Blanco y Negro Records. I came to JAMC through a combination of non-traditional methods, even for a band as alternative (back when alternative meant something) as the Scottish brothers Jim and William Reid.

My brother Patrick got deeply into the live-action role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade when it was released in 1991. Home from Marine Corps bootcamp circa 1993, Patrick introduced me to the game and boy did we have a blast finding folks willing to play and acting out the story developed for the evening. Unlike a lot of game manuals, the books included not only a suggested playlist to set the mood but scattered throughout were quotes from different songs. Nine Inch Nails, Skinny Puppy, Bauhaus, Joy Division, The Cure and The Jesus and Mary Chain among the many bands with song lyrics adding to the game’s mystique – a goth soundtrack codified by White Wolf, the game’s original publishers.

Much to Patrick’s disappointment, I spent significantly more time reading the manuals than playing the game as those random song lyrics became a treasure map for me. In between reading the history of particular vampire clans, if a particular lyric intrigued me, I’d write it down. Joy Division – didn’t hit (yet), Bauhaus – evenly split, NIN already securely in my library.

Unless you’ve lived there for any amount of time, trying to describe growing up in rural Alaska circa the late 80s/early 90s feels like an exercise in the unbelievable. We had a party-line for phone service and typically that detail is enough to dead-stop most people from the lower 48 – we won’t even get into the number of times I missed the school bus because a moose was blocking the driveway – well, that’s what we told Mom, anyway. School’s pretty easy to skip when it’s 40 miles one direction and your parents are 40 miles the other direction. All of that is to say a significant amount of cultural things either never made it that far north or were so late in their coming as to be DOA. Same was true of most music, especially the variety Patrick and I were trying to find at the time – Paula Abdul made it, but you’d be hard pressed to find Depeche Mode. Patrick and I were deeply involved in choir during our high school years as was our friend Julia.

To say I had a crush on Julia would be an understatement and my slightly overweight and awkward teenage self was constantly seeking conversational clues to talk to her – she could be surly as fuck at times if she didn’t like you so I had enough wherewithal to realize traditional routes would lead to dead ends. I can’t say for sure, but I’d wager it was my junior year when I noticed Julia wearing a Pixies t-shirt. Having never heard of them, I began doing what looked like research in the pre-Google era – for me that meant a trip to the library to scour current editions of Rolling Stone magazine as well as the Fred Meyer record store, praying they had anything in stock.

Much to my delight I hit paydirt in both – Rolling Stone had done a review of the band’s album Trompe le Monde (the album cover depicted on Julia’s t-shirt) and Fred Meyer had a singular copy still in its full-size cardboard packaging. Gathering what meager money I had at the time, I bought a copy of the album and devoured it, with the track “Head On” resonating with me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. The aggressive, circular guitar that lands 14 seconds into the song and Frank Black’s vocal delivery a half step behind the beat — à la Willie Nelson or Frank Sinatra — building tension with every bar, filled me with feelings I didn’t have the words to describe. I may have utterly struck out with Julia but the Pixies were now completely mine.

Back in San Diego, sometime later, I was at a Tower Records listening station working through my list. From the opening cool-ass guitar swagger reminiscent of Chuck Berry or Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Here Comes Alice” grabbed my attention and I stood there running afoul of any store-imposed time limit as the chug-chug-chug of the album’s second track “Coast to Coast” tightened its grip on my ears.

Then a flicker of recognition lit up in my brain — holy shit, these guys redid the Pixies I thought to myself — that’s cool! I flipped the CD over, perusing the cover — released in 1989. I continued listening, lost in the familiar, noticing the small differences in the remake. My brain did some quick mental math … wait a minute, Trompe le Monde came out in ‘91 … the Pixies were covering them?! This was the original?!

Automatic and a few other titles in my bag, I caught up with my Marine Corps buddy Richard and we loaded into his newly acquired Dodge Neon. Richard was everything I was not – born and raised in Los Angeles, he grew up immersed in Southern California cool via KROQ radio and access to culture nearly right outside his doorstep. I’ll never forget a black and white photograph he shared with me of John Easdale, lead singer of Dramarama, he’d taken as part of a high school photography class. That cool cut both ways though. I’m convinced he mostly tolerated me, my name on the lease to the apartment we shared and his ticket out of the barracks. I always figured his true viewpoint was made clear one evening as we both unloaded from the Neon. My hands full, I lifted my leg up and used it to shut the door and Richard was instantly furious.

“If your hick-ass EVER kicks my car like that again you will never ride with me again … do you understand?!”

Somewhat taken aback, I nodded my head in understanding, shrunken in what felt like a child being scolded by an overbearing father.

All of that was yet to come as we made the trip from the Sports Arena area of San Diego back to Oceanside.

“This album is amazing,” I said to him after slipping the CD into the player.

“How do you not know Jesus and Mary Chain,” Richard retorted.

Over the years I would find myself having to answer some version of this question over and over again … no seriously, growing up in Alaska is a handicap to young adults navigating the lower-48 world.

I brushed off Richard’s comment, having learned at some point that some things were just better to let them think they had the upper hand.

For more than 40 minutes I tuned out the world and listened like I was back in my family’s Chevy Safari van trekking between Fairbanks and home — forested landscapes replaced by the concrete jungle of coastal cities between San Diego and Oceanside.

You ever hear an album for the first time and already know it’s a no-skip recording? That was me and Automatic – I was hyped quickly running through the tracks at Tower but by the time that drive home was through, I was smitten. Don’t get me wrong, some songs landed harder on first listen than others while some would come around as standouts on deeper listens – looking at you “Gimme Hell” and “UV Ray.”

Fuzz, wall of sound, swagger and sneer … this is the lightning Oasis was trying to bottle with “Supersonic” from their 1994 release Definitely Maybe. Where Oasis, and hell for that matter every other band who tried to capture the Jesus and Mary Chain vibe, failed is that they missed a critical component – behind all that fury of sound and energy was a vulnerability that was real, that landed in a way my 20-something brain immediately identified with … projecting tough as nails on the outside hiding a scared, unsure of himself, little boy on the inside. “That’s me ‘cause I’m falling apart.” A young man from Alaska, a little boy-meets-world trying to make my way in a world that was both delicious and oversaturated.

My Dad loved his GMC S-15 pickup. We dubbed it the little truck that could – it could go anywhere it seemed, typically with a load of kids in the bed in violation of several state and federal laws these days. I would go on to flip that truck some years later trying to impress my baby sister — but to the world at large because I was trying to avoid hitting a dog – and that’s a story for another time.

After he retired from the Army, my father would often be the one to drop me off at middle school, some 40 miles away from the house, on his way to work at the mess halls of Fort Wainwright. Dad didn’t typically say a whole lot during the drive, more often than not we were listening to some mixtape he’d put together, the collection of TDK tapes falling out of the glove box.

One of my father’s favorite jokes started on one of those drives. Eventually “American Woman” would emanate from the speakers.

“Hey Ben, Guess Who sings this song,” he’d say to me in a deadpan mastered through his years as an Army drill instructor.

I’d look at him slightly befuddled.

“I have no idea,” I’d shoot back in my surly, pre-teen affectation.

“Guess Who,” he’d shoot back and on this would go until the joke was finally revealed.

Every so often I pull this one out on the unsuspecting though I don’t carry it as far – Dad had a tendency to take things to annoyingly frustrating lengths.

It was on one such trip that my father introduced me to Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. Working on the base’s chow halls, Dad was surrounded by younger Soldiers constantly fighting over who got to own the kitchen’s stereo for the day. Someone slipped in the Guns N’ Roses, my Dad loved it – or so I thought. I have a different view these days.

That was the last new record my father ever listened to.

For so much of my life, I thought I too would fall into this trap, that someday one of my boys would be sitting at my record collection, pull something from the stacks and think to themselves – “this is where Dad stopped.” And for a moment, I did.

Baby Kerouac lay on the floor of my Galion apartment, my puppy Pandora next to him, her own full belly doing its work putting her into a torpor as the two slumbered. I took this infrequently quiet moment to wander over to the computer, intent on finding something worth listening to. This was 2001 and Amazon was still in the process of becoming the internet’s Walmart, having recently started letting you listen to segments of music tracks. A band caught my attention – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club …

“Well, that’s an interesting name at least,” I thought to myself as I scanned the track listing.

“Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll” caught my eye and I chuckled, thinking the band was reading my mind. I hit play and was hooked. I ordered the CD off Amazon that day and for nearly 20 years, that was the last new album I ever listened to.

That’s not entirely true (nor was it entirely true for my father) but true enough that were one of my boys to sit down at my stack of records in that period between 2001 and 2023, they might easily be able to make that claim. There’s well-documented research noting how most of us stop listening to new music somewhere around the age of 33 — a phenomenon dubbed taste freeze. Sounds like some sweet treat my kids might ask for after dinner, if only it were so.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out – life gets in the way. We start having kids, adult responsibilities and worries, all the things that rob us of the element necessary to engage with new music – free time. But there’s more to it than just life asserting itself; music heard during adolescence and early adulthood is tied to intense emotional milestones, first loves, and identity formation, making it neurologically and emotionally more rewarding – the stuff is literally the soundtrack to our lives in those moments.

And there I was somewhere late 2023 in a Los Angeles hotel room following a day of some incredibly serious class I was taking. Life had been moving a mile a minute for the last 20 years; Kerouac was in the Army having finally navigated the high school graduation conundrum. After years of false starts and stops, surgeries and doctors, K and I had five-year-old twins at home — we’d recently moved from our home in San Diego to the Sierra Foothills. And that just scratches the surface; in between all of that was a nasty divorce, time in a war, and more natural disasters — floods, fires, and earthquakes — than I care to remember.

Music never went away, it just wasn’t allowed the time it demanded, and I wanted to give it; that had been eating at my brain as I stretched out on the bed. I flipped open my laptop in silent resignation at the state of affairs between me and the music I claimed to love so much. I doomscrolled for a few minutes, the weight of my advanced critical incident stress management peer support class weighing heavy on me. I’ve written before about my love of the Seattle radio station KEXP and it was here my doomscrolling stopped for just a second and my ears caught something. For the next few minutes I felt like I was in some Looney Tunes cartoon, my ears reaching inside my brain in a choke hold telling it to shut the fuck up for a minute, my eyes comically widening as the sounds of Hermanos Gutiérrez filled the hotel room. The cartoon devil and angel popped up on my shoulder.

“Give it a chance,” the angel said.

“Keep moving, new music sucks,” the devil replied.

I didn’t have to do anything. With the weep of a steel guitar the devil went away and I instantly fell in love. I stayed with that performance through the whole thing and then watched and listened again, and again. I must have gone back to that performance four or five times, moved through every moment of it.

I stood there staring out the window onto the southern California scene below me, a mix of anger and awakening rising.

“You fucking crab-ass,” I thought to myself. “You cranky-ass, get-off-my-lawn old man, you quit … the music didn’t.”

The lights of cars rapidly moving in opposite directions on the freeway outside caught me for a second, hypnotic in their movement.

“There’s still good music out there and this claim that there’s nothing good being made … you just decided to not listen to it anymore,” the thought continued.

Sure, I could make excuses for myself, that life got busy, that I was overwhelmed with it all. But, as is often the case, the truth was much simpler – I had quit. There was never a moment where I said to myself — that’s it, I’m done — never a conscious decision. I had, as most of us do, simply let life happen. I had allowed the fires of musical passion to grow dim due to inattention and neglect. The same trap my father found himself in so many years ago.

The next thought knocked me on my ass.

Dad hadn’t really quit… Dad was trying to connect. Like so many boomer parents, especially fathers, Dad was deeply reserved in showing his emotions. If I reflect on the times I remember my father telling me he loved me, I have to go back into my early adulthood — and I said it first — always his, a compulsory acknowledgement. The first time I ever heard my father tell me he was proud of me was when I graduated from Marine Corps bootcamp. Dad was career military in a time when the Army made zero nods to families – if the Army had wanted you to have a family they would have issued you one. So he was gone; field assignments that took him away for weeks at a time, long hours that saw Mom tucking us into bed asking when Daddy would be home. By the time my father retired, I can only imagine he looked back at his children — especially Patrick and I, separated by 11 months — and realized he barely knew these tiny humans occupying his house. What he did know was music, and he knew we loved music, and he did the only thing he probably knew how to do: try and bridge some connections through it.

Unless given reasons otherwise, children adore their parents. I have wispy images from a time in Germany — I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. Dad was coming home from a long field operation that day and we would be able to see his convoy across the bridge above our Army housing unit. I was fit to be tied; I wanted to see my Dad so bad I drove my Mom crazy asking — is this the moment? How about now? Is it time? — and exploding with joy when we finally saw him pass and wave at us, knowing he’d be home in a few short hours. Dad was always his coolest when he was just being himself, standing in the kitchen cooking something, a day’s worth of records already selected from his collection.

My Dad taught me how to make a mixtape not because he sat down and showed me, but because I would sit behind him and watch … play + record … run out the slack, hit pause, drop the needle, un-pause and then hear the results. Dad did everything on headphones, so the actual tracklist was a mystery — revealed only as we drove the family car to town, as much to listen to the new mixtape as to get groceries. Just by being himself, unseen by him, he was building a bridge that Patrick and I took to and made our own. Dad didn’t need Appetite for Destruction to connect with us — he’d been building that connection all our lives. He just never saw it. And where he forged a path, we took it further.

For what it’s worth, the science has an opinion on all of this.

Here’s the thing about the trap — and it’s a trap most of us walk into, quietly, without realizing. The same cliff I fell off, the same one that caught my father. By my mid-thirties I’d stopped reaching. Not because the music got worse — it didn’t. Not because I’d lost the love — I hadn’t. I’d just stopped showing up for it, the way you stop showing up for things when life fills in around them and you don’t notice until the space has been gone for years. The world doesn’t help: the apps are built to keep you comfortable, feeding you more of what you already know, walls going up so gradually you never feel them closing. Breaking out takes something deliberate — a willingness to let yourself be surprised, to reconcile the person you were when music first hit you with the person you actually are now. Most of us never do it. Most of us stay comfortable. Most of us, I think, aren’t even sure we’ve stopped.

Dad still stands in the kitchen these days. At nearly 80 years old his confident strides look more like a slow shuffle. There are a few things here and there that aren’t the same — his amazing flank steak, the meal I devoured as a child, is slightly overcooked these days and a bit on the salty side. But the radio is still on, even if it’s a bit louder than before. Dad loves his satellite radio and he moves between one of three stations: the 50s, the 60s, and Willie’s Roadhouse — those years in Texas in the 70s left their mark. Dad cut trail. He gave Patrick and I a path forward with music, and he’s allowed to slow down these days, even if the volume drives my mother nuts.

Tristan is sitting on the couch of our Sonora home. He’s absorbed in his game of Minecraft, mindlessly humming a tune I don’t exactly recognize. I tilt my head just a bit to listen to the words he’s muttering and it hits me — he’s singing Nine Inch Nails. Sanctified, to be exact. I am sanctified … I am purified …

And I see the path.

Kerouac stood against the piano, sipping a cocktail – some days it blows me away that he’s old enough to be standing here with me at a concert venue, an adult drink in his hand.

“Who’s this?” he asked me, a break in the conversation.

“A Tribe Called Quest, from The Low End Theory,” I quipped, moving back to our conversation about politics. We talk a lot about politics and are surprisingly aligned. Kerouac tends to dig more into things these days, which is saying something — next to music, politics is my thing. The conversation shifts, as does the song over the loudspeaker.

“What’s this one?”

“Bad Brains, I Against I,” I say, bopping my head for just a second. I notice Kerry has his phone up, looks at it for a second, nods.

“Fuck man, you’re faster than Shazam!”

Damn, my own boy is fact-checking me! We go on, moving to climate change and his choice to move to Minnesota.

I look over at this young man, incredibly proud of who he’s become and the life he’s slowly building for himself.

“Oh dude,” I say to him. “You’ve absolutely got to check this record out,” as the familiar sounds of Dummy begin. “I’m telling you, give it a chance and I think you’ll love it.”

“Who is it?” he asks.

“Portishead! This is their first record, absolutely brilliant.”

“Jesus, Dad, how do you keep all these in your head?”

I look at him and shrug.

“You know, you might be one of the very few people I know who, when they say they like everything, you actually mean it!”

He’s not wrong. I’ve always struggled with that question when it inevitably comes up – what kind of music do you like? Let’s be honest, most people will say they like a bit of everything; drill a bit deeper and everything suddenly becomes one or two things. Me? How much time do you have?

It’s a question that’s forced me to think hard: how do you answer it when your brain is musically configured like some schizophrenic Wurlitzer? Thankfully I’ve got bands like Westside Cowboy helping distill my thought process into something resembling a sound, and definitely espousing an ethos.

Released on August 21, 2026, It Goes On by Westside Cowboy revels in youthful enthusiasm.

“We wanted to make an album for our younger selves… young music made by some young(ish) people,” the band said in an interview with NME.

By whatever mark you choose to evaluate this record — and the critics have been squarely mixed in their reviews — this is a band having fun. They’re clearly taking delight in the sounds of their heroes and inspirations, from the Velvet Underground-infused “Kick Stones (The Boys)” to the T. Rex strut that opens “Dobro.” To hell with everyone else, this is a record they made for themselves.

Formed in Manchester in 2023, the four-piece includes Reuben Haycocks (guitar/vocals), Jimmy Bradbury (guitar/vocals), Aoife Anson-O’Connell (bass/vocals), and Paddy Murphy (drums). Entrenched in the UK indie-revival scene, the band calls their sound Britainicana, a fusion of British indie and Americana. Which is to say: a bunch of kids from Manchester fell in love with an American sound and built an identity on it. As an American who worries plenty about where we’re headed these days, I’ll take the small comfort — we still make things worth stealing.

Somewhere on the third or fourth listen it struck me, as “You Could Have Died There On The Dancefloor” filled the air. This, this right here is what I love. Full of jangly guitars laying claim to a genre, it struck me that of all the music I adore, I almost always come back to this indie sound. The raw, lo-fi feel (either by design à la The Strokes or by happenstance), songs a bit too personal, almost to the point of being quirky, with a vocal delivery bordering on mumblecore — think early Death Cab for Cutie, or more masterfully, the criminally underrated Say Hi.

I sat there content in the revelation, thinking I’d finally found an answer to the what-kind-of-music question. But as my brain is wont to do, I couldn’t let it go … no, that isn’t exactly it, is it?

Sonically, Westside Cowboy has nothing in common with the likes of A Tribe Called Quest or Portishead, but pull the string a little harder and a deeper truth becomes obvious. All of these bands were unabashedly being themselves. Now, that might seem obvious on first blush, but instead of asking that who do you like musical question, let’s look at a large portion of the answers. I don’t need to spell it out for you; if you’re here reading this, you already know where this is going. Most of the time the answer is some version of manufacture, of engineered and produced to sound pleasing to the ear, to be a radio hit that gets lodged in your brain so hard we had to invent a term for it – earworm.

Take the case of “Coyote,” a track that feels almost out of place in its plaintive vocals as Anson-O’Connell sings of the most beautiful places on Earth being destroyed in our lust to capture the next Instagram-worthy moment, pushing the native flora and fauna further to the edge of existence. But of course it works, because this is the band being themselves, doing what they want, talking about what’s important to them, delivering it the only way they know how — and suddenly the misplaced song becomes the pearl in the middle of an oyster.

The sounds of Black Flag’s “Black Coffee” fill the concert venue. Kerry looks over at me, tilting his head slightly, asking the question without uttering a word.

“Black Flag, off Slip It In,” I say to him, not missing a beat.

“Damn,” he chuckles as he shakes his head in slight disbelief.

Tomorrow morning I’m putting him back on a plane for Minnesota. The last two days have been amazing, with Kerry playing with the twins who adore their big-brother-bear. K, Kerry, and I wrapped in conversations about politics and the world writ large as we finish carving the pumpkins the twins abandoned hours ago.

I want desperately for this young man to live closer, to be in California to go to more shows with me and carve pumpkins with his brothers. But just like Westside Cowboy, Kerouac has to be unabashedly him, and I couldn’t be prouder of him for it.

What a weekend it’d been – three nights, three cities, three concerts. My oldest child had flown in from Minnesota for two of them and this one found me aimed toward Fresno, my friend, Aaron at the wheel. I’d been out of the office on fire assignments most of the summer, so Aaron and I spent the majority of the two-and-a-half-hour drive just catching up.

Both of us being passionate about our jobs, we spent a fair amount of time just bitchin’ and complaining about the state of things. Most of it just the inside baseball chatter of two dedicated individuals working in federal land management, some of it possible Hatch Act violations were it to be put in print.

We ease off Highway 99 and thread our way toward downtown Fresno. In all the years I’ve caught concerts in California catching one in Fresno is a first. Check that one off the list?

“What the fuck is this place?” I ask Aaron who’s done a little more research at this point.

“The Tower Theatre Lounge,” he says to me as I open my phone to dig deeper into the venue.

Capacity is 150 people standing in a 26’ by 35’ floor plan.

“Dude,” I say as I look up and over at Aaron. “This is going to be one of those shows that ten to fifteen years from now, you’re going to be at some arena or something telling the kids you saw them when they opened at a tiny ass venue in Fresno back in ‘26!”

And it’s actually a little bit better than I originally knew. The Rat Utopia Experiment is on their first ever national tour, supporting the Linda Lindas for select dates on their Gotta Get Out album release tour. This Fresno date happens to be one of the few where the band is headlining, crossing paths with Medford, Oregon based, Hate It Here.

Aaron and I walk into the venue and immediately I feel old – holy crap most of these kids are younger than the son I put on a plane back to Minnesota this morning. I walk over to the bar, order a whiskey and soda realizing (make it a double) I may be one of the few in the room with booze in his hand. Fuck it, I may be a grandpa but dammit I’m gonna be the cool grandpa.

These kids — and I don’t say that in any way dismissively, just a demonstrable fact; I’m not sure a single one of them is old enough to buy the whiskey in my hand, their frontwoman, Phia Lane, still just 18 — have been absolutely destroying it back in their hometown of Tacoma.

Nothing against Hate It Here but I’m chomping at the bit to see the Pacific Northwest’s favorite circus punk band so while they’re playing I make my way over to the merch table – I want a copy of the “Lobotomize Me” 7-inch and right now you can only get it at their shows. As I’m standing there, Phia, Francis and Maddox stop behind me, over my left shoulder.

“Hey…” the young man selling the merch whispers to me, eyes widening.

“The band … they’re right behind you!”

I lean in conspiratorially.

“I know!” I whisper back… “Let me get one of those tour posters and by the way… got a sharpie handy?!”

He fumbles through a few boxes but eventually produces a sharpie and I turn to the band …

“Hey guys, holy shit good to see you! My friend and I drove like two and a half hours to see you guys, any chance I could get you to sign this poster?”

They are beyond excited and in a world of cynical rock-stars, their energy is truly refreshing – they’re still just young adults out there having the time of their lives playing amazing music.

As three of the band is signing the poster, drummer Christian slides up on my right side and I quickly ask him to sign as well. Four of five – not sure where Drix is at the moment, but I missed him.

The band fades away and I make my way back to Aaron who’s enjoying Hate It Here, snapping photos of the band. Aaron is a perfect match as my regular concert buddy – one of these days I’m going to get him, Kerouac and myself all at one show, but that’s an evil genius scheme for another day.

Both of us are shooters with wildly different styles and we both look forward to the next few days where we’ll be able to look at each other’s images … asking how did you get that shot as well as just talking through it all, making each other better.

“I’m telling you,” I say to Aaron, Hate It Here has wrapped up and I feel comfortable to talk now. “These guys are absolutely going to blow up – they’ve got everything; incredible energy, tight performances wicked sharp lyrics and an energy that just feels like it’s been missing from this scene for too long.”

Aaron agrees, but I can tell he’s not all the way there yet. He didn’t listen to me when I recommended them back in June, and I don’t take it personally — it took me years to come around to a band my brother swore by. So I leave him to the fates. Some things you have to see for yourself. I’ve got a feeling it won’t take Aaron years, though. More like forty-five minutes.

Lost in the conversation I didn’t even notice the band had already taken to the stage until I hear Phia’s voice, “Give me a B!” and the band shouts it back in their call and response spelling out BLAST! Launching into their song of the same name, custom built as a show opener -- the audience is already locked in having played along with the band in their opener.

Phia is an absolute ball of energy as she bounces around the stage cooing how she took a man home, took him to her lair and bashed his brains out, flipping the script on both the caveman and serial killer motif, reclaiming the space for feminine power.

And from the start the band lays out their thesis – fuck patriarchy, fuck toxic masculinity, we’re going to take a hammer to it as we smash the glass ceiling along the way. And Fresno is one hundred percent here for it.

Behind me a mosh pit has erupted and I fight to get from one side of the stage to the other, camera in hand. God how I’ve missed this – raw, edgy, young energy exploding with a ferocity that if properly channeled would change the world. An unseen elbow connects with my ribs and for a second I’m back in the clubs of Oakland watching Green Day before Dookie, an unknown Rage Against the Machine destroying Lollapalooza. In an otherwise quiet and hot night in Fresno, Phia and the gang are recruiting an army.

Three or four songs in and a breathless Phia addresses the crowd. “I wanna talk to you all for just a minute … this next song, it went kind of viral and I’m guessing most of you know it but I wanna ask you, how many of you have heard about what happened at Cornell?”

The crowd screams in anger and recognition and I lose the last of Phia’s words, the din of audience and performers colliding as the band rips into “Lobotomize Me.” The line “You won’t believe me with receipts” hits like a freight train as yet one more example of a woman being sexually brutalized splashes across the nation’s headlines. We as a country are not ok. I’ve made this statement to K on so many occasions I’ve lost track. That said, the exact diagnosis escapes me as I see multiple sides to so many issues, my thoughts complicated by competing viewpoints. But Phia has words for it, and she screams them to the Fresno crowd, the rage electric as it flows from her body out to the crowd.

Youthful self-righteousness is both one of the most powerful and infuriating things in the world. Wrong is wrong, there is no in-between and should be dealt with immediately. As we grow things like doubt and extenuating circumstances creep into our brain buckets, we get bogged down by concerns for taking care of the family and our jobs. As I watch the band I offer up a silent prayer to whatever rock gods might hear me – “please don’t ever let these guys lose this, this passion, this energy, this absolutely on fucking point sense of right and wrong.” Amen coming in the form of a slam into the speaker as I turn around to shove the offending body back into the pit.

I need a break and pull out of the throng of bodies to the safety of the side of the stage. Aaron is ensconced by the emergency exit and we trade a few notes about how things are going. A young lady with a vintage camera snakes past us and I watch as she maneuvers to the front of the stage. That’s where I need to be, I think to myself as I think through working my way out of this conversation with Aaron. Thankfully for me, Aaron and I are on the same wavelength and I just point to the front of the stage, punch my chest and Aaron shakes his head in understanding.

The band is getting toward the end, you can feel it like a crescendo as well as see it as sweat drips from their faces. Phia’s hair is completely matted as she led the charge on this band’s sonic assault. Finally at the front of the stage, I drop down, the young lady with the vintage camera to my side. I look behind me and the pit is about to crash into us, I throw my arm up blocking the impact to the young lady who’s lost in capturing her decisive moment. I raise my camera, Phia has fallen to the ground, writhing as she sings, she sits up, laughs and falls back to the stage the song coming to a close.

“We’re the Rat Utopia Experiment, thank you so much for coming out to see us tonight! We’ll be over by the merch table here in just a few please come buy a record or a t-shirt and support all of us out here on this tour!”

And just like that the lid is placed on the bottle of lightning as the lights come up and the crowd is visibly exhausted, wrung out but vibrating from the experience.

Aaron is a hard read as we make our way back to the car. I never want to find myself on the other side of the table playing poker against him.

“So …” I begin a slight bit of trepidation in my voice. “What did you think?!”

“Dude … that was amazing, Holy shit that was amazing!”

Postscript – The Rat Utopia Experiment have a slew of shows across the country through the end of the month. Without question you should go to their website and if they are anywhere near you, go see them!

I shot a whole bunch of images from the show, you should check them out!

🎧 Apple Music | Qobuz

Lost in all of the debate around pumpkin spice lattes and all of that is the absolute joy that is the fall season. Time to don hoodies and, at least here in the Sierra Foothills, get the campfire going for late nights of making s’mores with the littles while an amazing soundtrack plays from the house.

Fall is the season that has it all for me – those late fall, second summer moments where things are still trying to hang on to the first chill in the house where you know you need a fire going in the stove. With that in mind, this mix has a bit of everything, the party anthems of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone to the more subdued musings of Donovan and The Lumineers and everything in between.

Crack a cold beer or fix a nice mug of hot coffee and enjoy what fall sounds like to me!

Side A (44:30)

1. Hot Pants - James Brown - 3:08

2. You Are the Best Thing - Ray LaMontagne - 3:51

3. Born on the Bayou - Creedence Clearwater Revival - 5:13

4. Pay the Road - Shakey Graves - 4:27

5. Slow Lightning - The Bones of J.R. Jones - 3:29

6. Holiday - Weezer - 3:25

7. Satanist - boygenius - 4:50

8. Breathe In - Frou Frou - 4:37

9. Oakwood - Angus and Julia Stone - 3:43

10. Hard to Explain - The Strokes - 3:48

11. Garden - Sean Hayes - 3:59

Side B (46:04)

1. Everyday People - Sly and the Family Stone - 2:22

2. Into the Void - Nine Inch Nails - 4:52

3. Prodigal Sun - The Black Angels - 4:23

4. Sarahtonin - Dexter and the Moonrocks - 2:41

5. Gouge Away - The Pixies- 2:41

6. Dobro - Westside Cowboy - 2:45

7. Nothing Like - Mannequin Pussy - 4:09

8. Crystal Frontier - Calexico - 3:59

9. The Worst Day Since Yesterday - Flogging Molly - 3:39

10. Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’ - Journey - 3:55

11. Dead Sea - The Lumineers - 4:07

12. Colours - Donovan -2:44

13. La Partida- Café Musique - 3:47

Total runtime: 90:34

“I think the kids today have something of a structural advantage,” I was saying to my oldest son, Kerouac, as we turned onto San Francisco’s Fell Street.

“How so,” he asked as we made our way to the Rickshaw Stop to see Ecca Vandal on her first night in The City, the third show in a 13-show North America run.

We’d been discussing how young people making music today had access to a far deeper musical library than artists from the past, and how, in my mind, the music was better for it. Kerouac was unfamiliar with Ecca Vandal, and I was trying to describe her sound in as few words as possible even when her story is so deeply rich that any sort of elevator pitch seemed a fool’s errand.

“She’s South African, Sri Lankan parents, grew up in Australia — and honestly she sounds like all of it at once,” I said. “Punk, hip-hop, reggaeton, the whole thing, sometimes in the same song.”

Kerouac gave me the look of a man who’d believe it when he heard it.

“Well, take Led Zeppelin,” I said. “We’re talking a huge amount of Chicago and Delta Blues with a dash of sixties psychedelic and British folk.”

He nodded as we took our place in line.

“I thought the doors opened at seven,” he said, a quizzical expression on his face.

We’d struggled to find parking in a downtown that was hopping, finally making the turn onto Fell Street around 7:30 p.m. We were sure we’d be able to walk right in, possibly miss the beginning of the opening act.

“I thought the same thing,” I said, equally perplexed.

We looked at each other for a second, shrugged, and continued the conversation.

“But take a band like Ecca Vandal – she’s got everything Zeppelin had in addition to everything that’s come since. And music has just expanded, hip-hop, rap, rock and country sitting comfortably within any 20-year-old’s Spotify playlist,” I said.

Kerouac nodded. We’d caught Billy Strings in Oakland the night before, a show he’d flown out from Minnesota to catch with me, and that was much more his wheelhouse; Strings, Tyler Childers, Charley Crockett and the like.

The Ecca Vandal concert was an absolute fluke. Two days prior I was sitting at the house hoping to see when The Bones of J.R. Jones was playing the area. They’re one of the few bands K has truly expressed an interest in seeing with me, so I’m hot to trot to catch one of his shows. I open the app and the listing for Ecca Vandal pops up – a sold-out show has resale tickets available.

“Fuck,” I exclaim. K looks at me confused and I tell her what’s up.

“Do it!” she says to me as I contemplate three shows in a row. K continues to list out all of the positives – you only live once, chaos is our forte, he’s only here for the weekend why not?

I text Kerouac – “Wanna see a punk show Saturday night?”

He near immediately pops back – “Sure, I’m game.”

Tickets purchased.

My watch lit up as a notification came across – “Your show’s about to begin!! Doors open at 8 p.m.” I share the information with Kerouac … I could have sworn the ticket said seven when I purchased it but no matter, we’re here and we’re not late.

Let’s talk about the Rickshaw Stop for just a second. This venue is fantastic and over the years they’ve hosted a slew of bands on the verge of exploding – Billie Eilish has played there, as has Charli XCX. My instinct is Ecca Vandal will soon be added to the list of “you should’ve seen them when they played…” bands. It’s an old television studio and the website notes the nearly 4,000-square-foot space can hold 400 people. This was a sold-out show, so we were about to find out what 400 people in that space felt like.

The Santa Monica-based power trio Speed of Light opened the show, and I plan on giving them their own piece, they were that good – let’s leave it at this for now; if you have the chance to go see them, DO! You will not be disappointed.

As Speed of Light finished up their set, I turned to take in the scene behind me. WOW. So this is what 400 people look like jammed into a space. I probably should have guessed the number had reached this point; the temperature in the room can only be described as swamp-like and I felt a twinge of pain for Kerouac, who decided to show up in his red Coleman flannel. He looked great but damn was he paying for it as he would occasionally take off his ball cap and wipe away the rivers of sweat.

“Hell yes, bubba – take it in,” I thought to myself, hiding a smirk as I looked at him, pulling my own soaked shirt away from my body a few times to get some airflow going. “This is what a rock and roll concert is supposed to feel like!”

Under the cover of darkness, drummer Dan Maio and multi-instrumentalist Richie Buxton, Vandal’s co-conspirator, jumped on stage, warming up for just a second before launching into “Eyes Shut” as Vandal seemed to just appear on stage, the lights coming up as the crowd erupted in approval.

“Holy shit, it’s already hot in here,” Vandal said to the crowd, catching her breath from the song, starting to make eye contact. That was the moment I knew this performance was going to be something special.

You go to enough concerts, especially in smaller, more intimate venues, and you start to be able to read the band’s body language. They know when the crowd isn’t digging them and they just power through their set, get off the stage and call it a night. And then there is that even more rare moment when they look out and the realization hits them – “this is WAY bigger than I expected!”

As Vandal scanned the throngs of bodies just below her, arms outstretched, whoops and hollers of adoration escaping their bodies, a sparkle began to take root in her eye. “Woah – y’all are even up there,” she exclaimed as she caught the crowd of people up in the balcony all there to see her. And you could see the switch flip – they showed up for me, I’m gonna show the fuck up for them.

And damn she did.

I turn to Kerouac, my eyes wide – “Hold on, bub … this is going to be good!”

“Dude – this could stop right now and I am completely blown the fuck away,” he yells back at me over the crowd. He’d spent the earlier part of the wait talking to folks, expressing how this wasn’t really his thing, how I’d convinced him to come and it was more my scene, and he really didn’t know what to expect. Whatever he expected, it was getting punk-rocked the fuck out of him, only to have that replaced with whatever Ecca wanted to put in there. I love me some Crockett, but take that, Charley!

Four or five songs into her set – at this point I’ve surrendered any sense of keeping track and just given myself over to this exact moment of pure back-and-forth energy transfer – breathing heavy after manically bouncing around the stage, Vandal addressed the crowd again. “You know, they told me I couldn’t do this but fuck it, I’m doing it.”

“How many women do we have here tonight?” she asks and is met with an earsplitting response.

“I need all my men to step back, I want all my beautiful ladies to come up here to the front, we’re doing this, this one is for you.”

Women start making their way to the stage only to be pulled up by Vandal, three, then five, and now I’ve lost count of how many women are sharing the stage with the performer as she leaps into “Bleed but Never Die,” an anthem dedicated to female strength, personal femininity, and building inner resilience.

Kerouac and I have somehow been split up, the snake of bodies having found its way between us. I catch his eye and a massive smile spreads across his face … oh yeah, he’s surrendered too.

The back and forth continues, everything this crowd is throwing at the band they’re redirecting right back at them in an ebb and flow that promises to consume itself but chooses instead to continue building. I have a moment of clarity as I watch Ecca catch the eye of a young fan down in the front; she makes her way toward the tiny human, not possibly more than 12 or 13 years old, and without missing a beat of her song reaches down, takes the little one’s hand, locks eyes, and for just a few seconds is singing only to them. In the midst of the chaos running rampant in this 4,000-square-foot venue, Vandal finds a way to cut through it all and be so incredibly human.

“We’ve got a few more songs for you all,” she says at some point, “but I wanted to talk just a second about the record we just made and the tour we’re now on. Everything about this has been DIY and we couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished.”

She’s not wrong, and the full story of that record is worth telling – I’ll come back to it. In the moment, something stranger is happening. There’s just a moment there where I feel slightly detached from myself as the lights drop and then snap back. I have no idea how it’s possible but I feel as though I just stepped out of some time loop -- I would swear this show just started, but a quick glance at my watch confirms we’ve been at it for well over an hour and a half. I have no idea how this is possible. Kerouac seems to have the same sort of dazed look about him, and I reach over, put my hand on his shoulder.

“You ok?” I ask him, still not entirely sure if I’m ok.

“Holy shit, Dad, that was fucking amazing!”

We both just sort of look at each other for a few seconds, somewhat dumbfounded.

“Come on, let’s find our way out of here – you’ve got a plane to catch real fuckin early in the morning,” and we turn to begin the walk back to the car, to the room, to Minnesota for him and Sonora for me. Thank you, Ecca — I couldn’t have asked for a better send-off than what you just gave us.

Postscript - Look do yourself a favor – through whatever method you prefer get a copy of Ecca Vandal’s latest release, Looking for People to Unfollow, you will not regret it. If you happen to be anywhere near, and I use near somewhat loosely, I would drive several hours to catch this show, go see one of Ecca Vandal’s show as the band runs through North America through the end of October. But don’t take my word for it, check out here upcoming tour dates.

The concert actually started a few months ago. See, I use a place called VetTix – they give away tickets to concerts around the country to … you guessed it … veterans. For their more prestige concerts, they do a lottery system; you enter accumulated tokens for a chance to win. Billy Strings popped up and while I’m not overly familiar, my oldest, Kerouac is, so I gave him a call, mind you the concert is in Oakland, Kerouac lives in Minnesota.

“Hey bud, would you be interested in coming to California to see Billy Strings,” I asked after we’d chit-chatted for a minute.

“Heck yeah – I’d need to figure out the travel, time off and all that, but heck yeah.”

“Well, it’s a lottery, so if I win, I’ll let you know, but let’s plan on it,” I said as I entered some of my tokens and read the drawing would be about six weeks later.

Fast forward to September 12 – around six p.m. I check my email and sure enough, I’d won two tickets! Hell Yes!

We’d already made flight arrangements figuring if we didn’t win the tickets it would just be an adventurous weekend!

Never let it be said this is a boring family. Home from the Dome Fire just long enough to wash a load of clothes, K, the twins and I woke up Friday morning, packed into Shaka -- our Nissan Xterra -- and set course about 100 miles west toward Oakland with a side quest in the other direction to Sacramento to drop off the dog for the weekend and pick up some Iris bulbs we’d ordered from a local farm.

The timing on this was going to be tight, get to Oakland, drop K and the boys at the rented house, back over to SFO to grab Kerouac, flight arriving at 5:35 p.m., across the bridge to the Oakland Arena in time for the show.

Airports are always a mess and today was no exception, circling through the arrival lanes I finally spot Kerouac in his blue flannel, slide into the pick up lane, jump out just long enough to give him a massive hug, in the car and away we go.

“How the hell are you?!” I blurt out as drivers on the 101 North do their best to kill us both.

“Not too bad at all,” he responds eyes widening as someone screams into the shoulder to pass us. “Crazy drivers,” he somewhat nonchalantly mutters.

We catch up for a minute as we make our way and I tell him he absolutely has to call the boys. My twins are eight and they absolutely worship their big brother – his phone is dead so I ring up K on mine and hand the phone to Kerouac. They chit chat for a while, excited little voices on the other end telling him what they see at the house and how excited they are to see him. We say goodbye and make our way into bridge traffic grind.

“We’re cutting it close, but we’ll make it,” I say to him.

We both are doing the mental math, gates open at seven, no way the band’s starting until at least 8 – we’ll be fine but let’s be honest, the slight manic of this all is adding something delicious to the mix!

The Oakland Arena is madness.

“Holy shit!” I say to him as we make our way through the assorted vendors hawking tie-dye and bongs, hot dogs and beer.

“I had no idea we were coming to a festival,” I exclaim trying to speak loud enough for him to hear me, but not so loud as to offend anyone – I’m not one to yuck someone’s yum but my guess is there was enough galaxy gas going around that anyone who heard me would have just laughed it off. This was my first clue that things were not what I had thought.

Think Oakland and you think punk, hip-hop and maybe a bit of the sixties hippie movement still hanging on. What I didn’t expect to find was this odd assortment of hippies, cowboys and preppies all milling, sucking on balloons on their way to the security checkpoint. There’s no doubt in my mind Strings bedevils the traditionalists in the bluegrass community, if he were dead, I’d imagine ole Ricky Skaggs would be turning in his grave listening to a Billy Strings concert. Rock, bluegrass, jamgrass, whatever it is you want to call Billy Strings it is apparently exactly what Oakland was looking for on a Friday night as it felt like the whole damn city was packed into narrow rows of tents, half of them fingers in the air looking for a Miracle ticket.

“Sure as hell didn’t look like this when I saw him in Atlanta,” a bemused Kerouac leans in to whisper in my ear.

Beers in hand, concert merch securely under our arms we make our way to our seats – not bad seats at all, thank you VetTix! The countdown begins as someone booms across the area – 15 minutes fam! We talk for a while, snap a photo together and engage with the fella sitting behind us.

10 minutes fam!

The crowd lets out an excited whoop and Kerry (that’s our shortened name for him) and I continue catching up. It’s been more than a year since we’ve seen each other, so we’re doing our best to compress a year into ten minutes. Don’t get me wrong we talk all the time – trading music, swapping life events and doling out advice on occasion.

Five minutes!

Now everyone is locked in and holy shit this is not what I was expecting. For concerts, the arena holds just over 19,000 people and it sure looks to me like every available nook and cranny has a soul tucked within it.

“Damn, really didn’t know Oakland would show up this hard, ” I say to Kerry.

“Me either,” he says. “But then I really don’t know what I was expecting.”

The stadium goes dark and the band begins, Ker lets out an excited yelp as the band launches into “In the Clear.”

“Oh shit, I love this song,” he exclaims as his whole body starts pulsating to the rhythm.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about Billy Strings. He’s one of those bands Kerry has been trying to get me to listen to for years I just never had. What’s all the fuss and suddenly I see it.

Kerry is in the zone, the band is in the zone, the whole fucking arena is in the zone and now I’m in the zone. Whole. Lee. Shit.

Without a pause the five players on the stage morph “In the Clear” to “Turmoil and Tinfoil” and thus begins a 20-minute jam session flowing from the purest bluegrass tradition to heavy metal ducking in and out of psychedlic. Billy sings a few lines and each band member takes a few minutes to show off their wildly impressive skills behind their instrument of choice.

With five studio albums to his credit, Strings has more than enough material to entertain a crowd and boy-howdy does he. Old favorites (I can judge this by Kerry singing along) with tracks from his new album So Much for Goodbyes thrown in – the crowd below already seems to know every single word to every single song off the new album.

And on they go for a solid hour and a half – blistering being the word coming back to my mind time and time again.

“God damn that dude can play his guitar,” a nearly breathless Kerry says to me over the din after another insanely impressive five minute guitar segue.

“Folks, we’re going to take a little break and be right back,” Strings tells the crowd. It’s been more than an hour and let’s be honest a lot of bands would have thrown in the towel by now, but this mother fucker is just getting started.

Kerry and I take turns hitting the head while grabbing some refills on the way back. We use the interlude to catch up some more. The lights go down and the band starts again, the mood has come down some with Strings running through some of his slower material – makes sense let’s ease this crowd back into things. “Live to Tell” begins, Kerry leans over to tell me this is his favorite song on the new album so far.

“Damn, that was absolutely everything I had hoped for,” Kerouac says as the song winds down. Another hour or so, the energy slightly throttled down, it’s like the band all did a rail before the first set and hit some of Oakland’s dankest green for the second. The energy is still undeniably there, it’s just down a notch which doesn’t seem to bother the swaying throng of bodies below us.

A few minutes before 11 hits my phone lights up – K is texting me.

“Hey, any sense of a ETA? I’ve got two feral monkeys here doing their best to stay awake until you two get home.”

I truly have no idea how much longer this is going to go on – could be ten minutes could be another two hours.

“They just started the second set – I have no idea maybe another hour?” I text back.

I look over to Kerry while I show him the messages.

“Want to bail after this song? They really want to see you,” I say as the band below us just keeps going.

“Absolutely,” he says to me, “let’s go see those monkeys!”

“We’ll finish this song and then head out,” I say, we agree, I text K and we settle back in.

This was apparently a mistake, ten minutes later and there’s no indication the song is anywhere near concluding so we decide to go ahead and duck out.

The drive through Oakland is uneventful, I pull up to the Airbnb, drop Kerry off and pull back out to find street parking – I’m not optimistic, it’s a Friday night in Oakland.

After a quick prayer to the fairy gods I circle the block. Parking secured, I start walking toward the rental and hear K call me in the distance.

“Where’s Ker?!” she asks.

Slightly confused, “Um, in the house?” I respond.

“What house did you drop him off at then, we watched you pass us!” A slight panic starting to creep up inside me, I turn up the street to see Kerry walking down the hill.

“What the fuck, Dad?! Wrong house!” he laughs as he saunters down. “Think I ‘bout scared that poor old lady to death when she finally opened the door,” he says.

The monkeys swarm Kerry in hugs, words exploding from their mouths. K breaks through to give him a warm hug.

We wander into the house, two adults punch drunk on music, two eight year olds just plain punch drunk and a very tired Mama ready to put everyone to bed.

Never let it be said this family is boring.

A word about VetTix, they’re freakin aweome! -Veteran Tickets Foundation’s Tickets for Troops Program is dedicated to giving back to those who gave us so much. We team up with major sports teams, leagues, promoters, organizations, venues and every day event ticket holders to provide free tickets to currently serving and veterans of all branches of the US military.

Veteran Tickets Foundation is proud to announce that to date 41,465,714 event tickets have been donated to Vet Tix in all 50 states and Washington, DC to support our Military, Veterans, and their families. Below is the breakdown of these donated event tickets.

Slide a key into a lock. If you listen closely, you can hear the pins align, everything drops and with a gentle turn the metal shank pops, opening a new world. So it was around 1998, living in San Francisco — trip hop was the soundtrack of my life. Cool ass coffee houses into the late-night hours playing some DJ interpretation of a jazz standard put behind a beat. Portishead, Morcheeba, Massive Attack and Beastie Boys?

Given the Beastie Boys’ penchant for double entendres or outright name dropping, you can be forgiven for thinking The In Sound from Way Out’s opening track “Groove Holmes” was about a famous adult film star versus an ode to soul-jazz organist Richard Holmes. Clocking in at just over 38 minutes, the 1996 release compiled instrumentals scattered across previous albums. One of the most recognizable hip-hop acts in the world releasing a 38-minute instrumental jazz-funk record to their French fan club in 1996 wasn’t a detour. It was a reckoning. They were making a statement while asking a question — not to me, not to you, but to themselves.

To get to this record, you’ve got to go back — first to Paul’s Boutique, widely considered one of the group’s masterpieces, but that recognition exists only through the lens of history. When first released in 1989, the Boys were working hard to shed the reputation they’d earned with Licensed to Ill, but the album initially landed with a thud. On their first move to prove themselves as serious artists, they flopped — talk about a hit to the ego. But no matter, they plowed ahead with 1992’s Check Your Head and everything starts to change with the introduction of a carpenter who moonlighted as a keyboardist.

Mark Ramos Nishita wasn’t a professional musician when the Beasties’ engineer Mario Caldato Jr. introduced him to the band. He worked with hammer and nails, miter saws and levels, his keyboard an afterthought in a life as far removed from the touring schedule of a professional hip-hop act as one could possibly be. Nishita was also the most musically accomplished in a room filled with multi-platinum selling artists with a punk rock pedigree. Perhaps he made them remember something long forgotten: that before the turntables and the microphones, before Licensed to Ill made them famous for being obnoxious, they were musicians. It’s a question worth pondering, but whatever the answer, when Money Mark walked through the studio door during the production of Check Your Head a rocket-launch countdown sequence began that would catapult the band from snot-nosed rappers to artists with something to say.

If you’ve ever spent any time learning an instrument there are two things you know with absolute certainty: it sucks and you suck, at least for a very long time. These three white, Jewish kids from New York weren’t starting from scratch but the calluses had most certainly been lost. But why? Why bother walking around with sore fingertips and frustration when you’re already selling millions of records? Eminem doesn’t play anything and he does just fine. As with most things Beastie, the past is prelude. Remember, this was a hardcore punk band before they were a hip-hop act. Punk demands authenticity — it’s a genre that can smell a fake a mile away and root it out like a terrier on the hunt. All of the Beasties’ commercial success amplified this tension — on some level, they were frauds and they knew it. Playing instruments — actually playing, actually being musicians in the traditional sense — was partly about earning something that no amount of zeros in a bank account would ever give them.

The hard work starts to pay off with Check Your Head, nine instrumentals making the cut. But this is the band trying things on, finding their way, learning their chops. As they move to Ill Communication the progress is noticeable — there’s a movement afoot that any serious listener starts to feel but can’t exactly put a finger on. Between these two records there’s an incredible amount of touring and the Beastie Boys are well known as serious crate-diggers, going deep into the far corners of record stores and sounds to source their samples and now their homework. Take, as example, their deep dive for inspiration into Miles Davis’ On the Corner and Agharta — often considered two of Davis’ most abrasive, most uncompromising records in the canon. You can hear the influence directly in “Bobo on the Corner”, its wah-wah grooves reaching back to Davis like a student acknowledging his teacher. These were suddenly serious musicians doing serious work.

Perhaps the greatest disconnect between the casual music listener and the one whose soul is moved by sound is the oneness of music and spirituality. It’s no accident that as the Beastie Boys were deepening their connection to their instruments individually, the music holistically, that something would shift in their philosophy and spirituality. If Money Mark had slowly become the band’s musical center, pushing them forward into, for them, uncharted waters, then MCA — with his move away from Judaism to Buddhism — would become the band’s spiritual center. Apology without actions is just words, so while the Beasties began acknowledging their past sins, saying the words, they also began the work of atonement. Gone from their lyrics was the misogyny and the locker room humor. By the time Ill Communication released, MCA was rapping about Buddhist ethics on “Bodhisattva Vow.” But to bring their new worldview into hyper focus, Ad-Rock’s direct public acknowledgment in “Sure Shot” that the disrespect to women in their early work was over — stated plainly and without apology — landed like a manifesto. Ideology firmly established, the band only had one thing left to complete in this chapter of their journey — prove to themselves they were every bit the musicians they thought they were — and thus The In Sound from Way Out was born.

Art is a funny thing. More often than not, we consume an artist’s work one piece at a time, assigning meaning, making judgments, inferring intentions. Take the work of street artist and the world’s best hide and seek player, Banksy. Anyone familiar with his work knows the Girl with Balloon, Kissing Coppers, or Pulp Fiction and in the context of stand-alone pieces, most of us have our opinions. It’s not until an artist’s work is brought together, curated and presented as a whole that we start to grasp the artist’s full worldview, the bigger picture. The In Sound from Way Out is the bigger picture — the gallery showing that lays bare a new worldview. Thirteen tracks, some reworked, things subtracted, things added, some left to stand on their own — proving as much to themselves as to anyone that the Beastie Boys, accomplished musicians, had something meaningful to say.

I often come across as dismissive of the casual listener. I assure you that is not my intention. I do fear the casual listener may be unwilling to do the work needed to truly appreciate this album. This is a record that needs you to sit with it, to give it your undivided attention and be willing to do at least some of the hard work required to appreciate all the lesser-traveled roads the Beasties covered. Consider “Eugene’s Lament”. Named for Eugene McDaniels — the R&B cult hero who wrote Compared to What, one of the most politically charged jazz recordings of the 1960s. Three men who built their career on samples choosing to name an instrumental after the man whose music they’d been drawing from. That’s not a production credit. That’s an acknowledgment of lineage. That’s saying this is where we come from and we know it. That is the something the casual listener will miss with a passivity that only hears “Fight for Your Right.”

I don’t think there’s a music critic or writer worth their salt who hasn’t been accused of being a snob or an elitist. And here’s the rub when it comes to the Beastie Boys — that knife cuts both ways. The casual listener wanted more Licensed to Ill while the serious listener was dismissing them as juvenile pranksters. The accusation of snobbery and the accusation of shallowness are the same failure of attention applied in opposite directions. Then Hello Nasty dropped with Intergalactic leading the charge and everyone’s world was rocked — the casual and the serious alike. Commercial enough to top the Billboard 200. Sophisticated enough to satisfy anyone who had been paying attention since Check Your Head. The private reckoning of The In Sound from Way Out made fully public.

Sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop in 1998, The In Sound from Way Out playing through my headphones and all of 24 years old, there was no way I could appreciate everything this album represented. It’s not a knock on the young to say that depth comes with experience, experience comes with age — I just didn’t have the depth in that moment. Nearly 30 years later, a life lived with richness and a seeking of experience, I’ve come to see this record for what it was. Three men at a pivot point in their lives. MCA was 31, Mike D was 30, Ad-Rock was 29. An authenticity ethos forged in the punk rock scene of 1980s New York City. Their credibility, to themselves, was the question. This album was the answer. Are we artists, are we musicians? Do we have something of meaning to say? The answer — unequivocally yes.

In my mind, one of the greatest things about loving music is the ability to completely geek out on it. When I was a kid, Patrick, our friend Chris and I would stay up late playing cards, swapping baseball cards and listening to music. All of the music: Dad’s, ours and a whole bunch of random shit from the radio.

But geeking out to me has always been about listening harder. Hearing beyond the initial drumbeat, the guitar solo, and catching something subtle. Slash’s guitar solo in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is iconic, but there’s a stretch in the first half of the song where Izzy Stradlin’s rhythm guitar moves the song from good to sublime. More often than not, those subtleties are missed by the casual listener. To this day, there’s a section of Weezer’s “Holiday” where the guitarist runs up the fretboard toward the end of the song that literally takes my breath, lifts me out of my chair as a grin of eternal happiness spreads across my face.

I was stupid excited when I heard a whole slew of never-before-heard recordings by The Cramps had been unearthed and were being primed for release under the moniker Gravest Gravy — the October 1977 Ardent Studios sessions in Memphis, with Alex Chilton behind the board. But. What would be the difference?

“TV Set” is one of my favorite Cramps tracks of all time, and from the get, I knew something was up. We’ll set aside all of the differences in the production; that goes without saying. What I wanted to hear — what, if for no other reason, makes this record worth every penny — was how the band thought when it came to these songs, allowing for an addition to the ever-constant geekified debate between music nerds. The drums are different. I won’t bore you with some Vanilla Ice defense/distinction of bum-bum-bum-bumba-bumba vs. bum-bum-bum-bumba-bum (that’s pretty close to his actual defense), just to say they’re different.

Wait a minute — what’s that?! There’s no blues shuffle in the original version, and Ivy’s guitar in this is far crisper! But oh my, that blues shuffle totally changes the timbre of this. Where the original guitar sounded like a gauntlet thrown down, this new take feels slightly less confrontational, a bit more fun — if such a thing can be said about a song whose highlight is using someone’s eyeballs for dials on their TV set.

“Domino” is set in a whole different pitch — my musical geekiness couldn’t tell you the differences in keys, but my ear hears it. The Gravest Gravy version also feels about a half step faster, with Lux’s vocals, if possible, slightly more frantic.

And I’m starting to notice a trend.

Let’s look at “Can’t Find My Mind.” Again, the Gravest Gravy version is slightly faster, but the biggest difference is Lux’s use of reverb for the lyrics. I feel like I understand what he was going for here — what it must sound like inside the head of someone who’s losing their marbles. The version that most of us know was on the band’s 1981 release Psychedelic Jungle. That version feels more intentional, slower, slightly more sinister.

And this is what I love about being a hard-core music fan — the speculation, the endless banter with fellow music geeks trying to work out what the artist was working out when they finally put their stamp of approval on a release. We’ll probably never know, short of Ivy doing a series of in-depth interviews — sadly, Lux died in 2009 — to talk about their recording process and why these were shelved in favor of other releases.

To my ear, I hear the band crafting a sound, a narrative, and a mystique — one that used tempo against itself. Punk rock is notoriously fast, and The Cramps could get quick with the best of them, but they seemed to have understood that the menace was in the slow. Lux didn’t want to perform for you; he wanted to scare you a bit, make you feel just a little uneasy, whether you were listening to a record or watching one of their amazing shows.

To me, there’s only one miss on this album, and like all things music, this is totally subjective. The Cramps covering Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Hungry” was a dud in my mind. A glance at the liner notes tells me that Alex Chilton, producer of this haul of buried treasures, was the culprit behind the keys — Alex, hands on the board, off the organ! The Cramps don’t do organs, period. End of conversation.

So should you buy this record? Hell. Fuck. Yes. Hard-core Cramps fans are going to tie themselves into bows trying to decode what was going on inside the band’s brain when they zigged vs. zagged. Casual fans are going to hear a band, while not fully formed, right on the precipice, already better than a huge swath of what’s currently out there. And for the new listener — let me introduce you to this wonderful, wacky, sinister band … The Cramps.

Somewhere into our two-hour conversation, my brother Patrick started talking about the week’s top sellers on Discogs. This was something Patrick liked to do, and we would gasp at the prices people were paying for their holy grails. If you’ve collected albums for any length of time, you almost certainly have a few holy grail records out there and, like me, you’ve probably scrolled longingly through Discogs eyeing the prize or scanning the rare section at your favorite record store, ever hopeful to finally complete the quest.

Two thousand dollars for an obscure Japanese pressing of some jazz performance most of us have never heard of seems ludicrous, let alone the amount of hard-earned cash being shelled out for 7-inches.

But is it? Not for me to decide.

I hung up the phone with Patrick but stayed on the Discogs website and punched in the name of a band, more specifically an album, I’d been searching for, for some time. This was a quest I thought I had completed nearly 25 years ago, but I’ll be go-to-hell … Morcheeba wasn’t done with me yet. The list came up; so few copies, so much money – nothing in the $2,000 stratosphere, mind you, but champagne prices colliding against my cheap beer budget.

Like I said, this wasn’t the first time this band and this album had me on a quest — for that we have to go back to 1997. Around that time I was separating from the Marine Corps, separating from California, and separating myself from a life up to that point guided by the decisions and dictates of others. My buddy Tim was from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and loves to tell people that’s actually where Billy Joel was when he wrote his classic, “Allentown.” Turns out, unless you’re writing a Christmas carol, Bethlehem doesn’t work real well in a song. We’d thrown our meager belongings into the back of a GMC Jimmy I had purchased three weeks earlier and struck out from Camp Pendleton bound for Pennsylvania. We needed somewhere to land for a minute as we settled into new careers and found an apartment closer to our New York City locale, so we settled on Tim’s childhood home for the time being.

We’d only been in town for a couple days; our sleep patterns not yet adjusted to East Coast time. We’d been up chit-chatting with the family, who around midnight or so finally decided to call it a night. Tim and I, still very much awake, flipped on the television and settled on The Late Show with David Letterman. On the television a band was already performing their song, and almost immediately I was transfixed by the pulsating rhythm. The lead singer, a beautiful, dark-skinned woman, was singing something about love and being the trigger hippie … here. Across the board I was smitten. I hung around to see if they would say who the band was, but no such luck. I drifted off to sleep that night thinking about that song and how I was going to figure out who that was. So, my first quest for Morcheeba officially began.

A couple things worth noting here — this was 1997, so I couldn’t Shazam it, I couldn’t pop over to the program’s website and see who that was, hell there wasn’t even a Google to at least point me in the right direction. So I did what any self-respecting music fan would — I went and made an ass of myself.

I’d walk into record stores in Hoboken, Jersey City, the Village, Harlem, with the basic idea of a tune and a few lyrics. I apologize to the universe and every poor clerk who had to suffer through … “Hey, any idea what this song might be” as they looked at me horrified while I tried to hum something. This went on for something like three months as I’d walk into a shop, give them my pitch, the clerk looking at me like I had something growing out of my forehead. And then I walked into Bleecker Bob’s.

In some of my previous writing, I’ve talked about “the universe.” I don’t believe in a god per se, but some days it sure does feel like there’s some sort of mischievous trickster up there, and every so often their gaze falls to you. Had I walked into Bleecker Bob’s months ago, I probably would have short-cutted this quest back then. But no. Apparently, I had to prove something to someone — store after store, embarrassment after embarrassment, like some initiation or passage of fealty to the music gods. I’ll never forget the exchange.

Me: “Hi, I’m hoping you can help me … I’ve been looking for this album for months now, saw them on Letterman a few months back, loved it, but can’t find it.”

Clerk, giving me a stern but helpful look: “I’m happy to try, got anything more than what you just told me?”

Me: “Well, I think I have the tune, it goes something like this …” and I would start humming. “And the lead singer, a woman, sings about being a trigger hippie, that’s about all I know,” I said, disappointment rising in my voice.

The clerk thought for a minute. “Well, give me a second, I’m not positive, but I think I have a thought on this.”

She disappeared for a few minutes, came back with a CD in her hands, cracked it open, and put it into the store’s system. The song began and at first I thought to myself, “No, this isn’t it…” but then Skye’s voice came in and my eyes widened. This. Was. It!

A smile spread across the clerk’s face — based on my reaction, she knew she’d hit a home run. She went on to tell me a bit about the band — Morcheeba. Where they were from — London. If I liked them, I should check out a few others — Air, DJ Shadow, Massive Attack.

Let me tell you, that album is about as strong a debut as anything anyone has ever put out. Ultimately, I would go through three copies of the CD, the first one I burnt through having played it so much.

Every so often I wonder to myself — would this album have meant as much to me if I had been able to instantly queue it up on Spotify, or if it had come wrapped in some algorithmic discovery playlist? If I could have just popped over to the Late Show’s website and most likely not only caught the name of the act but been able to watch the performance? And then, after all of those steps that never require me to step off my front porch, opened Apple Music and downloaded the album? Look, I’m not going to get too preachy, but it’s my strongly held belief that our instant access to everything has made everything more ephemeral, more disposable. Who Can You Trust means something to me, in part, because I had to work so hard to find it. Which brings us to the current.

Along California Interstate 15 between the Nevada state line and Barstow, there’s a series of billboards advertising Alien Fresh Jerky. I first encountered these signs in the early ‘90s as a Marine going between Barstow and Camp Pendleton — back then the signs for the Baker, California shop started way early. Along with the store’s tall thermometer, it’s the only thing of note in Baker, California. Desert towns being what they are, I suppose you’ve got to lean into what you’ve got.

I was intrigued and told myself I would stop in there one day and try it. And this went on. For years … like 30 years. I’d pass the sign and think to myself — is today the day? And decide nope — keep moving.

Until just a few years ago.

K and I were coming back from Zion to our then-home in San Diego. K knew the beef jerky story and was deeply in on the joke — she asked me with excitement if this was the moment, was today the day, as we’d speed past. But, for reasons known only to that mischievous fucker in the sky, this day was different — we stopped, picked up a couple bags of the overpriced salted meat, and got back to our travels, ripping open a package to satisfy a thirty-year itch.

Maybe I’d built it up too much in my head, or maybe — and I suspect this to be the truer thought — the idea of it, the wonder of it, was always going to be better than the actualization of it. It was mediocre at best. But more importantly, that drive along the 15? It’s different now.

But what in the world does Morcheeba and beef jerky have to do with each other?! I’m glad you asked. I’m at a hinge point with the band, and again, more specifically, this album.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. didn’t experience a complete vinyl collapse. By 1996, U.S. vinyl sales had cratered to a tiny fraction of the market — CD had fully taken over, and vinyl in America was mostly a niche/DJ/collector format. The U.K., by contrast, retained a much stronger vinyl culture throughout the ‘90s, particularly in dance, electronic, and DJ-adjacent genres — vinyl was still a functional, expected format for club play and specialist record shops, not a nostalgia item. The U.K. never let go of the physical object the way the U.S. did — vinyl culture didn’t die there; it just kept going quietly while America moved on to CDs. All of that is to say, Who Can You Trust saw a limited vinyl release in the U.K. under the China Records label. In the U.S., the album was put out as a CD release only.

As I sit here typing this essay, one of my browser windows is open to Discogs, more accurately a listing for Who Can You Trust. The album is going anywhere from $300 on the low end to nearly $500 for truly mint pressings. Over the course of the last year, I’ve placed it in my cart only to close the window before hitting the buy button. Get a little bit of unexpected money? Put it in the cart. Have a little too much whiskey? Put it in the cart. And so far, every time I’ve closed the window before completing the sale.

I have twin boys. One of them, Lucien, is totally my clone, and he’s gone to great lengths to get up early with me for as long as I can remember. Some time ago — Lucien had to be about a year old — I was down the pathway taking care of our goats. I heard him talking and crying from the bedroom, so I quietly went in, scooped him out of the bed next to a sleeping K and Tristan, into my arms, and walked back down the pathway with him. It was early, like 5:30 or so. Mother Nature was in a rare mood, deciding she was going to start the day with a light show exclusive to those of us awake at that moment. I stood there in awe, my son in my arms, and I said to him, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it.” Lucien looked at me, stretched out his arm and finger to the sky, and in his tiny baby voice said, “Beautiful,” as he continued to stare for several more minutes. I fell to my knees in that moment and quietly wept, overwhelmed by the beauty of the world, the beauty of my son.

And so I sit here, a vinyl pressing of Who Can You Trust in my cart, unsure of which it will be — a bag of mediocre jerky or a one-year-old pointing at the sky, his tiny voice repeating … beautiful.

For most of us, music discovery can be challenging. Given the amount of platforms out there, this feels maddeningly contradictory, and yet here we are, stumbling between Bandcamp, Spotify, and places like Substack, hoping to find someone with similar taste and interests we can follow along with. And then there is someone like me, who has as close to a twin as one can possibly get — a twin who also happens to so closely share your musical interests that it’s like having an additional discovery agent out there grinding it out and reporting back.

See, my brother Patrick is only 11 months younger than me. We grew up calling ourselves Irish Twins, though I’m not sure that would be proper anymore. We shared just about everything growing up — bedroom, experiences, and most importantly, music. I joined the Marine Corps in my late teens and we parted ways, but we never stopped talking (we still chat for several hours near every Saturday morning), never stopped sharing recommendations. Without question, I call Patrick my best friend. I would argue that I’m as responsible for as many of Patrick’s favorite bands as he is mine. Thus, why did it take me so long to come to the Lumineers?

I couldn’t tell you the first time Patrick mentioned them to me, but it was long ago enough that I’m slightly embarrassed thinking about it, doubly so admitting it. I was wrapping up my assignment on the Plaskett fire along the California coast. I’d been talking to Patrick the night before, and he brought up the Denver, Colorado–based band again. This was it — this was the moment I was going to dig into them. They meant something to him, and he means everything to me — enough putting this off. So, jumping in my rig for the journey between Paso Robles and Fort Hunter Liggett, I queued them up, and as the early morning hours refused to surrender their darkness, I began understanding why he enjoyed this album so much. Sitting in the Starbucks parking lot, grabbing a cup of coffee, I popped him an image and text of the stereo screen — “Time to get familiar.”

Wesley Schultz and Jeremiah Fraites started collaborating after Fraites’ brother Josh — who was also Schultz’s best friend — died of an overdose in 2002. They began writing and performing together as a way of processing that grief. This is what you notice almost immediately upon listening to this album — a sincerity, an earnestness that rejects rock star cool and sneer for something real, something human, understated yet profound.

“Jesus, these guys are the Ted Lasso of the music world,” I thought to myself. And the more I thought about it, the truer that comparison became.

Ted Lasso landed to critics rolling their eyes at “aw shucks” earnestness in a genre that usually rewards cynicism and snark. The Lumineers landed in 2012 in the thick of the “stomp-clap-hey” folk boom (Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men) and took real critical heat for being simple, even saccharine — some reviewers called “Ho Hey” borderline novelty-chant territory. Both won by refusing to be embarrassed about sincerity, and both ended up outlasting a lot of the flashier things people took more seriously at the time. They succeeded with kindness, with empathy, and with their raw, stripped-down humanity.

And much like Ted Lasso went on to become a cultural touchpoint, the Lumineers went on to blow past the initial sales estimates set at 30,000–50,000 units by their label, Dualtone. The album eventually went triple platinum with over 3 million in all-format sales, peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200, and “Stubborn Love” was reportedly on President Obama’s iPod playlist. “Ho Hey” became a cultural ubiquity — TV commercials, shows — off a lead single with famously simple, participatory, almost campfire-chant lyrics.

Barbecue sauce.

Two minutes into the track and “Dead Sea” easily became my favorite on the record. I pinged Patrick — what’s your favorite on this album? Almost instantaneously, he responded: “Slow It Down” and “Stubborn Love.” Give this record an hour, and then answer me this: what’s your new favorite track? Because there’s no way you walk away from this album without something touching you.

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to shift from fifth gear, humming along at 70 miles per hour, to first? You might survive the ensuing calamity assuming your head doesn’t punch through the windshield, your transmission almost certainly won’t. That was what it felt like moving from San Francisco to Galion, Ohio.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Galion, even most folks from Ohio haven’t heard of it -- its only real distinction as a town is being one of two towns in the country whose name is a singularity. There is only one Galion, thank the gods. And yet, here I was having survived the chaotic downshift.

Survived is probably the best word. I was beaten and battered but I was still alive, left in a state of shock. A typical Friday night in The City involved walking a few blocks to the Justice League and catching some new band coming through town, followed by a trip to Amoeba Music the next morning searching for something that either reminded me of the band I’d just heard or an even deeper dive into last night’s offerings. The height of Galion entertainment was mostly a collection of cautionary tales as you looked in horror at the shell of a human clutching their cheap wine at the edge of whatever dive-bar you found yourself in, vowing to never become them.

It was another one of those Ohio nights. Bored, dissatisfied, questioning every life decision I’d made that resulted in me being here. The one true thing in my life at that moment laid out on his freshly laundered blanket spread out on the floor. Kerouac was all of a month old as I sat there next to him, guitar in hand, determined to finally learn how to play this thing. I set the guitar down, walked over to the computer seeking inspiration, something fresh, something my ears could rejoice in. Back in 2001, Amazon was still a spunky internet newcomer, squarely in the pantheon of good guys, so I flipped over to the site and started digging for new music, stopping every few minutes to check on little man; change a diaper, feed a bottle.

Something caught my attention – “Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (shit, that’s a mouthful), ok let me give this a try.

Hooked.

Thus began my love affair with B.R.M.C. as they became more commonly known, which brings us to the band’s third album, Howl, released in 2005. But hold on, we’re not there just yet.

What must it have been like to be a new band in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Napster was slowly dismantling a distribution system that put the album first, record stores were rapidly circling the drain, and record labels, already feeling the pinch, were pulling back on development – you delivered now or you were gone. Into that fray stepped Robert Levon Been (bass, vocals), Peter Hayes (guitar, vocals), and Nick Jago (drums) as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Their self-titled debut was released on Virgin Records in April of 2001. While it didn’t chart in the United States, it reached #25 in the UK and was certified gold. Along came Take Them On, On Your Own, again on Virgin Records, peaking on the US charts at #47 and going gold in the UK, topping out on the charts at #3.

These first two records were a smash-up of British shoegaze and post-punk in the vein of Jesus and Mary Chain, Love and Rockets and the Stone Roses, while adding a healthy dose of classic rock’s swagger with nods to the Rolling Stones, T-Rex and the Velvet Underground. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club found themselves in pretty good company at the time as bands like The White Stripes, The Dandy Warhols and Interpol were dipping their toes in the same waters, each with their own flavor to the sound.

But B.R.M.C. had headwinds working against them that had nothing to do with the music. When was the last time you heard of a label dropping a band who had a #3 album in the UK? By 2003, labels were in full panic mode, tightening budgets, getting more conservative about who they’d sign and how long they’d tolerate a band that wasn’t immediately profitable. Add to the mix an unstable relationship with drummer Jago, later revealed to be substance abuse problems, and you’ve got a band suddenly imploding without a record label to backstop them.

During the 2003 NME awards, Jago’s unraveling became public when he stood on stage accepting an award and was silent for a full nine minutes. Things only spiraled from there after a fight with Hayes following a gig in Scotland that saw Jago pushed out of the band. So no drummer, no label and no guarantee anyone was listening, and Been and Hayes decided to push forward anyway, entering the studio with a collection of material they’d been messing around with backstage and in their off-time.

In a 2025 interview marking Howl’s 20th anniversary, Been told NME: “We were dropped from our label after our second album so Howl was like this Hail Mary to see if anyone gave a shit anymore… and every label passed on it. RCA only signed us with the stipulation that they’d put out a small amount in boutique stores if we promised to put out a rock record next.”

It felt like a Hail Mary. When I first ripped off the cellophane, cracked open the case, popped the disc in the player, the music that filled my house was a complete departure from anything the band had produced before. Gone was the Jesus and Mary Chain fuzz I loved so much, the driving rhythms and frenetic energy the previous two albums were filled with. In their place was stripped down arrangements, tones and sounds that harkened back to American roots; soul, blues, acoustic guitars, hand clapping beats and songs languidly stretching themselves out across nearly an hour.

I shelved it. There was so much on my plate both musically and personally that I didn’t have time for something that didn’t hit immediately. And it stayed that way for a few weeks as the album slowly drifted to the edge of my consciousness.

Somewhere between Galion and Boone County, West Virginia, on my way to see a rare performance by Jesco White and Hank III, I was flipping through the book of CDs in the seat next to me. Howl was in there - I’d absently popped it into the book at some point though I honestly couldn’t tell you why or when.

“Meh, why not,” I thought to myself as I pulled it from the book and slid it into the car’s player. Maybe I’d changed enough in the in-between weeks, maybe the waning sun and the fog-drenched hills were working some dark magic, who knows, but suddenly the album just clicked.

During my high school years, I was deeply involved in choir, drama and other musical arts. As a member of the men’s quartet, we would often slip off before a performance to one of the cavernous stairwells around the school looking for a fullness of sound that exists in such places. Hit play on Howl and the album’s first track, “Shuffle Your Feet,” feels like a band that slipped off to find a stairwell, just having fun as the voices harmonize before working themselves into a stomp-clap rhythm that ushers in a bluesy acoustic guitar.

In a 2025 interview with The Arts Fuse, Been elaborated on the philosophy driving the album’s creation: “We didn’t really know what we were doing when we started. We had a lot of the songs already written probably even before our first album ever came out. We had a lot of these rootsy songs that we would just have fun playing backstage or on tour buses with acoustic instruments. They didn’t really fit with the sound of the band that the public had become familiar with, so we first started recording the songs separately rather than trying to blend them in or put them through distortion pedals to make them into rock songs... We started recording one after another, and what started as a throwaway acoustic album kept growing.”

As if to put an exclamation point on that thought in response to fan backlash upon initial release, Hayes summed it up perfectly – “We kept telling you guys we loved Johnny Cash, but no one would listen.”

About halfway through the record, we get to the album’s emotional center. “Promise” opens with a lilting piano sequence, an instrument Been had to learn specifically for this recording. “I’ll comfort you, I’ll stay with you, it’s a promise not forgotten.” For a band in the middle of such internal turmoil, what must these lyrics have meant? Were they projecting out to Jago, who’d entered rehab and makes an appearance on this record specifically for this song? Like any truly great song, the writer’s meaning is somewhat secondary in that its original point is shrouded in just enough mystery that we as the listener can layer onto it whatever we like, making it ours. The best songs don’t give you answers but instead guide you to answers that were inside you all along.

Around Charleston, West Virginia, I eased off the main highway onto a series of state routes and winding back roads on my way to the show. West Virginia and Appalachia is as much lore as it is real, and so it felt appropriate that “Restless Sinner” cracked to life as I made this portion of my journey. Drenched in deep Mississippi blues, a slight menace sits just below the surface like a reckoning. It can’t be an accident that “Restless Sinner” is followed on the album by “Gospel Song,” tracing an arc of the sinner whooping it up on Saturday night only to find himself in a pew on Sunday morning, coming to terms with his own soul alongside the hangover.

Some twenty years on, and this album, one I almost tossed on first listen, stands as one of my favorite records of all time. And here we get to the nut of a deeply held philosophy – music finds us when we’re ready and not a moment sooner. Maybe Howl needed a proper setting, a West Virginia road trip, hours alone as fog-drenched hillsides worked their magic, setting a stage in my mind’s eye that let me truly hear it. I hope I never forget that: moment, place, time and magic all have a role to play in my musical journey, and what didn’t land yesterday might just find a home today.

Growing up in North Pole, Alaska in the late 80s and early 90s was tough. Most of us joked there was only three things to do in that area – drink, fight and fuck. Most of us were pretty damn good scrapers, some of us came out pregnant and most of us were borderline alcoholics before we ever made it to college. But there was also a subset of us, probably true in high schools even today – the smart weirdos, the staunchly anti-authoritarian set who stalked out to the tree line for a smoke at lunch and who still fell in love with words while secretly harboring a crush on our English teacher. We were listening to Black Flag while begrudgingly reading our worn copies of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

I graduated high school in 1992, one year before Bad Religion released Recipe for Hate, and I’ve come to believe that timing wasn’t incidental to how deeply the record landed. I’d already left Alaska by the time this album dropped and found myself in the middle of the exploding SoCal punk scene led by the likes of Bad Religion and Epitaph Records. By the time Greg Graffin’s voice hit my ears, I’d already spent years being handed the vocabulary he was speaking.

Steinbeck taught me a novel could stop telling its story just long enough to indict an entire system and dare you to keep reading anyway. Kerouac taught me that disgust with a hollow national promise could be its own aesthetic, its own reason to keep moving. Fitzgerald taught me the American Dream could be staged as tragedy, dressed beautifully, rotting underneath. Graffin didn’t introduce me to any of that. He translated it into three chords, a scream, and thirty-seven minutes; something in me recognized the language immediately.

That’s the only way I can explain why an album largely dismissed at the time as just another loud, angry punk record has stuck with me for over three decades as something closer to scripture.

“American Jesus,” the album’s most enduring track, does the same work from a different angle — dismantling the specific, dangerous comfort of believing a nation has been personally blessed above all others, and that its violence is therefore sanctified rather than just violence.

Released June 4, 1993, Recipe for Hate was Bad Religion’s seventh album and their last on Epitaph before jumping to Atlantic — the record that finally cracked a chart, debuting at number 14 on Billboard’s Heatseekers list. It’s easy to forget, given how unhinged the band’s reputation was, that Greg Graffin holds a doctorate and spent years teaching evolutionary biology at Cornell. This was never a record built on inarticulate rage. It’s an argument, constructed by someone trained to build arguments — trading the professor’s authority for punk’s sneer, but the instinct to teach never left him.

The album’s title track doesn’t waste time on any single villain. It traces something closer to a so-called free trade agreement — the way national mythology, the language of progress, and a sanitized version of history get fed into a machine that manufactures cruelty and calls the result heritage. That’s the record’s real move throughout, and it’s worth sitting with in 2026, watching Christian nationalism climb back into open daylight after decades of pretending it had gone quiet: Graffin never points at one man or one office. He points at the machinery. “American Jesus,” the album’s most enduring track, does the same work from a different angle — dismantling the specific, dangerous comfort of believing a nation has been personally blessed above all others, and that its violence is therefore sanctified rather than just violence. Thirty-two years later, you could set that song down next to this week’s headlines and it wouldn’t need a single word changed.

What I keep coming back to, though, isn’t just that the record predicted where we’d end up. It’s that it never once suggested a machine like this runs on individual villains you can simply vote out or replace. Recipe for Hate argues hate is manufactured, generationally, out of the very stories a country tells itself — its prosperity, its progress, its bloodline. You don’t dismantle a machine like that by identifying its current operator. You dismantle it by refusing to keep feeding it the same raw material, which starts with recognizing you’ve been swallowing it your whole life.

I don’t know that Recipe for Hate could have changed anything on its own, even if every person who ever heard it had internalized every word. Diagnosis was never going to be enough, and a record this uncompromising was always going to find the people already looking for it rather than the people who needed it most. But I know what it did for me, at nineteen, already primed by better books than I probably deserved, to finally hear someone my own age put a scream to what I’d only had language for in prose. Thirty-three years on, it remains one of the sharpest, most honest autopsies of what this country keeps allowing itself to become — and I still play it loud enough that the neighbors know exactly where I stand.

Many moons ago while living in San Francisco’s Mission District along Valencia Street, I was sitting outside on the fire escape trying to figure out what I was going to do next. My trusty GMC Jimmy had been completely ransacked, stripped and was now undrivable – I needed something and I needed it fast.

I happened to live across the street from one of those buy-here, pay-here lots and as I looked up, my eyes fixed on the $6,000 price tag.

“I can afford that,” I thought to myself as I climbed back through the window with the notion of crossing the street to investigate further.

I won’t bore you with the details, but a few hours later I was driving a mid 90’s Saturn SL2 and calling the local public radio station to claim the Jimmy.

And then it happened.

Driving around The City, I started noticing Saturns everywhere. And I mean everywhere. They filled the parking lot of the tech company I worked for at the time, they were on the 280 as I made my way home and driving up and down Mission Street I couldn’t help but notice how many caught my attention.

Science has a name for this, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion. No, there weren’t suddenly more Saturns on the road but now my brain was flagging that car as relevant, and each additional sighting reinforced this notion.

That brings us to Welsh born artist Ren Eryn Gill. Lying in my hotel room in Spokane following a long, two-week fire assignment, I was checking out his latest release, Asylum, a collab with Connecticut rapper, Chris Webby. “Madhouse” opens the album and as I’ve come to expect from Ren – that is to say, have no expectations – I was immediately caught off guard by … what is this? Did I just wander into a 1930s vaudeville act? And as I lay there just really hearing the music, a thought interrupted the sounds – how is this cat not as big as Eminem?

Like a lot of folks in my United States circle, I came to Ren through the absolutely bat-shit bonkers, viral video “Hi Ren.” I can at least say I came to it before seeing any of the hundreds of therapist reaction videos to it, so I was at least allowed to fully bring all of my own baggage to it before hearing others. It moved me to tears … and I mean ugly, holy-shit I thought I’d dealt with that type of tears. Once I could think through the water works and the snot, I decided I was going to dig deep into this artist -- there’s no way this came out as a first shot out of the gate.

So I dug, I followed, I listened, and before too long my feed was full of reaction videos, clips of Ren out there busking, talking about his mental health struggles – suddenly everyone was talking about Ren.

But were they? Or were the algorithms that play such a large role in how we consume media these days doing their job serving me up a slew of Ren content. Were there really more Saturns on the road?

Offline, I would talk to my friends about the artist and they had no idea who he was, never heard of him. Even some of my more musically in touch folks were asking me who this white rapper I was blabbering on about was.

Really?

Ren’s second studio release Sick Boi, hit #1 on the UK charts in October 2023, his YouTube numbers are on par with artists with much greater industry support, 2.6 million subscribers and 592 million total views, while his Spotify numbers would make any indie artist jealous – 722.7 million streams across 74 tracks.

So why isn’t Ren more of a household name? There probably needs to be a conversation about UK charts vs. US charts, the way music in the UK is driven by a smaller set of tastemakers vs the wildly segmented, highly genre specific way music is presented in the States but we’ll save that for a later conversation.

I made the Eminem reference earlier, but that would put Ren into a box that’s more limiting than helpful. Is he an incredibly talented rapper, with insane lyrics? Yes, but that’s probably where the comparison stops.

As listeners and readers, we absolutely love to put artists into containers our brains can understand – if you like this, you should check this out. Which, by and large works, a lot of the time, as points of reference are useful for context. Until you stumble upon an artist like Ren. The more proper comparison might be Sting during his years as the lead singer of The Police – both because several of Ren’s tracks tend toward a similar reggae/Caribbean vibe found in Police releases like Synchronicity, and because Ren, like Sting, has steadfastly refused to be tied down to any one style. This is both a blessing and a curse.

Take “Hi Ren” as one small example – before we get to the meat of the song, our perception is smashed by a classical flamenco style arpeggio that completely knocks the ground out from under our feet. Whatever expectations you had going into this song, the flourish of notes immediately tells you to abandon them and just listen with every sense wide open.

Following the smashing success of Synchronicity, Sting made the choice to cash in his well-earned chips and experiment. The success of the album had granted him a wide berth to play around with styles and be the artist he felt he was. But it’s important to pull back the curtain and look at the infrastructure The Police had during this time.

Starting with the label, A&M. Label co-founder Jerry Moss once said The Police were “so different and exciting, unlike anything else on the radio, which made them perfect for A&M.” Miles Copeland, the band’s manager, delivered the label a demo tape including the song “Roxanne.” As the band was going into the studio, Moss was looking at lyric sheets, gobsmacked by what he was seeing, realizing he had a massive hit album on his hands before ever hearing the melody. So from the start, the label was behind this band in a way most new artists can only dream about. This is no small credit to the band’s talent, but it also speaks volumes to a label executive going all in based on instinct.

Then we get to the support infrastructure in place around this time frame. Synchronicity was released in 1983 at a time when radio markets around the world were geared toward album oriented rock and Top 40 formats controlled by a relatively small number of corporate owned stations. This was a moment when getting added to the right rotation on the right handful of stations meant you were nearly guaranteed exposure to millions of listeners who might never have heard you. During this period, radio stations lived and died by their ability to grab your attention with things you hadn’t previously sought out.

Early on, Copeland recognized the power of MTV and sensed the disruptive nature the format was going to have on the industry. The Police were the first band ever sponsored by MTV, leveraging the outlet to run promotional stunts as they flew contest winners to Montreal to see the band perform alongside Talking Heads, English Beat and Peter Tosh.

This is an infrastructure – thoroughly decimated in the years between – that simply doesn’t exist for an artist like Ren.

But even as the old system was being dismantled, a new system was slowly developing, evolving, working through the machinations on its way to being the dominant paradigm. We’re of course talking about social media and the rise of algorithmic discovery. While often maligned, and in many cases accurately so, it’s probably much more accurate to realize this new system exists in the grey – neither hero nor villain. For every artist lost in the ashes of the previous system, plenty have adapted to the new rules and found a level of success. Ren would be one such artist.

I mentioned earlier that there was no way “Hi Ren” was the first shot out the gate, and it doesn’t take much to realize how true that thought was. Born on March 29, 1990, in Bangor, Wales, at an early age, Ren taught himself to play guitar by slowing down his collection of Jimi Hendrix and John Frusciante records. By age 12 he was selling home-made beats, and then his whole life was shook when at 19 he lost one of his closest childhood friends, Joe Hughes, to suicide. That same year he entered Bath Spa University to study commercial music, forming a band with classmate Charlie Fowler. The two would busk around town, being discovered by producer Eric Appapoulay, who signed him to a development deal with Sony.

Then came the collapse.

At 25 years old, in what should have been his career takeoff, Ren gets violently ill, spending upwards of 23 hours a day in bed. Doctors misdiagnose him repeatedly: depression, bipolar disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome. The stress eventually triggers psychosis. Sony drops him. Years pass before he’s properly diagnosed with Lyme disease. Eventually Ren gets the treatment he needs via experimental stem-cell therapy in the United States. This doesn’t cure him, but it gives him enough energy to walk outside again as he starts busking along the streets of Brighton, and in 2016 he releases “Freckled Angels” as a tribute to Hughes.

One has to believe that artists like Ren will always find a way. Perhaps that’s an overly romantic view of the driven-artist trope, but it sure feels appropriate here. In 2017, Ren, alongside Romain Axisa, Gorran Kendall and later Glenn Chambers on drums, forms The Big Push. They’re rowdy, with a blues-inflected sound that takes the streets of Brighton by storm as they develop a loyal following. In 2021 the band hits the road for a sold-out series of shows around the United Kingdom, but Ren’s illness gets the better of him, and in 2022 the band splits up due to his ongoing health issues.

“To have gone from best friends playing out on the streets for fun, to one of the most well-known busking bands in the world in a few short years is something we are immensely proud of, and we will carry each adventure and experience it gave us forever,” the band said in a statement following their break-up.

Never let it be said the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor. The day after the band plays together for the last time, Ren releases “Hi Ren” to YouTube, and the gears in today’s hit-making machine begin to grind. I won’t belabor the point, but today’s music discovery is largely based on algorithmic recommendation and moments of virality. Virality is that flash-in-the-pan moment where suddenly everyone is using the same 30 seconds for their video. What happened to “Hi Ren” was much more slow-burn algorithmic discovery.

In its first month on the platform, “Hi Ren” hits the two million view threshold; by May 2023 it’s at 13 million views. Across YouTube, people are stumbling across this strange, dimly lit video with a young man in a wheelchair being pushed by a man wearing a pig head costume. It’s immediately disquieting, and the first few seconds do exactly what a great hook should – draw you in. The algorithm goes to work as reaction videos begin popping up, fellow musicians and therapists feeling compelled to weigh in on the video, analyzing the layers upon layers packed into the nine-minute affair. By mid-2024 the video grows past 30 million views, all without any major-label support, without any of the infrastructure in place that helped propel Sting and The Police to the international stars they became. As of August 2026, the video sits at 72 million views, the likelihood that number will continue to climb being high as viewer after viewer, disaffected kid after disaffected kid, adult after struggling adult sits down in front of their computer and the algorithm decides the moment they need to see this video is now.

It’s not an unpopular opinion to state that the algorithm is ruining modern culture. At this point, it’s probably the default opinion for most of us. Think piece after think piece is published citing degraded attention spans, the lack of intellectual fluency and other markers of a civilization in rapid decline. I’m not going to push back too hard on that – I tend to think there’s probably some merit in the words. But how much of this is also just old coots screaming at the kids to get off their lawn? The same thing was said about dime novels, comic books, radio, hell… about rock and roll – Satanic Panic anyone? If we didn’t exist in an age where discovery (not just music – BookTok is a thriving, healthy thing) was driven by the likes of YouTube and Spotify, would an artist like Ren even be possible?

The romantic in me desperately wants to believe that someone as genuinely talented as Ren absolutely would. That whatever the mechanism of the day, he would be discovered, he would be propelled forward until he was a household name. None of us can say for certain if that is true. What we can say for certain is that Ren is a product of his age. He used the tools available to him and will continue to do so. And why shouldn’t he, given the success he seems to have found? It’s given him a level of control he might not otherwise have. But let’s not wander into this with eyes wide shut – for every step Ren has taken, there’s been an associated cost. Each chosen path comes at a price. Ren gets to write his own rules, but the cost of that is he’s not as famous as he could be. So it’s not black and white, and I’ll never know if he made that decision consciously or if he, given everything he’s gone through, felt he had no other choice – and his decision almost certainly wouldn’t work out exactly the same way for another artist. They call it catching lightning in a bottle for a reason.

So Ren is having his moment. He’s at a point where his treatment protocols allow him to be back outside, performing – not cured, but functional. He’s doing the thing, his way. Along comes 2025, and Ren, alongside his former band, The Big Push, declares the Summer of Busk. They hit the streets of Brighton in a deliberate return to where they started. This wasn’t a one-off nostalgia stunt; it was a real, sustained run, guerrilla-style, culminating on September 6 in a three-hour beachfront set at Kings Road Arches, the same spot they’d busked seven years earlier. Back then, they played to a nearly empty pavement. This time, it was mobbed – fans leaning over the railings to watch.

And then something interesting happens at that performance – toward the show’s conclusion, Ren asks fans not to swarm him. He acknowledges some had traveled a long way to be there, but describes himself as “a neurodivergent mess” and says crowds trigger panic attacks for him. No A&R guy to drive him toward fan engagement, no PR person counseling against such statements – just Ren being Ren, deciding for himself what success means and how he shows up in it.

In cowboy movies, we know who the good guy is and who the bad guy is – white hat/black hat. Lost in that overly simplistic dichotomy is the grey hat, the world most of us actually live in – somewhere between the two, with no one thing truly falling one way or the other. Would Sting exist without the infrastructure in place at the time? Would Ren exist without algorithmic discovery? I don’t know. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when one system dies a new one will almost certainly rise to replace it. It’ll need time to mature, to go through the starts and stops of growing pains before reaching a maturity into something we just assume has always been there. There will be winners and there will be losers, alongside the multi-page essays on how best to game the new system. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Back in the early and mid 1990s, hunter green as a color was having a moment. My Saturn was hunter green, and alongside noticing all the Saturns on the road I couldn’t help but notice the Corollas, Malibus and other mid-size sedans colored hunter green. I also know that I’m seeing more Ren, and for that I’m grateful, whatever shade it appears. I’m glad I live in a world where I can dust off an old Police record and hear Sting’s voice, alongside a world where I can pop over to Ren’s website and order his latest release.

I’ve been on an Incident Management Team since 2020. We’re the folks who support wildland firefighters on the federal side ensuring folks are fed, paid, and have everything they and the community needs when a wildfire breaks out.

One of the more interesting things about this gig is the peculiarity of fire shirts. Let’s try and get this out of the way quickly – a third party creates shirts and hoodies memorializing the fire. Firefighters and staff associated with the shirts buy them out every time. I used to buy them, all of them, but last year I stopped and came up with a different way to note – I was there.

Record stores and albums.

I made a custom sticker with a blank space to write in the assignment and year. Good for my music collection and good for whatever local economy I was visiting and a much more personal touchstone of my experiences. That brings me to the Avett Brothers and their May 2007 release, Emotionalism.

My wife, K, she likes music, but on some level, she indulges me my vinyl addiction. This last fire assignment found me in Spokane and amongst the four or five records I picked, Emotionalism was one – it contains mine and K’s song – “All My Mistakes.” Remember I said K indulges me? Every time I get home from an assignment, I would proudly pull each record out of the bag and show it to her and she oohs and ahhs at each reveal. I had saved Emotionalism for last and didn’t say a word. The smile that spread across her face — genuine, immediate, a smile of recognition rather than politeness — told me everything I needed to hear about whether I’d made the right choice bringing it home.

I came to the Avett Brothers in 2005, catching them open for BR549 in a mid-level venue in Columbus, Ohio, right in the stretch between Mignonette and the record that would go on to change everything for them. I was there to see BR549 and was not prepared to have my mind blown away by this band that I’d never heard of at that point.

Emotionalism was released on Ramseur Records, catching Rick Rubin’s attention it led directly to I and Love and You – their major label debut. It’s also just a genuinely strange, eclectic record — bluegrass sliding into something like hard rock for a moment, then cabaret, then back again, often inside the same three minutes. I was there for the hinge point, watching a scrappy string band on the edge of becoming something bigger, before the rest of the world caught up to what I’d already found.

But none of that history is really why this album matters to me. What matters is what happened after I found someone to share it with.

K and I found each other later in life — both of us already carrying full histories by the time we met. On paper, we made no sense at all: a Marine and combat veteran and a self-proclaimed Hippie, two people who shouldn’t have understood each other, let alone built something lasting. And yet, when we were together, we made perfect sense to each other. Emotionalism became the soundtrack to the part that came next — road trips, beach trips, long stretches of just being in the same room together, working through pieces of our pasts neither of us was particularly proud of. There were things about ourselves we had to say out loud that we didn’t like hearing or saying, conversations that took more than one sitting to finish.

None of it was easy. All of it, it turns out, was necessary.

Every hard conversation, every uncomfortable admission, every mistake either of us had ever made, had been quietly building the exact two people who finally saw each other during an Occupy Wall Street action.

“All My Mistakes” is our wedding song, and I don’t think that was ever really a choice so much as an inevitability. It runs over five minutes, unhurried, willing to sit inside its own reckoning rather than rush toward something tidier. That’s not an accident, and it’s not really about the song either — it’s about what kind of love actually gets built. Not the kind that shows up clean and finished. The kind that has to survive its own history first, that must sit in the mess before it earns the right to call itself something real.

That’s what I was handing K when I finally pulled that record out. Not just an album I loved. The whole shape of how we got here — every wrong turn, every version of ourselves we had to leave behind, all of it stacked up in one record, still sounding, all these years later, like coming home.

Are there James Bond movies without the iconic surf guitar-infused theme? Does Star Wars carry the same punch without John Williams’ score to wow us from the start … a long time ago? Is Michael Madsen’s character in Reservoir Dogs made more or less unhinged as he tortures a cop, dancing around the bound officer while Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” replaces the screams?

While that feels like a conversation I’d love to have sitting around a bar, a cold beer in hand, I’ll save that debate for that moment. What we can all agree upon – music and movies are nearly inseparable. The right song at the right moment can elevate a scene from good to sublime, while at the same time absolutely wreck a cleverly designed moment with the worst possible choice in song.

Some soundtracks have even gone beyond the movie they were built around – The Crow gaining more and more of a cult following based on the absolutely insane strength of its goth/industrial soundtrack – didn’t we all want to go to that nightclub featuring My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult as the house band – while movies like Repo Man are known as much for the movie as they are the album. Certain directors, Quentin Tarantino for instance, elevated the art, building scenes around a certain song plucked from the director’s legendary collection.

We missed August’s Mixtape Madness, slightly overwhelmed with a full-throated start to fire season, and for that I apologize, but we’re roaring back this month with a collection of some of our favorite songs from movies. But even more than our favorite songs, each one truly served the moment, nearly impossible to separate what was depicted on film from what your ears were hearing. This list is of course subjective, so let me know in the comments what I should have included. What was my dunder-headed misfire, and what do you think should have been there?

Note - Well color me dissappointed, “Why Can’t I Fall In Love” by Ivan Neville is arguably my favorite track on this mixtape and it’s not available via Apple or Qobuz, only YouTube. Guess I’ll just have to dust off my copy of the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack! Please listen via your preferred streaming service, just know we have a strong preference toward Qobuz as they’re one of the highest paying streaming services out there.

🎧 Qobuz| Apple Music | YouTube

---

**SIDE A**

1. “Free” — The Martinis (Empire Records)

2. “Lovefool” — The Cardigans (Romeo + Juliet)

3. “Black Sheep” — Metric (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World)

4. “Snakedriver” — Jesus and Mary Chain (The Crow)

5. “Lose Yourself” — Eminem (8 Mile)

6. “Birth Ritual” — Soundgarden (Singles)

7. “Natural One” — Folk Implosion (Kids)

8. “Nightclubbing” — Iggy Pop (Trainspotting)

9. “Everybody Knows” — Leonard Cohen (Pump Up the Volume)

10. “Dry the Rain” — The Beta Band (High Fidelity)

11. “Susanne” — Weezer (Mallrats)

**SIDE B**

12. “Why Can’t I Fall in Love” — Ivan Neville (Pump Up the Volume)

13. “There She Goes” — The La’s (So I Married an Axe Murderer)

14. “Sugar High” — Coyote Shivers (Empire Records)

15. “Shitlist” — L7 (Natural Born Killers)

16. “Stuck in the Middle with You” — Stealers Wheel (Reservoir Dogs)

17. “Fuckin’ in the Bushes” — Oasis (Snatch)

18. “Fight the Power” — Public Enemy (Do the Right Thing)

19. “A Hero’s Death” — Fontaines D.C. (Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man)

20. “Such Great Heights” — Iron & Wine (Garden State)

21. “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand” — Primitive Radio Gods (The Cable Guy)

🎧 When the Kite Strings Pop

Without getting into too much detail, one of my brothers was diagnosed with severe ADHD during a period when it wasn’t a common diagnosis. One of the prescriptives? Give that young boy coffee. Later in life, my mother would often tell me that after the journey she went on with one of her children, that while she wasn’t a doctor, she was positive that I too suffered from the same level of ADHD but was old enough to have never received a diagnosis.

For Shaun the answer was coffee and medication, for me it was loud, heavy and fast music – even if I didn’t know why. I may not have known, but around 1983 the scientific wife-husband team of Sydney and Thomas Zentall proposed the Optimal Stimulation Theory, built on a homeostatic model: every brain has its own biologically determined optimal arousal level needed to function well, and their hypothesis was that ADHD brains run chronically under-aroused relative to that target.

That’s an awful long way to go to say listening to Acid Bath’s When the Kite String Pops serves as a calming hand in the storm that is often my rapid-fire, ping-pong brain.

Acid Bath arrived on the New Orleans sludge scene to a landscape already occupied by the likes of Crowbar and Eyehategod, while finding a way to push past both. “The Blue,” the album’s opener, sets the chaos in motion with a bluesy swamp-metal riff before winding through a series of tempo changes, leaving one breathless in an effort to keep up. The feedback from the guitar acts as a warning klaxon, emoting the same feel one gets from a fire alarm going off. Riggs’ vocals dance between distorted and clean, a push-pull that keeps you slightly unbalanced, in a message that announces this is an album not to be trifled with.

But it’s the second song on the album, “Tranquilized,” that truly finds me mentally in a lotus pose, my mind finally finding serenity. The circular guitar riff drones like a chant, lingering just long enough to draw you in as Dax Riggs melodically utters the first words of his poetry as the rest of the band joins in.

And then they do that thing I LOVE.

The whole song stops for half-a-heartbeat before exploding back into your ears -- in the nearly 20 years I’ve been listening to this album, I don’t think there’s ever been a moment where that second doesn’t bring a calm smile to my face. And just when you think you’ve got this record figured out, along comes something more analogous in sound to goth luminaries Bauhaus – “Scream of the Butterfly” shares real musical DNA with “The Spy in the Cab,” and it’s worth naming exactly why: both songs open on a restrained, hinted-at riff that builds dread through withholding rather than volume, Bauhaus’s on guitar, Acid Bath’s on bass, and both Dax Riggs and Peter Murphy shape their vocal melody around the line the strings already laid down rather than singing over it. Same architecture, different instrument carrying the weight. Go ahead, try and pin this record down. I dare you, ‘cause up next is “Dr. Suess is Dead.”

I can’t help but think when the term sludge or swamp-rock was invented, this was the song they had in mind. The track opens with a languid, droning guitar as a down-in-the-basement deep, guttural bass drops the same note three times before Riggs’ vocals scream the song’s title in something that calls into existence Baba Yaga and her minions. It’s slow, it’s driving, it’s exactly the sort of brain-shattering heaviness that people inclined this way crave. Slowly the song increases in tempo, reaching a frenetic pace that promises to explode just before dropping back down to its original tempo. This is the kind of track that when I hear it playing on the speakers of a record store, I know I’ve found a keeper.

Released August 8, 1994, on Rotten Records, the debut from this Houma, Louisiana band arrived already wearing its fuck you on its sleeve in the form of a John Wayne Gacy “Pogo the Clown” painting, a provocation daring you to pick it up. Here’s the piece lost on those who’ve never lived inside a mind that never shuts up – this album isn’t extreme to everyone.

While some will hear noise, anxiety, a not-so-thinly veiled threat, other ears, my ears, hear something closer to recognition. See, I’m already operating from a place of private chaos, my own private Idaho to borrow a line from the B-52s, a feverish pitch that quiet music often can’t reach. Calm doesn’t always arrive as silence. Sometimes it arrives as the first sound all day that isn’t asking you to be calmer than you actually are.

The band never got to prove what came next. Bassist Audie Pitre, along with his parents, died in a 1997 car accident, ending Acid Bath after just two albums. What’s left is this one, still doing exactly what it was built to do three decades later — not shocking, not extreme, just accurate, for anyone whose baseline was already running this loud.