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

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**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.

Am I good enough? That’s the question every writer, hell every creative wrestles with as they pour their heart and soul into something. Will people see it, want to read, listen, see it? We all struggle with the doubt and yet, we’re compelled to move forward.

That question is exactly what’s been sitting with me this past week, because I hit a milestone I set for myself when I started this thing.

I started writing Playin’ in a Traveling Band a few months ago, and somewhere between then and now it moved from “a thing I do in the wee hours of the morning while everyone else is asleep” to something that occupies my brain regardless of where I may find myself. I gave myself two goals when I started this – turn on paid subscriptions when you reach 100 subscribers, and write a book. I surpassed that milestone just a week or so ago, with one of my beautiful 8-year-olds gleefully being subscriber #100. The book is still a work in progress.

Here’s the deal: I’m turning on paid subscriptions, but everything stays free. Every essay, every Mixtape Madness volume, every deep dive into a record I love — all of it, always, free to read.

If you want to pay, you’re not buying access. You’re just telling me the thing is worth something to you and helping me justify the hours I put into it on top of everything else.

No paywalls, no “upgrade to keep reading.” Just a tip jar with a “thank you” attached, for anyone who wants to use it. But also — thank you, all of you who’ve clicked that subscribe button and said my words are worth consideration. You’ve no idea how much that means to me!

God damn, Phoebe.

Can I call you Phoebe? I feel like after that last album of yours, we might be on a first name basis. You poured your heart out on it and boy oh boy if I didn’t leave a metric fuck-ton of tears somewhere in the Columbia River listening to it. I feel like the combination of my tears, your words earned us something beyond Ms. Bridgers, but perhaps I’m being presumptuous.

I’m coming at you like you have any idea what I’m talking about and, as we all know, context really is everything. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but some backstory is warranted. See, you released Lost Weekend on Friday, August 14, and I was working on my last day assigned to a fire in Washington. Thankfully I was in a hotel for this last day, so I had a moment to just listen.

I’m underselling saying I was on a fire assignment. I’m an information officer on a federal incident management team out of California. Normally I work for the Forest Service but summers in the west – you being from California know this – means wildfires. I typically spend the majority of the summer months going from fire assignment to fire assignment, California to Montana, Arizona to Washington. My team was supposed to take the Fox Fire there in Baker City, Oregon; instead we got emergency redirected to Spokane, Washington, August 1.

For two weeks my team was running and gunning managing the fire, getting information out to people, comforting those who’d lost everything – there wasn’t really a moment to think beyond the immediate. Especially in those first few days, we were running on coffee, nerves and not much else, camped out at the Spokane County Fairgrounds. See, that hotel room was a reprieve before heading home. And that night in the hotel, all I wanted to do was listen to music in the dark, put some pace between the last two weeks and going home. So I spent some time with your latest album along with Ren’s new album – damn good, heartbreaking company.

I gotta tell you – I’ve done a lot of road tripping over the years and I’ve come to both love and dread that time alone in my vehicle. This is where the hardest thinking gets done, where I’m alone with my inner monologue and whatever I decide to put on the stereo. It also means I’m going to be dealing with things I don’t maybe want to deal with, but when there’s nothing but road in front of you, things find a way to demand you pay them attention. That next morning, I had a long trip in front of me – Spokane back to my home in the Sierra Nevada Foothills. What I’m trying to say here – I had a lot of time on my hands.

See, the night before had sort of prepared me for this. I already knew this was a gut-punch of an album, but I didn’t listen to myself. It was kind of like that time I read a copy of Blackhawk Down while stationed at Camp War Eagle deep within Sadr City during the summer of 2004. Probably not my best decision, but here we are.

I’m a sucker for natural beauty, and no matter how many times I witness it, driving through the Columbia River Gorge as the mid-morning sun electrified an ocean of low hanging clouds – clouds that looked deceptively like smoke to my eye – moving from Spokane to Portland will never cease to take my breath away. I’m trying to figure out what the combination was that caused me to first tear up, then realize something within me had broken and I needed to pull over.

Phoebe, let me tell you – I ugly cried my eyes out for a good five minutes, draining weeks of grief, anxiety, sorrow and exhaustion into the Columbia River. I stood there with my eyes soaked as snot triggered by the water works flowed while “Still Standing” flowed from the truck’s speaker.

That’s a great song – hell, they’re all great songs – you’ve got a fucker of an album on your hands here – but that wasn’t the one. Like I said, I’ve been trying to think what the combination was, and I think I’ve come to it. It was the damn vocoder opening on “The Outside.” The way it allowed you to disassociate from your father’s memorial, an outsider numbly taking in a series of events as they unfold, all the while your true voice – fragile and vulnerable – sat underneath it all, just barely audible, made more human for doing so.

Yeah, that was the blow that started the chain reaction, and explosion after explosion in each subsequent song finished the job. The result? Me sitting next to one of the most beautiful scenes in our country, sobbing for everything that felt like it had just whirred by me, a lifetime of grief compacted into a two-week assignment.

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My good friend Chris came out with us on this assignment. Chris works FDNY and gets out with my team whenever his organization will let him. Chris had brought a couple FDNY t-shirts out for me on this assignment. Do me a favor, Phoebe, don’t tell Chris, but one of those shirts became a well-used handkerchief in that moment as I tossed it back into the truck, wiped my eyes, took a series of cleansing breaths and got back on the road. You got me all the way to Portland and a pit stop to check out a TikTok creator who’s making a run in this new-to-him city with his pop-up of coffee and home-made pastries. I think you’d like him, he wears his heart on his sleeve like you … like me.

Once through Portland I called my brother Patrick in Grants Pass – this is where I was going to stop for the night. We’d already planned a trip over to Time Machine Records, something we do together whenever I come to town. I typically go over there with no real agenda, just taking it all in, seeing what might be good. Not this time, this time I had a mission – I was looking for your album. It wasn’t enough for me to stream it through my phone, I needed this release on vinyl. It needed to live in my home, something I could feel and place on my record player with the same sense of delicacy that weaves through every track. As luck would have it, they didn’t have it. I’m not going to get too down on them for not having any copies in stock, but ahem… Jesse, looking at you – what the fuck, man?

I walked out a little disappointed, but I thought to myself – all good, you’ve got to drive through Davis and Sacramento before getting home, surely someone will have a copy.

I left Grants Pass at zero-dark-thirty after a quick cup of coffee with Patrick as he prepared for the workday. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Phoebe – I’m a bit hyper-focused at times, and as I rolled down Interstate 5, I kept peering down at my watch, counting the moments until the first store, Esoteric Records, opened. Sold out! They might have some new copies coming in next Thursday, but I needed this now. And so it went! I called a total of six record stores between Davis and Sacramento and no luck! Like, what are the odds of this?! Then I thought about it – your first new solo album in six years, already gaining a fair amount of acclaim with the release of the single “Lost Boys.” No shit no one had it. But still … this absolutely would not stand.

There’s a rest stop on the southbound I-5 about 15 or so miles north of Sacramento. I pulled in, prayed for good cell reception. It was spotty at first, and I had to get out of the truck and find a spot that allowed my phone to connect to the world. From there, I ordered a copy of your record from Evergreen Vinyl. And then I listened to it a couple more times on the last leg of my journey from Sacramento to Sonora. This last bit of my journey is where the word lost kept jumping out at me.

I thought maybe at first I was imagining things, and then I looked at the track listing. Man, Phoebe, I can’t even imagine all that you’ve lost in the last few years. Obviously, there’s the autonomy and anonymity of being a bit less known than you currently are, but singing “Nothing New” onstage with Taylor Swift and being insanely talented will do that. But that’s not it, is it? I haven’t navigated losing a parent yet, but that day is just around the corner. I think I read somewhere the relationship with your father was complicated – boy howdy do I know that feeling. I’ve given some thought to what it might look like some day when I’m standing there, not quite inside myself, coming to grips with the man whose coffin I’m now standing beside. Whoa.

But that’s not it either, is it? You’ve hit that point in life at 32 where people start expecting things from you, right? Now you’re a grown-up, so they say, so that childhood, that innocence, that’s lost too, isn’t it? I hear that loss in the ache in your voice on every song, the vulnerability and tenderness, a primal scream in the background railing against the whole notion of it all. You’ve got this thing, Phoebe, this thing that makes a person want to sit down and hear all of your secrets and then tell you theirs.

It’s that last “lost” though, the reprise, that gives me, and I hope you, hope. There’s no easy answers left for any of us, Phoebe, but I take solace in your closing thought. “We’re gonna be all right / Me and you.”

One day, Death Cab was just there. I couldn’t tell you exactly when they started appearing in my library, I truly have no recollection, but like a best friend – the minute you meet, you feel like you’ve known them your whole life. And like two old friends sitting at a coffee shop arguing over their origin story, does it matter? Was it Transatlanticism? Was it The Photo Album? Does it matter? Not really, but we can all agree on Plans.

Released in August of 2005, Plans was Death Cab for Cutie’s move to a major label. With four releases on the indie label Barsuk Records, Plans answered the question – could they make the leap. The answer a resounding YES! The album debuted at number 4 on the Billboard 200 and stayed on the charts for nearly a year. Plans would go on to platinum certification and would earn the band their first Grammy nomination.

This is an album obsessed with mortality dressed up as a breakup record. Lead singer Ben Gibbard has always written about love as something delicate and temporary but here that fragility gets manifested. “I Will Follow You into The Dark” imagines death not as an ending, but a promise kept alongside someone you love. The single-take, hushed ballad became the band’s best-selling single despite barely denting the charts upon release. Ultimately the song would go on to obtain double platinum status.

And then there is arguably, one of the saddest, most devastating songs ever recorded – “What Sarah Said.” Gibbard finds himself in a hospital waiting room as people disappear into “a room, and the room begins to slowly get smaller” until we hear Gibbard tell us – “love is watching someone die… So who’s gonna watch you die?” For a generation that came to this album in their twenties and thirties, how much more power does this song carry year-after-year as they live this exact moment? Every time I hear this song, I reflexively catalog a list of those people in my life… not those who are going to watch me die, but those I will, without question be right next to in those final moments. Every time I hear this song, my heart breaks just a little bit more.

This tension is what fuels the entire album. The record’s biggest hit and the song that finally cracked the Hot 100, “Soul Meets Body” deceptively packages itself as a bright, driving pop song, a summer single to play into the wee hours of the morning. And this is perhaps Death Cab’s best trick, their ability to package crushing lyrics into ear-pleasing arrangements as a deeper reading of the lyrics reveals the crushing intent. “Soul Meets Body” is a song about wanting a body and a soul to belong to the same place at the same time, a thought that only makes sense if you already suspect they don’t. Chris Walla’s production on the song is warm and more polished than anything the band had done before but it’s all in service of intimacy, Gibbard’s hushed voice feels earned and not just an affectation.

Pushing nearly 25 years since its release, Plans hold up not because it invented anything, but because Death Cab refused to trade their sound for a major label. Plenty of indie bands making the jump abandon what got them there in the first place or double down so hard their subsequent release feels almost defensive. With Plans, Death Cab simply feels like they were growing up, settling into where they were at that moment in their life. Were they more confident, more expensive sounding? Yes. But were they still writing from that same aching, uncertain place? Again, yes. This is an album proclaiming that love and fear are soulmates, and it never once pretends that growing up means outgrowing that.

When you’re knee-deep in the middle of a scene, do you have any idea how underground it is? Goth subculture in the early to mid-1990s was deeply underground. Bands like The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission and Fields of the Nephilim — staunchly second wave — had peaked and were on something of a hiatus, while third wave acts like Switchblade Symphony, London After Midnight and Black Tape for a Blue Girl hadn’t yet found their voice. Long gone were the first wave acts — Bauhaus, Joy Division — with The Cure having crossed over and found a bit of mainstream success.

One act ran through all the different goth eras and found a home in each: The Cramps. Steeped in B-movie horror, sporting leather, latex and vinyl on stage and singing songs about doing things on your terms, they were like your crazy cousin who found their way into everything — endearing and missing the mark, but not enough that you didn’t claim him as your own. This was the band who reveled in who they were and didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought of them. It was in the San Diego goth subculture where I found them.

San Diego doesn’t get the credit it deserves for the thriving goth scene it supported during that era, with legendary DJs like Bryan Pollard nearly sustaining it himself, operating at one time three separate clubs.

In my mind, two clubs were the heart and soul of the San Diego goth scene during the mid-90s. Friday night belonged to the 21-and-over crowd, to Bryan, and to Therapy in the Midway District, across the street from both the Sports Arena and Tower Records. For those unable to partake in adult libations, Thursday night belonged to you at Soil, off of Hancock Street, in a building that doesn’t exist anymore. Both were extraordinary venues with DJs insanely knowledgeable about the music and what the scene wanted. A bit more tucked away on what was then the fringe of the city, Soil was the spot where the rules absolutely went out the window, and I think I witnessed or partook in nearly every goth stereotype you’ve ever imagined.

It was at one of Bryan’s clubs that I was formally introduced to The Cramps. Less than two years in California and turning 21, Therapy was the club I was chomping at the bit to get into. I’d already made a few drive-bys, checking out the scene, the people, and was locked in as soon as the moment arrived. I didn’t have to wait long — I turned 21 on a Thursday, and the next night I was standing in line to get in the doors. As soon as I walked in, I knew I was home.

Always early to everything, I grabbed a drink from the bar, found a nice dark corner and settled in to watch the night unfold. My whole world was about to be rocked when, over the speaker, came the staccato walk down the fretboard introduction to “Human Fly,” with a dirty, nasty, made-you-feel-things-in-regions-of-your-body-you-didn’t-talk-about guitar fuzz, as Lux Interior came in and suddenly I was a human fly.

It would be some time still before I made friends with Bryan and we began our regular Saturday excursions to Off the Record in Hillcrest for new music acquisitions and lunch at Hamburger Mary’s. Don’t ask me which trip it was — there were far too many — but on one of those trips I finally picked up Psychedelic Jungle/Gravest Hits and Songs the Lord Taught Us. Immediately I ripped the cellophane off the CD and popped it into my car’s player, skipping to “Human Fly” and feeling an immediate sense of chaotic neutral cool as I made my way along the 5 back to Oceanside. I’d been a die-hard Cramps fan since that club, since those moments with Bryan. But something funny happened along the way.

You ever meet someone and can’t shake the feeling you’ve met them before? A face in the crowd imprinted even if not remembered. Popping Songs the Lord Taught Us into the CD player, a vision flitted by as “Garbage Man” filled my apartment. I’ve heard this before… where… why didn’t it stick?

All these years later, while I maintain I’d heard it before, I still couldn’t tell you where. But it did the work. Slowly, Songs the Lord Taught Us found its way into my player more often than any other Cramps record, and I had most of them.

Where do you start with an album like Songs the Lord Taught Us? Recorded in Memphis, Tenn., under the watchful eye of Alex Chilton at Phillips Recording, the album was released to an unsuspecting public in 1980. This was a band who had cut their teeth in the gritty punk scene of New York City, regulars at CBGB, while planting seeds for future music icons when they performed at the DC-based LBJ Restaurant & Lounge, known to the locals as the LBJ Club. Lux and Ivy knew what they were doing, deciding the birthplace of their musical foundations had to be where they recorded their first studio album. It was pilgrimage as much as recording session, the band wanting the album to continue that earlier sonic heritage.

That LBJ Club show is worth a beat on its own. In April 1979, two teenagers stood in that crowd and walked out changed — Ian MacKaye and Henry Garfield, who’d soon rename himself Rollins. MacKaye went on to form Teen Idles, then Minor Threat. Rollins formed State of Alert before becoming the longest-tenured singer of Black Flag. An entire branch of American hardcore traces back, at least in part, to one small room and one band willing to play it.

In an album of amazing songs, perhaps the most informative is “Sunglasses After Dark” — a manifesto of sorts, laying bare everything the band was about. Lux’s frantic lyrics tell you how to embrace coolness and non-conformity, and the risks inherent in that decision — finding himself in a night fight where everyone gets stabbed because no one could see through their sunglasses. The driving force of the piece, as with most Cramps songs, is the playing of Ivy.

Let’s full stop here for a moment. Ivy has never received the credit she is due. Without question, she is the Queen of Rock and Roll.

Ivy’s playing channels Link Wray’s own 1966 instrumental “Ace of Spades” — no relation to the Motörhead song most people know by that title; Wray got there first by over a decade — reworked here for the Dwight Pullen original. The frenetic energy of the opening gives way to a building feedback loop that resolves into the engine of a muscle car primed for danger, allowing Lux to explode into his lyrics.

And then there is the horror schlock of “TV Set,” the song that opens the album and isn’t exactly what it seems. On a critical level, the song serves as a critique of media’s influence on perception, and the unhealthy fixations it leads to. But to the goth and punk kids who absorbed the horror movie imagery of the song, and of the band as a whole, it was custom-built as a love song to their gothic partner. “Human Fly” may have gotten them onto the dance floor, but “TV Set” was the song they put on a mixtape for their lovers. The song is drenched in a cornucopia of surf rock guitar influences, ranging from Duane Eddy to The Ventures, Ike Turner back to Link Wray. Ivy’s playing on the album does what it always did best — makes the guitar mew, buzz, and weep — though no record exists of her ever putting it in exactly those words.

Ivy often returned to the sound of Link Wray, wrapping his influence into her own voice. But on “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” her voice becomes clearest in its affection, the opening sequence being as near a reproduction of “Rumble” as one can get while avoiding the lawsuits. This track, above all others, claims direct lineage from Wray — Ivy’s playing stating emphatically: we are this music’s children.

If “Sunglasses After Dark” was the manifesto and “TV Set” was the love letter, “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” was the armor. Ivy opens the track the same way she opens half the album — with Link Wray’s ghost in her fingers, that fuzzed-out riff announcing menace and cool before Lux has said a single word. Then he does: an outsider, a transformation, something monstrous living just under the skin. But it’s not the verses that did the work on the kids who absorbed this record into their identity. It’s the line he keeps coming back to, over and over, like he’s daring you to argue — no one could make me stop. Not a complaint about being misunderstood. A threat. A promise. For every disaffected teenager who’d wrapped themselves in black and got shoved into a locker for it, that line wasn’t a lyric. It was a posture you could put on along with the eyeliner — something to wear into a room that had already decided who you were and dared you to prove them wrong.

That was the heart of The Cramps, once you stripped away all the horror movie posturing. At their center, Lux and Ivy were two outsiders who leaned into who they were, what they loved, and told the world to go fuck itself in the process — inviting anyone willing to listen, to hear them, to join them. That was a message received loud and clear by generations of teens who thought no one understood them.

Nearly 50 years later, Songs the Lord Taught Us still feels every bit as essential as it was when released in 1980. Steeped in American musical roots, its power remains in the combination of channeling something as raw and electric as early American rock with lyrics accessible via horror movie, hypersexual window dressing that, upon deeper reflection, reveal themes of objectification, alienation, loneliness, and how to survive all of it as exactly who you are.

Lux died suddenly in 2009. The band folded, lacking a full half of the power couple that made it. Ivy retreated from the public eye entirely. But that is not the end of the story. In a truly amazing twist of fate, through her friendship with Henry Rollins, a series of tapes from the band’s original 1977 recording session at Ardent Studios have been unearthed. Living a third life as music historian, Rollins has worked alongside Ian MacKaye to restore the originals, edit, mix and cut the lacquers for what will be Gravest Gravy, dropping this August. As if that’s not enough, the release is the first of what’s expected to be several from the newly reformed Vengeance Records — the Cramps’ own imprint — with Ivy as the head of The Cramps Inc. 2026 is shaping up to be the year a whole new generation of kids get cramped.

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What time is it? Did I feed the dog? Holy crap, I need to finish those dishes. What was the name of that band again? Oh yes, I love that song.

Questions running rampant as various songs play on my mental Wurlitzer like some coked-out DJ who found god somewhere between Philip Glass and Lamb of God. The occasional random guitar riff or drum break flies in from out of nowhere, no relation to whatever song was in rotation. Snippets of movies, TV shows and cat videos on a tape loop. Previous and future conversations running in tandem until you’re not sure which is which — do we need to talk about this or have we already? The volume always at a near fever pitch, I work to keep things at something resembling my normal.

Then the mundane interjects — the boys sitting on the couch, their conversation edges one decibel too high, the dog barks, shattering the tightly held control, the kettle screams, the microwave dings, the doorbell rings and my brain snaps.

Bad things happen when it goes to 11.

Stevie Wonder famously said when you believe in things, especially those things you can’t comprehend, bad shit comes your way — I’m paraphrasing but you get the point. Many moons ago while traveling through the backroads of Arizona, K and I stopped along the side of the road at a Native American road stand and left with a handmade necklace, no, more like prayer beads. Fashioned from juniper seeds, they hang from the mirror of the car. Get through a yellow light? Touch the seeds. Pass the scene of an accident? Touch the seeds. Watch some maniac blow past us on the two-lane? Touch the seeds. While we both hold this shared superstition, mine is deeply private — I’ve rarely even given it voice.

There is nothing better in the world to me than hitting the road, windows down and the car stereo cranked. But cranked has a different meaning these days — I’ll turn it up to the point that I want it to be and then with every bit of intention I can muster turn it back two or three clicks. Over the years I’ve learned those two or three clicks is where the chaos lives, where the universe wakes up and decides that’s the moment it will have a little fun at my expense. I adore music, it is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning and ushers me off to sleep at night. I especially love loud music flying down the highway, no particular destination, but it never goes to 11. This was a hard-earned lesson. I like to think I’m the type of person who is quick on the uptake, but alas, density seems to be a property inherent to both myself and the periodic table.

Freshly minted driver’s license in my pocket, I begged my parents to let me use their GMC Safari to take a carload of kids 15 miles up the road to the local swimming hole at the end of Grange Hall Road. To be fair, I hadn’t done a whole lot to earn their trust, but either my silver tongue or dogged persistence finally won out and in a state of exhaustion they handed me the keys with a strict set of guidelines. I half listened, nodded in the affirmative, loaded everyone up with a few pickups on the way and hit the water. It was a glorious day of beating the heat — yes, it does get hot in Alaska — and when it was finally time to go home we did the whole thing in reverse. Somewhere between the swimming hole and the house the local radio station, KWLF, was playing Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” This was peak hair metal days and Def Leppard were the reigning kings, having released Hysteria just a few years earlier — what can I say, things show up a bit later in the frozen north. The stereo was blasting, every window in my parents’ van was down and all of us kids from my baby sister to Patrick and I in the front were singing as loud as the stereo. Then it happened. The steering wheel lurched and all of a sudden, the car took on a life of its own. Pulling to one side, the power steering apparently on vacation, I struggled to keep the van on the road. I made a hasty dash across two lanes and ducked into a wide driveway with no clue as to what was going on. Jumping out, Patrick inspecting one side, me inspecting the other, I heard Patrick yell out that we had a flat tire. I came around to evaluate the damage — this wasn’t simply a flat tire, this thing was completely blown out, looking like some fat old man’s ass cheeks in a sauna.

I’ll give you a minute to wipe that image from your brain.

Through a series of trial and error that rivaled the best efforts of any Keystone Cop, we finally got the spare on and limped the fun bus home, decidedly less fun than when we started.

Signal Number One — the moment lived, the message not received.

Coming out the back gate of Camp Pendleton, my marriage that should have been a date was falling apart. Accuse me of a lot of things, one that will stick is hopeless romantic — I proposed to Gayle after dating her for a month; her in Alaska, me sitting underneath the solitary payphone servicing a barracks full of young Marines. We eventually made the Fairbanks to San Diego road trip, a whole other story for a different day.

It was her car, a late ‘80s Toyota Corolla hatchback. I didn’t want to go home — home being the apartment where the word satanist lived now, unspoken but taking up considerable square footage. She’d had a dream. In it she married one, and from that point forward her requests that I join her on Sundays became less invitation and more intervention. I’d gone once, out of love and something resembling good intentions, sat through it, and left knowing I couldn’t fake my way through a life that required it. That honesty did not land well. So instead of going back to that apartment and that conversation and that look, I was finding reasons to mindlessly drive around Carlsbad, down into Oceanside, over to Escondido with Green Day keeping me company at ear-shattering volume. Passing the drive-in movie theater, cresting a long upward climb, a bang and crash broke through “Basket Case.” Nothing from the engine, nothing from the clutch — just nothing. Coasting to a shoulder, the car rolling backwards because in my confusion I’d forgotten the brake. A hole in the hood. Thrown rod. Her car, dead. The relationship? Same.

Signal Number Two — the moment lived, the message still missing the mark.

Then there was the one that took, the one that made me sit up, pay attention, separate the signal from the noise on a long, dark stretch through no-man’s-land Nevada.

I’m convinced that between Las Vegas and Wendover, Nevada is an interdimensional vortex. Time doesn’t exist there, hell, barely anything exists there. Wretched souls who lost everything in the slots come out here to find God, make a deal with the Devil or, more likely, a bit of column A and a bit of column B. Waves of heat radiate off the asphalt during the day while any sane creature still bound by nature’s law finds shelter. The night is when things come alive, sustain themselves and feast upon the unwitting. Patrick, Sheree — Patrick’s then-fiancée — and myself were cutting across the flatlands with the purpose of Kansas and spending the holidays with our family. Between the later than expected start that morning and the sun getting tired earlier this time of year, it was near pitch black by the time we saw Vegas in our rearview. Sheree had crashed out in the back of the Jimmy and Patrick and I were jamming to The Crow soundtrack — what an exceptional album that remains. Right around the time My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult came on with “After the Flesh,” Patrick and I just absolutely jamming, everything in the car stopped. When I say stopped, I mean like someone had discharged an EMP and everything went dead. Power steering gone, I wrestled the Jimmy to the side of the road.

Turn the key in the ignition — nothing. Wait a minute, turn the key in the ignition — nothing. If you’re unfamiliar with the desert you may not realize how cold it can be at night, extremely cold, especially in the middle of December. But I was from Alaska, how bad could it be? I told Patrick and Sheree to sit tight — I was going to walk up to the next town with no idea how far away the next town was. I think I made it a mile before I realized that the only thing in front of me was darkness, turned around and began wondering what lich or coyote was going to come out of that darkness to consume me — us.

I made it back and we started making an assessment of our situation. Fucked. Proper fucked — when the flashing red and blue lights of a police officer, probably highway patrol, saddled up behind us. The young officer walked to the car and I tried to explain I couldn’t roll the window down, well, because, and sort of frantically gestured at the dead engine. So I opened the door and we conversed.

“You mind stepping out of the car,” the officer said.

Feeling like my savior had potentially turned sour, I agreed and we made our way around the back of the car.

“So where you going?” he asked.

I told him our plans for Kansas and family Christmas.

“Know why I pulled you out of the car?” His voice grew stern.

Truly clueless, I grasped at straws. Was my registration expired? Was there a taillight out? Did I have a booger hanging out of my nose?

“No, I don’t,” I replied, fear slowly making its way up my spine. I’ve had plenty of run-ins with cops in my life and I can’t think of one I walked away from feeling good about.

“I smell pot,” he said accusatorially.

“What?!” I asked, genuinely shocked.

Cigarettes, maybe, some body odor from being crammed in there, probably — but weed? Look, I’ve got absolutely nothing against weed, I’ve smoked it a few times in my life but beyond putting me in a coma it’s never really done anything for me.

“Mind if I search your vehicle?” he asked.

Now I was just pissed. Three young adults, clearly in some distress, and this fuckwit wants to play the “I smell weed” game.

“Be my fucking guest,” I replied, the contempt just barely under the surface.

He looked at me, looked through the window of my very packed truck, looked back at me.

“Which one of you was a Marine?” he asked, having clearly spotted the 1st Marine Division sticker on the back of my truck.

“Me,” I said. “Division — Horno, Margarita and then Main Side for my last few years. Just got out a couple years ago.”

“All right, you can get back in your vehicle,” his disappointment somewhat palpable.

“Can you call us a tow truck or something? It’s damn cold out and we’re not exactly dressed for the weather — can we wait in your squad car?”

“Sorry, can’t have people in my vehicle.” And he got in his car and left.

About two hours later a tow truck arrived — at least he did something — and we spent the next few nights in Wendover at the Peppermill Casino. And people wonder why cops leave a bad taste in my mouth. As I stood out on the patio of our hotel room smoking a cigarette wondering how I was going to pay for everything, I went back to Thrill Kill Kult. It was too loud. Bad things happen when it’s too loud.

Knock on wood, pinch of salt over the shoulder, music too loud — most of the time our superstitions are carried forward from our family. Dad with his lucky fishin’ socks, Mom with her never-missed Gesundheit, and both of them letting us know they were crossing their fingers whenever one of us kids had something important coming up. They don’t make a whole lot of sense when you’re young, but they grow with you, they become you. Maybe you find your own pair of socks or a lucky hat, or maybe there was something to Dad’s notion about an itchy palm and incoming cash — why is my hand itching all of a sudden? Either way, these little rituals become a part of our daily life, so ingrained we rarely give them any thought, either to their efficacy or their roots, but there they are as you pass along a tissue.

And then there are the ones you earn the hard way, not bound by tradition, watching the pattern repeat itself until you finally notice a familiar thread and it becomes obvious. My superstition didn’t come from old wives’ tales or inherited folk knowledge — mine was earned one broken car at a time.

I get in the car, check my rearview mirror to make sure I can see behind me, slide the key into the ignition, turn the crank and before anything has a chance to happen, I reach over and turn down the volume.

Not today, Satan.

To say it was a cold, dark morning in Alaska is about the worst case of stating the obvious there could possibly be, but standing at the bus stop at 6:30 in the morning at the end of Melbar Road, it was one of those mornings that felt cold even by Alaska standards. My brother Patrick, Wendy, Chris, Kyla and I were all waiting for the flashing lights and our escape from the cold. After the half-mile walk to the bus stop and wearing only enough clothing to satisfy our teenage mindset, that bus couldn’t get there fast enough as we stomped around to try to stay warm in our sneakers.

Growing up in rural Alaska, one of those things you have no choice in accepting was a long bus ride to school. From where I lived to my high school, North Pole High and Middle School, was about 30 miles and an hour or so long ride after you picked up the remaining kids. At least I wasn’t Roman, the last kid on the route. I lived at 14-mile Chena Hot Springs Road. Roman and his family lived at 50-mile.

Just a mile or so up from my stop was where Ryan Kruse got on. Ryan was one of these impossibly cool kids in a very fuck-you sort of way — tall, skinny, with an apparel aesthetic built around an armless denim jacket, band patch on the back, overtop a black leather that made me view him with a reverence typically reserved for royalty. This was 1987 and while the hippies had made long hair more acceptable, it was still strongly frowned upon in rural Alaska. Ryan had long, straight, blonde hair, the type that made the girls both swoon and swell with envy. He played guitar, smoked cigarettes in the back of the bus and, most importantly to me, he carried a boom box that would fill the bus all the way from his seat in the back with whatever he felt like listening to.

It’s hard to imagine, but there was a time when Metallica was still an underground band and listening to them was considered an act of rebellion. My eighth-grade year was sandwiched between the release of Master of Puppets (1986) and …And Justice for All (1989). Ryan was a massive Metallica fan during a time when who you listened to and how you wore it was as much a line in the sand as anything. Back then battle lines were drawn by the tapes in your Walkman. The back of the bus was filled with the Holy Trinity — Megadeth, Slayer and Metallica — with Metallica claiming the lion’s share of the airtime.

After a couple of seasons riding the bus it was 1988 and the release of …And Justice for All that finally switched me over to the dark side. Sitting between adolescence and being a teenager, Master of Puppets had seeded a garden that hadn’t yet borne fruit. I was still holding on to the music of my parents — U2’s Joshua Tree was as far as I had gone in giving voice to my own musical identity, but it wasn’t too far astray as my father also loved it. …And Justice for All was something else entirely. Maybe it was the opening song, “Blackened,” with its long, droning guitar slowly building, the tension increasing as the guitar got louder until the whole thing exploded into a fury that seemed to immediately grab me and hold a conversation with every raging hormone and emotion exploding through my 13-year-old body. Some people reminisce fondly of their mom’s macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes — comfort food. I have comfort albums, and …And Justice for All is high on that list.

My transformation terrified my parents. Heavy metal listening was equated with the devil in an era with a Satanic Panic that rivaled anything Elvis had brought up, holding the nation in a death grip. Acts like Judas Priest were singled out, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister testified before Congress, and Ozzy Osbourne was dragged into court accused of causing the death of John McCollum through his song “Suicide Solution.” Tipper Gore had launched her Parents Music Resource Center, the PMRC, in 1985 and by 1990 the now ubiquitous Parental Advisory label found on so much music was officially launched. I bought a t-shirt with the logo emblazoned across it. Between 60 Minutes specials and the “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are?” advertisements, my parents — specifically my mom — were convinced that Patrick and I were dabbling in witchcraft of the darkest sort, and a fear for our mortal souls became a defining argument in our house.

Reaching its crescendo, there came a time when my mother threatened to take every tape she deemed offensive and burn them, forbidding us from ever listening to them again. My mother was not one to make threats lightly — there were plenty of wooden spoons busted over my ass — so we had no reason to believe she wouldn’t follow through. Patrick and I went into action, stealing away downstairs when we were supposed to be in bed, using Dad’s double-deck tape recorder to dub off versions of our favorites, removing elements of the speakers in our bedroom and hiding backup copies inside, stored away in the event the inevitable came to pass. Ryan didn’t even know mine or Patrick’s name, but he’d given us something and we had picked it up — I’d be damned if I was going to let anyone take it away.

Neither Patrick nor I ever used the word transmission. Nobody did. That’s the thing about the way music moved between people in that era — it didn’t need a name because it didn’t need to be explained. It just happened, the way weather happens, the way seasons change. Ryan didn’t decide to recruit a bus full of rural Alaska kids into heavy metal. He just played what he loved, loud enough for everyone to hear, every morning for years. My mother didn’t understand that in trying to burn our tapes she was fighting something older and more stubborn than Metallica — she was fighting the way music has always moved, hand to hand, speaker to speaker, one converted listener at a time.

That chain is older than any of us. It runs from the Mississippi Delta to the back of a school bus on Chena Hot Springs Road to a double-deck tape recorder running in the dark while our parents slept. We were nodes in it without knowing it — receivers who would become transmitters, carrying something forward whether we meant to or not.

What none of us could have predicted was how thoroughly that chain would be disrupted. Napster arrived in 1999 and what followed wasn’t just a legal battle over copyright — it was the beginning of a fundamental rewiring of how music moved between people. The hand-to-hand passage, the captive audience, the accidental discovery — all of it slowly replaced first by the illusion of infinite choice and then by the algorithm’s confident whisper about what you already like. The transmission lines didn’t disappear. They were rerouted through a machine that optimized for engagement rather than surprise, for comfort rather than conversion.

But something is shifting. The younger generation — the ones who grew up with every song ever recorded available in their pocket — are the ones now buying turntables, trading cassettes, showing up at local shows. The networks are finding themselves again, slowly, imperfectly, in record stores and music venues and yes, in the back of school buses where someone’s still playing something too loud for the front seat kids. The transmission is never fully broken. It just goes underground for a while and waits for the next Ryan Kruse to get on the bus.

Over the years between my freshman and senior year, I took my seat closer and closer to the back of the bus, passing Jana and her ever-present leave-me-the-fuck-alone eyes, avoiding the Christian kids, closer to the source. Metallica was supplemented by Iron Maiden, Anthrax and Corrosion of Conformity. When Pantera came on the scene with Cowboys from Hell we all lost our minds. Ryan graduated a few years before me and with his departure so too went the boom box. Josh, a few years younger than me, had picked up that mantle and was gleefully playing the role of music tastemaker as much as he could. With Ryan’s departure I was now in full control of the back seat, Josh a few rows ahead of me.

“Hey, Ben,” Josh said as he turned around, a slight tremor in his voice as he mustered the courage to speak. “Got a smoke?”

I shot him a scowl for a second. “Yeah,” I said as I took out a Marlboro Red and passed it to him.

“What about Justice — you got a copy of Justice I could play?”

I reached into the pocket of my black leather jacket, pulled out a dubbed copy of the requested album and tossed it to him.

“Keep it.”

There was darkness. There was hope. Somewhere around 36,000 feet above the ground between Seattle and Fairbanks the two were wrapping themselves together in my soul, arriving through drop-D tuning. As I sat in my seat, hitting rewind for the near 100th time on my CD player, something within me was stirring.

Marine Corps boot camp fresh in my memory, a few days home on the horizon and the soundtrack to a movie I’d yet to see — Singles — in my ears, I gazed out the window and felt that maybe, finally, a shift was coming. Skipping past Mudhoney, past Mother Love Bone, Alice in Chains’ “Would?” was the object of so many touches to my CD player and in that deeply dark sound, I was finding hope.

Fairbanks, home, was an absolute whirlwind. I’d left abruptly without notice and needed to spend some time explaining things to folks — not least of which was the 50-pound weight loss I’d undergone in just three months, making me nearly unrecognizable to most. Patrick and I had stopped into the Market Basket in North Pole, picking up something for Mom. Tina, our dear friend from high school, happened to walk by. I called her name, she didn’t hear, so I spoke louder. She turned, recognizing Patrick but looking at me without recognition, her eyes narrowing as she tried to place me and then going wide as the puzzle piece snapped into place.

“Maurice?!” her voice escaped, not confident in her question. During our sophomore year Tina had decided that I looked more like a Maurice than a Benjamin — so sayeth the shepherd, so sayeth the flock. I was Maurice to my friends from that moment.

“Yep,” I replied as a wave of confidence filled me. I’d always had a thing for Tina and standing there proudly in my new body, I was brimming with optimism.

We hugged, exchanged a few words and then went our separate ways. Mom’s last-minute assignment of picking up some items at the grocery store was a mere diversion to my true mission some 13 miles down the road in Fairbanks.

“So where to next?” Patrick asked as we jumped into the car.

“Pizza Plus, see Dawn and Rick and then Fred Meyer, man — I’ve got to get that Alice in Chains album,” I replied.

One thing worth noting: Patrick is about as close to me as any one person can possibly get — we’re Irish twins, him born in January of ‘75, me February of ‘74. We shared almost everything growing up and neither of us was ready to fall asleep until we’d chatted for at least a few minutes, each of us in our bed, about the day’s events, why we were mad at the other, or whatever needed to be said. We shared a room every day of our lives until I left for the Marine Corps. All these years later, we still spend most Saturday mornings up in the wee hours before our collective households are awake, chitchatting about life, music, and whatever else comes our way.

Grunge had already done the necessary work of displacing hair metal bands by that time and thank God. I’m not going to sit here and say that everything from that era was horrible — there were a lot of amazing songs released. But. It would be a massive stretch to suggest that any of those bands were populated by decent human beings. Nothing turns my heart a darker color than thinking of the recent resurgence of bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Skid Row.

We made the stop at The Plus, spent some time there before we finally headed down College and pulled into Fred Meyer — away from the main store and the separate music shop. Immediately grabbing Dirt, I took a few minutes to see what else was available. This was 1993 and release after release was absolutely amazing — the biggest issue at the time was the lack of funds to get everything I wanted. I grabbed Dirt, Nevermind and Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? All I wanted to hear for the long car ride home was Dirt.

But it wasn’t to be. After much discussion we settled on Nevermind and I promptly got swept up in the tsunami that was Nirvana. Already a fan through a friend’s cassette a few years earlier, catching this wave wasn’t much of a shift for me. I was a fan and for a spell, the only thing I cared about was this band, Alice in Chains temporarily set aside for the moment. My leave came to an end and I was on a plane, heading for Camp Pendleton and life as a newly minted United States Marine.

I must have looked like an absolute lost lamb wandering around the streets of Oceanside, taking everything in, not enough hours in the day to absorb everything I was trying to make a part of me. The music was alive in ways I’d never experienced. We had our share of outdoor concerts growing up but when summer is limited to a few months a year with the rest of the year in some state of freeze, there tend not to be many opportunities — let alone an amphitheater with an ocean backdrop. Music to me was something experienced in the dark of your room, on a long bus ride, or in the seat of your car, not with ten thousand of your closest friends all sharing the same space, all moving with the same rhythm. But none of that prepared me for Lollapalooza 1993.

I had dreamed about this festival for years. Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction threw the first one together in 1991, envisioned as a farewell tour for his band. But it picked up steam and just kept going — I hoped it lasted long enough for me to make one. A copy of Rolling Stone spread open across the steering wheel of my 1984 Nissan pickup, I fantasized about finally getting out of Alaska and being somewhere this show was playing. I’d already missed Ministry, I’d already missed Nine Inch Nails — I didn’t want to miss any others, ever again. So when my Marine buddy Richard asked me if I wanted to go, it was a no-brainer. I coughed up the last bit of money I had, bought a ticket and waited. August 7 finally rolled around and four of us loaded up on an Amtrak in Oceanside, destined for Los Angeles — or more specifically the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area in Irwindale.

If you’ve not looked at the lineup for the show, and why would you have if you weren’t there, the lineup was simply out of this world. The second stage was packed with Rage Against the Machine, Tool, Front 242 and Babes in Toyland. And that was the second stage. Main stage? Arrested Development, Fishbone, Dinosaur Jr., Primus, and Alice in Chains.

It was absolutely sweltering that day and the biggest trick was avoiding sunburn and dehydration for the day-long event. There was a moment halfway through the day I felt almost as though I had an out-of-body experience — I genuinely could not believe what I was seeing, what I was hearing, what I was feeling. The music, the energy of thousands of fans crushed into the tight space. I’ve often wondered what it felt like to have seen Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones when they were still young, still unknown — my story is seeing Rage Against the Machine and Tool when they were still mostly unknown, playing second stage at a traveling music festival.

The sun finally began to set and with it the temperature began edging down ever so slightly. Primus erupted onto the stage and Les Claypool dazzled the crowd for nearly an hour with his theatrical stage antics and masterful bass lines. As much as I loved the show and am a huge Primus fan, I was here for Alice in Chains, the final act. The heat, the lack of water, the sunburn — all of it led to this moment.

A curtain of chains descended upon the stage and the dark, foreboding bassline of “Angry Chair” erupted from the speakers. It’s no understatement to say the crowd erupted into bedlam as the band exploded into their set, Layne in his signature dark sunglasses — if only we’d known — and for twelve songs, I was swept up in a moment that still leaves me slightly taken aback to this day. People were climbing the chain net and diving into the crowd, mosh pits opened and closed across the throng of people and the music drove a generation.

The ride home on the train was a blur, my mind too overwhelmed, too sensory overloaded to properly place what I’d just seen — so I just stared out the window into the passing darkness, the occasional lights of an approaching town the only indication movement was happening. If someone had looked close, I would have had to explain away a few tears — not tears of sorrow, not even tears of joy, tears of release. Tears that come whether you want them to or not, when you’re so overwhelmed and the energy has to go somewhere.

Few things are certain in this world. One certainty is that life will continue moving forward. I moved around Camp Pendleton offices, landing at the Division Information shop. I moved homes, coming to rest in an apartment complex just outside the back gate. A terrible decision on a marriage left me struggling to figure out how to pay rent and thus a revolving cast of characters — or perhaps, more precisely, a revolving cast of wallets — took up residence in that Oceanside apartment. At different times I shared a room, slept on the couch, slept on the floor — whatever it took to never move back to the barracks.

Very few nights found me alone and on those chance occasions where everyone else had something better to do, I would drift off to my headphones. I would upgrade to a stereo system courtesy of one of those rent-to-own places, trading my headphones for club speakers. Richard was gone, Jason was gone, Gary was gone, Tim was gone. I slipped Dirt into the CD player, turned it up as loud as I could without a visit from the property manager, stretched out on my couch and closed my eyes.

My dad was a career military man, having done 20 years in the Army. When he finally retired, he immediately went to work as a civilian doing the exact same thing he’d done in the military — running mess halls. Reagan came along, my dad voted for him, both times, because military votes Republican. Reaganomics set about restructuring the federal workforce, one part of an economic policy that worked to increase the gap between the poor and the rich. Alongside the cocaine, decadence, and the highest highs for the wealthy, stagnation, real wage loss and economic downturn was the consequence for those on the lower economic scale. This is where the hollowing out of the middle class began in earnest and in our home some thirty miles outside of Fairbanks, we felt it.

Out of a job with six mouths to feed, a mortgage and the ever-escalating expenses of living in an environment that made everything harder, my dad finally landed work handing out basketballs at the base gym. I was too young at the time to understand what was going on, but some rule about laid-off federal workers gave him rehire rights for anything that came along on the federal side — so he handed out basketballs and wiped down weights at the base gym.

By the time I was alone in my Oceanside apartment, Clinton was in office. Maybe it was him as president, maybe it was this exact moment in my life — separation from the Marine Corps just down the road, my life about to get going — or something else entirely still unknown, but I felt a shift. The opening chaos of “Rain When I Die” filled the darkened room, the droning harmony of Cantrell and Staley giving it voice as Cantrell’s guitar wah-wahed through the opening. Nirvana may have been the generational lightning rod, Soundgarden may have had the voice in Cornell, but no one did dark harmony like the combination of Staley and Cantrell. Locked in, their voices wrapping around each other as they sang “She won’t let me hide / She don’t want me to cry,” a thought running counter to the music was beginning to take shape inside me. Those lyrics operate on three levels simultaneously: the drug, the witness, death itself. Staley was already living inside the album he was making. And somewhere amidst all of that, I felt like everything was going to be okay.

And for just a moment, it was.

Walking down Washington Street in Sonora, my 12-year-old nephew in tow on loan from his Wyoming family, we turned up the stairs into the venue, Black Bomb. There was a band playing tonight that I was keen to see — Aaron had clued me in, they had talent. Added bonus? Their guitarist, Cash, was the son of an old Army and Forest Service friend, Shawn. I hadn’t seen Shawn in a spell, so the chance to catch up was a nice addition to seeing the band. Wicked Ambition blistered through their set. Aaron was right. For being so young — the bassist still in high school — these kids held promise. Through no fault of the band, it wasn’t their originals that stopped me cold. It was their cover of Alice in Chains’ “Rooster” that transported me back to that couch in Oceanside, and a feeling of heartbreak washed over me.

Without ever directly expressing it, grunge broadly, Alice in Chains specifically, came loaded with promise and hope. They gave voice to darkness and forced a generation to sit with that darkness, own it. Implied in the albums they made — if you can sit with this, you can get through everything. But the promise fell apart. Kurt committed suicide in 1994, Alice in Chains played their last show in 1996, Layne found dead in his Seattle apartment in 2002. Pop punk exploded onto the scene as the whole culture decided it couldn’t look into the mirror grunge had put in front of them. Alice in Chains asked us to look deeper. Collectively, we blinked.

Some of us didn’t.

Sitting in front of my records, I pull Dirt from the shelf, dust off the record and move the stylus to the grooves. The couch in my house is eerily similar to the one I had in Oceanside — that one black, this one brown. Waves of emotion wash over me as a sense of betrayal rises. But that’s not right. All that hope I felt hearing this record for the first time — that wasn’t naivety. Those bands, those records, they earned it. Our culture just failed to deliver. But something deeper begans to take shape as I saw my 20-year-old self stretched out on that couch — that album gave me hope, gave me the armor to face the space between then and now. You’re going to have moments that will outshine anything you’ve felt up to this point. Some of those moments are going to leave scars so deep they still mark you today, but you can’t stop. People are going to try and tear you down, situations are going to seem impossible, but you can’t stop. Maybe the culture didn’t deliver, but you can. Fuck every single one of them. Get up. Keep going.

Album of the Week: The Afghan Whigs — Gentlemen (1993)

By 1993, the Afghan Whigs had already spent years proving they didn’t fit the Sub Pop mold. Cincinnati rockers who stood out among the grunge roster for their soul influences, splitting the difference between Hüsker Dü and Prince, they’d built a reputation on brooding, off-kilter records before jumping to a major label. Gentlemen was that jump, recorded largely at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Greg Dulli producing, released October 5, 1993 on Elektra.

I hit this record hard in my early twenties, full hormonal force, a young man coming into his own adulthood with all the swagger and sneer that entails — and Gentlemen has swagger and sneer to spare. It took years, and more importantly actual experience, to hear what was really on the record. What I once heard as pure attitude I now hear as something closer to confession.

The title is the album’s first joke, and its cruelest one. Dulli intended it ironically — the record chronicles a bitter breakup, guilt, manipulation, self-righteous anger, and raw, unhinged obsession, all filtered through a narrator playing a character while genuinely seeking catharsis. This isn’t a breakup album in the diaristic, wounded sense so many alt-rock records of the era leaned on. Dulli casts himself as the villain of his own story and dares you to still find him charismatic.

What keeps Gentlemen from collapsing into pure ugliness is the same thing that made the Whigs outsiders on Sub Pop in the first place — the soul. Dulli’s clearly studied Stax and Al Green as closely as he’s studied punk, and that tension between grimy alt-rock guitar and genuine R&B phrasing gives the record a swagger most confessional rock albums don’t have. It sounds seductive even when the lyrics are indefensible, which is the whole, uncomfortable point.

I still love this record, but I see it more clearly now for exactly what it is — the ugly breakup album, dressed up as a strut. Dulli remains, in my book, one of the most underrated songwriters of his generation, and Gentlemen deserves a lot more shelf space in the conversation than it gets.

I hadn’t spent much time in Oakland over the years but K had. We used to gently rib each other about our different preferences for Bay Area locales, with her decidedly in the East Bay camp. We were in town for a series of protests held by the Occupy Oakland family and were just walking around the city, making our way toward Oscar Grant Park.

Around 19th and Broadway, we found ourselves stopped at the intersection waiting to cross the street — on the other side I saw him. Not certain at first, wanting to get a closer look, I turned my normal quick step across the road into a slow shuffle to give me more time.

As we approached each other I knew I was right — it was him. Holy shit, it was him. I went quiet, a cold sweat flashed across my skin. We made eye contact, my eyes widened, his narrowed. I went to say something and no sound would come from my mouth, and the look he gave me made it seem like that may have been the preferred option.

We made it across the street and stopped. K looked at me.

“Are you ok?” she said, clearly a little concerned.

“Do you know who we just walked past?” I said, still trying to get my heart rate back down.

“Um, no… should I?” she asked, moving from concerned to confused.

“That was Boots Riley,” I said, exasperated.

“Who’s Boots Riley?” she said back to me.

And for too many people, that is exactly the question.

Frontman of the legendary hip hop outfit The Coup, political provocateur of the highest order, accomplished film director — do I need to continue? Well I shall. Lead vocalist of the supergroup Street Sweeper Social Club. I chafe a little at calling them a supergroup — I feel one needs to have reached a certain level of cultural saturation to earn that label. That said, take Boots Riley, add in Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, and forget supergroup — you’ve got an awesomegroup. Two of the most electrifyingly political artists playing today decided to join up like some left wing, socially progressive Justice League? Fuck yes.

As the legend goes, Morello scooped Riley up one night and took him to a cheap Brazilian dinner and told him “we’re in a band together, it’s called Street Sweeper Social Club, it’s going to be revolutionary party jams.” Then Morello did the most Morello thing ever — he handed Riley a cassette filled with musical ideas. This was 2009. Who the hell had a tape deck at that point?

No matter — they made it work, serving as the opening act on Nine Inch Nails’ 2009 tour featuring Jane’s Addiction, and that same year released their one and only full-length record, an eponymous offering featuring their first single, “100 Little Curses.”

This album is everything you’d expect from these two titans of social commentary. Morello lays down his trademark crunch-funk guitar that rivals anything he did with Rage, while Riley serves up political commentary not for the faint of heart. I wonder if they realized how far ahead of their time they actually were.

This is the music we needed in 2016 and more importantly the music we need right now. At its best, music inspires something in you — stirs you to action, whether that’s picking up a guitar or a Molotov. Woody Guthrie famously had “This Machine Kills Fascists” written on his guitar and I see no hyperbole in the statement. Just earlier this year you would have found me complaining that the kids were letting things slide, that there was no protest music, no social commentary. Boy was I wrong — I’ll let that bad idea fall by the wayside while bringing you back to Street Sweeper Social Club.

Yes, the kids are making great music that genuinely has something to say, but many of them are still in the finding-their-voice stage. Not so Riley, Morello and crew — they’ve been around the block a time or two, seen a thing or two, and have the scars to prove it.

Opening the album, “Fight! Smash! Win!” is trademark Morello — spiraling guitar that explodes into a driving, funk-as-fuck bass line setting up Riley’s lyrical attack. He means it when he says if you’ve got a blacklist, he wants to be on it. “100 Little Curses” is the wished-upon death by a hundred paper cuts that anyone who’s ever struggled to pay rent levels at the moneyed class. Not death per se — but until we make the revolution, we all hope your life sucks ass.

“Clap for the Killers” is probably the most aggressively raw track on the album, with Boots pulling absolutely no punches while zeroing in on his target with pinpoint accuracy. Before you get your knickers in a twist worried we’re glorifying murderers, go pull the liner notes and read the lyrics — you’re welcome. Music custom made for a protest that doubles as a party, because at the end of the day if you can’t have a little fun while bringing forth the downfall of our capitalist, patriarchal society, what’s even the point?

Then we get to “Promenade” — a throwdown funk number with a pulsating bass line that would be just as comfortable in an underground dance club as it is on the protest streets. While Morello is busy doing the things only Morello can do to a guitar, Riley makes his stance clear — till everyone is fed, till everyone has a bed, his skin is black, his star red.

The ‘60s had “We Shall Overcome” and the likes as the soundtrack to their movement. While appropriate for the times, might I suggest it lacks a bit of the fire and intensity the times we live in today demand? So my plea to any of you leaning a bit to the left who still see value in the street protest — perhaps while you’re building the mixtape to get folks amped up and ready to go, include a few tracks from Street Sweeper Social Club. Oh fuck that, just play the whole damn thing and we’ll have a riot on our hands. And if the debut leaves you wanting more, find the Ghetto Blaster EP. Their version of “Paper Planes” alone is worth the hunt.

K and I finally made it to Oscar Grant Park and started milling about. Given the history Occupy Oakland had already had with the Oakland Police Department, folks were a little standoffish with us at first. But we sat, we listened, we talked about the work we’d done with Occupy San Diego, our connections to the Bay Area, and soon enough folks started warming up to us — just in time for things to turn into a truly wild and harrowing night.

Slipping past a police barricade as they worked to kettle the protest, K and I made it back to our car, exhausted, slightly beat up and exhilarated. This was being alive. This was standing up for something when there were consequences attached.

Scrubbing the phone numbers off our arms — written in black Sharpie — I looked over at K.

“Damn, Oakland knows how to bring the fight... maybe you’re on to something with this whole East Bay love thing,” I said, as a nervous laugh escaped me, part relief, part dissipation of adrenaline.

A wicked grin spread across her face. “And you doubted me…”

How does one of the most influential albums of the early post-punk era remain one of the most current records coming into 2026, just one year shy of its 50th anniversary? Clocking in at a mere 35 minutes, the 21 tracks that make up this album mark it as one of the most brutally efficient punk albums ever made.

BUT.

Drop the needle on Wire’s 1977 debut release Pink Flag and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s something TikTok-ready in the vein of Fontaines D.C. or IDLES.

Many moons ago I was talking to my friend Alex about literature. This was extremely convenient as we were hanging out at a bookstore in San Francisco. Borderlands Books to be exact — before they moved into the Mission District, they called 534 Laguna Street home in the heart of the Hayes Valley neighborhood. Alex was one of those stupid smart people who said insightful, witty things without even realizing she was doing so.

“No one’s ever read Finnegans Wake,” she says to me.

I’m not much of a Joyce fan but I am both struck by this statement and doing my best to spend some time in Alex’s bedroom, so I find her eyes and ask her to tell me more.

“I take that back,” she says as she leans in, her low-cut shirt falling X-rated low but her eyes locked on mine daring me to break the gaze. “Something like ten people in the whole world have actually made it through Finnegans Wake. It is so insufferable, so difficult that everyone the world over just decided to take those masochists’ word for it and parrot it. So, ten people in the whole world have actually read the damn thing while everyone claims to have while parroting what they said.”

Have you ever listened to Wire? Oh, you have? Tell me more.

Everyone has listened to Wire and yet near no one has heard them. Ok, hold on, let me back that statement up because it’s not entirely accurate. Michael Stipe and Co. have heard them — just go listen to early REM. Elastica has heard them — Three Girl Rhumba was lifted directly for Connection (settled out of court, by the way). Most of the major players in the east coast punk scene — Minor Threat, Mission of Burma, Sonic Youth — have heard them and on and on and on. It would be quaint to say they were a band’s band. No — these motherfuckers rocked as hard as anything Detroit had hitting the street around the same time and beat the pants off anything coming from the eastern shores of the Atlantic.

And yet.

“We’re the most famous band you’ve never heard of,” Wire’s lead singer Colin Newman once said. “Our fans assume that Wire is massive — like, we’ve all got mansions. And then there are lots of people who know groups who are more successful than Wire who’ve been influenced by Wire — yet they’ve never heard of Wire. It’s a very strange kind of fame.”

Perhaps it is exactly that strange sort of fame that has allowed Wire to continue all these years, notching 17 studio albums on their belt. Fame is a fickle mistress. We’re all too familiar with the story of the small-time band that found success only to succumb to its demands — 27 Club, anyone? No one in Wire committed suicide so perhaps it’s more appropriate to view them alongside their London peers, the Sex Pistols, who self-destructed just three years after forming — cultural icons to be sure — but only one studio album to their name. The Pistols sought the spotlight and it consumed them. Wire avoided it and survived.

Walking up Fell Street toward my Scott Street apartment, my thoughts drifted from literature to music, specifically to Wire. My journey to the seminal band started with that Elastica lawsuit. Absolutely loving the song at the time and having no idea who that other band was, I dug in and found them. The more you listened, the more you found and I started hearing their influence in everything. Cutting across Alamo Square, I sat down on a bench, lit a cigarette and soaked in The City. I couldn’t have known then what I’d already figured out about the band. There was a shift in the vibe, a feeling in the air — far fewer Burning Man cars on the side streets, more Audis … something was changing. Over the years San Francisco has been its own headwaters to various cultures that ebbed and flowed with the current — what happens when someone dams the river?

No one knows when you’ll give your lover their last kiss, when you’ll hold them in your arms for one final embrace. The moment never announces itself — it just grinds on like an apathetic god who’s tired of your shit and just wants to get on with things. When I moved to San Francisco in the late ‘90s it was still alive. Bands like Storm Large were playing in local venues across the bay and Jill Tracy was holding her cabaret performance at Café du Nord where my dear friends got married. Silicon Valley money came in, rents skyrocketed, artists moved out — sorry, Portland. Everything became polos and khakis. Niche bookstores got evicted. Internet startups moved in. Where once funk and groove filled restaurants the new sound had a decidedly more adult contemporary, more Dave Matthews sound. I get back to the city often and I don’t recognize it — most of my touch points from that era are gone. At one point, I thought the old Borderlands Books building was gone. Alex tells me it’s still standing. I drive back to The City — sure enough, there it is, new paint, new façade, everything around it different due to the new Highway 101 on-ramp.

I call the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Sonora, California home. Working for the Forest Service, my job gets me outside a lot. On occasion I’ll find myself at Leavitt Peak at the headwaters of the Stanislaus River. Wire is the source, a place so few visit but so many drink of its waters.

You come here because it represents something more than the parts. Because you are the type of listener who wants to understand. Who isn’t content to gloss over the footnotes in a biography or an obtuse reference in a liner note. You want to dig, you want to go exploring a Sierra Nevada mountain. I’m not going to tell you what they sound like. That’s for you to decide. I’m not going to tell you that you should embrace them. That’s for you to decide. I’m not going to tell you they should be in your collection. That’s for you to decide.

You don’t come to the headwaters because you’re thirsty. The headwaters are pilgrimage — they’re Mecca. I don’t want to tell you that you should listen to Wire. I simply want to hand you a prayer rug, point in the general direction and hope you find it within yourself to make the journey.

For this is Wire — too abrasive for pop, too minimal for punk, too English for American rock. Too influential to be obscure, too obscure to be canonical. The band that built the house that everyone else lives in without ever quite living in it themselves. Still making records in 2026. Still not fitting anywhere. Still sounding more current than bands a third their age.

So how does a nearly 50-year-old album remain so relevant? Because the headwaters always are. Whether you choose to acknowledge them or not, they don’t care. They just are. They’re there should you decide to make the trip but their glory doesn’t fade, their majesty isn’t diminished with the passing years. They will continue to sustain future generations who make the sojourn. Running just beneath the surface, they will sustain everything.

Alex rolled out of bed, her naked body silhouetted by the streetlights, and opened the window letting the cool bay wind into the room. Lighting a cigarette, I pass her one and light one for myself, reaching over to the bedside table for the whiskey and soda that started this evening. Pink Flag was what we’d been listening to that night as we talked about books, politics and the state of “The City” — a topic near and dear to both of us as the century worked its way to a flip.

“I really think the San Francisco I know is more like Wire,” she says, a long plume of smoke exhaling from her as she slides back into bed next to me.

“Tell me more about that,” I say with a strong idea of where she’s going but wanting desperately for this night to never end.

“Well, everyone has this idea of San Francisco. They’re wrong. This city is grit — it’s the weirdos and the crazies and the lovelies all trying to find their way in the most glorious way possible but no one’s paying attention to the work, only the end product.”

She pauses, takes a drag from the American Spirit pursed between her lips and pushes the smoke into the room and continues.

“Some Silicon Valley twat is gonna come along and take that end product and turn it into the next big thing and not … even for a moment … acknowledge the gutter punk and flat squatter who brought it forward.”

I pull her close, her skin is warm against mine. We wrap our legs around each other and I tuck her hair behind her ear.

“Too much fucking Dave Matthews and not enough Wire,” she says, our lips connect and the night slips away.

Dominic lost his right leg three years ago. Coincidentally it was about that same time K and I made a deliberate decision to visit Wyoming family every year for an extended period over the summer. Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger and one of the perils of having children later in life is the risk they’ll miss knowing extended family.

The men in this family have always been early risers. Maybe, as with so many things, it all started with Dad, spending so much time in the military and then running a house of five kids forty-five miles away from their school. Whatever the case may be, Dom came limping out of his bedroom and plopped down at the table. Dad and I were already on our second cup of coffee and the sun was just shaking the cobwebs.

“Where you off to, bud?” I said to Dom as I handed him a cup.

“Gotta take Bluey for a walk,” he responded as he took his cycle of medications.

Bluey was a rescue. Some wildly comic mix of corgi and heeler rolled up in an affable grumpy old sausage body. Bluey had three legs.

“Let’s talk Casper when you get back,” I said.

“Allright, but are you sure you don’t want to do Billings?” Dom said as he walked out the door.

I returned to my conversation with Dad as Dom walked out the door. Dammit, I’m going to Sonic Rainbow. I texted Patrick who’d recently moved to Grants Pass, Oregon, one of the five and my second in command. I’m the oldest, Patrick is 11 months younger than me.

“You ever been to Sonic Rainbow?”

Blue Dots

“I think I went there once with you back in the day, why aren’t you going to Billings?”

What the actual fuck here … these two taterheads have lived in Sheridan for this many years and they’ve never made it to Sonic Rainbow? I let it slide. He’s right, back in 08 we made the trek to Ernie November’s in Cheyenne for the first ever Record Store Day and shortly after that I dragged him to Sonic Rainbow.

“I’m buying you a t-shirt, is there anything you’re looking for?” my thumbs connecting to my brain and send.

Blue Dots

“If you can find it at a reasonable price, I’m looking for a copy of Pablo Hony.”

Normally Pat would have headed over to see Jesse at Time Machine Records. Since moving to Grants Pass he’s become a regular customer at the little record store and struck up a friendship with Jesse, owner of the store. For reasons unknown, the Radiohead record has eluded them, which says something. Time Machine Records is generally considered the best record store in the country that isn’t in a major city. Jesse is the hinge point, stocking the store with records he would listen to, with all the personality you’d want in a store run by its owner. But greatest record store not in a major city? Sonic Rainbow has some thoughts on that claim.

You ever been somewhere and you just knew instantly you were home? Maybe it was a new city or a new apartment, but somehow it just felt right? I have this theory, as much as we like to think we control things, we don’t — the universe has an incredible sense of humor. Not in any sort of ten commandments way, more in your gloriously off his rocker uncle in the basement playing with his revolutionary war toy soldiers. You’ve learned to ignore the occassional hoop and holler coming from below but every so often something catches your attention. We don’t pick places or things, they pick us and they find us at the right moment. Sonic Rainbow picked me.

Casper, Wyoming isn’t the sort of place most people would consider for a vacation. It’s north enough to be damn cold and east enough to be desolate. Cows intermixed with prongies and oil rigs dotting a landscape that resembles its residents — weathered and worn but built for the fight. Something truly strange took place in this northern Wyoming town as it clawed its way back from the devastating closure of the Amoco refinery in 1991 — an unlikely punk scene emerged. Suddenly, all those abandoned warehouses and other spaces became performance venues for the myriad of noisy punk bands formed by disaffected and bored youth. Into that landscape stepped Jude Carino, one half of the ownership team of Sonic Rainbow, with a dream. Sonic just celebrated their 30th anniversary as a Casper institution in 2025.

A whole lifetime ago I lived in Wyoming managing a newspaper, the Pine Bluffs Post, at the extreme southeast of the state. I was also a member of the Wyoming National Guard and made my way up to Casper once a month. Mere was one of my Soldiers with the unit. When she wasn’t busy college-ing or soldiering, she worked at Sonic Rainbow. We would, when circumstances allowed, ditch drill early and make our way to the record store at 140 S. Center St — her to connect with her music family, me to dig through crates. We’re talking sometime around 2009; vinyl was still a footnote to everyone beyond the die-hard and collectors. Within those walls, you could feel the family, the shared inside jokes, stories of everyone’s favorite obnoxious customer and of course what each of us was listening to at that moment. Mere turned me on to Volbeat and the Airborne Toxic Event because they were selling out at Sonic Rainbow. Some months later, Mere would find herself deployed with me to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — where we collected Fidel Castro bobbleheads, stories for the day job and sea glass because it was pretty — but that’s a song for another day.

Dom walked back in the door. We’d been talking about Bad Religion the day before — how Generator was his favorite album and mine was Recipe for Hate.

“Dude, I didn’t know “Portrait of Authority” was on Recipe for Hate,” Dom says as he tossed the leash down and Bluey scampered to her couch.

“Told you it was fuckin’ good,” I snapped back.

Dom took his hat off, rubbed his leg and sat down.

“So have you really never been to Sonic Rainbow?” I ask, somewhat incredulous.

To be fair, Dom was never much of a driver, and the loss of a limb wasn’t helping matters. He proudly wears a t-shirt that reads — don’t pull my leg, no really, it’ll come off. So I had to cut him some slack, just maybe not so much as to take his other leg.

“Never made it there, dude, always wanted to, just never did.”

“Cool,” I said, dropping the sigh of authority only an older brother can. “We’re going tomorrow and the monkeys are coming with us.”

Sheridan to Casper is just over a two-hour drive. I had wanted to get on the road around 8 a.m. as Sonic Rainbow opened around 10 and I didn’t want this to be a trip that went into the evening as I am wont to do. The monkeys had other plans so about 9 we pulled out of Sheridan and eased onto Interstate 90. As the miles unfolded Dom and I talked the talk of brothers who hadn’t seen each other in more than a year — how’s our brother Shaun doing, music, how are Mom and Dad doing, music, you hungry, yep I’m hungry, music — with an occasional interjection from the back seat as the boys lobbed tangents from underneath their headphones.

“I don’t know what Shaun’s going to do when Mom and Dad pass,” Dom says, talking about our somewhat troubled brother.

“Me either, man,” I sigh, knowing this problem we’ve debated for nearly twenty years wasn’t getting solved in Shaka, our 2016 Xterra. The monkey’s say it came from the name of a dragon in one of the books they were reading, I’ll allow it, but I prefer to think it’s after the warrior king.

Pulling off the interstate I tossed Dom my phone.

“Navigate me the last few miles,” I said to him.

“Cool. Turn left at the next light,” Dom replied.

I wasn’t expecting downtown Casper to be as busy as it was but we circled the block a few times looking for a place to park. We tumble out of the car, stretch and make our way down the street. It’s been nearly 15 years since the last time I walked this sidewalk, but there it is and except for a few new stickers on the door, it looks exactly the same.

“Hoooollllly Shit,” Dom exclaims as we walk down the narrow store doing an initial glance at the records in their crates. There’s the new releases, there’s the punk, there’s the metal. Tristan runs up to me and tugs at the bottom of my shirt.

“Daddy, where’s the kids’ section?”

Directing Tristan to the counter, I have him ask the clerk, who looks slightly taken aback by the question. He thinks for a second and then moves from behind the counter and directs Tristan and Lucien to a crate tucked between the soundtracks and the bargain bin. I chat the fella up as we walk to the back of the store.

“Been about 15 years since the last time I was here,” I say.

“Oh really, wow,” he says with that polite retail banter that’s hearing what you’re saying even if not completely interested.

“Yeah, one of my Soldiers, Meredith, used to work here years ago and we would come over after drill.”

He stops, sort of turns and looks at me with a quizzical expression — “Wait, Meredith?!”

“Yep — wait, did you know her?!” I replied.

“Oh hell yeah, that’s awesome — what’s she up to now?”

Now we’re friends.

Dom digging through the 7-inches, the monkeys working together to dig through the kids’ section, I shot Mere a text.

“Visiting fam in Wyo — made an intentional stop in Sonic Rainbow in honor of you and to add to my collection!”

Mere is a notoriously bad texter; it may take days for her to get back to a message, but it’s also totally understandable. An absolutely fabulous and committed full-time elementary school teacher and single mother to two young adult children, she has her hands full. Soon after we returned from Guantanamo she hightailed it out of Wyoming for the Pacific Northwest, a lifelong dream of hers. I stuff my phone back in my pocket only to immediately feel the vibration against my body.

“Oh wow! That’s awesome <3!”

I pop her a photo of me with Dom in the background deep in the hunt.

“Are you still there?!” and I can hear the little squee Mere gets in her voice when she’s excited.

Tristan is struggling to reach the crates and I can see his frustration growing. They may be twins but that’s where the similarities end. Lucien came into the world at 6 pounds, 15 ounces; Tristan 3 pounds, 9 ounces.

I reach down, grab around his waist, hoist him up, resting his body against my waist. Content, he starts flipping through the records. I hand Lucien my phone, knowing full well what I’m asking. At seven years old, Lucien considers himself a maestro at everything he touches and everything he touches becomes a process.

“Take a picture of us?” I ask him.

He enthusiastically agrees.

“Ok, hold on, move to the left Daddy, look down brother, a little to the right.”

“Take the damn picture, monkey!” I say, my eyes widening a little with exasperation.

“Fine,” he responds and the shutter drop sound of the phone camera is audible.

Tristan and I go back to the soundtracks … wait a minute, holy crap, is that what I think it is.

“Tristan, flip back two albums.”

“This one?”

We negotiate the too many forward too many back until I see what I thought I saw — Flash Gordon, original soundtrack by Queen.

“Holy crap,” I mutter as I pull it out and immediately add it to my must buy pile. You just don’t find this in the wild I think to myself.

I send Mere the picture of Tristan and me.

“Just got here, passing the torch.”

Heart emoji

“Who’s behind the counter? If it’s a tall skinny guy with an epic mustache, that’s Brandon and you can tell him I say hi 😜”

I yell down the store — “Hey brother, I’m talking to Meredith right now, what’s your name?”

I make out that he used to be a customer and started working there a couple years ago but his name is lost to distance and din.

“It’s apparently a customer who came in a lot when you worked here.”

“Joe Eason?”

I yell back down — “Did you say Joe?”

He mumbles something and again comprehension and hearing are beyond my reach.

“Fuck maybe…. I’m fuckin’ deaf, I think he said Stink and I’m not asking again! 🤣🤣🤣” I text back.

Sorry man, whatever your name is, now it’s Stink.

I begin my search in earnest; Flash Gordon tucked under my arm, I saddle up to the new arrivals. I pull a Franz Ferdinand and a Dave Brubeck live record. Dom walks up to me thrilled about a Cherry Poppin’ Daddies 7-inch he found. We both go back to our search as I set my collection down and flip. Dropkick Murphys’ “The Gang’s All Here” comes into view and I pull it out — I should get this one.

“Dude, check it out,” I say to Dom and I hand him the record — I just broke the first rule of record buying — never, under any circumstances, pass a record without laying claim.

“Oh, that’s awesome,” Dom exclaims, “I love this record.” As he slides it into his must buys.

Dammit. Well, my mistake. I go back to searching and hear an excited glee come from Dom. I flip around all wide-eyed and ready to be wowed.

“Dude! Flash Gordon! This is so coming home with me!”

“Whoa, man, that’s mine,” I snap back, genuine concern filling me — Dropkicks conceded, I am not losing this one.

“The hell it is, I found it,” Dom says.

“Yeah, you found it in my stack,” I say, pointing to the stack of records that are, admittedly, sitting with all of the other records. “Not even a just-got-hired knucklehead is going to stack Flash Gordon, Dave Brubeck and Franz Ferdinand together!”

We make posturing facial expressions at each other for a minute and he finally gives in.

“Fine.”

Flash Gordon is safely back in my pile — Gordon’s alive!

We both go back to our search and I come across Pablo Honey and quickly text Patrick — “Still want it?”

The phone rings. It’s Patrick.

“What’s up, bud?” I say.

“How much is it?”

I give him the price and we chat while he thinks about it.

“Yeah, go ahead and grab it for me, please.”

I drop the call from Oregon and show Dom Patrick’s new score.

“Oh I so want that one,” Dom exclaims.

“Sorry bro, just got off the phone with Pat, grabbing it for him.”

“Dammit!” Dom exclaims and I start making my way to the counter feeling like I’d pushed my luck enough for one day.

Lucien and Tristan are both looking at the sticker book at the counter as Stink rings up my haul.

“Dude, tell you what, I’m gonna give you the Flash Gordon record for two bucks,” Stink says.

I can’t even get out a thank you before I hear Dom.

“What?! I lost the record and now you’re getting a discount on it?! Why universe, why?!”

We all laugh as the records are put into a bag. Taking one last look behind the counter, trying to write every moment to memory, I see it and a laugh erupts from me.

“What?” Dom asks, very confused by the moment, and I point to the bookshelf behind the counter.

Tucked away in all of the knick-knacks and toys — a Fidel Castro bobblehead and the universe laughs.

Listen to their first studio album beginning to end and you quickly realize Die Spitz turned the idea of something to consume into a weapon. In a day and age built for algorithms, built for one-minute TikTok clips, Something to Consume exists as a whole — a deliberate act of subversion. To remove any single track from the album would degrade it — shut your mouth, show your face, American Porn.

The foursome put the jet-black, souped-up muscle car into gear — think Stephen King’s Christine — shifting to drive with the opening number, “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)”, refusing to take their foot off the gas until the last sonic entry, “A Strange Moon/Selenophilia,” finally allows you to catch your breath. Melding punk, metal, and grunge into something uniquely theirs, the feral intensity of the album drips with rage at a late-stage capitalist society that finds the four wanting something to fill the void.

Most reviews of Something to Consume have drawn comparisons to Hole. It’s a fair line to draw but stop there and you haven’t done the work of actually listening to what’s in front of you. Both bands are drawing from a deep well where torrents of rage and the specific textures of feminine fury get channeled through an electric guitar. Patti Smith, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey, Kim Gordon — they’re all in that water. The well predates Hole and will outlive them all. Courtney Love just got there first in a way the mainstream couldn’t ignore.

All wells are simply veins into deeper aquifers and deep in the well Die Spitz is drawing from you’ll find Black Sabbath, the Pixies, Mudhoney, Mazzy Star, Deftones, and Nirvana — all points of reference for a generation that came of age when so much of rock’s storied history was already behind them, the future still to be written. The future of this band began in Texas.

Eleanor (Ellie) Livingston and Ava Schrobilgen, friends since preschool, split vocal duties with both women playing guitar. They met Kate Halter in middle school wrapping her into the fold. Kate learned to play bass specifically to start the band — something the women have described as a way to spend more time together during Covid lockdowns.

But something was still missing. The thing coming out of their amps wasn’t matching what was in their heads.

“We were missing a piece,” says Ellie. “We wanted a drummer, someone who could help convey the heavy sound we wanted to achieve. We only had about 1 or 2 friends outside of each other at the time. We were then gifted by the grace of God (our friend Molly from the Austin band Sludge) who let us borrow her absolute machine of a drummer (Chloe). This was the piece we had missed; with her added, Die Spitz became a reality. We’d always had the energy and the motivation, and after the puzzle piece fit, with hours of practicing Sabbath riffs and scales, we were able to get the sound,” they said in an interview with Austin’s KUTX.

The thing is this — go into Something to Consume armed with anything I’ve written, or the words of any other writer who’s covered this album, and you will fall into a trap. Every reference point, every signpost, every name-dropped influence becomes a lens that distorts more than it clarifies. I know because I did it. First listen I was playing whack-a-band with every track, pegging an identity only to have the next song blow it apart. By the third listen I finally understood what was required: Shoshin — the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind. Set down everything you think you know and just hear the band as the band.

Do that and Something to Consume will reward you. Yes, the influences are all there. But it took Ava, Ellie, Kate and Chloe — their specific history, their particular set of circumstances, the years of friendship before a note was ever recorded — to make the whole something greater than the sum of its parts. That alchemy belongs to them alone.

So, if you’re following along, at this point you’ve stopped reading and just put the album on. No seriously, go do that.

No? Still here? Ok.

Good players in a game will tell you exactly what they’re about to do with varying degrees of success. Armed with the information you feel prepared to put up a reasonable defense — you know what’s coming, right? The best players tell you what they’re about to do and then go ahead and do it successfully anyway. So it is with Die Spitz. The album opens with “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay).” You know what’s coming, you’re ready — until around the one-minute mark when the song takes a hard left and your whole game plan is upended.

I warned you.

The slow burn of the opening lures you in, the haunting, almost yearning vocals lull you into a false sense of serenity as the jangly guitars promise comfort and familiarity. Then the bomb goes off. The yearning vocal turns into a fierce growl, the comforting guitars shift to a metal riff that blows your hair back.

And that’s just the setup.

“Throw Yourself to the Sword,” with its Slayer-like riff, is the battle cry. This is the album’s barn burner with the band holding the drip torches, the mixture set to burn hot. With her lyrics barked as much as sung, Ellie absolutely dares you to fuck with her — there will be consequences.

“American Porn” arrives with a wink-and-a-nod title, immediately feeling at home in an early nineties Seattle bar alongside Bleach, Facelift and Superfuzz Bigmuff on the tabletop jukebox. Pulling another switcheroo, Ava takes the vocal lead, channeling Kurt Cobain in her wail. The similarity doesn’t end there — “American Porn” takes on influencer culture the same way Cobain addressed it with “In Bloom.” There’s always been someone willing to sell their soul for fifteen minutes of fame. The names may have changed. The game hasn’t.

Catch your breath. We’re not done here.

Chloe opens “Sound to No One” and lays down a foundational beat built upon layer by layer until Ellie hauntingly comes in over a crunchy, maddening, heavy riff that repeats and resolves into a dream sequence of a bridge — threatening to bring you back down to earth. Which it does, only for you to realize you’re about to be burned alive upon reentry as the intensity ratchets right back up.

Something to Consume is as much a manifesto as it is a thesis. If it has a message, it’s this: We’re here to rock hard. We’re going to have a damn good time doing it with these people for as long as we possibly can. Try us. It’s a puzzle that only makes sense once all the pieces lock into place. It’s a picture of lifelong friendship, generational rage, and a demand that something better come along — lest we all go down in flames of complicity.

All of us have that one sweater we love, but we’ve had it so long it started to get threadbare. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get when you pull on one of the loose threads — might come out quickly, might unravel the whole thing, you might pull, think better of the idea and just clip the damn thing with some scissors. This is a mixtape of pulling threads, of seeing where things go, and what they inspired. Side A focuses on the more personal with Side B taking a bigger stab at American music broadly and the whole thing wraps back around with the ending feeding the beginning. Where would you have stopped pulling the thread?

🎧 Qobuz | Apple Music | YouTube

Side A

1. Patti Smith – Free Money (3:53)

Before there were Riot Grrrls, before Courtney Love was writing screeds against the music industry, there was Patti Smith loudly smashing through doors. Horses remains one of the most essential albums in the canon — raw, literary, and entirely on her own terms.

2. The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog (3:09)

Along with their Detroit peers MC5, The Stooges were punk before there were proto and post prefixes attached to bands. They were just doing what seemed right to them, capturing the essence of the gritty Detroit scene they were a part of, and on the way they dug a well so deep many bands would return to over the years.

3. New York Dolls – Personality Crisis (3:41)

It’s a defensible point that without the Dolls there is no Sex Pistols and no everything that came after. Built as much around image as music, the Dolls were explosive and confrontational — proof that rock and roll could be provocative in an era drowning in Album Oriented Rock and Adult Contemporary.

4. Wire – I am the Fly (2:40)

The future luminaries who cite this band as one of the most influential they were listening to reads like a who’s who of 1980s alternative rock. Still going in 2026, Wire is one of those bands who are essential to so many future artists but remain a footnote to anyone beyond the most dedicated listeners.

5. Mission of Burma – That’s When I Reach for My Revolver (3:53)

Following in the same footsteps as Wire, this Boston-based post-punk band has been cited by R.E.M., Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and even Moby as influential in their artistic development. These guys pushed the boundaries with avant-garde sonic experimentation, raw energy, and uncompromising artistic audacity.

6. Hüsker Dü – Pink Turns to Blue (2:39)

Zen Arcade is still considered the framework by which so many future bands — especially those hailing from Seattle — would follow on their way to ushering in the Grunge Movement. Brutal and abrasive in all the right places, its aggression was balanced by melodic and experimental elements that elevated the album from artistic indulgence to a true masterpiece of the era.

7. The Jesus and Mary Chain – Head On (4:11)

A recurring motif with bands serving as headwaters is they existed in a genre before the genre had a name. Shoegaze is a term most music people know and use on a regular basis, but when The Jesus and Mary Chain were deploying their wall of sonic fuzz across eight studio albums, no such term existed. They weren’t inventing a genre — they were just following the sound wherever it went.

8. The Cramps – Way I Walk (2:30)

Smash punk’s raw energy into rockabilly’s twangy guitar sound with a healthy dose of horror and you’ve got the Cramps. There is arguably no band more responsible for defining psychobilly than the combination of Lux Interior and Poison Ivy Rorschach.

9. Sonic Youth – Teen Age Riot (3:50)

From here we start to get into second and third wave headwaters. Building on everything before them, Sonic Youth redefined what rock guitar was capable of as they embraced unconventional guitar tunings and feedback to create dense textured sounds, putting into motion a future that gave rise to alternative, indie, and noise rock.

10. The Pixies – Gigantic (3:58)

No one does soft-loud-soft like the Pixies. There was a time where Boston could lay claim as a musical hub and the Pixies found themselves in those fertile grounds as they developed their signature sound evidenced on Surfer Rosa, their second studio album. In their wake they left the blueprint for what alternative rock sounded like and bands like Radiohead and Nirvana took notice.

11. Nirvana – Radio Friendly Unit Shifter (4:51)

There is a current underfoot in the music of today’s youth. It doesn’t take an astute listener to hear the sonic fingerprints of arguably Seattle’s most influential band. It’s hard to remember there was a time when Nirvana was only a band from Aberdeen who found solace in the Seattle community before they would go on to define a generation while displacing Michael Jackson from the top of the charts.

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Side B

1. Ma Rainey – Prove It on Me Blues (3:15)

Arguably one of the most important people in blues and subsequently rock and roll. Recorded in 1928, her influence stems from her pioneering role in shaping the sound, style, and cultural impact of the blues, as well as her broader contributions to African American performance traditions.

2. Skip James – Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (3:24)

Forgotten and then found again. Haunting falsetto, songs that lived in minor keys featuring intricate fingerpicking — James’ music would make the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up. Robert Johnson took two of James’ most famous songs — Devil Got My Women and 22-20 Blues — and refashioned them into Hellhound on My Trail and 32-20 Blues. Rediscovered during the blues revival of the 1960s, his reach spanned generations all the way to the White Stripes.

3. Jimmie Rodgers – Mule Skinner Blues (2:50)

The father of country music. Rodgers blended folk, blues, jazz, and yodeling in a way unheard of at the time. The list of influences reads like a who’s who in the country music world — Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, and Dolly Parton.

4. Howlin’ Wolf – Smokestack Lightning (2:32)

Take the delta blues sound, move it north to Chicago, plug it in and electrify it. No one is more responsible for the Chicago sound than Howlin’ Wolf, with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, and Tom Waits claiming a sonic nod to the legendary bluesman.

5. Django Reinhardt – Djangology (approx. 3:00)

While tastemakers and critics alike love to put music in a box, filed neatly in a specific genre, music is constantly in conversation with itself. Blues speaks jazz, both speak rock and roll. Reinhardt brought a mastery and a style — gypsy jazz — to the main stage with inventive riffs and sounds that artists like Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath and Jerry Garcia would later note had a strong influence on their development around the guitar.

6. Robert Johnson – Cross Road Blues (2:39)

Some influences flow beneath the surface; others rage like a torrent filling every space they find. Robert Johnson is one such artist. His music preserved and expanded the Delta Blues sound and found its way into the ears of nearly every rock guitarist that came after him.

7. Hank Williams – Lost Highway (approx. 2:45)

With his distinctive voice and unique songwriting style, Williams defined the Honky Tonk style and is still widely represented from dive bars to the Grand Ole Opry — of which he is still not allowed back in — his music reinterpreted across punk, rock, and country acts alike.

8. Woody Guthrie – This Land Is Your Land (approx. 2:30)

This machine kills fascists — not just a label on his guitar but a mission of the man. Guthrie gave voice to the migrant and the working class with his blend of folk, country, and blues that featured political and social commentary. His most famous work, This Land Is Your Land, often gets dressed up and rolled out for a bit of patriotic jingoism — the first verse the only bit played. Dig deeper and the track takes on a whole new light with incisive social commentary.

9. Billie Holiday – Strange Fruit (3:02)

If this was the only song Holiday ever performed, she would still rank as one of the most important figures in American music. Thankfully for all of us, Holiday’s revolutionary vocal styling, emotional depth, and fearless engagement with social issues were a hallmark and not a one-off for the performer.

10. Chuck Berry – No Particular Place to Go (2:37)

The matriarchs and patriarchs of American music fill this side and Chuck Berry is no exception. The father of rock and roll, Berry’s inventive guitar techniques of double-stop bends, staccato rhythms, and rapid solos became the blueprint that nearly all subsequent acts would follow.

11. Link Wray – Rumble (approx. 2:15)

What is rock if not for the power chord, and what is the power chord without Link Wray? Experimenting with fuzz and distortion, Wray pioneered the raw, driving sound acts like the Stooges would go on to adopt. Looking at it with today’s eyes, it’s near impossible to think there was a time when Wray’s signature song Rumble was considered so incendiary it was banned in multiple places across the country.

12. Buddy Holly – Rave On (1:47)

Take a dash of country, a dash of rhythm and blues, and throw in some Texas twang and you’ve got Buddy Holly. A pioneer of his day, Holly was one of the first artists to play around in-house with overdubbing and double tracking, while his signature hiccup vocal style set him apart from nearly every performer of the day.

13. The Beatles – I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (7:47)

This mix was always intentionally designed as a circle — nearly everything before the Beatles had some sort of an influence on them, while nearly everything since, the Fab Four have had some sort of an influence on. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? As long as music continues to maintain its conversation with itself, no.

Last Minute Update: T.R.U.E. is releasing new material Friday, June 26. You should definitely go pre-save/get it now!

I hold a strong conviction that one must listen to an album at least four times before making an honest critical evaluation of an album. Every so often an album comes along that grabs you by the throat from the minute you hit play and doesn’t let go until the very end leaving you exhausted, gasping for air and still wanting more.

No Hit Wonders by The Rat Utopia Experiment is exactly that album. Buckle up buttercup, this is going to be a fucker of a ride.

I didn’t even get to a second listen.

But wait a minute – The Rat Utopia Experiment? This has got to be a joke, right? Someone’s pulling a gag? Less than thirty seconds into the first track on the album, “Bleed Me Dry,” and you’ll realize this is no joke – this shit is smoking! You can immediately hear something in Phia’s voice you can’t manufacture — it was one of the first things that made me stop and pay attention. I found myself thinking, holy fuck, how old is this woman? The edges haven’t been worn down; she hasn’t learned what she can’t do yet — so she does it all. The oldest member of this band just turned 21. Collectively, the five of them have been alive about as long as Mick Jagger.

Don’t let that last line fool you, they may be young but they play with a maturity and ferocity well beyond their age. You’d be forgiven if they haven’t made your radar just yet, they’ve mostly stuck to the Pacific Northwest with an occasional jaunt to Boise and Portland. Now let this one sink in — a band that rarely leaves the confines of the Pacific Northwest is sitting at 58,362 monthly Spotify listeners, 26k fans on TikTok and more than 72k followers on Instagram. They’re doing something right.

Formed in Tacoma in 2022, T.R.U.E. — Phia on vocals, Francis on bass, Maddox and Casey on guitars, Evan on drums — describe themselves as a PNW alternative circus act. They’re not wrong. The clown makeup is real, the chaos is real, and the circuit they’ve burned through — Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia — has been building something that the Pacific Northwest has apparently been keeping to itself, but not for very much longer.

Three of the crew, Phia, Evan, and Maddox met during a music summer camp in Tacoma – just normal kids doing normal kid shit. But they decided to form a band. Shifting through a few lineup changes, the core three added Francis on bass and Casey on guitar at the beginning of 2025 and haven’t looked over their shoulder since. And why should they? Nothing but open road ahead.

The band name comes from a real psychological study, the rat utopia experiment, where researchers gave rats everything they needed, removed all struggle, and the rats essentially stopped living. Ceased to thrive. The band named themselves after that study as a deliberate refusal of the premise. Every band member wears uniform clown makeup. The stage chemistry is electric — polished madness.

Here’s what the receipts look like: Sound Off! 2024, the premier 21-and-under showcase in the Pacific Northwest. KISW 99.9 Loud and Local Band of the Week. Airplay on both KEXP and KISW. A Puget Sound commercial. Treefort Fest in Boise. A sold-out night at Neumos — Seattle’s legendary music hall — before most of these kids are old enough to drink in the room they just packed. The résumé doesn’t lie. Neither does the music.

I was a high school sophomore when Bleach first dropped, a friend of mine sent it to my Alaska home on a TDK tape with a note – “Listen to this.” I have visceral memories of the minute or two after I hit play on the tape deck, the thrumming bass line opening “Blew,” the guitar coming in and Kurt starting to sing. Chills still run down my spine thinking of that moment — this is like hearing Bleach for the first time. The same raw energy, anger, and zero fucks about what comes next.

From the moment you hit play on No Hit Wonders, the claws come out and start tightening their grip. You’re only going to get one chance to catch your breath through the blistering eight songs on this album, appropriately at the mid-point, track four, “Interlude for the Angels.” Already showing a sophistication for song placement that takes much more experienced acts years to realize, the breath between the songs can be as important as the songs themselves.

And what songs they are!

The band cites Lamb of God, Metallica, Iron Maiden, and Avenged Sevenfold as just some of their influences. Eddie would be proud to claim “Europa” on nearly any Iron Maiden record, while “Part/Whole” channels Lamb of God heaviness and virtuosity. Now couple this with Phia, the lyrical engine of the band, who cites Nirvana, Bob Dylan, and Elliott Smith among her main influences. Combine those elements and you’ve got crushingly heavy riffs played at breakneck speed while Phia spits some of the most intelligent and confrontational lyrics to come along since John Lydon made it his mission to offend everyone in England.

So you made it this far into the record, track eight is coming along and you finally think you can take a breath. But no — all the way to the very end this album continues to hold, and with “The Rat Who Barked” the nails come out to dig in deeper, making sure you won’t forget this record. In fact, you’ll have the scars to prove it.

True to form, the band has already come out and told everyone to junk this album and wait for the next one, which they’re currently working on. With all due respect to the band, I would suggest you not follow their advice on this one. I got that TDK tape in late 1989. Nevermind didn’t drop until 1991. For just a brief moment in time, Nirvana belonged to a very small few of us — and that felt like something I couldn’t name then and still struggle to now. The world hadn’t found them yet and we were living inside that secret.

Right now, The Rat Utopia Experiment belongs to a very small few. This is your tape. Don’t wait for the world to find them first.

🎧 No Hit Wonders

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I’m a hypocrite. Today I start changing that.

One of the main currents running through this website is transmission — the idea that music works best when it moves hand to hand. A mixtape sent in the mail. A “you’ve got to hear this” leaned across a bar. The direct transfer of one person’s obsession into another person’s ears.

I’ve spent months arguing that the obsessive, dedicated fan is the engine that keeps music alive, the node that matters more than any algorithm ever could. And the whole time, I’ve only ever been a node in one direction — receiving, never transmitting outward to the artists themselves. I’ve curated myself into a small, closed ecosystem. Not as myopic as it could be, but nowhere near as large as it should be, with my own curiosity as the only thing driving expansion. That’s the antithesis of everything I write about.

My father is where it started. Five kids, a house that ran on Saturday morning cleaning to whatever was on the turntable, and the occasional “Hey Ben, come hear this” that felt like an interruption at the time and feels like inheritance now. Somewhere in there he didn’t just hand me songs — he opened a pathway, built guardrails around it that kept me from bailing on something difficult before it had the chance to land. I still run by a four-listen rule because of him. Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions took me all four.

That inheritance became its own transmission line. Patrick and I talk music every Saturday morning before our households wake up — eleven months apart, close enough in age that we’re tuned to the same frequency, far enough apart to still surprise each other. My son Kerouac and I run a private Discord that’s mostly just YouTube links thrown back and forth. He’s the one who put me onto Sturgill Simpson, deep in his own Americana rabbit hole long before I caught up.

All of that is real, and all of it is good. It’s also a closed loop. I built a small, comfortable circuit and called it a relationship with music, while telling everyone else their circuit needed to be bigger.

That has to change.

I believe in walking your talk, so here’s me pulling my boots on. If music is going to survive the algorithmic playlist and the anytime-anywhere consumption we’ve all quietly agreed to, it needs human transmission lines running in both directions — not just fans discovering artists, but someone willing to say you’ve got to hear this about the artist nobody’s discovered yet. I want to be that node. Diminished, maybe, in an industry built to route around people like me but real, and getting stronger as more of us remember what we gave up when we let Spotify do our listening for us.

If you’re an emerging artist, I want to hear you. I want to write about you. I want to help you reach whatever you’re building toward, with whatever reach this small platform actually has. Send me your work — the how is in my Submissions and Editorial Policy. I won’t promise to cover everything that comes my way. We won’t always be a match. But I will never be cruel about it.

The digital age handed us infinite choice and called it progress. One transmission at a time, let’s take back the thing we used to do without even thinking about it.

Who in their right mind puts “The Lemon Song” by Led Zeppelin on a mix tape for their eight year old son?

Oh wait, I gave the answer away already.

Well, no one ever accused my father of being in his right mind. Though he is left-handed. Appropriateness and the years it took me to fully understand exactly what in the world Robert Plant was singing about aside, a far more important seed was planted.

Like any seed, germination rates may vary and it took a hot minute before this one took root. But it took root solidly and this seed was transmission. There is a rather famous adage that goes “That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.”

Which is why, near 50 years later and a lifetime of spending my last nickel to see shows both grand and hyper local, trading mix tapes, then CDs, then playlists with friends, young, emerging artists still occupy my turntable and fill my headphones.

Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigette Rose recently published a substack piece entitled Slave To The Algorithm: Why Working Class Musicians Are Giving Up On Being Heard. I highly encourage you to go read it and then come back to this piece. In the article, BOO talks about the myriad issues facing musicians as they work to gain traction in a world more and more defined by social media algorithms and virality versus talent. There’s not much in the article I disagree with. I do think BOO left a very important piece of the equation off the table, that of the music fan, the music consumer. BOO frames the question as such:

The question for listeners is: what kind of music culture do we want? One where discovery is orchestrated by marketing agencies and every trend is potentially manufactured? Where our favorite artists spend more time strategizing TikTok hooks than writing songs? Or one where we have a human to human connection which grows organically. It might be slow, but just as good lumber is grown slowly with its rings closely pressed together, it will be strong.

And herein is where I think a category error has emerged. As I read it, the question is posed to music listeners the world over. There is no distinction between the truly passionate, truly engaged music lover and the casual fan, the one who can’t list a single band when you ask them what they listen to and they blithely answer – Oh, a bit of everything. These are not the type of people who are going to drive more than 100 miles to see their favorite artist nor are they the ones willing to stand in line for several hours waiting for the record store to open so they can snag the newest release.

A few months ago I was standing outside Rock Cellar Records in Truckee, California. It was a record store day event and I had called ahead to get a sense of how early I needed to be there. The voice on the other line assured me that an hour or two early and I should be fine, so by 8 a.m. the next morning stadium chair in hand I pulled up in front of the store. Not hugely to my surprise there was already a line. I set up and began chatting with the folks ahead of me.

“What time did you two get here?” I asked the two young ladies in front of me.

“Oh, we got here at 6 a.m. and drove from Reno,” they replied, looking for a copy of Bring Me the Horizon’s Lo-Files album.

This is not a casual fan.

The only real solution to this system is a culture change. When people stop inferring opinions from social media and start connecting directly with other people again.

The idea that we’re going to get that large a population to change their habits is, in my view, a non-starter. The casual listener has always been a problem for musicians as they have always been dictated less by passion for the music and more by the whims of the moment. In past decades that has been dressed in social acceptance and radio play; today that looks like TikTok hooks and social media moments. At the end of the day, to be successful music requires transmission from me to you and so on. Stripped back of all of the drag placed on it by corporate entities looking to squeeze the last dime out of anyone willing to play, that’s all social media channels are – transmission lines. Terrible transmission lines, but still.

But shouldn’t an artist work to engage these fans? To convert more casual listeners to dedicated fans? No. We shouldn’t. We’ve already noted an artist’s lack of time to be creative in the sea of obligations required to be successful. Why would one spend time trying to turn back the ocean when a more elegant solution is already in front of you. More directly engage those obnoxious, obsessive, outliers in the music community to do the work for you.

I can’t decide if the argument BOO makes is intentionally less confrontational than it should be but it feels a bit like a piece written in the moment of now. In this moment we’re less willing to go direct, to attack the source with language that leaves no question as to whom it is leveled. And so I will. Fuck the casual listener. At least in terms of your marketing plan.

Expecting them to be the saviors is like expecting weather to plant a forest.

Because here’s the trick – if you activate that small core of die-hard fans, the ones who were given a mixtape at a way too young age, who grew up with music as an indispensable part of their life, they’ll do the work for you and bring those fans along. Don’t fight the ocean, let the ocean do what it does best – bring nutrients from the ocean floor and wash them to the surface. The question shouldn’t be framed as posting less content, it should be whose hands are we going to ensure this lesser amount of content gets to.

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favor of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

But a return to what, exactly? “Tangible” and “real” aren’t destinations — they’re descriptions of a relationship, and relationships require someone on the other end. If artists are pulling back toward the hyper-local and scene-based, they’re pulling back toward us — the obsessive, the outliers, the ones who showed up at 6 a.m. in Truckee. BOO sees the shift coming but stops short of naming who’s standing on the other side of it. I’m not going to make that mistake.

I’m not exempt from this. I’m not some elder statesman dispensing wisdom from outside the system — I’m as much a node in the transmission lines now as my father was the day he handed me that mixtape. Music is one of the main things my oldest son Kerry and I talk about, tank crews and turntables apparently having more in common than you’d think. And in our house, music plays near constantly — not as a lecture, not as homework, just as the air my seven-year-old twins Lucien and Tristan breathe, the same unobtrusive infection my father gave me.

But it’s not just downstream. My brother Patrick has been a transmission line running the other direction for as long as I can remember, and there’s a core group — Hannah, Bethany, Aaron — who are every bit the obsessive outliers I am. We trade what we’re listening to, play snippets for each other, argue about it. None of this is algorithmic. None of it is optimized. It’s just people who care, talking to other people who care, the way it’s always worked.

I know it’s not fashionable to wear your heart on your sleeve about something as “trivial” as music. But some of us do. We bleed for this stuff. And that — not the algorithm, not the casual scroller, not the TikTok hook — is whose hands musicians should be fighting to get into.

BOO gets close. The piece gestures at a coming shift — artists pulling back toward the hyper-local, the scene-based, the real — but stops short of naming what that actually requires: not a better platform, not a smarter algorithm, just more people willing to be what my father was to me. The Who said it best, decades before any of this: the kids are alright. They always were. Someone just has to hand them the tape.

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