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

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

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

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

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

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

I consider myself one of those people.

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

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

So I have decided to embark on a journey.

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

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

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

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

Keep Listening,

Mr. B

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

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

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

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

“Fuck you,” I shot back “Watch me.”

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

“Told you.”

Daggers.

I tried again, this time a tone.

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

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

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

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

And I waited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I feel that!” I said.

We disconnect and I slink back into my chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some records don’t wait for tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Dark.”

The Bones of JR Jones?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

K snickers at the observation before responding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rules of the Road

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

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

The Sound of Somewhere Mixtape

Youtube | Apple Music

SIDE A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIDE B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there is the Conundrum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something is in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the parallels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iress took to the stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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