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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The. City. Exploded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d look at him slightly befuddled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give it a chance,” the angel said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next thought knocked me on my ass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I see the path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I lean in conspiratorially.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Oakland Arena is madness.

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

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

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

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

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

10 minutes fam!

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

Five minutes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where’s Ker?!” she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

Never let it be said this family is boring.

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

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

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

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

But is it? Not for me to decide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until just a few years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God damn, Phoebe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share Playin' in a Traveling Band

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad things happen when it goes to 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So where you going?” he asked.

I told him our plans for Kansas and family Christmas.

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

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

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

“I smell pot,” he said accusatorially.

“What?!” I asked, genuinely shocked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not today, Satan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Keep it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And for just a moment, it was.

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

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

Some of us didn’t.

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

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.

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.”

Something is in the air.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the parallels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iress took to the stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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