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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s this one?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is it?” he asks.

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

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

I look at him and shrug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I’m starting to notice a trend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbecue sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Record stores and albums.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🎧 When the Kite Strings Pop

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

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

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

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

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

And then they do that thing I LOVE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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