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.
