I woke up one morning in spring and decided to look and see if Phish was doing a summer tour. At first, in high school, I hated Phish, but part of this was because my friend would invariably play me the most appalling songs, like “Makasupa Police Man” and “Slave to the Traffic Light.” Once […]
There’s an age-old knock against Led Zeppelin: that all of their success stems from essentially ripping off the early blues boys. Of course, in addition to being completely asinine, as their most famous song, the eight-minute “Stairway to Heaven” utilizes neither blues scale nor structure, it’s also hypocritical, since other bands like the Stones made […]
Now, “antidepressants” is kind of a misnomer, as the source of my mental struggles was kind of like the opposite — like always being in a white-hot light of attention, interaction and voluminousness of the mind. I needed to get stripped down a bit. It was the end of my sophomore year at Indiana University, […]
There’s an astonishing chasm between reality and gesture. Behind dark eyes, we retreat, we attempt at a paradigm to make sense of what’s around us. Eventually, something gets our wheels churning again, gets us back to the primal authority of the sounds of our own voices, gets us back to liking “us” better than “them.” […]
Now, amusing initially is the observation that, despite the unthinkable awfulness of this song, corporate America ate it up like hotcakes, and I still hear it on a regular basis in the grocery stores where I work. By the way, canned pumpkin is on aisle 10 next to the pie filling, for any interested parties. […]
In the grocery store, on my job of doing resets, I trudge through the motions, as befits this closed-circuit terrarium in which I’m rendered. The speakers belt out the finest in expedited, blank worship of the general term of “love,” with musical interfaces ranging structurally from fast food jingle to overly personal soap opera. I […]
An alternative question, of course, might posit as something like whether Jay Farrar meant, with his definitive statement of Son Volt’s “Tear Stained Eye”; to combat Roger Waters’ adamant denigration of the static, overly comfortable lifestyle. Farrar, on what sounds like the sort of musical cumulus cloud that must have been amassing in his mind […]
Jamie McDonald, my friends, is to grace the upcoming county fair, in July, and the event is receiving profile on a highway billboard. Now, what we know about her is very limited, you might say. Upon first glance, her blond hair catches the eye of anybody seasoned with this sort of thing, over the years, […]
Appropriately enough, near the end of 2025, we came to an era when the Billboard charts invited in at least a couple of songs which were actually composed by computerized mechanisms, and not human beings. This makes sense, I suppose, in an age when most pop songs, even if somewhat gripping and catchy, tend to […]
In recent years, I’ve developed the rather quirky habit of naming Adore as my favorite album by The Smashing Pumpkins. Now, obivious “hipster” accusations aside, I did cite the album’s consistency as a commendable measure ahead of Mellon Collie, and, even Siamese Dream, whose uncomfortable extremes of volume can certainly be a handful. I mean, […]