“Life Can Be So Fair, Let It Go On And on…”

It started on some random Saturday night in December of 2004 watching Austin City Limits. Some band I’d never heard of called Spoon was on the stage playing songs I’d never heard. The band looked cool; swagger for miles and they seemed to know how to use the stage to their advantage. But as cool […]

“Cheer Up, Honey, I Hope You Can” : Yankee Hotel Foxtrot At 20

We arrived in Chicago just in time for the Palestinian protests and roving motorcycle gangs speeding through traffic on Michigan Avenue on Motorcross-style dirt bikes. Chicago cops in the median standing next to their mountain bikes flummoxed and indignant. The entrance to our underground parking a mere 50 feet away, though it might as well […]

She Comes, We Talk : Wojciech Golczewski’s ‘Tonight She Comes’

So what’s my favorite horror film score to a horror film I’ve yet to see? Well I try to do my best to see the films that I buy scores for, just for posterity’s sake. It just feels like part of the whole process: see the film and enjoy the score. Or if I buy […]

“You’ll Know When You Get There” : The Genius Of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi

It’s not that Herbie Hancock doesn’t get the love and heaps of praise that he deserves, but his trilogy of albums he released for Warner Brothers Records in the early 70s definitely do not. Mwandishi, The Crossing, and Sextant were released concurrently in 1971, 1972, and 1973, and saw Hancock expanding his sonic palate exponentially. […]

Ready Lets Go : Board Of Canada’s ‘Geogaddi’ 20 years Later

As much as I’d like to say the Beatles or the Stones or Radiohead or Wilco were the most pivotal musical moment for me, I think the truth is that hearing Boards of Canada for the first time might be even more pivotal. There was something about hitting play on a Boards of Canada album […]

Orchard Ridge Albums Part One : The Grays’ ‘Ro Sham Bo’

In the spring of 1995 my wife and I got our first place together. Well, technically she wasn’t my wife at that point. In 1995 we were still just dating so this new place would be us living in dirty, filthy sin. And to add a little to that, we’d been living with my parents […]

For The Love Of Roscoe: Looking Back On Midlake’s ‘The Trials of Van Occupanther’

2007. It was a pretty good year for music. Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, Spoon’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero, of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, just to name a few. All of those mentioned albums had […]

Hollow Little Reign

I was reminded recently of the band Supergrass. I don’t know that I’d forgotten about them per say, or that I was needing to be reminded of my longstanding love of the UK rock band, but regardless this drop from the social media ether got me down the Supergrass rabbit hole. I remember pretty clearly […]

“I drink your milkshake!”

One of the great things about having a teenager that’s into good art; be it music, films, books, etc, is that you get to go back and revisit all those great films they haven’t seen yet but you have. My son and I have been doing this for a couple years now. First it was […]

Message To Love : Hendrix and Band of Gypsys

Growing up, Jimi Hendrix was one of the big ones for me. Guitar hero, guitar God, six-string guru,..whatever you want to call him he was this super cool, super groovy alien being in colored silks and a flaming Strat making sounds on a guitar unheard of before. Of course he’d been dead over three years […]