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 […]

Above & Beyond : Makaya McCraven’s ‘Highly Rare’

For it being only the second week of February I feel like there’s been an amazing amount of new music that’s hit our ears already. At least I’ve written about a lot of new music. I’m not complaining, man. January and February are typically pretty barren of new music off the bat. It’s usually March […]

Left Side, Right Side : Rush’ Masterpiece ‘Hemispheres’

It’s been one year to the day that one of the greatest drummers to beat the toms passed away from cancer. The wizard, the professor, and the all around thoughtful thinker Neil Peart moved on to the next phase of existence. For a guy that had gone through so much heartache and sickness of his […]

Revisiting The Classics : The Films of Scorsese and Coppola

There are milestones you look forward to in the lives of your children. First words, first steps, first day of school, first best friend, sleepovers, learning to drive, high school graduation, college graduation, marriage, and then becoming a parent themselves. Then there’s the milestones that parents look forward to because the parents themselves are interested […]

“Lost inside my sick head”…

Alice In Chains’ Facelift was unlike any album I’d heard when I first put it in my ears of December 1990. They were a Seattle band, but they were not like Soundgarden, Mother Love Bone, Screaming Trees, or Mudhoney. They were darker and much more metal than their Pacific Northwest peers. With Jerry Cantrell’s guitar […]

“If Words Could Speak They’d Mean Even Less”

Christmas, 1990. I was 17-years old and my Christmas list consisted of just a few very important items: Alice in Chains’ Facelift, Super Mario 3, Soundgarden’s Louder Than Live videotape, and Jellyfish’ Bellybutton. There were some socks and a bag of peanut M&Ms, as well as a bottle of Brut 33 in my stocking. Under […]