Christmas, 1988 : The Stockin’ Was Rockin’

Christmas, 1988. I was a newly-minted 15-year old, in the prime of a dorky and awkward teenage existence. I didn’t play sports, got bi-weekly allergy shots, had a mere handful of friends(the kind you spend lots of time with, not the kind you bide your time with in Algebra or English Comp), and spent most […]

A Box Full Of Wilco : A Deep Dive Into ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’

It’s safe to say that Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of the most important albums to come out in the last two decades. It’s certainly one of the most important for me personally. It was one of the most striking sonic shifts that a band could make, while also simultaneously not changing […]

“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. […]

’68 To ’72 : MIles And ‘Water Babies’

It’s safe to say that Miles Davis was the first jazz artist I was obsessed with. I bought Thelonious Monk’s Monk’s Dream back in the mid-90s, but I didn’t deep dive into jazz until the late 2000s when I bought an AT-PL120. Yes, my jazz journey coincided with my purchase of a record player. It […]

“Louvered ribcage, gills rise metamorph”

I’ve gotten stoned just a handful of times in my life. Weed was never really my jam, honestly. There was maybe two times that it clicked for me, and one of those times was getting high in my cousin’s Nova as we drove around the Amish countryside waxing ecstatic about Steely Dan. Besides that, most […]

How Stuart Hamm Rewired My Brain(or the odd case of Dr. Gradus ad Parnasum)

For a long time now I’ve wondered what happened in my brain to where I’ve veered from loving the singer/songwriter to being almost exclusively a fan of instrumental music. I mean, from 16 or 17 years old until about 5 years ago I was all about great songs. The Beatles to the Kinks to Brian […]

I bet your 7″ lathe cut can’t do this….

I thought I’d seen everything. From UFOs landing in Midwest cornfields and their extraterrestrial pilots revealing to me the meaning of existence thru an old Lite Brite, to talking coyotes that revealed to me the meaning of existence thru an old Milton Bradley Simon game, to a monkey that could make Toaster Strudels for a […]

“What The Hell Did I Just Buy?” : Adventures In Vinyl

As a vinyl guy, it’s my duty to make things hard on myself. I am quite aware that there are these things called “digital downloads”, where you can receive music right through your computer and put those albums onto a digital listening device. This allows the listener to have hundreds or thousands of albums inside […]

Diver Downer

In my life, Van Halen have gone from being hailed as Gods to being complete clowns back to being a source of great love and nostalgia. Growing up in the Midwest in the 80s you were limited on cultural growth and expanding ones tastes musically to Top 40 radio and physical print mags you found […]

That Dracula’s A Bad Mutha….

Of all the video games I was a fan of, none of them were as fun for me as Super Castlevania. I was never much of a hardcore video game guy. I liked simple stuff, mostly. Mario, racing, fighting, and shooting games were where it was at for me. Even The Legend of Zelda was […]