This past weekend Julie and I saw Bill Callahan in Kingston, NY. It was my first time seeing him with a band since 2019 in Brooklyn, when he opened his set with “Trains Across the Sea” in tribute to David Berman. Callahan’s family was there at the recent gig, and his young son was manning the merch table. When he and the band took the stage and plugged in their gear, they were silhouetted in strobe lights while Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” pumped out of the P.A. I wondered if the thought crossed their mind: Are any of the songs we’re about to play this exciting? It was a funny and surprising gesture, and I also took it as a sign of confidence.

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Their set was very good—heavy on the new album, as expected, and I always love watching Jim White play drums (I wrote about his playing a while back). I’ve been a fan of Callahan’s music for almost 30 years, and when you follow someone as prolific as he is for that long you can’t help but think about how he has changed, how you have changed, and how these changes line up. I reviewed My Days of 58 and I like it a lot—it’s probably my favorite of his albums since he returned with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest in 2019 (I reviewed that and Reality for the WSJ, and Gold Record for Bandcamp). But my reaction when playing it for the first time, possibly owing to my own state of mind, surprised me: I found myself feeling a bit wistful for the bleakness and confusion of his earliest work.

For the first 14 years of Callahan’s career, which accounts for all his records as Smog save 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love—that’s 10 LPs and one essential singles-and-B-sides comp—he regularly wrote from the perspective of someone so alienated from the world that mere existence becomes painful. Some of this material seems as if it’s set in a Todd Solondz-like universe, where characters live so far outside the norms of society that every instinct is wrong, which only compounds their anger and isolation. If you’ve ever known some version of these feelings, hearing someone articulate them in harrowing detail while also throwing in some laughs is both comforting and intoxicating. You can’t help but feel a kinship.

It’d make no sense for Callahan to be making records from that vantage point now—the roots of those formative songs came from the mind of a teenage Smog, sewn to the sky, after all. His work has grown deeper and richer as he’s allowed more of life into it. And I want to be careful to differentiate the guy narrating these songs from who Callahan actually was as a person—I’d rather focus on the work, which is what it is regardless of where it comes from. But I still return to that early stuff regularly, because it gives me things no other music can. Songs such as…

“My Family” - Burning Kingdom EP (1994)

The EP is a companion to the album Julius Caesar from the year before, and like the earlier record, it makes brilliant use of cello. The strings on “My Family” are something out of a gothic nightmare, with a six-note seesaw figure repeating without variation as drums thud and cymbals explode in the distance. Singing from the perspective of a child, Callahan describes a scene of parental neglect unfolding inside a house that has become a prison. Mother is getting stoned behind a locked bathroom door. Father is watching porn in the study—“He gets to me,” the boy sings about the old man, “Planting footprints/Where I hope I’ll never be.” And sister, whom we might guess is the one person in the house the kid connects with, phones to say that she’s not coming home—ever. She says she’ll write, but the boy knows that’s a lie.

“Your Dress” - Forgotten Foundation (1992)
“Bathroom Floor” - Wild Love (1995)

In some early Smog songs, the narrator has a perspective we might now associate with the term “incel”—he sneers at women out of a contempt rooted in self-loathing, and he’s both fascinated and repelled by the trappings of femininity. In “Your Dress,” a minimalist one-chord tune from his second Smog album, Callahan remembers a woman in a purple dress, “The one you could afford because of the money/Your husband sent home from the war.” Ten years later, she’s in the same clothes, standing by the road “Like some forgotten foundation/For a never finished bridge.” He sings these lines like he’s either blaming the woman for something or celebrating the fact that she’s met a pathetic end, yet he himself sounds powerless and alone.

By the time of “Bathroom Floor,” the production on Smog records had improved considerably. The murky cello we heard on “My Family” is now crisp and bright, and it’s laid next to an instrument that has the ring of a harpsichord. The arrangement has the air of chamber music, which lends a dream-like feel to a story that’s the musical equivalent of flash fiction—it’s a horrifying/humiliating scene involving bloody rags and a broken string of pearls that whoever lives through it will be thinking about daily for the rest of their lives.

“Back in School” - Kicking a Couple Around EP (1996)

Sometimes a short phrase holds a mysterious story inside it. To hear that someone young is “back in school” is to wonder where they’ve been—maybe it was summertime, maybe they flunked out, maybe they got sick, maybe they ran out of money, maybe they just quit. To be “back in school” might mean you’re trying to get your life back on track, emerging from a perilous and uncertain place. This song from an EP that came out between Wild Love and The Doctor Came at Dawn opens with Callahan seeing a girl and a guy together—her hand in the guy’s hair, the guy’s hand in her back pocket—and all he can do is stare.

In an instant, his plan for connecting with her has fallen apart:

I wanted to tell you that I was back in school
But in the dark of the club, I knew it wouldn’t carry much weight

This song in particular seems to take place in a Solondz film. And it’s rendered so exquisitely, the moment-by-moment thought process of this crushingly lonely person with no idea how the world works, as seen in two lines that more or less serve as part of the chorus:

Well, I’m trying to learn your language
It’s like a fly learning how to bark

“Our Anniversary” - Supper (2003)

I’d divide the Smog years into four phases:

Ultra Lo-Fi

Sewn to the Sky
Forgotten Foundation

On these records, it’s Callahan recording at home alone—he plays most everything, songs tend to have one musical and one lyrical idea and that’s it.

Sonic and Thematic Growth

Julius Caesar
Wild Love
The Doctor Came at Dawn

During this period, Callahan writes with a rare sense of freedom—he’s learning how songs work and channeling his typically dark (and frequently funny) point of view into settings that are more musically sophisticated. He writes about childhood dreams, fractured adult relationships, puzzling things he’s witnessed and horrifying things he imagines. These are songs that feel like they could go anywhere, from a winter-rate seaside motel to Prince’s studio.

First Peak

Red Apple Falls
Knock Knock

On these records, both produced by Jim O’Rourke, everything locks into place—the melodies are sticky, the arrangements are creative and support the songs, and the sharp edges of his storytelling are further honed.

Transition

Dongs of Sevotion
Rain on Lens
Supper

These strong records sound like they’re coming from a guy in search of something new. My favorite is Supper, which should have been the final record as Smog, though Drag City convinced him to keep the moniker for one more album (in pretty much every way, A River Ain’t Too Much to Love sounds like the start of the Bill Callahan era, with a more mature and present perspective that allows him to explore subjects with a greater degree of nuance).

“Our Anniversary” is one of many favorites on Supper because you can hear Callahan’s narrator fighting his worst impulses and giving in to them partway, perhaps pointing him toward a wiser future. We hear the pretty countrified groove, and the opening imagery sets a scene for the kind of thoughtful, mature love song he’d write later, where love is an extension of the beauty of the natural world:

It’s our anniversary and the bullfrogs
And everything that can sing is singing
Its mating song

He then spies his car sitting in the driveway, and fantasizes about driving away in it. Problem is, his partner has hidden the keys, knowing he’d split if given the chance, which would ruin their special day. He imagines hotwiring it, and then retaliates, turning on the headlights so when she wakes up the next morning to go to work the battery will be dead. Sounds pretty bad. They have messy, drunken sex and then he starts to think about next year, holding out hope that something this damaged can turn into something bearable:

Let us thrive, let us thrive
Just like the weeds we curse sometimes

“Our Anniversary” sounds so sweet, but it’s a fucked-up story about a fucked-up relationship that somehow leaves you with just the tiniest sliver of hope. I think of it as a version of what Paul Thomas Anderson, around the time of Magnolia, called “The saddest possible happy ending.” Changes were coming.

There’s a profile of guitarist Jeff Parker by up on Pitchfork today that you should read. I’ve been thinking about his place in music over the years, and whether he recently hit a creative peak or if it just feels that way because he’s getting more attention for his recent projects. But I’m at the point now where I immediately want to hear every new record with his name on it.

My introduction to the sound of Parker’s guitar was unforgettable, and could fairly be described as an epiphany: the opening refrain that runs through Tortoise’s “TNT.” From the first listen, I could hear entire worlds inside that handful of notes, and it was as if he’d perfectly articulated a state of mind that music had never described previously. That sounds lofty and maybe even a little crazy, but that’s the effect his riff and the piece of music built around it had on me.

It’s hard to put into words. So hard, in fact, that when I wrote a Sunday Review on TNT I tracked down his email to ask him about it. He sent a friendly response and tried to answer my questions. But I could tell from reading his thoughts, which had more to do with how the piece as a whole came together, that what to me seemed a once-in-a-lifetime flash of genius was for him another day in the office. I also realized that I was basically asking him to explain why this musical fragment made me feel so much, which is dumb. It was a beautiful reminder that so much of what happens when we experience music happens outside the realm of language, and when we are at our keyboards all we can do is try to get close.

In December 2021, I had the great fortune of seeing Parker with when he played Tubby’s in Kingston. That might have been my first show at the venue, which has since become my all-time favorite place to see a show by a considerable margin. It’s basically a corner bar with a small stage in an adjoining room that holds about 100 people; during this show, I was sitting on a bench about five feet from Parker watching him play. He was touring his then-new album Forfolks, a solo record of supreme patience and focus with some of the most Zen playing of his career. I bought my copy at the gig and he played a good chunk of it, working his hollow-body instrument while adding little loops here and there along with light feedback as texture. Watching him play, and listening to the record, you realize he’s basically duetting with electricity, allowing streams and droplets of electromagnetic current to add color to and fill space in between the notes. It’s the most gorgeous thing.

Most of the time, home-recorded lo-fi music is heard most clearly in its moment. With fewer barriers between those making the art and those experiencing it, recordings can feel more like letters from friends than “records” preserved for posterity. Which might explain why so much of the lo-fi from the past that hit me hard and seemed terribly important when I first heard it is most mostly forgotten now. Take Weed Forestin from Lou Barlow’s Sentridoh, for example—when I reviewed a reissue of it in 2012, it seemed like I couldn’t get anyone who hadn’t heard it back in the day excited about it. To me it was a stone classic and I found myself wondering if you had to be there.

And then there’s Sukpatch, a trio (mostly) who made lo-fi indie pop in a style jokingly (and accurately) called Casiocore. I discovered them in the ’90s because their label, Slabco, had an affiliation with fellow Seattle imprint Up. The latter, home to Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Quasi, and others, was the kind of label whose taste was so good and matched my own so perfectly I’d buy one of their new records without knowing a thing about it. And Slabco seemed like a kind of feeder for the indie-pop side of Up’s offerings, as embodied by the romper-room psychedelia of a sample-based project called Land of the Loops.

Since Sukpatch was on Slabco, I first assumed they were from Seattle and later learned they were from Minneapolis. So much of the home-recorded lo-fi stuff I’d enjoyed was a mix of noisy and abstract and folky but Sukpatch basically seemed like they took Depeche Mode’s “Dreaming of Me” as a starting point and set out to create their own version with half-busted samplers, cheap keyboards, awesome basslines, and tape loops. Their tunes were funny, wildly catchy, and streaked with a bit of melancholy.

I couldn’t get enough of this stuff. I bought Sukpatch’s album, Haulin’ Grass and Smokin’ Ass, along with an EP and several singles. Later, I saw that Slabco was selling a number of its early cassettes and bought two from Sukpatch (one actually a side project under the name Patch), one from Land of the Loops, and one from Australia’s Stinky Fire Engine. (I wrote about several of these releases for the Allmusic Guide around the turn of the millennium, which might be the only reviews of them on the entire internet, or indeed the known world).

In 1998, Sub Pop re-launched its singles club, where you’d subscribe for a year and they’d send you two new 7-inches every other month. If memory serves, the first installment was Modest Mouse’s “Never Ending Math Equation” b/w “Workin’ on Leavin’ the Livin’” and Sukpatch’s “Stolen Chrome” b/w “Bubble Shaff” and let me tell you, it was thrilling. Both were so good, and exactly what I wanted to hear at that moment. Not unlike the earlier tapes I’d been enjoying, it was like this package had been prepared just for me. Not long after came word that Sukpatch had signed with the Beastie Boys imprint Grand Royal, bringing together two of my personal obsessions in a very unexpected way. They released one EP, Tie Down that Shiny Wave, and Grand Royal shut down soon after.

I didn’t hear anything about Sukpatch for quite a while after that. Slabco wound down, Up Records stopped releasing new music after founder Chris Takino died, and the mini-scene I found so captivating seemingly vanished. Sukpatch released one more album in 2006 on Moshi Moshi but somehow I missed it entirely. I kept their ’90s music in rotation, however—nothing since has quite scratched that itch—and now and then I’d wonder if they might reenter the conversation somehow.

To my surprise, there’s been quite a bit of Sukpatch activity in the last year or so. Lite Hits, one of those early tapes, was reissued on vinyl, and in the past few months put out the compilation Thin Skin Diver, which gathers some of their best work from 1991 to 1996 (the date cutoff might explain why “Stolen Chrome,” possibly my favorite Sukpatch song, wasn’t included). I never knew much about Sukpatch while they were a going concern, information was scarce. Michaelangelo Matos has an informative interview with them over at The Current, I believe it’s the first I’ve read.

A while back I was talking lo-fi with my friend and colleague Sydney Salk (subscribe to her newsletter Compilation Nation). She’s a student of home-recorded music and knows the history. I mentioned Sukpatch to her, and she dug what she heard, bought a copy of Lite Hits, and she wound up playing them on her WFMU show, which I consider a feather in my cap. All of which suggests that this music can indeed reach people who care from later generations, a thought I find reassuring.

Two Years

In a couple of weeks it’ll be two years since Steve Albini died. Because he had so much to do with so many albums I care about, I think about him regularly. I’ll put a record on and think “Albini recorded this” and then “Albini is gone,” and it’s still strange, not just because he’d been working in music for so long but also because I imagined he’d be here for much longer.

I met him once, in 2011, at an event called “Industry Night” put on by Columbia College in Chicago. The school has programs in music business, recording, and I assume other related fields, and that semester I was teaching a class called Press, Consumers, and The Music Business. I can’t recall the specifics of this event but I was one of the speakers and I believe Albini may have given the keynote.

I was standing near him as we were milling around beforehand and I introduced myself. I’m sure I was nervous because of his cantankerous reputation but I reminded myself of all the times I’d heard about someone known to be unfriendly and was surprised to learn how warm and approachable they were in person. Well, this time I wasn’t surprised. The look on Albini’s face when I smiled and said I was Mark Richardson from Pitchfork and stuck out my hand is hard to describe—I registered what appeared to be a mix of disdain and disgust, and interpreted his expression to mean something like “Decorum prohibits me from saying what I really feel, and I can’t believe I actually have to shake your hand.” But shake it he did, very briefly, and within seconds he was looking for someone else to talk to.

By then I knew that many long-time participants in the Chicago independent music scene disliked Pitchfork for a host of reasons, from the site’s dismissal of beloved local bands to its position outside the community to what they believed was its unearned success and the fact that it took up so much oxygen. To them, we were interlopers. So I didn’t take it personally, at all, and in some ways it was the perfect Albini encounter.

A Missing Sense

Some years ago I acquired a CD of Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing and the piece made an enormous impact on me. It’s on YouTube but I can’t think of a less appropriate platform for listening to it. It requires set and setting, and is best heard in near-darkness with all connections to the outside world turned off. The quality of the mix on this particular record is unreal, and unlike anything I’ve heard. The piece is partly about the difficulty of communication and how we ascribe meaning to particular sounds, so the proportions of all the little flutters, groans, and whispers have to be exactly right. When listening to it, you often wonder if what you are hearing is happening somewhere else. It requires you to take in all the sounds in the room and separate them into “music” and “other.”

I may have bought Automatic Writing from the website of the distributor Forced Exposure, and I’m positive FE is where I first read about the “remake” of Ashley’s piece by Steve Stapleton/Nurse With Wound called “A Missing Sense.” His work was directly inspired by Ashley’s—it’s not a cover, exactly, but a piece of similar mood and texture. Stapleton’s description of Ashley’s work is unforgettable:

A Missing Sense was originally conceived as a private tape to accompany my taking of LSD. When in that particular state, Robert Ashley’s ‘Automatic Writing’ was the only music I could actually experience without feeling claustrophobic and paranoid. We played it endlessly; it seemed to become part of the room, perfectly blending with the late night city ambiance and the ‘breathing’ of the building.

I haven’t done LSD in roughly 30 years but I can tell you from memory that Automatic Writing might be the last record I’d ever want to play were I to take it again. It’s an album seemingly designed to make you question if what you are hearing is real, and the fact that Stapleton listened to it to reduce paranoia suggests that there are an endless number of ways to be in this world.

I’d long coveted “A Missing Sense” but never owned a copy, so when it appeared last year on Steve Albini’s Closet, a site for selling his belongings overseen by his friend Byron Coley in coordination with his estate, I couldn’t resist. While it’s made for late nights, I’ve taken to listening to it early in the morning, at a volume low enough that I don’t wake Julie upstairs. When I put it on, I can’t help but wonder what Albini, a person I’ve never in any way associated with altered states, thought of it.

Room Sound

It seems fair to add an observation about Albini’s work that runs counter to conventional wisdom. He was known and sought out for how he recorded drums, and yes, on records like Pixies Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s In Utero, the drums are positively massive and work well for what the music is trying to do. But to my ear, there’s a little too much room sound in his approach. Albini’s technique is “honest” and captures what the instrument sounded like in a given space, but I like a snare captured up close, where you can really hear the pop, like a rifle report. Compare Britt Walford’s drums on Slint’s Tweez with those captured by Brian Paulson on the band’s following album, Spiderland. The latter might have my favorite drum sound in all of rock music, and to my ear it’s dry and not particularly Albini-esque. That may not be a fair comparison since Slint grew so much between those records, becoming much better players and songwriters, but still. Albini famously reviewed Spiderland for Melody Maker, and while he took note of the band’s quantum leap, he heard the drum sound differently: “The incredibly precise-yet-instinctive drumming has the same range and wallop it would in your living room,” he wrote, before giving it “Ten fucking stars.”

Quiet Music

The best-known records Albini engineered tended to be loud and searing, unsurprising since that’s the kind of music he made himself. But he worked on quite a few brilliant records, such as Low’s Secret Name, that communicate in whispers (plug: I wrote about Low’s debut album, produced by Kramer, a few weeks back). My favorite of these might be the final Labradford record, 2001’s Fixed::Context. I’ve been playing it again recently for the first time in a while, and I’m struck by how exacting and considered it is, how every gesture does what it needs to with the utmost efficiency. It deliberately avoids extremes and lets you decide what to make of it, which can make it a little unsettling even though it sounds at first so tranquil. Which makes Albini the right engineer to bring it to life, a guy who knew just where to put the microphones and always got the fundamentals right so the music could find its own way.

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Once in a while a piece of music makes such an impression on me it creates a new category in my mind. Sometimes the music is literally of a kind I have never heard before, and sometimes it conveys a special feeling more intensely than I’ve ever felt it. In a small way, after experiencing it for the first time, I think, “Life is different now.”

When I was 16 or 17, my brother Merrick put on a CD of a piano recording of the Trois Gymnopédies by Erik Satie. Within a few notes, I was staring at the speakers in a state of slack-jawed wonder.

This was the platonic ideal of musical-beauty-streaked-with-melancholy, and its particular mix of feelings seemed to capture some essential truth about life and death. Everything about it was perfect, each emotional gesture rendered with the smallest possible number of elements. If there were one fewer note it wouldn’t land; one more would be superfluous. It had to be heard on piano, the central tool for Western musical structure, and it had to be the instrument alone.

Later, I saw someone describe the pieces as like viewing a single sculpture from three different angles and that unlocked something too, showed me how language can both reflect and shape the experience of music, and I’ve borrowed/stolen that image a few times in my own writing over the years.

After that first encounter I heard Trois Gymnopédies many times, often not by choice. I learned that these pieces had long been used for advertising and as background in film and television, and that, for many, their ubiquity rendered them banal. Not me though. The magic remained, and I’ve sought out music that was “like” Satie’s piano music ever since, in the same way I later sought music “like” Boards of Canada or “like” My Bloody Valentine. It had defined an approach to music and I couldn’t help but seek out more of it, even as the intensity of that original impression remained elusive.

This pursuit led to a minor teenage obsession with George Winston, a phrase that looks very sad when I see the words appearing in front of me now. I should have been listening to something like Lansing’s Crucifucks alongside my fellow alienated teenagers but there I was, hitting the "back” button on my Autumn CD so I could hear “Woods” again. I can’t hide from my truth.

I moved to Keith Jarrett (this great book by Peter Elsdon has a chapter comparing Jarrett’s work to Winston’s, a comparison Jarrett has always hated) and Bill Evans (his “Peace Piece” could be the most sublime piece of piano music I’ve heard; Winston’s fellow Windham Hill artist Liz Story recorded a nice version of it). I heard the Satie pieces in many configurations, including a take by Evans and Herbie Mann on their album Nirvana. After that, I encountered the work of Harold Budd, first through his association with Brian Eno. His album La Bella Vista, which appears to be out of print everywhere and only available presently on YouTube, may be the best album-length exploration of the Satie feel I’ve heard.

When I was 18 or 19 I bought a double CD of Chopin’s Nocturnes based only on something I read that compared them to Satie—they were great, but too dynamic for what I was looking for. I learned that John Cage’s early piano music carries a great deal of this emotion I’m trying to describe—he worshiped Satie and titled pieces after him, so that’s no surprise.

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And then somewhere in the ’90s I discovered the music of Richard D. James, aka the Aphex Twin. He loved Trois Gymnopédies too and sometimes you could hear it in his music. Last week I wrote a piece on “Flim” for Pitchfork’s relatively new Saturday Tracks feature (I also wrote one on New Order “Ceremony”) and I touched on the Aphex—>Satie connection. The single record of his that most evinces his love of the French composer is probably Drukqs, which I’ve been listening to quite a bit in the past few months. But I can hear it in “Flim,” too, along with what might be the most emotionally resonant drum programming I’ve heard (I touched on this quality in an earlier newsletter about Jim White).

For critics, beauty is hard to trust. I think a lot about musical surfaces and texture as a locus of meaning but I’m often unsure about the relationship between beauty and quality. Ultimately, when writing about music I tend to start with how it makes me feel and I think about its history, context, and artistic intent later. Sometimes, what I learn affects my response, but sometimes the initial reaction remains and I have to honor it. This is partly why, for example, I’m interested in the challenge of regarding new age music as “art,” how easy it is to dismiss and how people who like to think about music find value in it.

Last year, Ian Penman wrote a delightful book about Satie called Three Piece Suite. His writing often makes me jealous because he seems to move leisurely from one thought to the next, stringing together interesting ideas with no concern for form. Since his writing has the warmth of conversation, his offhand manner can fool me into thinking what he is doing is easy, and it makes me want to try doing it myself. When I get deeper into one of his books, I see how the observations fit together and that structure is deliberate and logical, just differently shaped.

One section of Three Piece Suite is a kind of glossary/encyclopedia, with Penman riffing on aspects of Satie’s music, personal obsessions, milieu, and more. Here’s an example I like:

TYPEWRITER (1)
Early typewriters, with their circular pad of spoked letters, constitute a kind of inverted visual or technical rhyme with the umbrella.

There’s not much to it, but the image of a typewriter as a visual rhyme for an umbrella scratches an itch in my brain. I’m in thrall to the dark art of Noticing Things.

And here’s a bit that triggered a “That’s it!” clang in my head when I read it:

The Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes do not sound like nineteenth-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads. They feel as old as sand, but strangely contemporary.

It’s something I forgot from that first listen to the Gymnopédies: the quiet, the space, the importance of silence. This was music for CD. The hundreds of recordings of it that were made before the early ’80s were rendered obsolete when the first digital version rendered it into 1s and 0s. In a distant and impressionistic way, it seems like computer music, which makes the Aphex Twin connection that much clearer. There should be no surface noise, nothing additional. Satie included everything that was needed.

Among innumerable milestones of infinitely greater importance, 2026 is also the 50th anniversary of my consciousness, which I’m defining as my first sustained memories of being alive and aware of myself as one human being living on Earth among a few billion others. I was born late in 1969, about a month after the Woodstock Festival, which was named for the small town where I now drive once a week to do laundry but was actually held somewhere else about 50 miles away. I have scattered and blurry memories from the early ’70s, you probably know the kind I’m talking about—something weird that happened on a playground, the way a large dog barked at me from behind a fence, seeing a sparkler thrown and then arcing through the air on July 4. But these are just fragments, and I can’t piece them together into anything coherent or locate myself as a thinking being inside them. By 1976, I could.

This new awareness I associate so strongly with that year is mostly a product of biology—a quick google calls it “childhood amnesia,” and suggests it has to do with a combination of brain development and language facility. I’m sure that’s most of it. But 1976 was a good setting for those early sustained narrative memories because I was living in the United States during the Bicentennial. I can’t begin to describe how much red, white and blue I took in, how many times I saw the magic number “76,” including on an orange globe that rotated above the gas station a few blocks from our house in Lansing (the place, incidentally, where I first fell in love with the smell of gasoline and which often comes to mind when I smell it now).

I couldn’t help but feel patriotic. We still said the pledge of allegiance, and the United States seemed like the center of the world—or more precisely my state, Michigan, which seemed to me the center-of-the-center, the most American of places in the broader nation. It hurts badly that, half a century on, the Semiquincentennial will happen with Trump in office—this time, I’ll be happy to get it over with.

This is more of a guess, but 1976 may be the year I noticed recorded music, and some of the prominent sounds I was hearing were specific to my home state. Bob Seger released both Live Bullet and Night Moves, and I heard at some point that he was a Michigan dude; Gordon Lightfoot had a hit with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which I’m sure I heard on the car radio late in the year, and which was set in the world of the lakes surrounding me (though at this point the one I knew best was Lake Lansing).

The Bicentennial came up virtually every day while it was unfolding, including while I was watching TV. All year long, CBS—the station my parents watched most, probably because it had Walter Cronkite, but it didn’t hurt that the transmitter was 10 blocks away and thus the picture was crystal clear—broadcast one-minute segments that told stories of what happened on the corresponding day in 1776. These spots blew my tender and still-forming mind—it felt like climbing into a time machine. The series was called “Bicentennial Minutes” but I knew it as “200 Years Ago Today,” since that was the phrase that opened each episode. I found it riveting, probably because many seemed like adventure stories, with the evil guys in red coats and our scrappy heroes winning the day.

I loved 200 Years Ago Today and looked forward to it each night. And then one day I noticed they weren’t airing anymore. I asked my Mom about it. She explained that they were only created to commemorate the Bicentennial, which was over. I don’t recall learning that Santa Claus wasn’t real, but this I remember: I was devastated, the best thing on TV was gone forever.

It’s hard to believe we’re coming up on a year since I posted my first newsletter of the year and I’m thinking this will probably be the last one of 2025. I started with a thought on song from Bill Callahan’s most recent album and lo and behold he has a new one coming in February, which I hope to write about.

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There’s not much left to do now but debate with Julie whether A Charlie Brown Christmas or John Fahey’s The New Possibility is the Greatest Christmas Album of All Time. I’ll also throw in a word for Phil Spector—pictured here in a rather sad-looking fake stereo version issued in the UK in the early ’70s—and I’m very fond of Flaming Lips’ psychedelic take on holiday music as Imagene Peise. One thing working in Fahey’s favor aside from his alternately thrilling and peaceful music is his record’s title: The New Possibility. There’s a phrase that can get you out of bed on a dark morning, so open and free, suggesting something good might be around the next corner.

I wanted to take a moment to plug my conversation with my good friend Will Hermes about some of our 2025 highlights, which we streamed live and is posted for posterity here. I’m not even sure if I knew this kind of thing was a feature of this platform until a few weeks ago, but talking music with Will is always very fun, and this was no exception. You should subscribe to his newsletter New Music + Old Music if you don’t already.

I’m making a vow to write here more frequently in 2026. I’m also going to update my website more often to include links to pieces new and old. Recently, I revisited a few Resonant Frequency columns I wrote circa 2010, and it was interesting to remember earlier days of digital culture, trying to get a handle on something like YouTube, which had only been around for a short time. I put links to a few of those on the website and will add to that when it makes sense. Thanks for reading and wishing you a season of new possibilities.

Julie and I moved to Phoenicia, New York, on October 31, 2020. The path that led us here was long and winding. Shortly after I pulled the U-Haul truck into the driveway, my friend Josh texted to say that Michigan State’s football team had just beaten Michigan, which seemed impossible. May that miracle be repeated again this Saturday. Our five years living upstate have been good ones.

I’m enjoying a book called The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, by a professor named Seth Horowitz. Occasionally, when a young music writers asks me for advice, I’m tempted to say “Start with hearing, and work your way to music.” For me, understanding how sound transmits and hearing works has always been connected to how I think about listening in general, including music. It’s probably because my early interest in sound reproduction and formats happened concurrently with my interest in records.

Hearing is a finite resource. Throughout your life, the fleshy mechanics of how vibrations are turned into a perception of sound, a process involving skin and bone and hair and bodily fluids, move only in a single direction: worse. But the brain has a part to play. When I interviewed Kevin Shields about a Loveless reissue a number of years back, I asked him about the delicate process of evaluating tiny differences in remasters, when his hearing had surely been severely damaged during insanely loud My Bloody Valentine shows.

This is a weird thing. What scientists discovered in the past five years is that when they look at people who work with sound in a professional capacity, the part of their brain [that processes sound] tends to be about five times bigger. So as people who work with sound get older, they know their hearing isn’t as good, but at the same time, a lot of guys can still do really good work. We don’t hear in any kind of passive, mechanical way. [Sound] interacts with your brain. So when you hear, it’s a bit like when the scientists talk about the nature of reality and how it’s like an illusion in our brain. Everyone has their own reality, in some sense.

Living up here has led me to think more deeply about my senses. A lot of this happens when I’m walking our dog, Lenny. I get to see the passing seasons up close—when you are looking at the grass and the shrubs and the trees every day, you notice they’re changing constantly, always in the process of growing or dying. So that’s in the mix, every day is something new. And when I’m walking Lenny, I get to experience the world through his perception.

One of Horowitz’s research specializations is the sonic world of bats. The book has detailed descriptions of how they use ultrasonic chirps to create a “3-D”" image in pitch blackness. Though we can’t talk to bats about what that’s like (unfortunately), brain studies suggest they really do “see” the world in great detail using sound alone, to the point where they can tell what kind of insect is 5 feet in front of them based purely on how their sounds are reflected back to them.

I’ve been observing how Lenny takes in the world on these walks, and how he prioritizes his sensory information. He has a good amount of terrier in him, including, somewhere in there, rat terrier, so he has a strong instinctual drive to look for small rodents. If he could do that all day, that would probably be his vision of heaven. Last week, he was rooting around in a shrub and he came out with a mouse in his mouth. I yanked his leash and it fell and ran away, unharmed. He doesn’t want to eat them, I don’t think—it’s all in the hunt and the catch. After that, I’m not sure he knows what he wants to do.

As I walk with Lenny I notice that he uses his ears first, they direct him where to focus his attention. Once his attention is focused, he uses his nose to get a deeper understanding of where a chipmunk or mouse might be and that dictates his tracking direction. From there, if he can get close enough, he uses his eyes to figure out where to direct his jaws.

Lenny teaches me stuff. I’ve learned that as the weather gets colder, some small rodents take shelter in steel pipes, which makes sense. You can imagine if you are able to get deep into a pipe and stuff it full of grass and moss and whatnot, it’s probably pretty well insulated in there. Cozy, even. I learned about all this because once summer ends and fall creeps in Lenny starts sticking his nose into pipes, such as the ones on a bike rack by the abandoned elementary school next door.

It’s another reason why a pipe is a good place for these rodents to hide—Lenny can jam his nose into the opening, but he can’t get in. They’re well-protected in there. Something that could get into the pipe is a snake, and I’m thinking this is why mice don’t make their homes in pipes during the summer. Come fall, though, temperatures drop, snakes can hardly move and they’re finding a place to hibernate, and that pipe is probably looking pretty good.

There’s a lot of great music about the seasons changing, and lately I’ve been revisiting Ronnie Lane’s “Annie,” from his great album with Pete Townshend, Rough Mix. What a gorgeous piece of music—so wistful and, yeah, autumnal. It’s “sad,” kinda, but not really, at least not on good days—only as sad as being alive while knowing that one day you won’t be. That’s always; today, we’re here.

If you write about music, you might find yourself thinking occasionally about anniversaries, a marker of passing time to direct readers to an album or artist. It can be a little annoying and arbitrary to pay attention to such things, but it also makes practical sense—record companies and media properties have to organize their output around something.

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A few weeks back I touched on Brian Eno’s 1985 CD Thursday Afternoon, and in the past few days I’ve been thinking about Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours, which came out in 1955. I know a fair amount about Eno, having written about his music a number of times and read a few books on his work, but I’ve never studied Sinatra with any depth. I do love this record, though. It’s often mentioned as one of the first “concept albums,” where all the songs are arranged around a particular theme—in this case, solitary rumination over lost love—and are meant to be heard in a single listening session. This extended communion with recorded music was a relatively new idea in 1955 because the 33 1/3 LP format was itself new, having only reached the market a few years earlier. While “albums” of 78s had been manufactured for years, listening to them in one sitting required flipping a record every few minutes. Taking in the 49 minutes of In the Wee Small Hours, however, is an experience.

The cover painting tells us a lot—this is the kind of loneliness where you wander around because you can’t sleep and you feel like the only person in the world. If Sinatra was a high school boy in this photo, he might be the main character in Smog’s “Teenage Spaceship.” Let’s stipulate that this image catches him after he’s had a few drinks, and now the bars are closed. He still has his cigarettes, which, if memory serves from my days as a smoker many years ago, can be a welcome companion at such a moment.

The music is absolutely beautiful. I have a feeling I bought this record roughly 20 years ago, while Julie and I lived in Richmond, Virginia, probably at Plan 9. I already owned a copy of September of My Years, another concept album, this one about growing old, from 10 years later. The arrangements by Gordon Jenkins on September are heavier and more symphonic, and I probably expected a similar palette from this one. But Wee Small Hours, arranged by Nelson Riddle, has a gentler and quieter tone with tinkly sounds including what sounds like a celesta, as if it’s trying to send you off into reverie.

A few of my favorite standards are here, including “Deep in a Dream.” Whenever I hear this song I think of drug-chilled Chet Baker reciting the lyrics in a scene from Bruce Weber’s documentary Let’s Get Lost. I believe he identifies it as his favorite song, or one of them, and as he speaks the words you get a sense, even in his addled state, of how much they mean to him.

Along with the music on the record, which as I said is phenomenal, I also enjoy holding the LP in my hands and thinking about the fact that this slab of cardboard and plastic is 70 years old. It’s one of the older objects of any kind I own—I have a 3xLP recording of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” that was pressed in 1952, though it was recorded in 1938—and it’s remarkable to me how well it continues to serve the function it was designed for in 1955. As you can see from the stamp above, my copy was once part of the library of WTOP, which were then the call letters of a station in Washington, D.C. (now WHUR, owned by Howard University). So a journey from D.C. to Richmond, where I purchased it, probably for $5 or so, wasn’t far.

I love reading Wikipedia pages about radio stations with long histories, though in this case the chronology jumps from 1949, when The Washington Post bought the station, to 1970. So I can’t tell you what the station was up to in 1955 when In the Wee Small Hours came out. WTOP called itself “The Sound of Washington,” and let’s assume that the sound of Washington in the mid-’50s probably included a good dose of Sinatra. And In the Wee Small Hours hit No. 2 on the Billboard album chart, so it was popular. That means the precise copy I’m listening to in my living room now was spinning on an industrial turntable in a radio station seven decades ago, sending a couple hundred thousand people in and around D.C., most of whom are no longer with us on this Earth, deeper into a dream.

I was in the car yesterday motoring down Route 28 with a CD of Fables of the Reconstruction in the deck, and “Driver 8” came on. It’s always tricky quoting a song lyric and pondering what it “means”—I wrote an earlier newsletter about this subject, thinking about a David Berman song—and that’s doubly true for REM, especially their earlier work. Despite listening to their music for decades, I’m often unable to hear or make out what exactly what Michael Stipe is singing, forget knowing what the songs are “about” (which, incidentally, hasn’t diminished my enjoyment in the slightest).

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Anyway, there’s a line in the song that goes “I saw a treehouse out on the outskirts of the farm/The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged,” if the online lyrics sites are correct. It’s a couplet that lights up something inside of me. It makes me think of being a child, like 7 or 8, say, and how a yard or a street or a neighborhood or a field is your entire world. Since this area is all you know and it’s so small, you inevitably become an expert on what’s there. An animal bone found under a tree or a burn scar from fireworks ignited on the sidewalk can become objects of fascination. You are learning how to notice things.

Quite a few early REM songs contain shards of detail like this, which makes their albums feel like worlds to inhabit, places both strange and familiar, like a surrounding neighborhood. Another line from another song by another band on another fantastic Joe Boyd-produced album from 1985—written and sung by Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, a good friend of Stipe’s around this time—has a similar effect on me: “Steep is the water tower/Painted off-blue to match the sky.” I hear her sing it and I can see it.

I took the photo above a while ago, it’s just a random power line pole on the side of Route 28. But the fact that the pole and transformer are surrounded by this wooden platform starts me dreaming in a very early REM/early 10k Maniacs kinda way. Had I grown up in the house you see in the background, this platform probably would have become a theater for adventure, a place to set up army men and hide stuff while bells from the railroad crossing a hundred yards away were ringing.

Ever since I submitted a ballot for Pitchfork’s half-decade list just over a year ago, I’ve been wanting to revisit the one I assembled for the site 20 years earlier. Compared to many music writers, I’m not much of a list-maker—I generally only make them when asked. I do, however, like reading lists. And I enjoy revisiting documents that show where my head was at a given time, in part because what actually happened can be so different from what we remember.

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In the first half of the 2000s, my listening was strongly weighted toward electronic, experimental, and ambient music of various kinds, with the occasional indie rock or pop record in the mix. From around 1998 until roughly 2007, I was in a near-continuous state of heightened excitement about what was happening in these worlds, especially at the intersection of computer software, analog synthesis, and sampling. To my ear—it seems naive to me now—it was almost as if the entire idea of what music could be was being remade. I experienced sonic texture as pure pleasure in a very “pop” kind of way. It was intense and overwhelming, and I absolutely loved writing about it.

In the years since, I’ve wondered: Was it just me? By that I mean, was the revolution in sound I perceived happening entirely in my own mind, or was there something legitimately new and important going on that others recognized? I’ve never been able to answer this question to my own satisfaction, but logic suggests the answer to the first question is yes. Even so, I can’t help but think something was in the air. Maybe the combination of ever-increasing computer power and new software along with the ubiquity of the compact disc created a sympathetic environment for a certain type of creativity. Or maybe it’s just a matter of certain trends meeting my ear at exactly the right time.

And now? A few times a year, I’ll hear an album in this broad vein that thrills me and I can’t stop listening to it—Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing, Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano, and William Tyler’s Time Indefinite all come to mind. But music of this ilk isn’t central to my listening these days, and that’s OK. There’s lots to explore; you never know where things are going and what the next obsession might be.

So, below is the half-decade ballot I submitted in 2004. It has shocking omissions and baffling choices made for reasons that have slipped from memory, but it also has dozens of records I enjoy as much as I ever did and put on often. Many of my current favorites from this period aren’t here, and a few I haven’t listened to in a (very) long time.

Perhaps you’ll find a record you enjoy. And if you know of something newish you think I might dig based on what I’ve listed below, leave it in the comments and I’ll check it out.

Mark’s Top 75 Albums 2000 - 2004, as Compiled in Summer 2004

1. Mouse on Mars: Idiology (Thrill Jockey)

2. Keith Fullerton Whitman: Playthroughs (Kranky)

3. Farben: Texstar (Klang Elektronik)

4. The Clientele: Suburban Light (Merge)

5. Sogar: Apikal.Blend (12k)

6. The Books: Thought for Food (Tomlab)

7. Gas: Pop (Kompakt)

8. Luomo: Vocalcity (Force Tracks)

9. Fennesz: Endless Summer (Mego)

10. Animal Collective: Sung Tongs (FatCat)

11. Boredoms: Rebore, Vol. 0 (WEA Japan)

12. Philip Jeck: Vinyl Coda I–III (Intermedium)

13. Pluramon: Dreams Top Rock (Karaoke Kalk)

14. Herbert: Bodily Functions (!K7)

15. Boards of Canada: Geogaddi (Warp)

16. C-Schulz & Hajsch: C-Schulz & Hajsch (Sonig)

17. Vert: The Köln Konzert (Sonig)

18. Ekkehard Ehlers: Plays (Staubgold)

19. The Avalanches: Since I Left You (Modular)

20. Daft Punk: Discovery (Virgin)

21. Manitoba: Up in Flames (The Leaf Label)

22. Radiohead: Kid A (Capitol)

23. Devendra Banhart: Rejoicing in the Hands (Young God)

24. So: So (Thrill Jockey)

25. The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat (Rough Trade)

26. Tim Hecker: Haunt Me, Haunt Me, Do It Again (Alien8)

27. Herbert: Secondhand Sounds (Peacefrog)

28. Matmos: A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure (Matador)

29. Califone: Quicksand/Cradlesnakes (Thrill Jockey)

30. Jóhann Jóhannsson: Virðulegu forsetar (Touch)

31. Christopher Willits: Folding, and the Tea (12k)

32. Max Tundra: Mastered by Guy at the Exchange (Domino)

33. Oval: Ovalcommers (Thrill Jockey)

34. Pan Sonic: Kesto (234.48:4) (Mute)

35. Sunroof!: Sad Frog Wind (Giardia)

36. Black Dice: Beaches and Canyons (DFA)

37. Gramm: Personal Rock (Source)

38. Jan Jelinek: Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (~scape)

39. Terrestre: Secondary Inspection (Static)

40. Electric Birds: Electric Birds (Deluxe)

41. Basement Jaxx: Rooty (XL/Astralwerks)

42. Panda Bear: Young Prayer (Paw Tracks)

43. MRI: All That Glitters (Force Tracks)

44. The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.)

45. Various Artists: Hypercity (Force Tracks)

46. Múm: Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK (Tugboat/FatCat)

47. Sigur Rós: Ágætis byrjun (FatCat)

48. Deathprod: Morals and Dogma (Rune Grammofon)

49. Various Artists: Total 3 (Kompakt)

50. Various Artists: Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats (Essay)

51. Biosphere: Autour de la Lune (Touch)

52. Brian Wilson: Smile (Nonesuch)

53. Various Artists: EADGBE* (12k)

54. Air: Talkie Walkie (Virgin)

55. Tom Waits: Real Gone (Anti-)

56. Sam Prekop: Sam Prekop (Thrill Jockey)

57. Erlend Øye: DJ-Kicks (!K7)

58. Junior Boys: Last Exit (Domino)

59. B.J. Nilsen/Hazard: Live at Konzerthaus, Vienna 06_12_03 (Touch)

60. The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike (Memphis Industries)

61. M.I.A./Diplo: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 (self-released)

62. Random_Inc.: Walking in Jerusalem (Mille Plateaux)

63. Deadbeat: Something Borrowed, Something Blue (~scape)

64. Triola: Im Fünftonraum (Kompakt)

65. Guided by Voices: Half Smiles of the Decomposed (Matador)

66. DJ /rupture: Special Gunpowder (Tigerbeat6)

67. Two Lone Swordsmen: Tiny Reminders (Warp)

68. Windy & Carl: Consciousness (Kranky)

69. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch)

70. Trans Am: Red Line (Thrill Jockey)

71. Modest Mouse: The Moon & Antarctica (Epic)

72. Susumu Yokota: Sakura (Leaf)

73. Polmo Polpo: Like Hearts Swelling (Constellation)

74. Neina: Subconsciousness (Mille Plateaux)

75. Labradford: Fixed::Content (Kranky)

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Also:

Last week I reviewed Big Thief’s Double Infinity for the WSJ, and I liked a great deal. I also reviewed a reissue of the Stars of the Lid’s Music for Nitrous Oxide for Pitchfork.

I became a record-buying music fan when I was 14 or 15, which suggests it was probably early in 1984. I have a suspicion that becoming a music consumer during this era has a lot to do with why I’m obsessed with formats. Going into a shop in search of an album around that time meant you had to decide if you wanted to buy on LP, CD, or tape.

This October marks 40 years since the release of the first album I knew of that came out only on CD: Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. I heard the record not long after its initial release via my brother Merrick’s copy, and bought the CD I still have a couple of years later. It’s still one of my favorite Eno records, taking ideas from earlier ambient releases like Music for Airports and Discreet Music and distilling them to a hushed, tinkly piece that, depending on how deeply you listen, is either constantly changing or doesn’t change at all. For me, it closes Eno’s 10-year run of ambient brilliance. I’ve liked plenty of music he’s done since, but I’m not sure I’ve heard any ambient music proper from him that I like as much as what he put out between 1975 and 1985.

Thursday Afternoon was CD-only because it was 61 minutes long, and Eno wanted it to be heard without interruption. He liked working with duration and the vinyl medium was limiting for him. The title track of Discreet Music takes up the entire A-side of the record and lasts just over 30 minutes, which is a long side for an LP. This length meant that it had to be cut extra quietly to allow for narrower grooves, which in turn meant that any surface noise on the record was louder than it would be on a conventional LP cut. From one perspective, clicks and pops on an Eno record are no big deal—given how he approaches sound, one could easily say, Christian Marclay style, that the wear on a given record becomes part of the “piece.” But with Thursday Afternoon, he wanted something uninterrupted that fit the music’s ultra-quiet nature, and the invention of the CD made it possible. I still play the piece somewhat regularly, and it’s the rare ambient recording I’ve heard “played out”—more than one massage therapist has put it on during a session, and I imagine in that line of work it has the added bonus of measuring a single hour almost exactly.

So Thursday Afternoon was designed for CD and it did things that only CDs could do, but it was first conceived as the sound portion of a video work, also called Thursday Afternoon. Though it was initially an installation piece, the video was issued commercially on VHS and LaserDisc. Despite hearing the music for 40 years, I’ve never seen the video until today, because I never thought to look for it. But now it’s free for all of us on YouTube, at least until it gets taken down.

In the liner notes to the CD, Eno writes that he was trying to make a video that held up to repeated viewings the way recorded music can be enjoyed over and over, something that could be admired without concern for narrative or sequence. And the video is a slow-moving series of treated and processed images of a woman’s body.

Thursday Afternoon was what we now call a “vertical video,” which is ubiquitous in 2025 but extremely uncommon then. Back in the ’80s, if you were to buy a copy of the Thursday Afternoon tape and watch it at home, you had to turn your television on its side. As TVs were then were bulky, bulbous cathode ray tubes, that would have been challenging. I remember reading Eno’s description of the video in the notes with the CD and it made me dream—a vertical video, what a crazy idea! I had more than a decade of TV-watching under my belt, and I never thought of turning it on its side.

One last item from the CD’s liner notes: “The cover is a painting by TOM PHILIPS, reproduced here actual size.” He’s bragging: Rather than bemoaning the loss of LP-sized artwork with its shrunken dimensions, he tasked an artist with creating a 4.75” x 4.75” image suitable for a jewel case. Every detail was considered, every gesture performed with intention. With this single piece, Eno embraced and then subtly reinvented two fledgling formats.

A few weeks back I wrote a Pitchfork Sunday Review of Movietone’s The Blossom Filled Streets. Writing an entry in this series is one of my favorite assignments, as I get to burrow deeply into the history of a record/scene/band/sound and try to square that history with my own reactions to the music. Sometimes I’ve written about records where I know little of the story behind them at the outset—the Waterboys’ This Is the Sea comes to mind—and that’s always pleasurable. And sometimes it’s a matter of gathering thoughts that have been rattling around for years and seeing if I can arrange them in a way that makes sense.

I knew the broad outlines of the Movietone story in part because the small scene they were part of during their run—usually called Bristol post-rock—interested me while it was happening. And much of my initial interest in the late-’90s centered on Flying Saucer Attack, the noisy, folky, sorta-shoegaze project led by Dave Pearce, which at one time also included Movietone’s Rachel Coe. When exploring FSA at the time, roads of inquiry tended to wind back to the UK zine Ptolemaic Terrascope, which covered mostly music in the psychedelic folk vein. I’d picked up a couple of issues (wish I still had them now), and a frequent reference point in its pages for Pearce and quite a few other groups found therein was the American folk outfit Pearls Before Swine.

Until this year, I’d never listened to Pearls Before Swine. The band/project, led by singer-songwriter Tom Rapp, wasn’t exactly obscure, since I’d often see them mentioned in interviews with musicians (Damon Krukowski has brought them up a lot, and in fact produced a Pearls Before Swine record in 1999, after Rapp had been retired from music for years). But they weren’t a band that people around me talked about much, and if I saw their records in the bins, I didn’t take notice.

Much of Pearls Before Swine’s reputation rests on Rapp’s first two albums, released on ESP-Disk in 1967 (One Nation Underground) and 1968 (Balaklava), which as of today are the only two I’ve heard (I have my eye out for other records from the late ’60s and early ’70s, I’m hoping there are a few other gems in there.) Both are wonderful, filled with deeply atmospheric folk heavy on the reverb steeped in modes traceable back to the British isles, and Rapp moves between songs about the end of the world rendered in poetic language to a song about wanting to have sex with someone rendered as a clever joke a kid might tell.

The latter, which is kind of as I describe it and kind of not, is one Pearls Before Swine song I simply can’t get out of my head: “Oh Dear (Miss Morse).”

It’s short, and the instrumentation is pretty much just a plucked banjo, a strummed guitar, and, I think, an early synthesizer known as the clavioline, along with an oscillator. The first time I heard it I thought “Elephant 6 meets Broadcast,” which is of course two bands/scenes from the ’90s that were fascinated by the music of the past and shaped it to their own ends and whose members, probably, loved Pearls Before Swine. So I was hearing in this song a future which looked back at a past that I experienced in the present, and I love that shit.

The tune is catchy, and the mix is wild and weird and perfect, the explosions of synth way louder than they should be, like someone accidentally dropped a brick on the keyboard in the studio every other bar. So sound-wise, it’s ace. And it has what seem to me to be some inherently funny lines, like “This may strike you/Oddily/But I want you/Bodily,” each syllable enunciated so clearly you can’t help but fixate on the made-up word and the rhyme—it’s a Dad joke that wants to make sure you don’t miss what’s cringey.

But there’s more. Miss Morse is named for Samuel, inventor of the code that was carried across nations via elevated (or submerged) wires and which changed communication forever. And so communication with her must be in such code. And Rapp landed on a sequence that suits his chorus perfectly, as perfectly catchy as a ’70s jingle and just as difficult to get out of your head:

Dit Dit Dah Dit
Dit Dit Dah
Dah Dit Dah Dit
Dah Dit Dah

As a young boy, the only morse code I knew was “SOS,” which in Pearls Before Swine parlance was:

Dit Dit Dit
Dah Dah Dah
Dit Dit Dit

I learned it around the time I got my first plastic red Eveready flashlight, and I was told that knowing this code could save my life. If I were lost in the woods and all alone I could flash “SOS,” and those searching me would be on the lookout for such a communication and would come find me.

So that’s all I knew, SOS. Perhaps your average person in 1967 knew a bit more morse code than that—maybe they’d earned a scouting badge for morse knowledge, say. And those buying records on ESP-Disk—a label, after all, founded to encourage the use of the new hybrid language Esperanto—were perhaps slightly more likely to know how to translate the dits and dahs to letters than the man on the street. But most people, I’m guessing, heard in the song only a catchy chorus and the cool electronics and that was more than enough.

Still, those who knew morse code had access to what we now call an easter egg: Rapp’s letters spelled “FUCK.” See for yourself with this handy morse code translator. He later said he’d originally tried “LOVE” but the rhythm of the dots and dashes failed to match the melody. FUCK, however, was perfect. Whether that altered the meaning of the song and he came up with the oddily/bodily line afterwards, I don’t know, but I imagine landing on such a secret cornball joke led to a happy feeling, and that feeling is still spreading around the world 58 years later. What can I say—I’m a sucker for a clever, dumb, yet elegant gesture like this one. It’s great fun to imagine being a morse-fluent kid in 1967, hearing this transmission, and getting the reference—you’d be running to tell your best friend within seconds, sort of like I am doing now.

Decades ago in some introduction to psychology class the instructor said offhandedly that every time you have a song stuck in your head, it’s related to an unconscious emotional need. Must have been a Freudian thing—no random accidents in consciousness—and she was probably wrong, but hey, I believed her anyway.

On the last day of my 2024, which you are reading about on the first day of 2025, the song I couldn’t stop hearing in my mind was “First Bird” by Bill Callahan. It must be an important tune for him, since he opened both his 2022 album Reality and his 2024 live album Resuscitate! with it, and also he put a painting of a bird, which we can assume is the First Bird, on the cover of the former.

It’s one of Callahan’s great tunes, regardless, and I think it played in my head so many times on December 31st for obvious reasons: Coming out of dreams, coming back to dreams—the past, where the stories have been told and the endings are known, is receding, while the uncertain present is here and it’s now and yet often it doesn’t quite seem real. The cycle of beginnings and endings; how, when life feels good, like it does for me today, we can find peace inside this rhythm.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading.

One night in November 2021, I was up late drinking wine and scrolling twitter and in a moment of weakness I posted an engagement-bait prompt tweet. I asked people to share a favorite piece of music not on streaming services, and someone I don’t know mentioned a passage from Cat Power’s 2019 performance at Glastonbury, in which she combined the traditional folk song “He Was a Friend of Mine” with the Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” and “Shivers,” originally by Nick Cave’s pre-Birthday Party band the Boys Next Door. There was a YouTube and a timestamp. 

I played it and experienced a happy and familiar feeling that is always accompanied by a thought: This music is now part of my life. What I mean by this is that the song moves me deeply, and I know immediately I’ll be returning to it over and over for the foreseeable future. This instantaneous love is for me somewhat rare—more often, my appreciation for something develops gradually. But here, I knew on that first listen. Then I played it again. 

I’ve written about my fascination with songs built on two chords, how when listening to a good one, the song seems to expand and take in more and more, until it finally becomes a meditation/treatise/exemplification on/of life itself. There’s a relationship between harmonic structure in music and ways of seeing the world. This Cat Power medley has three chords, not two, but the correlation between the harmonic structure and the emotional effect is just as profound. Though the “Say a prayer for Jimmy Brown” lyric in the medley comes from Lou Reed’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’,” the arrangement brings to mind the slower version of “Sweet Jane,” another song from the album Loaded, which happens to be very close to the chord progression of “Shivers.” I remember playing a version of the progression when I was first learning guitar; it has that skipping feeling where the transitional chord is barely touched on, a little tap you let you know it’s there while the other two chords do most of the emotional work.

I hadn’t heard “Shivers” before that night. It was written by the Boys Next Door’s bassist, Rowland S Howard, and it’s a famous post-punk artifact that has been covered many times, but somehow it missed me. Something great about living a long life immersed in music—there’s always something new to discover, some lost classic you missed or something that sounded just OK 25 years ago that now blows your mind.

Poking around to learn more about the song, I came across a book called Urban Australia and Post-Punk: Exploring Dogs in Space. It’s a series of essays about the 1986 Richard Lowenstein film starring Michael Hutchence of INXS. I remember when the movie came out, probably because I read about it in SPIN or Rolling Stone, but I’d never seen it. Dogs in Space apparently had enough resonance in Australia to generate an academic book about its impact on culture there, and one of its essays, by Lisa MacKinney, is about “Shivers” as featured in the film.

It’s a great piece, and in it she touches on the track’s harmonic structure and how it conveys the song’s meaning:

However, where these songs use the sub-dominant (IV) as a stepping stone (hence the sub-) to get from the tonic (I) to the dominant (V), ‘Shivers’ uses the dominant (V) as a passing chord or stepping stone between the tonic (I) and the sub-dominant (IV), rendering the dominant (V) peripheral and, in fact, not dominant at all. This inverts the standard rock power dynamic in favour of a two-chord tonic/sub-dominant (E/A) progression that simply rocks gently back and forth, like a boat swaying left to right in a sea breeze but not moving from its mooring.

This lack of resolution in conjunction with the metronomic movement back and forth between the E and A chords establishes a harmonic stasis that is maintained throughout. This simultaneously creates a sense of tension and of languid torpor that functions as a marvellously effective method for conveying musically the themes and concerns with which ‘Shivers’ is preoccupied.

MacKinney also writes of Howard’s ambivalence toward the song’s success, how he felt that Cave’s highly dramatic interpretation distorted its essential humor. As she points out, the first line, “I’ve been contemplating suicide,” is a dark-hearted goth-rock all-time opening line, but then Howard followed it with “But it really doesn’t suit my style.” He was poking fun at the self-seriousness of a certain type of melodramatic teen, and he would have known a lot about this type when he wrote the song, because he was only 16 years old.

Cave took Howard lines and sang them from the perspective of a kid who couldn’t see or understand anything beyond the desire and pain of the present. His version didn’t allow its narrator to laugh at himself, it was too caught up in this moment of torment. Cave is such a gifted singer, he transformed the song completely, and his reading informs how we’ve heard it ever since, no matter who is singing it. 

Howard’s song traveled from his teenage bedroom to a recording studio where the Boys Next Door were cutting their album, where Nick Cave changed it and passed it on. “Shivers” then made its way to the Lowenstein film, where it appears twice, once in its original version and again as sung by Marie Hoy, singer from the fictional band in the film’s story. From there, as told to Chrissie Hynde in Interview Magazine, it traveled to the other side of the world and found Chan Marshall, age 13, living in one of many Southern towns she called home during her itinerant childhood:

My big sister worked at a video store, and she brought home this video cassette called Dogs in Space. Michael Hutchence was the lead actor and it was shot in Melbourne. There were two artists that I learned about from that movie. There was Nick Cave’s first band, Boys Next Door with Rowland Howard. In the movie there was this girl with her hair all teased and she was singing the lyrics to “Shivers.” And then at the end of the movie, a really awful thing happens, but it’s beautiful the way it’s filmed, and I wasn’t sad because the song that they chose was [Iggy Pop’s] “Endless Sea.” 

“Endless Sea” wound up on Cat Power’s 2022 album, Covers. She has yet to record “Shivers” in the studio, though this medley version has become a regular part of her setlists. At Glastonbury, the version of the song that found me decades after her encounter, she prefaced it with “He Was a Friend of Mine,” but she only does that sometimes. Her take includes lyrics from INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart”—“We could live for a thousand years/But if I hurt you, I'd make wine from your tears”—and I have to think it’s the Dogs in Space connection, an homage to Marshall’s first meeting with the song. There’s something beautiful about that, how after seeing that video as an 8th-grader, this song traveled with her until she started performing it herself decades years later, and she wove in words from another song with a loose and entirely personal connection to that initial exposure. You get the sense that she trusts such connections implicitly and allows her memory and unconscious to stitch these patches together.

This version from earlier in 2019, taken from a concert at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, is now the one I listen to most. The sound is clearer, better to hear Adeline Jasso’s achingly lovely guitar refrain (it comes from a radio broadcast, which is on YouTube and Spotify in Australia but is not, alas, available in the U.S. If you have a recording of the whole set to share, please get in touch). And it’s extra special because she brings “Shivers” back to its home.

Her performance of this song, and the backstory we piece together about how her hybrid came to be, is an embodiment of this thing I’m talking about: This music is now part of my life. Marshall is one of the great song interpreters of our time because she hears things in songs that others do not, instinctively makes connections between them, and finds ways to articulate what she hears in her own expression. Pulling back a little bit, I can’t help thinking her words are in part describing the experience of music itself, trying to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle moment when a song becomes everything. “We give you…shivers,” I think I hear her singing at one point, and let me tell you, she is absolutely right. 

Some time back my former Pitchfork colleague Matthew Schnipper—you should read his great Deep Voices newsletter—told me about Jerry Garcia and The Days Between. The period between Jerry’s birthday on August 1 and the date of his death, August 9, are called “the days between” by Dead fans after a song he wrote toward the end of his life that the Dead never recorded in the studio. It’s become a time to celebrate his life and his music, which is a nice idea, and also poetic: We’re all just passing through, enjoying a brief sliver of light bookended by two eternities of darkness. 

I’ve been thinking about another Grateful Dead fan. In July, I drove to Virginia solo from our home in upstate New York, which is about nine hours away, and on the trip I listened to Purple Mountains, the final album from David Berman, formerly of Silver Jews, several times in a row. As solo driving music goes you can’t beat it—it’s the kind of record where you tune into what the singer is saying and the story he shares and then your mind drifts back to your life and you start drawing connections. It also feels like an invitation to make something of your own and try and put something beautiful into the world.

Purple Mountains came out on July 12, 2019, and Berman died a few weeks later on August 7. I learned about his death from Schnipper, in fact. He texted me at home around 8 pm that day and asked if I would write something for Pitchfork. I was sitting in my living room with Julie, who loves Berman’s music and writing as much as I do, both of us stunned. We cried a little, then I packed my laptop and started walking to the G train. I was renting a desk at a writer’s space in Cobble Hill, and I’d be there for the next 5 or 6 hours working on my piece while trying in vain to stay off twitter, where so many people I know were posting song lyrics and sharing stories.

I’ve found myself deep in the Berman zone these past few summers, revisiting thoughts and feelings that return annually, like a comet. When Purple Mountains came out it seemed, for a time, from the outside, and despite its dark bearing, like a kind of rebirth, since it had been so long since we’d heard his songwriting.

I’ve seen people mention that they have trouble listening to it because so many of Purple Mountains’ songs foreshadow his death, that it’s even a “suicide note,” which makes a certain amount of sense. But that’s never been true for me, maybe because the feelings he describes are so close and the guy sharing them was so funny and talented his work makes you want to live life more deeply. It’s one of those contradictions that’s hard to explain, how connecting with art about pain can ease your own. Songwriters feel it too. I’m thinking of Lisa Walker’s line from Wussy’s “Teenage Wasteland,” a song where she describes hearing the Who as a kid and suddenly the world looks different, bigger. And yet it’s a connection formed in sadness: “It don't take much to sound like a sleeping prophet/When your misery sounds so much like ours so far away.” 

***

You may know that this newsletter gets its name from a line from a David Berman’s poem “The New Idea,” from his collection Actual Air. I got a little chuckle when I was first considering the name: I googled the line to make sure it wasn’t already being used for a publication of some kind, and the first two results were actually things I had written—a column about Bob Dylan I wrote for Varyer in 2021, and, for some reason, no good ones I can think of, a review of a Fennesz album I’d written for Pitchfork 21 years ago. I was worried that someone else was obsessed with this phrase and had used it for their own thing, and it turned out it’s just me that was obsessed. 

This is the passage from the poem: 

I was in high school
when I realized that not doing anything
was categorically different from deciding to do nothing,
but beauty blew a fuse, the hold music put me in a trance,
and what was black and heading towards me
transported me here like a cow in a comic hurricane.

This stanza is a good example of what David Berman’s writing can do to me—fear and darkness collide with absurdity and laughter and it’s like particles in a cyclotron smashing into each other and forming new matter. For me, the four words of his I selected for this Substack convey perfectly the too-muchness of it all, which can be both inspiring and debilitating. 

* * *

In the fall of 2001 I was assigned to interview Berman for Pitchfork. Then, Berman did most, or maybe all, of his interviews via email. He said he wasn’t particularly good at speaking off the cuff and preferred to state things as clearly as he could after he had had time to think about his answers.

This was just after 9/11, which coincided with other changes happening in my life. In November, Julie and I moved from Greensboro, N.C., to Richmond, Va. I got a temp job in a law office downtown, working for an ambitious young attorney who made me nervous and had a photograph on his desk of him and William F. Buckley smiling together on the deck of a sailboat. 

I spent most of my days in a little office that was really a closet, a space stacked floor-to-ceiling with bankers boxes filled with files from a case that had just wrapped. I had to move them around to create a path to my desk. This closet was in the center of the building, no windows, and the fluorescent lights overhead flickered. I spent my time typing letters and briefs dictated by Mr. Buckley Guy, using a tape machine I controlled with a foot pedal. I’d kill time by reading news stories about the investigation of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks.

There was something vaguely Bermanesque about the whole situation, like this was the day job for a person who spent his nights working at the airport bar, where life is like Christmas inside a submarine. Sequences from Being John Malkovich played in my head. It was a bleak period, but I also felt a sense of hope and there was something amusing about it too. I guess you wouldn't call it a scene. 

I’d check my email to see if Berman had responded to the questions I’d sent. Ryan Schreiber kept asking me about the piece. I hit up Drag City once or twice, but they couldn’t help me. Radio silence. And then, in January 2002, while at work, I got an email back: Berman said that he’d been drinking many cases of beer and watching the NFL playoffs and had lost track of time. I wish I had that email now, it was brief and hilarious. He said he’d have answers in a day or two and he was true to his word. His email arrived when I was sitting under the buzzing lights and I felt an overpowering sense of wonder reading what he’d written. There was one particular Q and then A where I noticed something while living my life and thought, “This reminds me of a David Berman song.” I asked him about that and he said he understood what I meant. That was big. 

The interview went up (the date on the site is December 31, 2001, but it ran closer to the end of January 2002) and I’d mixed up a song title. Berman emailed me within a couple of hours to point out my mistake, which I then corrected. He said he was trying to prevent the snarkiest of the Joos message-board-types from going after me. I knew then that he was reading this stuff that had been written about him, sometimes at least. Four years later, I saw Silver Jews live in Charlottesville and wrote about it. This was an early show in the first real tour of Berman’s life, and he was clearly nervous. He read his lyrics from sheets of paper he kept on a stand, craning his neck and rarely looking up at the audience. I mentioned this awkwardness in my little write-up, while also trying to convey how awesome it was to him sing his songs. That was April. In July, Berman gave a radio interview in Chicago where he mentioned my piece on the Charlottesville show and said that he’d committed himself to memorizing the songs after reading it. 

In 2008, I wrote a column about the uncanny brilliance of Berman’s writing and how his work had both rewired my brain and shown me things that were there all along and I just hadn’t noticed—which I now know are fairly typical observations about his work. Shortly after it went up, a Drag City publicist forwarded me an email Berman had sent them, alerting them to the piece and saying it was “pull-quote city,” i.e., indicating there might be a line that could be used in a future press release (going from memory here, another lost email I wish I’d saved). 

I mention these events not because they were unusual. Berman clearly read his press, even though, like many in his situation, he sometimes said otherwise, and he liked hearing from people whose work meant something to them. Earlier this week, Steve Hyden published a newsletter about the Purple Mountains record, and he mentions that, prior to the release of the album, they had corresponded via email after Berman had reached out to him. Even knowing all this, it’s slightly weird to write about someone whose work means as much to you as Berman’s did to me and know they are watching. 

In 2008, I reviewed the Silver Jews’ Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, a record I thought was solid but wasn’t the band’s best. One role of critics, to me, is to make distinctions and situate an artist’s work in the context of what they have done before, which is doubly important when a musician is on their sixth album, as Silver Jews were at that point. I found much to admire on Lookout, and there are songs from it I’ve returned to many times since, but, for me, it didn’t hang together as a record the way every Silver Jews album since Starlite Walker had. 

Seven months after the release of the album, Berman retired Silver Jews and went away for a while. In a Kreative Kontrol podcast interview with Vish Khanna—you should listen if you haven’t, it’s great—Berman said that he took some of that time to indulge a fantasy he’d had since childhood, of being able to devote entire days to reading and not much else. Here and there over the next few years, he mentioned that the reviews of Lookout Mountain were disappointing and that he was afraid of making bad music, and that was part of why he stepped away (the reason for the breakup he gave at the time had to do with what he was going through dealing with his father, lobbyist Richard Berman). Not surprisingly, quite a few people on twitter over the years said my review sucked, I was a bad person for writing it, and I bore some responsibility for the demise of the band. I turned it all over in my mind, felt a certain amount of guilt. 

* * * 

A couple of months ago I was a guest on a podcast created by my former Pitchfork colleague Dave Maher called “This Is Your Afterlife.” Guests are invited to imagine visions of heaven and hell that might await them after they die. I described heaven as a feeling of freedom, the sense of having a weight lifted, of starting over. I mentioned graduating from high school, and the day of the graduation itself, and feeling a deeply pleasurable sensation for the first time: Thank fucking god, that’s over. Everything to that point, all the questionable decisions and compromises I’d made, every idea of who I was that had been reflected back by those around me, had been cast off. I felt light and centered, fully in the moment, possibly for the first time in my life. 

Of course, that sense of freedom only lasted for so long. The next couple of years were rich with experience and halting attempts to find my way in the world, but a sludge of bad feelings eventually overtook me, and once again I felt stuck. And then, during a summer when I was 19, things began to shift. A relationship ended. I moved into a new house. To quote a favorite line from Neil Young, pretty soon I met a friend, he played guitar. Me and my new friend talked about books, and, out of nowhere, with no previous interest, I started writing poetry. This writing was nothing I would ever share with anyone, at least initially, and sharing it wasn’t the point. What mattered was doing it. I put a little spiral-bound notebook into my backpack. I was on a mission to document the joy that comes from noticing things. 

I wanted to read poetry, in part to confirm that the writing I was doing could reasonably be described as such. Two books plucked from the shelf at Paramount News in East Lansing made an impact. One was called The Haiku Anthology. This compressed three-line form, it seemed to me, was all about noticing things—it appealed to me immediately and I started writing haiku myself. The other was an anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu called Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970. I liked that the starting point for the collection, the marker of what was new and what mattered now, was 10 weeks after my birth. 

The first poet featured in Up Late is New York School writer Ted Berrigan, and on page 2, he had a poem called “People Who Died.” It’s a list of people he knew with their cause of death and the year they passed, that’s it. Just seeing it in print thrilled me. I didn’t know you could do this. Was it poetry? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I liked it. Many years later I found an recording of of him reading it in 1971. I downloaded an mp3 of it and it rarely leaves my phone. I listen to it like a song. 

***

Quick Aside: You might know that poet and songwriter Jim Carroll would later borrow his friend Ted’s line and concept for a song of his own. In 1973, Carroll released a book of poetry called Living at the Movies. In it is a poem called “A Fragment” that for me primed the pump for taking in David Berman’s work, and which I think about often:

**

Ten years after Up Late, several albums deep into my Silver Jews fandom, I came across Actual Air. I was living in San Francisco ‌and I can remember bringing it with me when I went to meet my friend Josh at a bar called Edinburgh Castle. I was a little early, and I was flipping through it with a beer while I waited. Turning the pages, I couldn’t believe it, how he could pull in so many references and imbue each line with ache and wonder while rendering it all in writing that sparkled. 

This guy noticed things. And man oh man was he funny. 

I was sitting by the space heater,
numbly watching you dress,
and when you asked why I never wear a robe
I had so many good reasons
I didn’t know where to begin.

That’s from “Self Portrait at 28,” which I read when I was 29. I didn’t really scribble poetry anymore, but I was still writing—mostly, by that time, about music—and still working to notice things. Actual Air became a totem of inspiration, I could just see the spine on the shelf and feel like I wanted to create something special. It gets me excited about being awake, nourishing the sense of possibility. It was such a gift. Which makes it so very sad that the guy who gave it is no longer around and left this world far too soon.

***

When I first read “People Who Died” my life was almost miraculously untouched by death, and now I’ve experienced it up close, with increasing frequency. I’m bracing myself for what’s to come. I never knew David Berman, never spoke to him, but his work has always been there when I needed it. Something, maybe, like a friend. I think of how Berrigan ends his poem: 

My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now. 

And then I think about The Days Between, and I go back to Jerry’s songwriting partner Robert Hunter, and a line he wrote for Phil Lesh’s song “Box of Rain”:

Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.

Some music gives everything away the first time you hear it. You’re hit with the totality of the sound—a huge riff, an unforgettable chorus—and you immediately understand how it works and why it exists. Instantly appealing music represents a small yet significant slice of the music I care about. More often, something draws me in from the first listen, but it’s hard to name. I have to ask myself: What is this doing? What quality inside the music is creating this effect?, and it can take a while to figure out.

One strategy for working through this puzzle it is to “enter” the sound while listening, fixating on a single aspect of the piece to hear how it contributes to the whole, and what measure of the music’s total force this element carries. What’s that piano doing? Is the reverb on the vocal reminding me of something? Is there a feeling of surprise when the horn comes in? And so on.

* * * 

Sometimes a line or two from something I read will lodge in my memory and shift how I hear music from that point forward. And then, after many years, I might forget where I read something, and question if I actually read it. One example came to mind after Lee “Scratch” Perry died. It was from an interview where, going from memory here, he said: 

“I don’t make reggae. I made eggae. Because without the egg there is no chicken, and without the chicken there is no Scratch.” 

I read it once, could have been 20 or 30 years ago, and it carved a space into my brain because it crystalized his trickster humor and the way he could scramble inputs and have something surprising come out. It was like one of those perspective drawings where an exterior surface of one shape is also an interior surface of another, and you blink and shift between possibilities.

Another quote that changed things came (I think) from an interview with Frank Black. He was talking about his favorite records, and he mentioned Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” The reason he loved it so much, he said, is because of Kenny Buttrey’s drumming, which he described as “emotional drumming.” I took that to mean that the drumming carries a significant portion of the song’s emotional content. That sounded exactly right: listen. Buttrey’s hesitations, his rolls, his galloping backbeat. It doesn’t just echo what Dylan is singing—it comments on it, tells its own story within the story.

Buttrey did that a lot when he played, but I would say “emotional drumming,” in the way I’m thinking of it, is somewhat rare in rock music. A great rock drummer drives a song, pushes it forward, adds a spine and a bit of texture, and ultimately, most of the time, offers support above all else (an important job, to be sure). Emotional drumming is more common in jazz, especially starting in the 1960s, when a drummer didn’t necessarily have to keep time. Elvin Jones is a master of his approach (see “India”), and so is Sunny Murray (see “Vibrations”), though they play very differently. Then there’s Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” The delicate piano part gets all the press while the programmed drums speak the drama, the way they tumble and then stand up, suggesting awkwardness, shyness, melancholy, inner strength, all with perfect control. Rhythm always conveys feeling, of course—we’re talking about a foundational aspect of music that goes back a few hundred thousand years—but I’m thinking about when percussion becomes a character in the story told by the music.

* * * 

Drummer Jim White is 33.33% of Australia’s the Dirty Three. I reviewed their excellent new record recently. In addition to his main band, he’s played on many records in an array of contexts. No matter who he is playing with, his drumming is doing everything drums should do, and they’re doing a great deal more. He’s always in conversation with the song—scraping the snare, pausing in unexpected moments, increasing the volume to show you one thing and playing so quietly you can barely hear him to show you something else. He does this in a subtle way that’s always present if you “enter” the sound, get close to his percussion, listen closely, and let its meaning come to you.

White released his first solo album this year, All Hits: Memories, and it’s excellent. It’s a collection of short pieces—a series of moods or “feels”—that allows him to explore in detail the expressive possibilities of percussion. It’s an uncanny record, both intriguing from the first note and also perfect for exploring piece by piece, taking in each fragment and figuring out how it all fits together.

My favorite Jim White performance is also one of his simplest. He has recorded as Tren Brothers with Mick Turner, the guitarist in Dirty Three, and in 1998 they released a 7-inch on Secretly Canadian with “Gone Away” on the A-side and a track called “Kit’s Choice” on the flip. “Kit’s Choice” is one of those tracks that means the world to me while I wonder if anyone else knows it exists. It’s possible that I love it more because I’ve never really been able to share it with anyone. There’s music as a social practice, which is deeply embedded into the entire structure of the art form, and then there’s music as an object for solitary contemplation, which is where I’m living a lot of the time. 

For years “Kit’s Choice” wasn’t available digitally, until it found its way to the Mick Turner comp Blue Trees on Drag City, which I imagine sold a few hundred copies. And for years after that, it wasn’t available on YouTube or streaming, so I’d have to email someone an mp3 in order to discuss it with them, which I did a few times. Now you can hear it any time you like.

I thought to listen “Kit’s Choice” shortly after Steve Albini died, because I remembered how well he recorded drums, and that the single had been tracked at Electrical Audio. After I dug out my 7-inch, I discovered that while it had indeed been recorded at the studio, Greg Norman served as engineer. (Let’s assume from its sound, bold and clear with nothing extraneous, that he and Albini had discussed how to mic a trap kit at some point.)

On “Kit’s Choice,” Turner plays two chords, double tracking melodica and guitar. If you’ve read my writing, you might know where I’m going with this because I’ve written many times about the majesty of the two-chord vamp, how it traps past and future and mashes together hope and regret. It’s a structure I never tire of. I can close my eyes now and play back White’s entire drum part in my mind, the way he lurches forward and hints at accents you don’t expect while leaving out the ones you do expect, how his rimshots sound like the crack of a rifle. As it builds, everything sounds terribly alive and beautifully imperfect—sometimes it’s almost too much—as is rolls and snare hits grow louder and then, finally, fall into something like a predictable cadence. The track’s title suggests a crossroads; by the time the closing march begins, perhaps, a decision has been made, the story has taken a turn, and we follow alongside, desperate to know how it ends.

Reading through the entries after it ran, something struck me about the commentary on “How to Rent a Room,” a Berman song that probably would have landed in my own Top 5: something that was obvious to two of the writers—that the song was about Berman’s lobbyist father—had never even occurred to me. “How to Rent a Room is first and foremost raw invective aimed at his rotten lobbyist dad,” wrote Justin Sayles, I writer I admire a great deal. I wondered where this seemingly widely understood truth came from, whether I missed an interview with Berman somewhere in which he explained “How to Rent a Room.” I couldn’t find it on a quick google but I’m assuming it’s out there somewhere. I did see that someone had annotated the Genius page with the lyrics of the song, connecting almost every line to Berman’s relationship with his father but without attribution.

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What interests me isn’t so much what the song is “really about” but rather how meaning gets attached to songs, and how a site like Genius serves as a source of truth for decoding what songs mean. This was a particularly interesting case for me because I first heard “How to Rent a Room” shortly after the album came out, probably in 1997 or 1998, and I played it hundreds of times between then and when Berman revealed who his father was in 2009 (it was the kind of song I’d have in my CD Walkman and hit the rewind on 10 times when walking around a city). So that’s 11 years of living with the song and thinking about it and internalizing it without a clue to to its origin, those facts being unknown presumably outside of Berman and maybe a few people close to him (this is assuming the Genius annotator and writers are correct).

I knew it was about the narrator being angry at someone he had history with, I knew it was funny and evocative and had some brilliant lines like “when your curtains move in the wind you can bet I’m betting against you again,” which captured the hot charge you feel when you’re pissed at someone you despise and wishing terrible things for them. I also knew that it has one of my favorite lines in music—“An anchor lets you see the river move”—which strikes me as not angry but wise. Who knows, if Berman were another kind of artist and in 1996 was doing a typical press roll-out and the internet in its current state existed, he might have done a “Silver Jews Track-by-Track” feature interview where he explained the impetus for every song and what he was thinking when he put them together, and then those observations would be recorded on Genius as the “official” word, shutting down future debate about where the songs came from. Is that a better world?

For my part, by the time Berman revealed who his father was, the song was in me. I was always going to think of my life when hearing it, not his, and I had so much history with it I remembered where I was walking and what I was doing while it played. In a certain way, I had written it.

At some point in one of the pieces I wrote about Berman on Pitchfork, I quoted Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino: “Reading [him], I had the unnerving sense that I was also writing what he had written; thus does his art prove his case as writer and reader become One.” That’s Berman to me—I encounter his work is both frightening and comforting because it seems to come from my own mind. Not that I have 1% of his skill or insight as a writer, I need to make that very clear even as it’s obvious. But that feeling of recognition is what makes his work special to me. You can sense the mind working, and for many who connect to his work, you can feel how it mirrors the working of your own mind, even if you don’t have the ability to articulate it.

I was thinking of Berman too because this morning I finished Ann Powers’ great new book Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. Maybe I’ll have the time and space to write about in more detail later because I have many thoughts. But one thing about Joni’s work you can’t deny is that people have always listened to her songs wondering who she wrote them for, what true events they describe. And she reinforced this every step of the way, discussing in interviews which relationship or situation was connected to a particular song—this one is about Graham Nash, that one is about David Geffen, etc.

I’m not immune to appreciating that kind of biography in song and it’s fun to parse. But, perhaps I’m alone in this, it’s only distantly disconnected with what I love about her music. Unlike with Berman, I don’t have the uncanny sensation of feeling like I wrote her words, but I still have a desire to map them onto my own life, to think about her adventures and observations and connect them to mine. What she was thinking and doing is in the mix, but it’s less important than these other connections. It’s how all that comes together that matters.

Am I self-obsessed, living in my own head? Maybe. It might explain why I can (sometimes) continue to enjoy music by people who years later did or said something repellent: The Smiths catalog is mine, not Morrissey’s. But that’s a topic for another newsletter.

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What an awful day this past Wednesday was, when I was texting with friends about what we were seeing on twitter and we learned one-by-one which of our friends at Pitchfork no longer had a job. I've seen such a thing unfold on twitter many times, but it hits different when it’s people you worked alongside for years, at a publication you’ve been contributing to for more than half your life. 

The day after, Pitchfork’s reviews editor Jeremy Larson sent word that Pitchfork would continue, and we’ve seen a regular slate of reviews since, including pieces from two of my favorite music writers—Jenn Pelly on Sleater-Kinney and Simon Reynolds on the Cocteau Twins. Pitchfork isn’t dead. While we don’t know what will happen next, there are still extremely smart and thoughtful people working there, and I’m rooting for them. 

Still, given who was let go, clearly things will never be the same. Scrolling to see who was losing their jobs was for me a bit like rewinding a tape—I started thinking about when I first met these people and how I became aware of their immense talents. So after taking it all in I typed this in a rush—it’s long and rambling and filled with typos and probably a few errors, and it doesn’t cover everyone who was laid off, just those I worked with closely over a number of years. But it feels necessary to me somehow, to document just what these folks, once my co-workers and now my friends, brought to a publication that has meant so much to me. Maybe think of it as notes toward a speech I wish I could have read aloud at the proper going-away party all these people deserved. 

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I have to start with Amy Philips, Pitchfork’s former Executive Editor, who was, I believe, Pitchfork employee No. 5 when she was hired to run the news section in 2005. The site was really taking off at that point—founder Ryan Schreiber had hired Scott Plagenhoef as editor and Chris Kaskie to run the business side, and they were moving aggressively to make everything about the organization better. That included creating the Intonation Music Festival—the first iteration of the Pitchfork fest—and I was there for that event, as I would be every summer through 2018. That’s where I met Amy. I came up from Virginia, she from New York, and we both crashed in Ryan’s apartment, as did a few other people. She had already been hired but hadn’t yet started. 

There was a buzz of excitement around the fact that she was joining the staff because she was a “get” as hires go, even though she was, I think, only 23 years old. Amy started writing for music pubs of considerable note when she was 19, which was incomprehensible to a late bloomer like me, and I knew her work. “They brought on Amy Phillips, that’s a good sign,” was how I saw it. We talked some that busy weekend and she said she’d email me contact information for all the print magazines she had written for and I was trying to break into, which she did. 

Over the following year, I began to edit part-time for Pitchfork and became more involved in the reviews section. And then in 2007, Ryan, Scott, and Chris offered me a job and I moved to Chicago. My primary duties initially were doing a sizable chunk of the review edits and running the Forkcast section (more on that later). I have a clear memory of walking into the office on my first day. It was on North Ave, a few doors down from the bookstore Quimby’s and above a yoga studio, and it was one large room with a small office at the far end. Many of the desks were hulking steel monstrosities from the 70s. Amy had a creaky old Windows machine on her with an ethernet cable that led to the modem, and that cable, which you had to be careful not to trip over if you were walking along that wall, was stretched to the breaking point. For the next 11 years, in several offices in two cities, every weekday I’d be sitting somewhere near Amy and we’d be discussing, verbally or via messaging, the music news of the day, music in general, and, later, as we became friends, our lives. 

Amy was the loudest typist I’d ever heard, at least until I eventually worked near Jayson Greene. I can remember being in rooms with her where I had my headphones up loud, blasting Autechre, say, and we’d be going back and forth on AIM about whether some new album announcement was worth covering, and I could hear every key of her being slammed over the clatter of the music as her words emerged on my screen. It was fun discussing music with her, in part because our tastes were pretty different. But there was some overlap. I’m thinking back to the two of us chatting on AIM when Jamie xx released “Gosh”—I was working on a track review, and a couple of days earlier the news story announcing the In Colour tracklist had lit up the internet like a goddamn pinball machine (inside joke for Amy only) and we were losing our minds at how good it was. 

Amy is the kind of person for whom working extremely hard is the default—especially in those days, it took effort for her not to overwork herself. It seems possible that, early on, as it was for me, she saw this opportunity at Pitchfork as the chance of the lifetime, and she didn’t want to mess anything up. You have to watch out for that feeling because if you give into it, you can easily forget to take care of yourself. 

Amy created the structures for organizing and processing information that made Pitchfork news what it was. Her ability to get things done right on an extremely tight deadline was awe-inspiring. Over time, and through many changes and growth in her role—much of which happened after I moved on, when she became Managing Editor and then Executive Editor—she became the unshakeable foundation of Pitchfork, the person who always had her shit handled even when there was chaos everywhere else. She did that away from the spotlight. She was late to join twitter and seemed to be immune to the “Hey everyone, look at me!” impulse that drives social media (let it be said that I am not immune to this impulse, so I notice when others feel differently). 

I was always trying to get Amy to write for the site more, because I knew what a talented writer she is, but she was already putting in ridiculous hours running news so it wasn’t really possible. I used to get excited every time I was assigning blurbs for a year-end list, because she contributed to those and nailed her pieces every time—I’d relish the combination of knowledge, insight, and funny-yet-sincere tone I first noticed when she was a freelancer. The Amy Phillips Era of Pitchfork started shortly after Spoon released Gimmie Fiction and the Hold Steady put out Separation Sunday, and it ended last week.

* * * 

I can’t think about News at Pitchfork without remembering Evan Minsker. He first worked for the site as an intern in the Chicago office in 2010. Pitchfork had an improbably lucky run with interns over the years, kids just out of school who would later join the staff, and Evan established the template. From the beginning, he was eager and meticulous. He was deeply committed to DIY culture and passionate about underground music and, like many with these attributes, he loves the democratizing power of independent radio. He loves garage rock and knows a shitload about it. I was so stoked when he started writing his column, Shake Appeal, which covered that scene—I remember thinking when it launched that we got the best guy in the world to cover this stuff, always a good feeling for an editor, and I loved following along, especially because so much of what he wrote about was unfamiliar to me. 

We’re connected by our Midwestern roots. One night I worked late at the Greenpoint office and I had just finished up. He had recently moved to Ann Arbor, which excited me, and he was just clocking on. Feeling a bit of Michigander pride and wanting to welcome him to his new state— it’s possible I’d had a beer or two—I hopped over to Discogs and sent ordered him a vinyl copy of Bob Seger’s out-of-print early masterpiece Mongrel, which it seemed to me every garage-rock obsessive based in Michigan should own. I think he liked the Seger record, but I never got to talk to him about music as much as I wanted to, since he was on the night shift. He essentially ran the site on his own for half the day—it was a tremendous responsibility, and he was very good at it. He also mentored many new staffers. Along with interning, part-time news shifts during off hours was a common entry point for those just starting at Pitchfork, and Evan, a thoughtful and generous leader, worked closely with this cohort, helping them become better. 

* * * 

Another person I met at Intonation, only briefly, was Ryan Dombal. We said hello for the first time at Schreiber’s apartment (as you might imagine, we got used to saying “Schreiber” and “Dombal” at Pitchfork rather than “Ryan”—if it was just “Ryan,” that was usually Schreiber) and shared a cab to a post-show event somewhere. I can remember a brief conversation about whether he preferred Four Tet, whose album he had recently reviewed, or Caribou/Manitoba. (As I recall, he was a Four Tet guy all the way, and that time Caribou was closer to my heart.) I was already a fan of his writing for Pitchfork, both with reviews and in the track reviews section. Like Amy, he was funny and knowledgeable and very good at packing large thoughts into a small space. 

In 2009, Pitchfork hired Dombal and Tom Breihan. For a while, Dombal wrote news and did it well, but he was full of ideas and obviously wished he was doing something else. Around this time, Pitchfork still had a private staff message board where the writers and editors would hang out and post about music and whatever else. At some point I had started a thread there called 5-10-15-20, asking new contributors to post and discuss their favorite music from each of those ages, as a kind of icebreaker. Dombal had the idea to turn the thread idea into a Pitchfork feature, where we’d ask artists about the music in their lives. 

5-10-15-20 caught on and is still going 15 years later, and it’s possibly my favorite interview franchise in the history of the music press, up there with The Wire’s Invisible Jukebox. The best of these offer an intimate look at an artist’s life and tell their story through the music that mattered to them, and, for me, they erase the line between artist and fan. My favorite entry in the series, and what I’ll call one of my favorite interviews with an artist ever, is the one Dombal did with Robert Wyatt. I still read it pretty much annually to be inspired by ways of thinking about life and creativity. Later, he created the Over/Under video series for Pitchfork.tv, which was instantly great and is still running. 

So yeah, ideas pour out of this guy. And if all Dombal did was write terrific pieces and invent franchises, that would be a lot. But I haven’t even talked about his greatest gift, which is editing. Everyone who has been edited by him will tell you this: He cares so much about making a piece as good as it can be and he has some kind of superpower that helps him understand how structure informs impact. I asked him once how he was so good at turning OK pieces into great ones, and what his trick was, and he told me that if a piece starts to get boring, he cuts the boring part. I think he was kidding, but it wasn’t always easy to tell with Dombal because of his low-key demeanor. 

Dombal has great taste in music. If he says something is good and its appeal escapes me, I listen to it over and over to understand what he hears. And if I’m having trouble getting it, I know I’m missing something important (sometimes this gap in understanding was more like a chasm—Lil Peep comes to mind). As with Amy, I always wanted Dombal to write more because he’s so good at it, and he has written some of the best reviews and features to run on Pitchfork. But he was mostly busy with editing, and only took on a piece if he knew he could make it great (once in a while, he’d write about something because he was driven by being deeply curious about a subject and wanting to learn more). That impulse seemed to drive everything he did at Pitchfork—if it’s not going to be great, why bother? Check out this twitter thread from Dombal to see a tiny sample of some of those great things, including the last column I wrote for Pitchfork, which, as usual, he improved immensely.

* * * 

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My partner on the Forkcast blog was Marc Hogan. Through the 2000s, Pitchfork grew mostly based on its news and reviews sections—thanks to Amy it was a one-stop shop for information on all things indie rock and beyond, and the reviews as always were there for people to read and argue about. In the indie world people call this the “blog rock era,” and Forkcast was Pitchfork’s home-grown blog, a place to post quick-hit thoughts on mp3s, YouTubes, new tracks posted to Myspace, and so on. It had its own RSS feed. And while lots of people contributed to the Forkcast, Marc was its primary writer, contracted to be available Monday through Friday to write about whatever came over the transom. 

Looking back now, Marc was one of the first people I became friends with through the internet. We were tethered via AIM, where we’d spend our days looking at what was happening in the blogosphere and discussing which tracks or videos we’d cover. He was such an efficient writer it was scary—I don’t remember the precise nature of his compensation package, but there was an incentive for hitting a certain number of pieces a day, and I can remember  occasions where it would be well over 20 pieces in a single day.

By then, Marc was an established Pitchfork contributor, and I knew him through his reviews. He knew a little about everything, but was passionate about twee-leaning indie rock of a certain kind, and I enjoyed learning from him about that world. Perhaps because our friendship started over AIM—we’ve never lived in the same place—I’ve always enjoyed shooting Marc an occasional text about an old Forkcast favorite, pointing out that I’m currently listening to Evangelicals “Skeleton Man” or Cloud Cult’s “Chemicals Collide.”. In 2008, we had an epic hang when we went to Denmark to cover Roskilde for Pitchfork. We watched My Bloody Valentine play in a tent that was billed as the largest in Europe and then we stumbled to a hill to listen to Neil Young singing “Old Man” as our ears recovered. While we were there, Marc told me about Tumblr, which I’d never heard of.

But the Forkcast days with Marc were just a blip when we talk about the significance of his work. In my mind, he’s without question the most important reporter working in the music space in the past 15 years. I enjoyed geeking out with him and learning what made I’m From Barcelona tick, but his later reporting, often about the abuse of power by individuals and organizations, shifted culture. For a few years after I became editor of Pitchfork, Marc was applying those skills at other music publications and it was killing me. It would be physically painful when Marc would break a story at another outlet. It just seemed just wrong somehow, and when the opportunity presented itself, bringing him back to Pitchfork was the top priority, a missing piece that we knew would make us great. Check out the essay he wrote for Rolling Stone about his P4k tenure. 

* * * 

(Quick aside: Competition is good for magazines. After Puja Patel took over as editor at SPIN prior to her tenure at Pitchfork and changed its focus to in-depth reporting, we were feeling the heat of that shift. I began to worry that they would beat us to scoops and sometimes they did. It hurt, which made us want to do better. And so later, it made so much sense that she’d come to lead Pitchfork. Puja is rightly being celebrated for transforming the site in the past five years—she came into an exceedingly difficult situation and made the site better and I’m not sure anyone else could have pulled it off.)

* * * 

Another brilliant writer and editor whose hire at Pitchfork required effort and strategizing was Jill Mapes. I first read her work at Flavorwire and then on Tumblr, which I was spending time on after Marc introduced me to it. She had that mix of intelligence, humor, and insight that always jumps out at me, a perfect balance of conversational tone and smart commentary. I’d learn something new with each piece. Like Amy, she was doing exceedingly impressive things career-wise when barely out of college. 

We interviewed Jill for a job early on, but it wound up going to someone else. A couple of years later, when we needed someone to edit The Pitch, the site’s blog-like space for shorter features, everybody knew she was perfect for it. Problem was, by that time she had a highly desirable job as an editor at Vulture, and it wasn’t easy for Pitchfork to lure people away from these NY publishing institutions. Historically, given its modest origins, Pitchfork was often a stop on the way to something bigger.

I remember feeling like a man on a mission when taking the subway down to Park Slope to talk to her about the job over lunch, going over in my mind how important it was for me to close the deal. I was thinking of the famous story of when Steve Jobs was trying to hire John Sculley, then CEO of Pepsi, to come work at Apple, and he asked him something like, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” But nothing we could offer at Pitchfork provided such a stark contrast to the work she was presently doing. But, lucky us, she wanted the job and, as with Marc, I felt an enormous sense of accomplishment after bringing her aboard. 

Jill came up reading Pitchfork and came in with a million ideas, many of which were explicitly about expanding the range of the site’s coverage. I loved discussing writers with her, who was doing good work and who we should reach out to, and she had a long list of potential contributors who weren’t anywhere on my radar. She made me pay attention to artists I hadn’t really engaged with before—Julien Baker and Big Thief come to mind—and once in a while I’d edit one of her reviews, and it was exceedingly fun to sit at a table and kick around ideas about how to make a piece even better. I’ve been thinking about that phrase you see on social media when someone leaves a job: “I can’t wait to see what you do next.” I heard that one a few times when I left Pitchfork, and while of course it feels good that people care, my first thought was always, “Appreciate that, but it might turn out to be kinda boring!” It’s a lot of pressure to expect one’s career path to be a never-ending series of rungs stretching upward, and the mindset of the phrase suggests, just a little bit, that our work is who we are. All that said, and knowing something about her particular ambitions, I really am excited to see what Jill does next. 

* * * 

I have the same excitement about the future of Sam Sodomsky. He was another intern who grew to become a cornerstone of Pitchfork. (Come to think of it, we have to put Dombal in this category too—he interned at Pitchfork in the early 2000s while studying journalism at Northwestern, and he tells a funny story about trudging to the post office with a dozen bags of CDs to mail to writers). My memory is that Brandon Stosuy brought Sam in. At some point early on we went to lunch in Greenpoint, and I learned that he also made music, and that he had a deep knowledge of what Pitchfork was all about and thoughts on the art of music criticism. He’d read and absorbed the best of what Pitchfork had published to that point as far as music criticism, and he was poised to extend that legacy with his own work. I admire his writing so much, and every time I read his thoughts on a record, I hear it with his ears and it expands my perspective. We also share favorites. Springsteen was my first exception as a teenager getting into music, and Sam knows more about him than almost anyone, and has a seemingly endless reservoir of thoughts on Springsteen’s art. Once again, if Sam took an artist seriously and I’d only skimmed their work, I knew I had to go back and listen a second time to hear what I might have missed. 

After I left Pitchfork I got to know Sam a bit better from seeing him occasionally, texting when a record review caught my eye, and listening to the two podcasts he co-founded (I learned via the latter just how screamingly funny he can be). I’ve learned how he thinks from the other side of the Google doc when he edited a few of my reviews. And as is true of everyone I’ve mentioned here, he cares about quality and getting it right. I started to miss working with these folks in 2018, but I was comforted by knowing what they were up to on Pitchfork each day, either from seeing their byline or having some awareness of what they were doing behind the scenes. Now they’re gone after so many years of fantastic work, and that’s going to take a while to process.

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For most of my life as a listener and record buyer, I'd not been a Zappa guy. When I was 21 or so a friend made me a tape of Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation, and filled the extra space on the cassette with tunes from One Size Fits All. This friend was deep into the Grateful Dead—earlier, he'd taped me most of Europe ’72, along with Cornell, and he later tracked down tapes of the two Dead shows we'd attended together in Detroit in 1992—and he was deep into Zappa. 

I listened to that tape a fair amount, though I more or less figured that it would be all I needed from the man. At some point a few years ago, I bought the albums from the long-gone cassette and enjoyed them enough to pick up a new Zappa record when I found one for a decent price. From there, my interest in Zappa accelerated, to where by a year ago I owned at least a dozen of his records. Waka/Jawaka was one I hadn't heard, and it came from the early ’70s, around the time as the first clutch of his music I'd heard 30 years ago. 

Since there was no turntable in this apartment, I listened to Waka/Jawaka on my computer. It sounded good, but I wasn't in the headspace where I could fully enjoy it. Two days earlier, my Mom, who had some Alzheimer's-related dementia but still lived independently, called from Michigan to say that she was having trouble breathing. I then called an ambulance and they took her to the hospital. As so often happens when you go to the ER but your condition is stable and you don't have a life-threatening emergency, it look many hours for her to see a doctor. She was on a gurney in a hallway and I was calling the hospital, calling her, trying to figure out what was going on By this point I was used to the challenges of caring for my Mom from far away, but this day was particularly frustrating and scary.

I finally talked to a doctor and then got an update the following day. By then, my Mom had a room. They'd given her a body scan, and discovered fluid in her torso, which had been pressing against her lung. They inserted a tube into her side and drained it, and it turned out to be two liters’ worth. I kept picturing a Coke bottle of that size, having that wedged in your gut, and trying to breathe. She was feeling much better, but they'd be keeping her for a while. 

On this night in Brooklyn, scrolling while listening, I was looking at the Mayo Clinic website and WebMD to see what this fluid could be. From reading and triangulating among various probabilities, one thing the doctor mentioned seemed most likely: cancer. I booked a ticket back to Michigan. 

The next 10 days were chaos: I flew to Detroit and rented a car. When you rent a car these days, they tell you to just take one from a certain section in the lot, your choice. I chose one, put my suitcase in the back, started it up, and saw it didn't have bluetooth. So I turned it off and chose another car instead. But I left my suitcase in the first one, and only realized it when I arrived in Lansing. Enterprise had no idea where my bag was. It set the tone for many stress-induced mishaps and general bad luck to come. 

The worst luck of all, which we discovered the day after I landed, was that my Mom had stage 4 cancer. I was her power of attorney, so I huddled with my siblings and we had to make some decisions. Given her age, her dementia, and her own wishes, surgery and chemo were off the table. So based on what they were telling us, we found a bed in a hospice facility. Given how the cancer had spread, they predicted she would live for between three and eight weeks. Two weeks earlier she seemed perfectly healthy and now her time was very short.

I would make two solo trips to New York and back over the next month, driving through Ontario. Every detail of life was charged with emotion, which made these drives intense. I enjoyed the time alone to think, but I was often feeling worried or afraid and I missed Julie. 

On these drives, to my surprise, I listened to a great deal of Frank Zappa. This desire had something to do with the fact that the values of this music—compositional complexity, odd juxtapositions, instrumental virtuosity, general zaniness—fell outside what I usually listen for, and so his records felt new to me, and not so weighted down by my own history. And there was a lightness in the music, which took me away from the dread I was feeling. Zappa was a misanthrope and his lyrics, with their casual bigotry and desire to shock, were sometimes hard to stomach. But his music is steeped in delight and filled with surprises. During one drive across snowbound Ontario, which began before dawn when I couldn't sleep after crashing in a hotel and decided I was better off getting back on the road, I listened to his 1969 album Hot Rats front to back, and for the first time in a while I felt happy. I played it again.

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For most of January, me, Julie, and my sister Sera, who came out from Portland, stayed in AirBnBs around Lansing. My brother Merrick came in regularly from his home in western Michigan. My Mom’s boyfriend, whom she had only met in past two years, was there every day. We visited my mother and when we needed a break Sera and I explored our old home town, seeing what was still there and the new places that had sprung up. We saw things from our childhood for what we knew would be the last time. And as part of our farewell tour, we hit record shops in the area. We stopped at Flat, Black & Circular, the great East Lansing shop that opened in 1977, which was the first record store I ever visited. I bought used Zappa LPs when I found them, which was often.

My Mom died on the last day of January. It was horrible. But I also felt a great deal of gratitude. I was glad we could be there with her at the end. Maybe I’ll write about it someday. And then it was time to head back to New York.

Through all this turmoil there was one Waka/Jawaka song in particular I couldn't stop listening to, ever since first hearing it that night in Brooklyn. “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal” starts with a slow, loping rhythm infused with twang, like something that might play when a comic character rides down a street in an old Western.

The lyrics describe a surreal scene: a frog walks into your house and dumps a mountain of sand on the carpet, which then sprouts into a forest. We watch the tableau unfold, and the song disassembles—it speeds up, slows down, switches the beat, collapses in on itself. And then the lyrics take a turn:

Just consider this:
You can be scared when it gets too real
You can be scared when it gets too real
But you should be diggin' it
While it's happening
(Yes! You should be diggin' it while it's happening!)
'Cause it just might be a one-shot deal

From there, the song slides into an impossibly light and gliding country-funk groove: Zappa plays acoustic, a rarity for him on record, and Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers solos on pedal steel. 

This solo is so beautiful. Breathtaking, really. Every time I play “One-Shot Deal,” I rewind the pedal steel part at least three or four times. This fanatical desire to spin it back led it to be my most-listened song of 2023, if Spotify Wrapped is correct.

The pedal steel solo conjures images of improbable joy—the first thing that came to me is a rock skipping across water, defying gravity as it zooms over the surface of a lake. As a kid in Michigan, I loved skipping stones, and there were millions of flat ones on beaches—I’d look for one not too thin or light—that fit perfectly into a 10-year-old boy's hand.

I remembered reading the Guinness Book of World Records around that time and seeing the numbers on the stone-skipping record, and it included the breakdown between skips and pitty-pats. I didn't know what the latter meant and there wasn’t an easy way to find out. But now I can Google it, and I just did. I have to say, I was pretty good at skipping stones back in the day. I saw that world record and what I could do, and it didn't seem that far out of reach. 

So yeah, a tough year: But you should be diggin' it while it's happening. Trying. Have to keep remembering the good stuff. Like now, listening to this heavenly tune by Frank Zappa, as the chords suspend the pedal-steel lead, keeping it aloft long enough for it to work its magic. Hearing it again after many dozens of plays this year, I return in my mind to the grace of the rock moving over the water, going further and further from the shore as it slows down from skips to pitty-pats but remains visible, locked in a moment you wish would last forever. 

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