Unbelievably, yet somehow, another month has come and gone. For everyone in the Northeast, I’m sure this February has felt interminable. And, because of that, I won’t mention the weather in Austin.

It’s been a—not strange, but different month for me. This is the first time I haven’t had a full time job since I was 22. I’ve been working full-time in an “office” job since April of 2008 when I started as a paralegal at a boutique real estate law firm on the corner of Broadway and 21st Street.

I stepped away from my job at Bon Appetit to explore new paths for my career. And so far I’m doing that. I’ve dipped my toe into consulting and I’ve enjoyed how varied that makes my weeks feel—but it’s just different.

A few other updates from this month:

• I finished the first draft of my latest novel manuscript. Now it’s time for revisions. We’ll see how those go and then maybe my lotto ticket will finally come in!

• I’ve been taking tennis lessons. What? I’m 40-year-old HENRY, what else do you expect? Been spending a lot of time practicing my shots against a wall. And let me tell you one thing: I suck.

• Speaking of tennis, my wife and I took in the ATX Open. Seeing any kind of professional tennis being played is a treat.

• Practiced baking by picking out and making recipes from Aleksandra Crapanzano’s Gateau (2022). Didn’t mess up too badly!

• Saw Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon (2025) in the middle of the day at Austin Film Society, the theater he started with Robert Rodriguez. Good experience.

• Watched lots of movies when my wife went out of town for President’s Day Weekend. The lineup: Prisoners (2013), The Brutalist (2024), Wild Strawberries (1957), Downhill Racer (1969), Eddington (2025), a rewatch of Decision to Leave (2022), La Strada (1954), a rewatch of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), a rewatch of Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Drowning Pool (1975).

• Performed live improv for the third time since I started taking classes again about a year ago. Wasn’t terrible.

I also got a chance to hear from a lot of people about these playlist posts I do. It’s funny, you know, people often reach out to me or come up to me on the street to talk about these. Some say things like, “Hey man, I love what you’re doing with the playlists.” Others are more like, “But how do you do it month after month?” And still others say things like, “These things are great—they got me through college and, for me, a college-level amount of coursework is tough so I owe my B.A. to you buddy, cheers!”

As you can see, that’s pretty high praise. And here’s really the only advice I can give with these playlists: Only pick the good songs and never pick the bad songs.

That’s my trick. I only pick the good songs—I never pick the bad songs. It really comes down to that. So many people pick the bad songs for their playlists and don’t pick the good songs. And, really, the key comes down to picking the good songs and not the bad songs.

So, here’s a playlist of good songs for you, if you like that kind of thing. And if you ever want any guidance into what is a good song versus a bad song, I’m totally happy to help you.

Until next time.

“Heart and Soul” by T’Pau

Here’s a success story for you. I wasn’t familiar with the work of T’Pau until I asked my college roommate to curate a playlist for our wedding after party. What was on said playlist? “Heart and Soul” by T’Pau. It immediately became a…oh, what do they call it? Starts with a b? Oh, yes, a “banger” that I love to play very loud in my home. Recently I was in the store Room Service here in Austin perusing the vinyl while my wife looked at furniture. She found a lovely bar cart while I found T’Pau’s Bridge of Spies (1987) on vinyl for $9.99. Lead track? “Heart and Soul.”

“Could’ve Been Me” by John Martyn

Speaking of artists I never had a clue about but really should’ve: John Martyn. One of my best friends from college put a John Martyn song on the cocktail hour playlist at our wedding and it quickly became a favorite track of mine. Well, at Room Service I not only found a vinyl copy of a T’Pau album, but I also found a copy of John Martyn’s 1982 album Well Kept Secret. Lead track on that one? Yep, “Could’ve Been Me.” Let me tell you: This song is 100% sick. And, again, this is why you ask your friends to curate playlists for you. You never have any idea what they are going to turn you onto.

“Nobody Told Me” by John Lennon

One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing a song I’d never heard by a legendary artist I thought I knew well. The best was when this happened on the radio. I heard “Nobody Told Me” probably on our 1998 Pathfinder when my mom was driving me to basketball practice or something during the winter of 2000-2001. I was like, “This is fucking John Lennon?” And then my mom asked me why I was cursing.

This has always been one of my favorite Lennon songs—solo or in The Beatles. Even though it was released posthumously in 1984 on Milk and Honey, it is still technically unfinished. What hurts about this song is that, even though it is unfinished, it shows that Lennon had regained his fastball right before he was murdered. A classic example of how Lennon (and McCartney) could write lyrics that seemingly mean nothing but somehow manage to add up to something because of their skill with melody and arrangement.

As I’ve learned, this is a typically “horizontal” Lennon composition—its melody barely moves up or down, it only moves forward, urged on by rhythm and emotion. And, here, the emotion is all in the way Lennon manages to hit notes of pain, bewilderment, and wisdom in the chorus when he sings “Nobody told me there’d be days like these.” It’s a rare skill and he was perhaps one of, if not the master, at nailing the nuance of human emotion in his vocals, whether he knew it or not.

“On The Other Side Of Time” by Shintaro Sakamoto

Read about Shintaro Sakamoto’s album Yoo-hoo (2026) on Allmusic’s Editor’s Choice list and immediately saved the record as one to listen to. I turned it on one Saturday while I was baking and had that great feeling when you put on a record you know nothing about and are immediately like, “Yes, this thing is SICK and exactly the kind of record I was looking for.” This is just immaculately produced music—pop, rock, light funk, I don’t even know what you want to call it but it rules. Had no idea Sakmoto was a legend but maybe you did. Give this album a listen and you won’t be disappointed.

“My Girl Has Gone” by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles

Heard this Smokey song on the car radio one evening. There is an absolute moment of nirvana at about five to seven seconds into this track when the drums roll in and the first notes on the piano are played. The chorus is excellent but the verses, and the way Smokey sings them, on this song are truly exquisite.

“I’ll Be There For You/You’re All I Need To Get By” Mary J. Blige and Method Man

This one came on at my training gym one Friday afternoon as I was about to do some neutral grip pull ups. Now, those are challenging on most days but are even harder when you are fixated on a track like this and trying to figure out what the hell year it’s from and yes, of course it’s Method Man rapping but is that Mary J. Blige singing? And what’s the song they are sampling? Built on a sample of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s 1968 song “You’re All I Need to Get By” this is a sterling example of a peak-era Bad Boy production.

“Chasing Shadows” Santigold

OK, so I don’t really know anything about Santigold except that she and Julian Casablancas collaborated with Pharrell on “My Drive Thru” back in 2008 and I didn’t really care about it because I was just waiting for The Strokes to release their follow up 2006’s First Impressions of Earth. (I’d have to wait another three years.) But I heard this one in my training gym and thought it was good! I was like, “OK, Santigold! I see you! This is a bop!” And then my trainer was like, “Who are you talking to? Are you on your second or third set of this circuit?”

“Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes

Whoever was picking playlists or curating “radios” on Spotify at my training gym was killing it this month because I also heard this one there too. I know nothing about Kim Carnes and had no idea that this song was a number one hit on the Billboard 100 in 1981. This is actually a cover. Jackie DeShannon (of “Put a Little Love In Your Heart” fame) wrote and recorded it in 1974 as a much more early-70’s country-pop style track. The Kim Carnes version is miles better. It’s just a great turn of the 1980s production and Carnes’s vocal channels Rod Stewart at his very best: smoky, raspy, rough, and a little longing. Try to keep your heart from swooning just a little bit when you put this one on.

“Rose Garden” by Lynn Anderson

Heard this one on the car radio. Never had even the faintest idea that it existed. But this country pop gem hit number three on the Billboard 100 in February of 1971. It’s a great recording that sounds like it could have been produced from anywhere between 1965 and 1973. The opening lines? “I beg your pardon / I never promised you a rose garden.” Starting a song with the line “I beg your pardon” is a genius-level move. An absolute blast of a song.

“Some People Never Know” by Wings

It’s getting hard, you know? It’s really getting hard. I keep telling you—time and time again—that Paul McCartney has given more to us than we’ll ever know and you REFUSE TO EVEN LISTEN!!

This one is from the much-maligned Wild Life (1972). I’ve written about Wild Life before, mainly because Stephen Thomas Erlewine’s review of it on Allmusic may be the best and most succinct music criticism ever written.

Naturally, I love the entire record. But any normal person would probably identify this as one of the two “good” songs on the record—the other being “Tomorrow.”

“Some People Never Know” is a classic McCartney composition from 1968-1973. This song really could have fit on The White Album (1968), especially based on the sound of the production. I love the way this song sounds, I love the way Paul’s voice is, and I love the way he is slowly figuring out how to use Linda’s voice and to incorporate it into the overall sound he’s going for in his post-Beatles work. The track is also notable for an instrumental segment where Paul’s vocal from an earlier take remains buried in the mix, which creates a cool effect. And I love the prolonged outro. This is an excellent song and it is absolutely buried in this genius’s catalog.

As of this writing, I haven’t yet watched the new Paul documentary Man on the Run, which comes out on February 27th. And even though I probably know everything that’s going to be in it since I’ve read over 1,400 pages about his life and work from 1969-1980, I’m still going to giddily devour it and possibly watch it multiple times over the next week.

“Find Yourself” by The Meters

I can’t even remember where I heard this one out in the world in February, but I’m glad I did. The Meters are one of those bands I know a bunch of songs by but have never spent a ton of time with their albums. This is just incredibly smooth shit—just an undeniable groove. The vocals also have that kind of compressed sound that you’d find on albums during the late sixties and up through the mid-to-late seventies. I’m thinking about the way “weaker” singers like Jesse Ed Davis or Ron Wood had their vocals treated on some of their albums. Anyway, great track.

“Don’t Stop” by Fleetwood Mac

You ever have one of those nights when, across multiple dreams, you re-encounter people you’ve loved and been in relationships with in the past and it still feels as if you’re in the middle of those moments in time even though you are now married and in an incredibly happy and loving relationship and couldn’t imagine life ever being another way, and yet the visceral feeling of being in the moment, in your dreams, with those people you loved makes you want to be in that version of life where things worked out with them because that love you felt at that time had to be true and now this dream you’re having is telling you that it was true all along it was just that the waking reality couldn’t make it manifest because of all the reasons that reality is reality and time is time and then you wake up and your heart hurts in a way that makes you feel like you just smoked a pack of cigarettes and you turn and look at your wife sleeping in bed and don’t really know how to explain of all the things that just happened in your dreams—things that suggest something deeper about your desires and all of the the impossible wants and experiences that happened in your life before you met her?

Yeah—no—me neither. But no song makes me feel like a heartbroken and always in love early-twentysomething than this immaculate piece of pop. Good job, Lindsay. Somehow you figured it out.

“Volunteers” by Jefferson Airplane

To put this in the parlance of Bill Simmons, America is feeling very “Volunteers-ish” right now. Wonder why that is. Gotta be a reason. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

The AllMusic review of the Volunteers (1969) album is poignant: “Although the political bent of the lyrics may seem dated to some, listening to Volunteers is like opening a time capsule on the end of an era, a time when young people still believed music had the power to change the world.” Just take out “music” and replace it with “anything” and I think that sums things up.

“Fall Apart” by Juliana Hatfield

I’m gonna take the L on not knowing who Juliana Hatfield was until very recently. Her end of 2025 album, Lightning Might Strike makes me incredibly sad. Not because the music makes me sad, but because this kind of well-written, well-played, well-produced rock record would’ve been a bigger deal maybe even seven years ago. But now: I mean I guess some people cared about it, but I didn’t hear a ton about it—not that I’m plugged into any kind of music discourse anymore. Lightning Might Strike gives me the kind of joy that a late-period Elliot Smith album gives me: It’s just a complete and satisfying experience from start to finish.

“It’s Only Life” by The Feelies

This one came on while I was in Room Service looking at records. I’m always so bad at identifying The Feelies when they come on and they always surprise me by how much they sound like Lou Reed on Coney Island Baby (1975).

“Such a Shame” by Talk Talk

Sometimes I’ll hear a Talk Talk song out in the world, like I did for this one, and just think, “Jesus Christ, were they the best band that ever existed?” I’d never really thought about this song before, but it’s from their 1984 album It’s My Life on which they basically perfected synth-pop. But even here, they are already pushing toward the outer boundaries of their music, boundaries they would continue to break across their next three albums: The Colour of Spring (1986), Spirit of Eden (1988), and Laughing Stock (1991). Music doesn’t get more expressive or moving than what Talk Talk is doing on Spirit of Eden and you can already see them starting to get to that place on “Such a Shame,” which managed to get to number 1 in Italy and Switzerland while only reaching 49 on the U.S. singles chart.

“Suspended in Gaffa” by Kate Bush

Another song by an 80s pop pioneer. Is there anything more delightful than realizing a store or restaurant is playing Kate Bush—especially a Kate Bush song that you haven’t really spent a lot of time listening to closely? I don’t think so.

Like so much of her work, this is an astounding production that is both dazzling and challenging but also undeniably catchy. There’s probably even more to this song than I realize and I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life analyzing and poring over it.

“Där huden är tunnast” by Dina Ögon

Read about this one on Allmusic’s Editor’s Choice list for February. I know nothing about Dina Ögon but their 2026 album Människobarn is full of slick, expertly produced stuff like this. This song sounds great and has some incredible changes happening within it. Very glad I gave this a chance.

“You and I” by Jakob

Dina Ögon is Swedish and Jakob (Jakob Ogawa) is Norwegian. That’s really the only connection I could make segueing these two songs into each other. I heard this Jakob song on the radio one night when I was driving and thought it fit the mood really well and didn’t want to forget it.

“I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” by Prince

One of my friends moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut back in 2018/2019. And every once and awhile the rest of my friends and I would all meet up there to spend the night.

One time when we were staying over—after his wife and daughter had gone to bed—we all sat in the basement staying up late watching movies and music documentaries. My friend fucking loves music documentaries. Can’t get enough of them.

It must have been about midnight or one in the morning when we turned on the Sign o’ the Times (1987) movie, which is basically a recorded live performance of Prince and his band at his Paisley Park Studios.

The Sign o’ the Times movie features some of the best stage showmanship I have ever seen. It’s better than the stuff in Purple Rain (1984) by far. Because the range of songs on the Sign o’ the Times is so much wilder than even what’s on Purple Rain.

“I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” is maybe my favorite song on Sign o’ the Times and it was playing one Friday when I was working out at my training gym. I couldn’t refrain from singing along and bopping my head while I once again prepared to do three sets of neutral grip pull ups. Upon that listen, it occurred to me that Prince’s guitar solo basically gave Slash the idea for his guitar tone on the Use Your Illusion albums several years later—particularly on “November Rain.” Trust me, I think there’s something there.

“Promises I’ve Made” by Emitt Rhodes

During one of my trips to Room Service with my wife this month, I managed to find Emitt Rhodes’s self-titled 1970 album on vinyl for $6.99! Do you understand how much of a steal that is? I won’t even tell you what they are charging $25+ for on vinyl there and yet this absolute fucking legendary gem of an album was sitting there for $6.99! Unbelievable.

Anyway, back in the winter of 2007-2008 I spent most of my time online looking for my first full-time job after college and scouring blogs to download complete albums that were hidden gems or under-discussed masterpieces. This was in the glory days of .RAR files being available across the vast galaxy of music blogs that were out there. My college roommate and I would try to “out find” each other in our discoveries. The album and artist that best represents this period of my life is Emitt Rhodes’s self-titled 1970 album.

In the years since, Emitt Rhodes went from a little-known cult figure to a somewhat known cult figure. There was a documentary about him made in 2009 and in 2016 he came out of the wilderness to release his first album since 1973, Rainbow Ends. He died in 2020.

His career was a series of false starts and what-ifs and bad timings. When you listen to his music, you immediately see this and understand that making art is hard—no matter how good something is, sometimes the luck and the market doesn’t add up. Because Rhodes was writing and recording songs that were on the level of the late-period Beatles, except that he was releasing them in 1969 and 1970 when the The Beatles were breaking up and the world and the music industry was moving on.

Part of why I love “Promises I’ve Made” is because it truly does sound like a Paul McCartney song. Everything about it is brilliant: from the writing to the singing to the playing and to the recording.

But I mainly love it because it sounds so desperate, so full of pain. The singer has promised himself so many times he wouldn’t think of “you,” wouldn’t dream of “you” but finds that awful hard to do. Finally, the synthesizer that quietly ungirds the entire song becomes a storm that overtakes everything in the end.

Hope everyone is doing well, staying warm, and especially staying safe wherever you are. Part of me can’t believe that the first month of the year is already over while another part of me can’t actually comprehend how much has happened in the world in January. On that latter point, I’m not in a position to speak nor do I have words for what I’m feeling right now. But I’m paying attention to where and how I can help.

Personally, it’s been a busy month full of change. Just a few things here:

• I moved on from my job at Bon Appetit and Epicurious after four years. I had a great time there, learned a lot, and most importantly got to meet and work with so many excellent people. Don’t let any coverage of CN politics or the larger business decisions get things twisted: there are amazing and smart people doing good work there every day and I was so privileged to get to spend time with so many of them.

• I’ve been talking to lots of people around media, digital marketplaces, product marketing, and otherwise to try and figure out where I should be spending my time next in order to round out my skills and keep growing as a professional. This has been awesome.

• I’m about 35-40 pages away from finishing my current novel manuscript. If I’m good, I’ll be done in a week.

• I started a new Substack to split out my thinking on the information space from all the random shit I like to write about here.

• I read 5 books: The Novelist by Jordan Castro, In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, As Time Goes By by Derek Taylor, Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, and John & Paul: A Love Story in Song by Ian Leslie. Up now: The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Bad Company by Megan Greenwell. I do like 10-15 pages of fiction and then 10-15 of non-fiction every night before bed.

• Saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) in a theatre at Austin Film Society and it was a glorious experience.

• And last but not least, I went to Miami for several days to see one of my best friends from college get married. I got two swims in and was so happy to see my friend get married to another truly wonderful person.

This visit to Miami got me thinking about the past in a few different ways. My friend (the one who was getting married) and I were roommates for four years in Williamsburg during that heady period of 2008-2012. For a stretch of time, our place was kind of the place where everything happened among our friend group and the various concentric circles our friends brought into the mix. We had GREAT parties and I’m not overselling that or being hyperbolic.

But as time has gone on, I’ve realized that what we were able to create in our apartment was a sense of home for people who were about 19-25 years old and maybe living with four other people in the McKibbin Lofts in Bushwick or off Bedford Avenue and working on food trucks or in coffee shops during the day and making music at night. And I’d sort of taken that for granted. We had a space that belonged to just the two of us, which was rare then, and we had plenty of room. It was a place you could come and hang out and have a BBQ or make dinner or sit on the couch and listen to records and watch Mad Men or the NBA (because of course I paid for cable and not Wi-Fi) and feel the ground settle under your feet for a moment. And I think that maybe meant something more than I’d ever understood.

I’ve been thinking about my friend’s wedding and the past while reading Ian Leslie’s book about John and Paul’s friendship, which has gotten me been thinking about the nature of friendship more broadly. At the end of Leslie’s book, he was able to articulate something I’ve struggled for a long time to articulate: “[W]e have trouble thinking about intimate male friendships. We’re used to the idea of men being good friends, or fierce competitors, or sometimes both. We’re used to the idea, these days, of homosexual love. We’re thrown by a relationship that isn’t sexual but is romantic: a friendship that may have an erotic or physical component to it, but doesn’t involve sex. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes describes how a pair of friends can be ‘lost in amazement of love and friendship and intimacy’ yet unable to ‘explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of sexual intercourse, but of something else, which the soul of either evidently desires but cannot identify.”

Elsewhere in the book, Leslie says the following, “Long relationships often run into problems because a couple know each other too well—or think they do. In the first few years, partners build a mental model of the other person that is so accurate, so sensitive, it can feel as if they’re one mind in two bodies. But over the years, as those individuals change and develop, the model doesn’t get updated. The partners start to misread each other, generating puzzlement, frustration, and resentment, until before they know it they are estranged.”

I’ve written before about my bafflement and confusion with the strange mystery of friendship and used the story of the Beatles to map that all onto. But in his book, Leslie does it far better than I ever could. Because what I’ve struggled to accept is that I’ve been so lucky to have so many of my friendships fall into the kind of intimate relationship that Leslie and Plato describe—and I worry about my inability, or the lack of care I have, to refresh those “models” of the friendship in my mind. To make sure they are updated in order to prevent any kind of estrangement.

And that’s something I want to work on.

In any case, this is a January playlist if you like that kind of thing. I certainly do and I still like writing them.

Until next time.

“Seven Years” by The Impressions

Earlier this month, I was at my friend’s wedding in Miami listening to “The Makings of You” from Curtis Mayfield’s 1969 solo debut, Curtis, and talking about Curtis Mayfield with two of my closest friends. One of my friends was the groom and the other was going to be giving a joint speech with me at the reception. We talked about Mayfield, how great he was, and how ahead of his time he was. I asked my friends if they knew “Seven Years” by The Impressions, Mayfield’s band before he went solo. They shook their heads. These two know more about music than I’ll ever know, so this was a rare instance I knew a song they didn’t.

“The Makings of You” is a stately and rich song. Meanwhile, “Seven Years” absolutely fucking rips.

I was blessed to have this song greet me one evening when I turned the radio on in my car. There is a piano break in this song that makes me want to evaporate and live purely as a soul among the light of the universe. If you’ve ever pictured yourself in a movie about returning home and wondered what song should be playing in the scene when your car tentatively turns and then creeps along that old lane you thought you’d never see again, I’d recommend setting that to this song in your mind.

“Red Lady” by Phil Cordell

Speaking of weddings, my friend who was getting married in Miami put this song on the cocktail hour playlist I asked him to curate. Discovering a song like this is why you ask your friends to curate and make playlists for you on your wedding day. I wasn’t lying when I said this guy knows more about music than I’ll ever hope to. This is a phenomenal song with a slide guitar that sounds like a sitar. Right at home in the George Harrison Wonderwall Music (1968) period.

“Draggin’” by Hannah Cohen

There was a time where I devoured every year end music list. Like I actively looked forward to them. Now, I just wonder when Spotify Wrapped will go live. O, how the mighty have fallen. But I stumbled upon Amanda Petrusich’s best albums of the year piece for The New Yorker and read about Hannah Cohen’s 2025 record Earthstar Mountain. Turns out, the album is a great little production that is right in my wheelhouse. This song in particular has that skronky, thumping sound—full of wonderful ascending and descending guitar and bass lines—that any of the Beatles and their close cohort were capable of creating from 1968-1971.

“No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature” by The Guess Who

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Lester Bangs in Almost Famous (2000) is perhaps the performance in any movie that had the most profound effect on my life. First of all, it introduced me to Lester Bangs as a person, which then led me to find books of his writing, which then led me to think I could and should be writing like him, which then led me to start handing in unassigned essays on Captain Beefheart to my English teachers after class and asking if they had any writing assignments covering live music they could give me. One teacher told me to go watch his son play jazz Port Jazz in Port Jefferson and write like 1,200 words about it, which I did.

But what Hoffman’s performance as Bangs taught me more than anything was that you could have an opinion about an artist that you didn’t actually believe but could deliver it with fervor as a means to make a greater point about how to live life and appreciate art. When Lester Bangs in Almost Famous says “Ah, Jim Morrison is a drunken buffoon posing as a poet. Give me the Guess Who! They have the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic,” I heard those words and let them become a sort of animating principle for my life.

This song isn’t a good song. It’s some late sixties rocky, schlocky stuff. But I love it. The actual Lester Bangs probably didn’t actually like The Guess Who even if he said he did. I don’t take him for an “American Woman” guy. But he was making a point about living and creating work that was true to who you are—even if you are a drunken buffoon.

“Forever Young” by Alphaville

You see Marty Supreme (2025)? Did you enjoy it? I didn’t really. It’s an impressive production and wonderful to look at—but as a movie I didn’t find it that compelling. It felt like knockoff Scorsese and I thought the ideas it has don’t really hold up under much scrutiny. But that’s no great sin. You may like your “young shithead finding his way” movies in a different flavor than I do. Give me Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) any day of the week. Plus, come on you’re going to try to do the Look Who’s Talking (1989) conception bit? No, just leave that to the pros.

But I can’t lie to you. When “Forever Young” hit in the theater, I felt something. And I’ve been listening to this song pretty much nonstop ever since. Even though I hate how vaguely melancholy this song makes me feel, I also can’t stop wiggling the tooth. This may be the best match of vibe and title of any song I can currently think of as I’m writing this.

“I’m Not Ready for the Change” Nation of Language

I read about Nation of Language’s 2025 album Dance Called Memory in Allmusic’s Editor’s Picks section. Josh Safdie could’ve put this one in his movie too. Fits nicely right beside Alphaville.

“Talent Show” by The Replacements

There’s really nothing like a Paul Westerberg song. Well, I mean, technically there is. Because he was influenced by a lot of different songwriters and plenty of songwriters have been influenced by him. But what I mean, his songs just always hit the spot in the best ways. This is the opening track from 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul and kind of sets the tone for the rest of the album, which was probably The Replacements’s moodiest record to date. Bonus points on this one for having an outro that features the refrain from an unreleased track called “Portland,” which I’ve written about previously.

“Ecstasy (Apple of My Eye)” by Strawberry Switchblade

As you may know, I’ve gotten into Italo disco in recent years. I’m no expert by any means, but I’ll certainly buy a double album anthology on vinyl. Because of this, it was quite a joy to arrive home one night to find my wife listening to an Italo disco playlist she found on Spotify. I’m not sure if Strawberry Switchblade, who are Scottish, actually qualify as Italo disco but they were served to us by Spotify and I certainly ate this shit right up.

“You Can Get It If You Really Want” by Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy Cliff passed away at the end of November last year. I didn’t really mourn it at the moment as I’ve become sort of numb to famous musicians or celebrities passing away. Not that I don’t feel sad or anything, it’s just that I don’t feel the need to text anyone about it or kind of wallow in the loss in the same way as I might once have when I was younger. Probably because I’m 40 and I’ve started to lose people directly in my life who shaped me as a person as opposed to artists or performers who shaped my taste and the pieces of culture that have strung together the moments of my life.

But I loved Jimmy Cliff just like everyone else. I first learned who he was in 2006 when I heard the Walkman’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s cover of “Many Rivers to Cross” from his notorious 1974 album Pussy Cats. That Walkmen version became kind of an anthem for one of my childhood friends and I. While the Nilsson version (and Pussy Cats as an album) became a sort of iconic work of art my college roommate and I obsessed over.

In my twenties and thirties, I got more into Jimmy Cliff’s actual discography—namely when I worked at Kirkus Book Reviews and would have to fact check about 20 book reviews a day. I used to listen to an entire band or singer’s discography over the course of a day or two while I fact-checked reviews that self-published authors paid for so they could have some kind of marketing blurb for their Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight knockoffs. This was 2012-2015 after all.

I eventually got a copy of Struggling Man (1973) on vinyl and it remains one of the prized possessions in my collection. Always a good record to put on.

Earlier this month, my wife and I were doing volunteer work at a church and someone put Jimmy Cliff on the stereo. This was one of the songs that came on.

“Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing” by Stevie Wonder

I heard this one during a brunch I had with my wife’s family around the holidays. It had been a long time since I’d heard it. As the song hit everyone’s ears around the table, I saw shoulders begin to shimmy. “This was the song Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence danced to in Silver Linings Playbook (2010)” I said unprompted. Everyone nodded and once again realized that I’m insane. But this song is also a little insane. It’s so smooth and polished, but Stevie is really going for it vocally on this one. If you haven’t listened to it in awhile, take a stroll down memory lane.

“I Need A Dollar” by Aloe Blacc

I don’t have the receipts handy, but I feel as though I’ve seen, in spots, people trying to reclaim the HBO show How To Make It In America, the Bryan Greenberg and Lake Bell vehicle from 2010-2011 about two friends trying to make it in the fashion business in New York City. Now, I just happen to be one of the world’s foremost experts on this show. When I lived in Williamsburg, my roommate and I watched this show every Sunday night. My roommate once described it, accurately, as “room temperature air blowing on your face.”

Ever heard of Rasta Monsta? Well, Luis Guzman’s character tried to sell it on the show. This show stunk and if I hear otherwise, I will…well, I don’t know what I’ll do but as the primary scholar on it, I believe there’s something I should be able to do.

In any case, “I Need A Dollar” by Aloe Blacc was the theme song for the show and, look, I will admit that when it hit every week I got fired up to see what Ben Epstein and Cam Calderon were going to get up to that week.

I heard this one recently and it brought me down memory lane.

OK, so maybe I liked the show.

“Build Me Up Buttercup” by The Foundations

This is possibly one of the best pop compositions of all time. A completely euphoric piece of work no matter how many times you hear it. Paul McCartney even sang it when he realized the Beatles were actually breaking up and there was no way for him to recapture the past. When that piano and organ combo hits at 8 seconds in, my heart explodes every single time.

“In Your Ocean” by Iron & Wine

“Hey, man—you like Iron & Wine?” This was a question often asked to me years ago by friends and acquaintances. That’s because I seemed like a guy who’d most certainly like Iron & Wine but who in reality could not have been bothered to care. Always got him and Bonnie “Prince” Billy/Will Oldham mixed up. Probably a bunch of stuff in that whole vicinity I missed out on.

But I heard this song off Iron & Wine’s upcoming 2026 album Hen’s Teeth on the radio this month and enjoyed it very much. Maybe you will too.

“Treat Me Like A Saturday Night” by Joe Ely

Joe Ely passed away in December. You may not be familiar with him. I certainly wasn’t until my father-in-law told me about him. My father-in-law is a big Joe Ely fan. You know who else was? Joe Strummer. Yeah, Joe Strummer of….THE CLASH. I’m still only scratching the surface.

To scratch deeper than the surface, you often need some help. When I was in Miami for my friend’s wedding we had dinner with another one of my best friends from college—who I actually really became close with during my early years in New York. He moved down to Miami in 2011. I’m pretty sure it was on New Year’s Day because I remember, I think, saying goodbye to him and his wife at the time at my apartment while they were packing up a van to either drive down there or getting in a cab to an airport to fly down there. See, already my memory has mixed things up.

Anyway, he’s been living in New York for 15 years and I’ve written about him and his music before. He’s another person who’s forgotten more about music than I’ll ever know. After dinner, he drove my wife and I back to the place we were staying in Mid-Beach. We talked about Joe Ely in the car and he played some Joe Ely tunes. He texted me a link to this one after he dropped us off. It’s a good one.

“Come On Up To The House” by Tom Waits

Historically, I haven’t been a Tom Waits fan. Something about him seemed so put on and disingenuous. But that was probably just my ignorance and habit to find a position on an artist or work of art and dig my heels in.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about Tom Waits recently. Mainly because I rewatched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2019) and realized that his performance as the prospector in “All Gold Canyon” is the stuff of genius. Unfortunately for my wife, I’ve been walking around our place saying, “I know you’re in there, Mr. Pocket” far too often over the past few months.

When we were visiting my family for the holidays, we decided to put on Wake Up Dead Man (2025) one night to watch with my mother. My wife and I both liked it a lot. Mainly, it made me want someone to cast Josh Brolin as Captain Ahab in a new adaptation of Moby Dick (1851) immediately. But I was pleasantly surprised to hear this wonderful song by Tom Waits at the end of the movie. It’s probably one that people love, but I’d never heard it before. I find it incredibly moving in an abstract way. It makes we want to write something spiritual, something using the tropes and cadences and language of church hymns. But that’s just me.

One day recently, after finishing the grocery shopping, I got in my car and his version, which is the original, of “Way Down In the Hole” was on the radio. I’d never heard this song in the wild. The only time I’d ever heard it was over the opening credits of Season 2 of The Wire.

It seems like the universe is telling me something.

“A Passing Feeling” by Elliott Smith

Every now and then, like I’m sure a lot of you, I think about Elliot Smith. For some reason recently I decided that I wanted to listen to From a Basement on the Hill (2004), Smith’s posthumous, final album. As I was listening to it, I’d periodically let out a cry of, “Fucking shit!” This caused my wife to ask me what was wrong. To which I replied, “Oh, I just forgot this song was also on this album. It’s so fucking good.”

I used to listen to this song all the time, but I’d forgotten it was on From a Basement on the Hill and where exactly it was sequenced on the record. It’s the 9th song out of 15 and probably the standout on the second half of the album. Smith wasn’t shy about how much the Beatles influenced his work and this is a song that would’ve fit on The White Album (1968).

This album will always remind me of the beginning of my freshman year of college. It hadn’t been released yet, but that was when I found out Elliott Smith had killed himself. I remember distinctly being in the dorm room of a girl who was a close friend of mine during the first half of my college career. She was one of those people who loved bands. I remember how much she loved the Fruit Bats and the Shins and, I think, Death Cab for Cutie also. I remember the excitement of being in a girl’s dorm room and us sitting on the bed thinking about Elliott Smith having stabbed himself in the heart. We barely knew each other at that point but we’d stay friends up until our mid-twenties. I don’t know what exactly she was thinking at that moment. And I couldn’t tell you what I was. But it probably had something to do with how I’d listen to Figure 8 (2000) or XO (1998) on burned CDs on a stereo system when I worked alone in the warehouse at my father’s veterinary supply business on Saturday mornings during my senior year of high school. And I’ll never forget what it was like to listen to Elliott Smith amid the dim overhead light and the dust.

“Surrender” by Suicide

My college roommate was the first person who ever talked about Suicide to me. And over the years, he’d sing their praises to me. But it was one of those situations that happens with friends where they are really into something and tell you about it but you kind of only hear “wah, wah, wah wah” like they’re an adult in Peanuts. Don’t know why this happens. I guess sometimes the wavelengths just don’t register. This song is sick and I think I’m starting to understand what my college roommate was saying all those years ago.

“I Can’t Fall” by This Is Lorelai

I follow the rock critic Steven Hyden on Substack now. And recently he predicted that This Is Lorelai will be the Geese of 2026. Mainly he said that the lead singer, Nate Amos, will have a big year just like Cameron Winter did. I’ve long given up on trying to predict or really follow the trajectory of any musical artists, but I’m glad that I heard about This Is Lorelai from Mr. Hyden. Their 2025 album Holo Boy was a rewarding listen from start to finish. And it was only 26 minutes! That’s what I’m talking about!

“Flutes of Chi” by Ween

One evening this month, another wonderful surprise greeted me upon my return to our home: my wife was cleaning up the house and listening to Ween. It was The Mollusk (1996), which is the album I play the most. I hope you one day know the joy of coming home to your partner listening to Ween without any prompting. We spent the rest of the night listening to Ween records and I forgot how good White Pepper (2000) is. And this is maybe my favorite song off that fantastic album.

“Punk Rocky” by A$AP Rocky

Part of the programming for my friend’s wedding weekend in Miami was a welcome drinks gathering on Key Biscayne. The welcome drinks then led to a night around mainland Miami. Because most of us already are or on the way to turning 40, the fun and dancing ended at about 11:30 PM. That meant when my wife and I returned to our hotel room, Saturday Night Live was still on. We watched a few sketches and then saw A$AP Rocky perform this song from his new album. I honestly know very little about A$AP Rocky so you might think this one is lame—but I think its a pretty neat song with a great sense of atmosphere. But what the hell do I know?

“Love Song” by Simple Minds

I’m lucky because the local radio stations play a lot of Simple Minds. And because of this, I’ve come to learn something very important: Simple Minds are absolutely fucking sick. Maybe you already knew this. Perhaps you’ve even seen them perform live. But, for most of my life, I have not known that Simple Minds are absolutely sick. They’re like if Talk Talk had leaned into their early, borderline U2 inclinations instead of deciding to create uncategorizable cosmic jazz pop with the studio lights turned off. This song is truly transcendent. Absolutely fantastic stuff that transitions nicely into the next selection this month.

“Listen” by Tears for Fears

Sometimes I sit and think about Tears for Fears and the fact that their first album was Songs from the Big Chair (1986). They came out with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and “Shout,” and “Head Over Heels” all on their debut. Truly one of the great achievements in pop history.

I’ll go long stretches of time not listening to Songs from the Big Chair and then all of a sudden I’ll crave it so badly and every time I crave it and listen to it, it always hits the spot. There are other records that sound like Songs from the Big Chair, but there is nothing quite like it.

Perhaps what I love the most about this album is this song, which is the final track. I’m not sure how to describe how this song makes me feel. When I’m not sure like this, I tend to lean on the sensation I’ve gotten in church before. I grew up Catholic and was confirmed, I’ve never been the most religious person. But I love the feeling of being in church, particularly a Catholic Church—most likely because those are the ones I’ve known the best.

And there have been times when I’ve sat in a Catholic Church and felt, there is no other word for it, holy. That sense of entering into a quiet sanctuary in a state of dereliction and having the ceremony and the sanctity of the place make you somehow feel whole again. Not necessarily because you are worshipping, but because you are in a quiet place with an organ and for a time your soul is still, it is in repose and able to piece itself back together.

That’s how this song makes me feel.

“The Long and Winding Road” by Aretha Franklin

Like I said, I’ve been reading Ian Leslie’s book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I’ve also been watching the remastered and rereleased version of The Beatles Anthology on Disney+. So in two mediums I’m once again going over the story of the Beatles.

By now, I’m sure you’re sick of hearing me talk about this shit, but unfortunately it will continue to be a lifelong obsession. Like the best stories from the beginning of time, there’s too much to pick over, too much to sort through, there’s too much unresolved. In this case, because it actually came from life where almost nothing is truly resolved.

This time around, I’ve been thinking about the creative unconscious. How a song like “The Long and Winding Road” could certainly be a love song for John Lennon or also for Paul’s deceased mother. Or it could just be a story he was trying to work out in song, as we see in Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

Leslie points out in his book that around this time, in 1969, Paul was writing plenty of tunes that felt or touched on the end of something—of being left alone. And he was never the kind of songwriter to confess anything, really. But instead, like so many artists, there was something stuck in his subconscious, some feeling, he was trying to get out. He knew The Beatles were ending, he knew that his friendships with these guys he’d spent so much of his formative years with were never going to be the same. And that’s a massive feeling. So it comes out in bits in and pieces, from different angles and through different melodies, all of which feel like elegies.

And I’d never heard Aretha Franklin’s version of this song, but it manages to be both mournful and celebratory in a way the original really isn’t. Sort of how she was able to do for “Bridge over Troubled Water”—another song about sensing the end of something.

This playlist post is coming in just under the wire.

It’s been a busy month—busier than expected. There have been some changes in my life that I’ll tell you about some other time.

A couple things from this month

• I had my second live improv performance in front of an audience and was able to get some laughs

• I went to lot of different doctor and dentist appointments since I met my deductible and then some this year

• I saw: Zootopia 2 (great), Sentimental Value (excellent), The Sponge Movie: The Search for Square Pants (insane), and Marty Supreme (it’s complicated)

• My wife and I spent three nights and three days in New York City and saw some great art at MoMA and saw Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway, which was a truly worthwhile experience for the ticket price

• I had dinner with two good friends at their apartment in Ridgewood on a windy, cold night in New York that made me glad to be inside but also glad to step back out into the wind

• Took my two nieces—who are six and a half and two and half—to the American Museum of Natural History and got Levain cookies (I’m basic, so sue me) from the original location after

• Spent five days in a row with my nieces and cherished every minute of it, including making Santa footprints by the fireplace for them on Christmas Eve and watching them open presents on Christmas Day

• Came back to Austin to spend the days after Christmas with my wife’s family and had a lot of fun with them

Next year I’m hoping to get back into a rhythm here and figure out how to make this both a useful product for other people and also a way to entertain myself and write about things that I love in the way I want to write about. Might need to be two different things.

There’s a lot to be worried and sad about, but I’m excited to be alive and stepping into another year. I had no idea what 2025 had in store and I’m sure the same thing will be true for 2026.

Anyway, here’s a December playlist if you like that kind of thing. I like making the December ones lightly holiday themed with songs for the holidays and ones that feel like secret holiday songs.

Hope you’re safe and well and see you next time—and next year.

“Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie

This song has a kind of “barely made it to the end of another year” feel to it and I suppose it’s kind of about that too. The fourth track on 1980’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) , this track was Bowie’s fastest-selling single up to that point and only his second number one single on the U.K. chart. “Modern Love” from 1983’s Let’s Dance has been overused in movies and TV shows at this point—let’s use “Ashes to Ashes” more.

“That Spirit of Christmas” by Ray Charles

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) only gets better with age. Not that I have kids or a family or anything. No, it just becomes funnier with each annual viewing around the holidays. I wasn’t a fan of this movie as a kid, but now I think it contains some of Chevy’s best work. It also features this Ray Charles song, which has become perhaps my favorite Christmas song alongside the Beach Boys’s “Merry Christmas, Baby.” Charles’s song plays over the one earnest moment in Christmas Vacation when Clark is stuck in the attic watching old family movies. That depiction of delving into the past around the holidays paired with the strings on this track and Ray’s intonation on some of the lines creates perhaps the most human moment in any of the National Lampoons movies.

“Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War

I’m very proud of this transition. I think it is stellar work. The organ part that opens this track sounds like a twinkling star and would fit into some kind of Christmas hymn. An absolutely ridiculous song that is always a good time.

“I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman

After my wedding in New York and a short minimoon in the Catskills, my wife and I returned to Austin. On the second morning after we were back, I woke up with a stiff neck. That stiff neck soon turned into a burning upper back pain that extended into my arm and down to my finger tips. After a few days, I noticed that the tips of my thumb and forefinger were numb. When this condition didn’t change, I decided it would be a good idea to start going to physical therapy. Eventually, a neck and back specialist took some x-rays and determined that I probably had a bulging disc at the base of my spine. He prescribed me some anti-inflammatory medicine and said I should keep up the physical therapy and let him know if things didn’t get better. Things have worked out and I’m feeling much better as of this writing.

But during my time in physical therapy I was also reading A Few Words In Defense of Our Country (2024), the recent biography of Randy Newman. I was also going through a lot of drama at work (I’ll tell ya about it someday) and I both felt sick and tired of and fed up with everything and wanted to be left alone. On my walks to each of my physical therapy appointments, I found myself listening to “I Love L.A.,” looking at my Slack messages, and wishing nobody knew my name.

Now, no one does sick and tired and wanting to be left alone better than Randy Newman. And this song is perhaps his masterclass in disguising disenfranchisement within jubilation.

The opening of this song sounds like a slushy December afternoon in New York City—all gray and brown and dripping. Then, of course, the song explodes and rides the line of glory and melancholy that defines Newman’s genius. This is one of the best compositions created on the planet Earth in the 20th century and you can’t tell me different.

“Without a Leg to Stand On” by Buckingham Nicks

The recent reissue of Buckingham Nicks (1973), the self-titled album from Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks before they joined Fleetwood Mac, has had me thinking, “Where the fuck was this when I was listening to the shit out of this album on my iPod back in 2010 because smart phones really weren’t a thing yet—like maybe I had an old Blackberry that my dad had given me because he got a newer model through work or something and then I think I got an iPhone in like 2012?” This was an iconic album in the .RAR era of listening to music on the internet and this is the best song on it.

“No Place to Turn” by Tony Molina

I read about Tony Molina’s On This Day (2025) via Allmusic’s Editor’s Choice list. This is a nice, tight, flowing album of homespun baroque pop. The kind of shit Emitt Rhodes and Ram (1971) made freaks like me worship at the altar of for the rest of our lives. This song quotes the structure of a few church hymns and maybe even the Home Alone (1990) score and sounds as if it could be in some kind of Christmas movie.

“Welcome Christmas” by Boris Karloff

My wife and I watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966) the night we put up and decorated our tree. I forgot how stellar the score is for that TV special. I like this one because of the fake Latin sounding lyrics. I’ve amused myself to no end by singing made up Latin-sounding lyrics of my own set to this tune. A nice pastime if you can get into it.

“Late Night Last Train” by Young Gun Silver Fox

This is a little Fleetwood Mac homage on Pleasure (2025), the latest album from Young Gun Silver Fox. These guys specialize in paying tribute to the soft rock and soft funk of 1977-1983. I guess you could call it “yacht rock.” I’m not sure if anyone has. This is smooth shit.

“Put out the Light” by James Booker

God, I wish I could remember the name of the weird streaming player I used to use to listen to James Booker’s Junco Partner (1976) album. I listened to it in the office when I was working for the literary quarterly Salmagundi at college. I listened to it in the library when I was trying to write my first novel during the second half of my senior year. And it was on some weird orange-tinted streaming player.

When I was younger, when I pictured getting married I always pictured it taking place in some barn somewhere with a piano. There were no details other than that somehow my friends and I would be playing boogie piano tunes and people would be drunk and singing along. Much of my imagination at that time was formed by The Faces stage show from concert footage that was already over 30 years old.

Anyways, James Booker is one of the masters of boogie piano and this album is fantastic.

“Silent Exchange” by Whitney

Your mileage may vary on Whitney. Personally, I like them. I mean they make Beatles-inspired music that sounds like it would be at home in 1970-1973—that’s the kind of shit I live for. I think this is a pretty little song and I could listen to it any day of the week.

“Cities In Dust” by Siouxsie and the Banshees

I heard this one come on in my training gym and thought immediately of how it was used masterfully as a needle drop in Grosse Point Blank (1997). Man, Grosse Point Blank. What a movie. I’ll have to write about it sometime. Luckily I have a series about the one movie I’d pick from every year I’ve been alive if I could only pick one movie from that year and the next year in that series is 1997.

The synthesizers on this song have that amazing eighties feel and the chiming quality they achieve make the whole production somehow feel like a Yuletide song.

“On the Beach Tonight” by Cruisin’ Gang

My wife and I were recently browsing the local Austin establishment Room Service on a fall evening, as we’re known to do. She was looking for second-hand home goods and decor items while I was browsing the vinyls, again as we’re both known to do. I found a double album anthology of Italo disco in one of the bins and you had to believe I was going to fucking buy the shit out of that. I mean, I’ll spend $19 on that versus $20 on A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector (1963). And that purchase has been worth every penny. I don’t like to use the phrase “banger” because I don’t like using overused phrases but this is a “banger.”

“Frequency” by Super Furry Animals

I’ve written about this song before but they finally brought Love Kraft (2005) back to Spotify so at long last I can formally put it on one of these playlists. I fell in love with the Super Furry Animals when I was 16 back in 2001 through the pages of Rolling Stone magazine when I read a review of Rings Around the World (2021). When I bought the record, I couldn’t believe that there was a contemporary group capable of producing songs that sounded like they’d fit on a late-period Beatles album.

Over the last 25 years, I’ve cherished their albums and the solo work of their lead singer Gruff Rhys. But this song has become perhaps my favorite of all. The more I listen to it, the more I think it contains everything that makes them a great band. There is the effortless McCartney melodicism, the hard-swerve into a tune that sounds like it came from a movie about Ancient Egypt, the fuzz guitars, and then a soaring chorus. A phenomenal song.

“Love, Maybe” by MeloMance

Yes, I watched KPop Demon Hunters (2025) like everyone else. But my favorite song wasn’t one of the main hits, it was this charming little number by MeloMance that plays when Jinu and the other demon hunks in the Saja Boys first cross paths with Huntrix and throw the ladies into a bit of a swoon. This is my kind of K-Pop. I actually don’t know if this counts as K-Pop.

“Your Gold Teeth II” by Steely Dan

Upon leaving the gym one evening, I turned on the radio in my car and was lucky enough to catch this track just about mid-way through. This one is from 1975’s Katy Lied. A jazzy number (I mean its Steely Dan) that has a core arrangement that wouldn’t feel out of place on Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) score.

“In The Stars” by Melody’s Echo Chamber

I also read about this one on Allmusic’s Editor’s Choice list. This is a nice bit of relaxed psychedelia that reminds me of early Tame Impala.

“Christmas All Over Again” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

They’ve been playing this one all over the place in Austin: on the radio, in stores, in coffee shops, and restaurants. This is one of the less talked about Christmas songs from a major artist and I always kind of forget about it. It probably has the funniest chorus of any Christmas song. Just a treat to listen to.

“Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” by George Harrison

Living in the Material World (1973), George Harrison’s follow up to 1970’s iconic All Things Must Pass, remains a bit under appreciated. It’s been reclaimed, sure, but it still feels like people don’t talk about it enough. I guess that makes sense for an album that is over 50 years old. It sits so firmly in the shadow of All Things Must Pass that it’ll probably always be hard for it to truly emerge. But I love the production and arrangements on this album far more. This is one of the best songs on the record and it has that kind of twinkling quality that makes it feel right for the holiday season.

“Porpoise Song” by The Monkees

If you asked me to recount the plot of Cameron Crowe’s 2002 film Vanilla Sky, I wouldn’t be able to do it. But I would be able to tell you about how that movie introduced me to “Porpoise Song” by The Monkees and thus sent me scurrying through their discography and story to better understand their arc.

This track serves as the theme song to the movie Head, which was written by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafaelson (who, in 1970, brought us the masterpiece that is Five Easy Pieces) and is ostensibly about the Monkees breaking free of the artifice of their construction by the entertainment business.

The song itself was written by Goffin and King and when you know that and listen to it, you can immediately tell that this is a Carole song. But you can also listen to her devastating demo version.

I can’t tell you how much I love this song. It sort of served as the soundtrack to my own Randall “Pink” Floyd moment in high school when I decided to give up being a captain on my soccer team in my senior year in order to more fully dedicate myself to writing (whatever that meant at the time). After having my first experiences with hallucinogens when I was 15 and going on 16, a song like this and music like this were all I wanted to listen to. And the idea of breaking free of whatever you were expected to do and doing what you actually wanted to do was extremely appealing to me. I was probably the only high school junior and rising senior in America in 2001-2002 who listened to “Porpoise Song” to pump himself up before soccer games. (I say “in America” because I bet there was some kid in France who was listening to this track to pump themselves up before football matches there).

A remarkable song that always makes me want to break down and cry.

“Our Prayer” by The Beach Boys

Around that same time, I was piecing together MP3 versions of songs from the lost Beach Boys album SMiLE (1967) in order to compile and burn a copy of the album for myself. I remember when this one was completed on Kazaa and I heard it for the first time. This was to be the first track on the album and, dear god, what a way to start a record—with possibly the best vocal harmonies to ever be recorded.

“We Three Kings of Orient Are” by The Beach Boys

“Our Prayer” serves as a nice segue into the Beach Boys’s version of this traditional Christmas carol. This has become my favorite of the traditional Christmas songs. I think the composition is genius—all swelling emotion that rises and subsides in different shades.

“This Woman’s Work” by Kate Bush

For some reason, probably some vocal cue or offhand remark my wife made that somehow triggered me to think of this song, I decided to put this song on after dinner one evening earlier this month. It fits, thematically, into the actual events of the Christmas story. A staggering song, really, no matter how many times you listen to it.

“Love Story (You and Me)” by Harry Nilsson

This is from Nilsson Sings Newman (1970). It’s easy to call a song or an album a “gem,” but this record really fits that description: it is approximately 25 minutes of impeccably crafted music that shines and makes anything next to it look ordinary. The way Nilsson sings the final words of this song are both undeniably human but at the same time otherworldly.

“Still Crazy After All These Years” by Paul Simon

Another year has come and gone and I look back at the younger version of myself who used to sing “Still crazy after all these beers” to my friends to get them to laugh and think that I may not be so different from that guy even if in most ways I am. This song is the sound of walking with your hands firmly in your pockets down streets you’ve walked down so many times but that somehow still seem new. Even if you find it a little sad that you keep telling people that you remember when the new restaurant on the corner used to be new two restaurants ago.

Thanksgiving is this week. That means November is nearly over. And that means this year is almost done.

This month has flown by, just as this entire year has seemed to fly by. I feel fairly similar to the way I felt last year when I wrote, “Each year, increasingly, feels more and more like a dream. I can’t believe THAT happened in March—I thought that happened two years ago.” I suppose that happens as you age.

A couple of highlights from this month:

• I went to a ton of doctor’s appointments because my surgery and 10-day stay in the hospital sure as hell helped me meet my deductible.

• Reconfigured some existing plants and added some new plants to our front bed. I guess you call that landscaping.

• Took a historic homes tour in a nearby neighborhood

• Went to a classical guitar and accordion concert at a small local theater with my wife and her father. The guitar player was from Azerbaijan and the accordion player was from Russia.

• Saw The Mastermind (2025) and loved it. (My wife hated it.)

• Saw Jeff Tweedy perform at the Paramount Theater.

• Saw an incredibly moving documentary called The Librarians (2025) that my friend edited. Everyone should see it.

• Got to do a dramatic acting scene at an improv class and it made me feel alive

I was talking with my parents on the phone this past weekend and my father reminded me that I’ve lived an enviable life this year. “You overcame a health scare, you got married, you live in a beautiful area, and there’s lots of people who would want to be in the situation you’re in.”

And I don’t take that lightly.

This year, my wife and I got married after what felt like an eternity of planning and lead up. Now, we’re in the aftermath and thinking about our future together. But my future feels more precarious than ever.

Everything feels like it’s in transition. I’m not sure what the future holds for me at my current job. And I’m not sure what kind of career I’m going to be able to build in a world where even the largest companies are contracting.

I’ve been lucky enough to gain a grab bag of fairly marketable skills in my career so far. But how useful will those be as I get older and it becomes easier to look at my resume and assume that my best days are behind me instead of ahead? Or when, on paper, AI might make much of the work that I do a lot easier?

And I’m actually a fan of AI in the right doses. I like using it at work to make things easier, to do certain tasks faster, to find new ways of assessing and disseminating information to people I work with. I use it personally, too. But probably in ways that probably aren’t healthy or productive. I have money in Nvidia.

But how responsible does that make me for the insane amount of energy this technology requires? And what part am I going to have in the impact that energy usage is going to have on this planet?

As 2025 ends, I’ve now reached, most likely, the midpoint of my life. Somehow, up to this point I’ve managed to live an enviable life. And yet, it feels like so much is about to change. All I can hope is that I’m ready to meet that change—with my eyes open, humility in my heart, and the luck and fortune that are always required to survive in this world.

Anyways, here’s a November playlist if you like that kind of thing. I’ll keep writing these things until someone pries my cold lifeless hands from any keyboard-like tool.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone.

See you next time.

“Rough Boys” by Pete Townshend

Heard this one at my training gym. My feelings on The Who remain the same: they have been and will be victims to time. But god damn when I hear the sound of a good Pete Townshend song out of nowhere something, as Vincent Hanna in Heat (1995) once said, comes out of me. A tremendous rocker hidden in a long and increasingly forgotten discography.

“Goodnight Tonight” by Wings

I saw Paul McCartney perform at the Alamodome at the end of October. I’ll be writing more about that at some point. No, he didn’t play this song. That would have been insane! But this song is another example of how much Paul McCartney has given to us over his extraordinary career. I know you REFUSE to listen but it’s true!

This one was the A-side of a single released in the lead up to Back to the Egg (1979) that went to number 5 on the Billboard 100. I love the B-side, “Daytime Nighttime Suffering” more because it is classic McCartney. But this is one of those songs that serves as a reminder that Paul could do—and has done—just about anything.

“Hang on to Yourself” by David Bowie

There’s a certain point you get to with David Bowie where you go so deep into his catalog and the many different sounds and eras he had over the years that you almost forget about the glam Ziggy Stardust stuff. Like I heard “Rebel Rebel” on the radio the other week and was like, “Man, forgot about this one.” And that’s “Rebel Rebel”! This is just a pristine example of the Bowie-Ronson partnership. Everything is fucking, sharp, clear and compressed. You could get a paper cut from the acoustic guitars on this song.

“This is the Killer Speaking” by The Last Dinner Party

Read about The Last Dinner Party and their new album From The Pyre (2025) on Allmusic. The record was described as “art rock” and if anyone is still making art rock these days, I’m interested. This is a highly listenable album from start to finish. My wife and I enjoyed listening to it together while I made dinner one night. And this was the standout song for me.

“Thinking of You” by Sister Sledge

OK, this one was on my Shazam and I don’t remember where the hell I heard it out in the world. An absolutely intoxicating production with a purring chorus.

“Losing You” by Solange

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never really kept track of Solange’s career. I remember a period around 2016 or 2017 when people started talking about her as being “cooler” than Beyonce, but that seemed to fade away. At Artsy, we named her one of the people that shaped visual culture in 2017. I heard this song out in the world recently and was like, “Who the hell is this?” Well, a Shazam revealed it was Solange. A song I probably should’ve known about way earlier but what the hell are you supposed to do?

“The Ones” by The Autumn Defense

My wife and I saw Jeff Tweedy play earlier this month (more on that later) and as we were driving home, I attempted to explain the difference between Jeff Tweedy’s solo work and late-period Wilco. The point I was trying to make was that in Wilco, it seems like Tweedy and the band fall into a sort of established sound that they’re comfortable with. When Tweedy plays solo he gets closer to some of the simpler, more direct music—albeit embellished by production—he made in the earlier Wilco days. There is something inherently more interesting when Tweedy plays solo these days.

The Autumn Defense is the Wilco side project led by Pat Sansone and John Stirratt. Their newest record Here and Nowhere (2025) sounds more like late-day Wilco than Tweedy’s latest release Twilight Override (2025). That’s not a knock. The album sounds great and the songs are all well-done, it just lacks a little punch. And this song is exemplary of what they are capable of.

“Minotaur” by Thee Oh Sees

Like the minotaur, Thee Oh Sees have long been mythical figures for me. I’ve heard rumors of their existence and tales of their fans, but I’ve never managed to come across them. I heard this moody and groovy song from their 2013 album Floating Coffin in my training gym. Not too bad!

“I Believe in Love” by Tyler Ballgame

Heard this one on the radio while driving one evening. Reminds me of Ty Segall’s “My Lady’s On Fire.” I feel like there is a type of modern indie rocker (is indie rocker still a thing?) that taps into T. Rex and then adds some other elements to the mix. In this case, it’s a piano interlude that would’ve fit on Joe Jackson’s “Stepping Out.” This is a nice little production. Hats off to you Tyler Ballgame.

“Betrayed” by Jeff Tweedy

Like I said, we saw Jeff Tweedy perform live at the Paramount Theater here in Austin earlier this month. He was on tour for his new record Twilight Override, which features his sons Spencer and Sammy as part of his backing band. The kids were there playing with him and watching the whole thing made me sort of emotional. And there was something about the emotions I was feeling that night that somehow related to the emotions I felt watching Paul McCartney in San Antonio at the Alamodome. There’s something more in there I want to write about.

He opened the show with this song. And this is one of my favorite songs on the new triple record. This is a fine example of mid-tempo rock of the mid-1970s Neil Young vintage. Bonus points for the fact that the song’s bassline is pretty much the same descending one from Alice Cooper’s “Elected” off Billion Dollar Babies (1973).

“Cherry Tree” by Lera Lynn

Not familiar with Lera Lynn at all, but one night I started my car and jumped right into the middle of this song playing on the radio. Nice little number.

“Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down” by Margo Price

Margo Price also came to town this month. I heard about it on the radio. But it was too late for me to get a ticket. Probably should’ve tried to make it work since I like her so much. Her new record Hard Headed Woman (2025) is a return to the alt-country or country rock that she started off doing after the detour into Fleetwood Mac-ish territory on That’s How Rumors Get Started (2022) and Tom Petty territory on Strays (2023), which are both albums I absolutely loved.

This is just a fun, stomping country rocker.

“Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)” by Randy Newman

My college roommate and I have a tradition of sending each other books on our birthdays. This year he sent me the Randy Newman biography A Few Words In Defense of Our Country. Because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about Randy Newman this past month.

A Few Words In Defense of Our Country is a flawed biography but I loved reading it. It’s more of a hagiography than anything else. And, this isn’t really the book’s fault, Newman’s career kind of has a repeat cycle to it: Randy Newman is a genius, he doesn’t want to make an album, he realizes he should probably make an album, people think it should sell a lot of copies, it doesn’t sell a lot of copies, Randy gets depressed, then Randy plays live on a tour or does a movie score and people think he’s a genius, and he feels better, then he doesn’t want to make an album, he realizes he should probably make an album…In between all that, Randy just wants to watch TV.

This is great stuff because, well, it’s Randy Newman. He is an absolute genius. And reading the biography helped me appreciate just how vast his output has been. From Brill Building-style pop to a musical adaptation of Faust. It’s one thing to hear his lyrics paired with his songs, but seeing them laid out on pages (and pages—the biography goes heavy on showing you lyrics) puts them in another light. A devastating light. So many of Newman’s songs about America are devastating and true—true 40 or 50 years ago when he wrote them and still true now.

That’s why I picked this song to put on the playlist. It’s from 1974’s Good Ol’ Boys, which is probably his best album. This song is written as a throwback to the Great Depression Era, but it was relevant in the 1970s and it’s certainly relevant right now, over 50 years after it was written.

“Remember” by John Lennon

One night, driving home from the gym this song came on the radio. I hadn’t listened to it or any other song from Lennon’s first solo album Plastic Ono Band (1970) in a long time. As we listened, I pointed out to my wife that this song basically invented Spoon. She nodded and said, “You truly are a genius,” as she always does when I make an astute observation about influences across musical acts.

When we got home, I started making dinner and put Plastic Ono Band on. As the opening track “Mother” played, I started to tear up. Not only because the song itself is probably one of the most emotional vocal performances put to record, but because I have had such a long history with Plastic Ono Band.

I first bought it on CD when I was 16 or 17 years old after learning about it on the 1970 episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” series. The fact that “God” was John tossing aside any “idol” in his life, including the Beatles, made a big impression on me at that stage of my life when I was looking for and worshipping idols: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bangs, Joyce, Casablancas, Dylan, and even John Lennon and The Beatles.

Obviously, I didn’t have any of the life experience to understand what he was talking about. But listening to that song and that album—where he tore his identity down to find himself, only to then lose himself once again in politics and then booze in the succeeding years—further instructed me on the ways a person could myth make.

It also introduced me to the idea that no matter how many myths you make, you’re only left with yourself. And no person, no idol, no piece of art can save you from yourself.

“Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” by Elton John

I absolutely love every minute of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973). It is an absolutely audacious and ridiculous double album filled with all kinds of drug-addled theatricality. And it is a blast. In my mid-20s, I think I might have been the only person in New York City who would get zonked on 4Loko and then walk in a winter drizzle on a Saturday Night listening to all 10 minutes of “Funeral For A Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” to get hyped up on his way to meet his friends for a night at the bar. They don’t keep records of stuff like that (I asked ChatGPT) but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

“Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” is one of the best recordings ever made. I’ll stand by that any day of the week. If this song comes on and you don’t feel blood rushing through your veins, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’m pretty sure my fingers have bled from doing air guitar to the break that starts at about 2:10. Even after listening to this song a million times, it never loses its effect.

A true work of art.

“We Stand A Chance” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Tom Petty day always sneaks up on me. Every October 20, Sun Radio here in Austin plays Tom Petty songs all day. It’s great. A good day to be driving around town. I heard this one during this year’s Tom Petty Day and it just reminded me once again that I really don’t know anything about the depths of the Tom Petty catalog. There’s some great Petty “wahs” on this song.

A Petty side story. One evening in bed, I was trying to explain about Tom Petty to my wife (as I’m known to do) and I started talking about the bonus features on the Not Just The Best of the Larry Sanders Show DVD (also as I’m known to do). On those bonus features, Garry Shandling goes around reconnecting with old friends and guests on the show to talk about the show’s legacy and just life in general. It’s truly a unique thing. One of the people he visits is Tom Petty, who was one of his good friends. This is one of the best conversations you’ll ever see. It’s WTF before WTF. But it has one of my favorite moments of all time. I recommend watching this.

“Disco Life” by Say She She

I read about the Say She She album Cut & Rewind (2025) on Allmusic. Just a great album to put on in the house.

“My Best Step” by Lady Wray

Another one I read about on Allmusic. Don’t know anything about Lady Wray, but her new album, Cover Girl (2025), is another good record to just put on in the house. I recommend having this one on the next time you sit down to dinner.

“Ballad In Urgency” by The Black Crowes

I was perusing a recent newsletter from Stephen Thomas Erlewine and noticed he did a short review of a re-release of Amorica, the 1996 album by The Black Crowes. Amorica is an album I hadn’t thought about in years, but I immediately had the song “Ballad In Urgency” in my head.

The Black Crowes are the real life Stillwater. People obviously remember Oasis more, but these guys were the other fighting brother band from the 1990s. They never reached the heights of Oasis, but they made some strong neo-classic rock when classic rock radio was at its zenith.

A rootsier (and slightly watered down) take on Led Zeppelin’s “Ten Years Gone,” this song is a textbook example of them at their very best.

“One For The Road” by Ronnie Lane

Ah, my beloved Ronnie Lane. Perhaps one of rock music’s most unsung heroes, Ronnie Lane will always play in my home until the day I die.

This is one of my absolute favorites. A circular song that doesn’t necessarily go anywhere, it manages to capture the essence of being a little tipsy and surrounded by people that you love. I’m not sure what this song is about, but whenever I hear it, I think of all my friends. I think of all my friends and how good it would feel to be in a room with them all for one night.

The lucky thing is, that I just was able to have that experience at my wedding back in September and it looked and felt like the things this song makes me see and feel whenever I listen to it.

Should’ve put it on one of the playlists. Alas.

I’m sure most of you are out either trick-or-treating with your families or getting ready for other Halloween festivities. Stay safe out there.

October has both been a long and incredibly short month. It’s been a month of getting back into the swing of things after our wedding and minimoon with lots of little distractions popping up here and there. With all the planning work of the wedding behind us (and my hospital stay), there’s so much regular life planning and maintenance to get back to.

There’s been so much I want to write about: getting married, seeing Paul McCartney live in San Antonio, my stay in the hospital, the Phillies being absolute frauds, seeing Wet Leg in concert and thinking their stage show was great but feeling nothing, the Eagles being absolute frauds (or maybe not?), continuing the 40 for 40 series, and, yes, even a few things about the media industry. And I’ll hopefully get to some of those things soon.

It’s just been hard to find the time to write! The majority of my writing time this month has been getting back into the latest novel manuscript I’ve been working on. I’m about two-thirds of the way through and trying to finish it as fast as I can before life inevitably takes some next unexpected turn.

Mostly, though, my wife and I have been trying to soak in the aftermath of our wedding. It was a lot of work, but turned out kind of exactly how we wanted it to. Luckily, she had the idea to have people write us postcards instead of filling out a guest book at our wedding. So, each week, we’ve been getting post cards delivered to us with notes that people wrote on the night of our wedding. I have to thank my mother for sending the batches to us every week.

Fall is just starting to arrive in Austin. Life is settling back down. We’ve got thank you cards to write, Thanksgiving dinner to plan, and holidays to prepare for. Each day, I feel a greater sense of peace than I’ve had in some time. I’m going to try to hold onto that for a while.

This is an October playlist if you like that kind of thing.

Until next time, take care of yourself.

“Call Me the Breeze” by J.J. Cale

Heard this one on the radio driving around town. Then heard it on an episode of The Lowdown, the new show from Sterin Harjo. Something in the air with this song right now. This song is completely unbothered and I love it for that.

“Everyday Magic” by My Morning Jacket

Every couple of years I remember that My Morning Jacket are a band and that they have existed for almost 30 years. The first time I ever registered them was during the fall of my freshman year in college. This was 2003, so naturally my roommate and I were up late on a weekday watching Late Night with Conan O’Brien on NBC.

From about 2000-2005, watching Conan was, for me, the most important non-sports thing on TV. It’s hard to explain now because watching any kind of talk show on TV feels like a completely surreal and alien experience. You kind of just had to be there. Every night felt like a surprise, like you might see something new.

Anyways, one night he had My Morning Jacket on and I remember this performance leaving such an imprint on me. Then I tried listening to My Morning Jacket and I was like 🤷.

This one is from their new album. I heard it on the radio and thought it was quite nice.

“Come with Me” by Eric Kaz

I got married on September 20th at Frankie’s 457 Spuntino in Carroll Gardens and I’ll write a little bit about that at some point. But one of the things about having the wedding at Frankie’s was that based on some of the rules, the options for music were a bit limited. This was a good thing! It saved us from thinking about a band or a DJ. Instead, I just asked some of my friends to curate playlists for different parts of the night. When you have friends who have way better taste than you and know so much more about music than you do, you just HAVE to ask them to help you for your wedding.

Case in point: my friend Mikey put this song on the playlist he made for part of the dinner. Did I know who the fuck Eric Kaz was before this? But did I need “Come with Me” by Eric Kaz in my life? Absolutely. This song is phenomenal. And if you want to see Mikey’s full playlist (unedited by me for flow and wedding logistics, etc.) you can check it out here.

“Enough” by Jeff Tweedy

When all is said and done, Jeff Tweedy will end up being one of my favorite artists in any medium. He is one of the few artists I’ve truly followed with regularity for more than 20 years. Now, that I’m 40, there is something—no strange—but hard to describe about being a witness to another person’s creative arc for multiple decades. To watch them peak, to watch them ebb and flow, to try things, to experiment, and to falter.

But Tweedy has never failed. He may be the personification of “dad rock” but that observation always felt a little too easy—a short hand crutch for music critics that had lots of album reviews to get to.

Wilco and Jeff Tweedy are admittedly never going to be as interesting as they were from about 1996-2006, but how many bands or artists can maintain being interesting for longer than that? Very few.

The thing is, Tweedy is always trying. And, though he may falter, I don’t think he ever truly fails. And that alone is an achievement. This is a good song by a 58 year old man, playing with his two sons, from a triple album he released this year.

We could only wish to accomplish so much in our lives.

“Ready or Not (Here I Come)” by The Jackson 5

Who saw One Battle After Another (2025) this fall? Sick movie, right? Absolutely loved it. Is it my favorite PTA? Hard to say. Phantom Thread still exists after all. But One Battle After Another had two iconic quotes. “A few small beers” and perhaps my personal favorite, “Life, man….LIFE!” The more I think about this movie, the more I want to watch it again.

Anyway, One Battle After Another had amazing needle drops. Hard to beat the “Dirty Work” one, but this one stuck with me a little more for some reason.

“My Baby Is the Real Thing” by Allen Toussaint

For my wedding, I gave my buddy Erik Gundel a really tall order: curate me playlists for both the pre-ceremony guest arrival AND the cocktail hour. But let me tell you that he pulled through in a big way.

His playlist was full of great songs, but I, of course, was drawn to this Allen Toussaint gem song. The first, oh, 11 seconds of this track are extremely my shit. I’ve had this song stuck in my head for about two months straight.

“Giving Him Something He Can Feel” by En Vogue

When I was a kid, my dad bought a brand new CD player and hooked it up to an excellent Kenwood stereo system. One of the CDs he bought after bringing home the CD player was Funky Divas (1992) by En Vogue. I’m not sure why. And, for some reason, we used to play this game where my sister and I would jump around on the couches in our living room while he played “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” and threw pillows at us. I’m sure the parents and children of parents out there all have some kind of mysterious ritual like this.

I heard “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” from Funky Divas at a second hand store called Next to New here in Austin and was like, “Damn, I haven’t thought about En Vogue in a long, long time. I remember when I was a kid when my dad bought a brand new CD player…”

“Late in the Evening” by Paul Simon

For our wedding, we needed a playlist to segue out of cake cutting/dessert serving and into some initial dancing. This was about an hour and a half block of music. I turned to my friend Chase (an extremely accomplished record collector and estate sale expert) to pull a batch of songs together.

This was a Paul Simon track that he put into the mix. I’d never heard this one before. It’s a single from Simon’s 1980 album One -Trick Pony that actually went to number 6 on the Billboard 100. This is now one of my favorite Paul Simon songs. See, this is why you have your friends pick the music for you.

“I Wanna Be Your Lover” by Prince

Heard this one playing in Next to New as well. This was the lead song on Prince’s self-titled, second album in 1979. Prince. He really was something, huh?

“Paranoid” by Kanye West

Can’t really talk about Kanye West anymore, but a funny thing has been happening. After a long period of never hearing his song out in the world, I’m starting to hear them more. At the gym, at stores, and at restaurants. I heard this one, from 808s & Heartbreak (2008), out at a very good restaurant called Vic & Al’s and it immediately struck me. Anyone else noticing Kanye songs coming back? Wonder what it means.

“FloriDada” by Animal Collective

I’ve written about the heady days of 2007-2009 when it seemed like, no matter if it was actually true, that Animal Collective were the biggest and most important band in the world. Probably had something to do with living in Williamsburg and being about 22-25 years old, but I’m not entirely sure.

After the triumph of Merriweather Post Pavilion, I tried to keep up with Animal Collective’s work. Hell, I even sat next to Avey Tare at my barber shop on Leonard Street and saw him looking at a porno mag. But I was just never able to. Perhaps it was because I was getting older. Or perhaps their spell had finally worn off.

I heard this song from 2016’s Painting With out at lunch one day and it was like running into an old friend. When this song was released as the first single from Painting With I was deeply unimpressed. Now, I could see someone playing this for their kid. That’s not a bad idea.

“Panama” by Van Halen

This song was filed under, “I never want to fucking hear that song again in my life” for me for a very long time. But have you listened to “Panama” lately? Have you heard it come on while you are working out at your gym? Have you listened to it on a hot summer day with the windows down in your car? It’s fucking “Panama.” No one did it quite like Van Halen at their peak.

“Cobra” by Geese

I’ve seen Getting Killed (2025) by Geese praised everywhere. I like the record, but I kind of like Cameron Winter’s solo album better. You might recall seeing his tracks on some of the playlist posts earlier this year. That’s why I like this song—it reminds me of his solo work. You give me songs like sound like slurring Todd Rundgren and I will listen to them.

“Breathless” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

My college roommate might be the biggest Nick Cave fan in the world. One year for his birthday I sent him a Nick Cave book. For many years, I stood in close proximity to his love for Nick Cave and appreciated his passion without really partaking in any of Cave’s work. I heard this song playing at Next to New on a Saturday and was like, “Ah, yes. I see.”

“Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” by Kurt Vile

Next to New was really on a heater this past month. While I was rifling through used records and putting my grubby mitts on Graham Nash’s Songs for Beginners (1971) and Stephen Stills’s self-titled solo album from 1970, I heard the familiar sound of Kurt Vile’s voice over the speakers. I rushed to my Shazam app and, lo and behold, it was the Viper himself. (No one calls him this.) And, wouldn’t you know it? It was a cover of a song by the late, great John Prine. A very pretty track.

“Goin’ Down to Laurel” by Steve Forbert

Steve Forbert’s music has been a real revelation for me over the past two years or so. In that time, Forbert’s “Romeo’s Tune” has become a kind of secret handshake song for my childhood friends and I.

I still don’t know a ton about Steve Forbert. In fact, one time when I was playing “Romeo’s Tune” at my in-laws house, my father-in-law (who’s forgotten more about music than I’ll ever know) heard the song and said. “Ah, Little Stevie Forbert.” I asked him if he’d like Steve back in the day. And he said, “Yeah. He used to wear a lot of flannel.”

I’m not sure what that means. But I’m sure one day I’ll find out.

“Fall on Me” by R.E.M.

I might be the last person on the planet Earth to fully understand how great R.E.M. are. This song came on in my training gym one evening and, after pushing through a PR on my back squat that brought tears to my trainers eyes, I dropped to my knees, looked to the sky, and with tears suddenly in my own eyes, cried out, “R.E.M are fucking sick.”

“Weather With You” by Crowded House

After our wedding, my wife and I had a little minimoon in Upstate New York. We stayed at the Henson in Hensonville, New York. It was a little splurge at a trendy spot people have been talking about. Overall, I’d say it was worth the money. There wasn’t much going on in Hensonville or Hunter or Wyndham or any of the other nearby towns—and that was exactly what we were looking for.

Often, we sat on the covered porch outside our room and listened to the rain falling. It rained, spat, misted, or poured at some point basically every day we were there. One day, we were in Tannersville when it was spitting and starting to rain. Nothing was open beside an antique shop, so we ducked in there to browse and kill time.

As I looked at old postcards from other people’s lives, I heard this song come on. Another gem from Crowded House. “Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you.” I’m not a huge lyrics guy—I famously don’t really care what songs are about—but there might be something in there to think about.

“Beautiful Girl” by INXS

In the very same antique shop, I was looking at small wood sculptures of black bears and fearing an encounter with one (sightings this fall in the Catskills were apparently on the rise) and heard the sound of a nice guitar part with light reverb and a clear, well-produced plunking piano come over the speakers in the store. “Is this INXS?” I asked myself. “I think this is INXS.” Is your guy good or what?

“Couldn’t Love You More” by John Martyn

This is another song from my buddy Erik Gundel’s cocktail hour playlist for our wedding. Another song that makes you think, “Holy shit, where the hell did you find this one?!” This is a slow burner that build and builds to an experience that you simply can’t forget. It’s like Dire Straits meets David Bowie.

“The Subway” Chappell Roan

After our wedding and minimoon, upon getting home to Austin, my wife and I began to take stock of the wreckage of our regular day-to-day lives after a momentous few weeks. We were tidying up our apartment one day and Spotify started playing the latest Chappell Roan single. I didn’t jump on the Chappell Roan bandwagon two years ago, but I’m starting to come around. This is probably the best song I’ve heard from her. Could be the early nineties production, could be the melody. Either way, I think this is a very well done piece of work.

“Heart And Soul” by T’Pau

The after party for our wedding was in the Frank’s Wine Bar space right next to Frankie’s 457. We had a two hour block so people could do some real dancing.

For the after party playlist, I knew I had to turn to one of my best friends, my old college roommate, David Stern. David used to have an apartment in Williamsburg near the Graham Avenue stop and he’d often have impromptu dance parties there with perfectly selected deep cuts. I know that sounds like a generic description (or even a stupid one) but when I tell you that these were perfectly selected, you’ll have to trust me. The reactions were real and you kind of had to be there. I’ve been with David on more than one occasion at a bar where he’s put songs on the jukebox and had people at the bar and also the actual bartenders compliment him on picking the song. This has happened in multiple cities.

This song is a perfect example of the kind of track I could never in a million years think of. Mainly because I didn’t even know this song existed. A textbook case of the late 80s and early 90s sound that Chappell Roan is after on “Subway,” I dare you not to pump your fist and shout along to this song as it builds to a crescendo.

“Slip Away” by David Bowie

Every once in a while, usually when I am driving at night, I am surprised by a song by late period David Bowie. This one is from 2002’s Heathen. I remember this album coming out, but I couldn’t be bothered to listen to it because I was still poring over Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) and obsessed with The Strokes and the White Stripes and The Hives and shit. I mean it was 2002!? What the hell else was I supposed to be doing?

This song is just one of those staggering tracks from an artist you think you know pretty well and then realize you don’t actually know anything about their work at all. Sure, I could listen to “Moss Garden” or “V-2 Schneider” all day long or talk about how “Win” might sometimes be my favorite Bowie song, but I never knew shit about “Slip Away.”

Well, now I do.

“Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?” by Cate Le Bon

I’ve never intently listened to a Cate Le Bon album. Mostly, friends of mine would play me her songs or I’d hear them out somewhere. Every time I hear a Cate Le Bon song I like it. When I saw she had a new album, Michelangelo Dying (2025), out I decided to give it a spin. This was the song that really stood out to me. And it makes a nice companion to the Bowie track right before it—they flow into each other surprisingly well.

“Hungry for Your Love” by Van Morrison

Another one from my friend Chase’s playlist at our wedding. This is a cut from Van Morrison’s 1978 album Wavelength, an album that was kind of misunderstood at the time of release but that has found renewed appreciation over time.

This is Morrison at his warmest. This is a song that, with every surge, kind of lifts your soul along with it. Like “Late in the Evening” by Paul Simon, this was a song by a major artist that I hadn’t really given my full attention to.

It’s had my full attention now for about two full months—and will for a long time to come.

This month has been a blur.

My fiancee and I started the month in Lugano on the Swiss-Italian border. We were lucky enough to be able to take a two week vacation to Europe for the fourth straight year. And I’m ending the month with a flight to Long Island to spend some time there and around the northeast for a few weeks.

While we were on vacation, we followed the news of the floods in Texas. We also followed the news about what would be on the agenda for the special summer legislation session.

The rest of the month has been a blur of small steps to keep moving toward our wedding in September.

I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to people around my industry this month and all I hear is that everyone is facing the same problems everywhere and no one has any idea what is going to happen. I like to hear that because, as you know, nobody knows anything.

But it makes it hard for me to give advice. And I found myself in a position of giving advice to a recent graduate from my alma mater. I’ve said before that I’m in a place in my life now where it looks like I have a well-developed career and so sometimes younger people reach out to me for advice.

I don’t really know what to say to people that ask me for advice. I’m not sure what to tell them about getting into media or publishing. But what I tell them is to have their eyes open, to be curious about the industry in a way I never was when I was their age; to not take job rejections personally because it often comes down to timing and the imagination of the overworked hiring manager or overworked recruiter; to reach out to more people who have jobs they think they might like to do and expect nothing in return; and to figure out what they are passionate about versus what they are good at.

I also try to remind them that life and careers are random. I was reminded of this when rewatching the documentary The History of The Eagles (2013) recently. I like to turn on this documentary for a good laugh every once and awhile because it features some of the best unintentional comedy of all time. But the legend Joe Walsh says at the beginning of the movie, “You know, there’s a philosopher who says, as you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t.”

So, when people ask me for advice, I try to relay that to them. And I try to remember that every single day of my life.

This is a July playlist if you like that kind of thing. And you can see all the playlists I’ve made here.

See you next time.

“I’m Your Boogie Man” by K.C. & The Sunshine Band

K.C. & The Sunshine Band, if not quite forgotten to time, are kind of under discussed these days. Probably because so many of their greatest hits were played to death for so long. I mean, how many times have you heard “That’s The Way (I Like It)” or “Get Down Tonight” or “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty”? But Harry Wayne Casey was one hell of a songwriter and producer and his band put out some undeniable records. Like this one, which is an irresistible bit of pop funk. Some might even call it disco. Call it whatever you want—this song is so sick and just feels like a hot summer night.

“What Was That” by Lorde

Lorde’s latest single actually came to my attention via a TikTok by Kyle MacLachlen. Hey, this is the year 2025. Anything goes when it comes to discovering new music. I’m not the biggest Lorde fan, but we love Solar Power (2021) in our house and I think this is a great summer single. Anything so I don’t have to hear another shapeless Addison Rae song on a speaker somewhere.

“Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear

Where were you when Grizzly Bear debuted “Two Weeks” on the David Letterman Show in July 2008? I’ll tell you where I was: Living at 647 Grand Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I watched their performance via YouTube or some other video player embedded on Pitchfork because everyone I knew couldn’t stop talking about it.

It’s hard to explain how big of a deal this song was to a certain type of person at that specific moment in time. “Two Weeks” was the kind of song that made you think the music and the artists you liked were about to take over the world. Sure, maybe I was biased because Ed Droste lived around the corner from me on Leonard Street and I’d see him in the window of his apartment when I walked to and from the Lorimer Street stop, but it seemed as if I was right in the middle of something—a movement, a shift in culture that would be talked about for decades to come.

The anticipation for “Two Weeks” to be officially released as part of Grizzly Bear’s next album grew and grew. That album, Veckatimest, came out in May of 2009 and received widespread acclaim. Jay-Z and Beyonce were at the Grizzly Bear McCarren Pool show on the waterfront in Williamsburg that August. (It was part of the McCarren Pool concert series even though they’d moved the shows from the actual pool when it was undergoing renovations.) I was there too—a stone’s throw from Jay-Z and Beyonce. It felt very important.

But after Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear kind of faded away. Now, they are most likely remembered as one of the bands who came and went in the last wave of the New York rock revival scene that started with The Strokes and several other bands at the beginning of the 2000s. A small part of a small moment and even smaller feeling moment in time that marked the beginning of the end of a certain kind of music and music appreciation.

“No One Does It Like You” by Department of Eagles

Department of Eagles was a Grizzly Bear side project led by Daniel Rossen. The group actually predated Grizzly Bear itself but only released a proper album in 2008 in the lead up to the release of Veckatimest in 2009. I’ve always had a soft spot for this record and especially this song. It’s a nice bit of psych-pop that’s good for the season.

“Back in My Arms Again” by The Supremes

It’s hard to come up with many more life affirming things than the sound of Diana Ross and the Supremes. All these years later, their sound cuts through the noise of whatever bar or restaurant or store you’re in. There’s just something about their songs—really the swell of their prechoruses—that makes your nerve endings come alive. Maybe there’s a science to the music, to the way the songs are composed, but it's magic to me.

“Strange Powers” by The Magnetic Fields

While my fiancee and I were in Europe this summer, the continent was going through a major heat wave. We arrived in the town of Lugano (really Castagnola) on the Swiss-Italian border and made our way to the little guesthouse hotel we were staying in. A Swedish woman ran the place and she told us to go right away to the Lido di San Domenico to take a swim in Lake Lugano. Who were we to argue? While we were there drying off and working up our limited Italian to order drinks at the little bar beside the lake, this song was playing over the bar’s speakers.

“Anything Could Happen” by The Clean

I’ve had this song on various playlists over the years. But I’d forgotten about it until I heard them playing it on the speakers at the bar beside Lido di San Domenico in Castagnola, Switzerland. Anything could happen indeed.

“Tales of a Visionary Teller” by The Bug Club

I read about The Bug Club and their new album Very Human Features on Allmusic. This is a solid album. And, sure, maybe I’m predisposed to liking it because the vocal filter sounds exactly like the one Julian Casablancas used on Is This It.

“Face Meets Glass” by ACTORS

My trainer likes ACTORS, so we hear a lot of their music on playlists at our training gym. This song came on one evening and I just liked the emotional sound of the music. It is obviously derivative of Joy Division, but lots of bands have taken that road. I don’t what I admire more: bands that are able to take the aesthetic of an older band and master it or the fact that music has some ineffable quality to make you feel as if you are living in a decade you never actually experienced when you hear certain tones or textures that bring up all of the pop cultural signposts that have built an image and sensation of that decade in your mind and body. I dunno, maybe you can tell me which one to admire more.

“IVORY” by Kio Amachree

I don’t know where I heard this song, but it is a groove and I love it.

“Oops (Oh My)” by Tweet (feat. Missy Elliott)

When I was in junior high school and high school, whenever you saw a song that Missy Elliott or Timbaland had touched in some way you knew it was going to be cool. These songs just stood out on the radio or on MTV. I didn’t fully understand why then, but I do now. All due respect to Tweet, but this song is sick most likely because Missy co-wrote it and Timbaland produced it.

“Cemalim” by Erkin Koray

My fiancee and I started our trip this summer with a few nights in Zurich. Nice town. I’ll tell you where to stay. I heard this song when we were doing what we normally do on the first full day in any city when we travel: taking a Rick Steves walking tour. We were nearing the end of Rick’s guide through the streets of Zurich when a DJ, set up in a little square, started his set by putting this record on. Psychedelic music is really the best and the way it has been translated internationally over the years is endlessly fascinating.

“Little Wing” by Valerie June

Earlier this year, I was in Mexico for my friend Erik’s 40th birthday trip. We were walking to dinner one night and I listened to Erik and my college roommate talk about Jimi Hendrix. My college roommate made the case that Jimi Hendrix is still underrated as a songwriter. I hadn’t thought about that acutely, but I knew exactly what he was saying.

This became apparent to me earlier this month when I was in the coffee shop on the ground floor of our hotel in Lecco at the southeastern end of Lake Como. This song came on. I couldn’t place that it was a Hendrix cover at first, but it soon revealed itself. This song has no true chorus. It’s like a hymn more than anything else—a short poem. Yet, the way Hendrix structures the song and sings it, there’s something unforgettable about it.

I’m becoming more and more of a fan of Valerie June and I think the production and singing on this version is excellent.

“The Wind Cries Mary” by Jimi Hendrix

One Saturday this summer, when I was driving in Austin, this song came on the radio. It had been years since I’d heard it or really listened to it closely. If there is ever a song that sounds like the tops of uncut blades of grass in an open grass being rustled by a breeze, this one is it. When you pay attention to the lyrics and the feel, it is such a singular and melancholy song. Obviously it has suffered from overplay, but this is a tremendous piece of music. If it was written and released by Scott Walker perhaps we’d think of it differently.

“Porcelain” by Frankie Cosmos

Different Talking (2025) is the 6th full-length album by Frankie Cosmos (aka Greta Kline, the daughter of Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline). I remember when my college roommate first told me about her and recorded a cover of one of her early songs. I’ve not followed her work closely but I was reading about her latest album and gave it a spin. This is a well-written song from a well-done record.

“Colour” by Pete Josef

After a rainy day in Lecco on the shores of Lake Como, the sun finally came out and so my fiancee and I went up to the roof deck bar of our hotel to have an aperitivo and look at the mountains. My buzz was settling in and I heard this song wafting from a speaker somewhere in the landscaping on the roof. I wouldn’t call this a good song or even much of a song. The lyrics aren’t even really that profound. But sometimes when you hear a repetitive song with repetitive simple lyrics and you’re just a little buzzed it hits you in the right way. So whereas lyrics like “Colour in my life / Make me happy / Colour in my life /Give me joy” might normally strike me as rudimentary and lazy, in this moment they actually made me appreciative of my fiancee and all of the unexpected color she had added to my life since I met her. The kind of things one can never plan on when they imagine love or what love will look like.

“Hard Headed Woman” by Cat Stevens

Not much discussion of Cat Stevens these days. I recall his VH1 Behind the Music being a very good one when I was younger. No one enunciates quite like ol’ Yusuf Islam during his peak. Cat Stevens’s run of classic records from 1970-1972 managed to capture the same spirit as the early Neil Young albums like After the Gold Rush (1970): a mixture of loose ramshackle acoustic-electric playing with a really strong low-end that also weaves in a strong dose of orchestral pop and production polish influenced by The Beatles. Not easy to do. We used to spin Tea for the Tillerman on sacred Sunday hangouts at my apartment in Williamsburg during 2008-2010. These were slow, all-day drinking affairs with games of Dominos and Apple to Apples that often ended with a sporadic barbecue on our roof. Because of this, I have strong fondness for this song.

“Una canzone d’amore” by 883

I heard this song in a gift shop in the town of Varenna on Lake Como. My fiancee was looking for a ceramic Christmas ornament to put on our tree. The organ immediately struck me. I was like, “What? Are they playing Talk Talk in this store?” But soon a slick bit of Italian soft rock emerged. And look, I kind of like it.

“Hey Tonight” by Creedence Clearwater Revival

A big moment in my life was buying the Creedence Clearwater Revival “best of” album Chronicle, Vol. 1 (1976) on my ninth grade field trip to Cape Cod. This was a major trip. My school district was split into a K-6 elementary school, a 7-9 junior high school, and a 10-12 high school. So ninth grade was a big year—we were the kings of our junior high school for one glorious year and the Cape Cod field trip near the end of the year was one of our crown jewels. I’d had my heart broken by a girl that year (long, dumb story; no need to get into it) and was “in my feelings” at the time, even though I didn’t know that was a phrase that would one day exist. Chronicle, Vol. 1 introduced me to the joys of CCR. It has every major song on it. For some reason, lately I’ve been thinking about “Hey Tonight.” This is a hot cup of coffee of a song that always does the trick.

“Tumbling Dice” by The Rolling Stones

It’s hard for me to write about Exile on Main Street (1972). This is one of my favorite records of all time and one that probably helped influence my taste in music at a formative age. I have listened to this album too many times to count. It is by far my favorite Rolling Stones record.

I bought it when I was in the 11th grade (2001-2002) after watching the “1972” episode of the VH1 series “Years that Rocked,” which briefly covered the recording of Exile on Main Street and the Stones’s infamous 1972 U.S. tour.

When you are making your way through the classic rock catalog, you often read about records that have important legacies, that cast long shadows. And many times, the descriptions of those records are better than the actual albums themselves.

But Exile was everything everyone said it was. A dark, murky, surreal, and strange double album that both undeniably rocked and made you want to live a life a glamour and danger where the night never ended—but also warned you about what could happen if you did.

This album will always remind me of freedom. And when I say freedom, I mean this: One Saturday in the early spring of 2002 I took my PSAT exam at Centereach High School. This was a high school in a neighboring town, so at the precious age of 16 that might as well have been a different planet. I finished my PSAT, got into my parent’s 1998 Nissan Pathfinder and drove home—my junior license sitting securely in my wallet. It was a sunny, warm spring day. I drove down Nicolls Road back to my safe little colonial town on Long Island with the windows open. And with those windows opened, I smoked a Camel Light and listened to Exile on Main Street. I was 16 years old and didn’t know much about anything at all. I was probably going to see my friends that night, I was going to get some beer somewhere. I didn’t know where I was going to go to college but I knew that I wanted to be a writer, to write important novels and that I’d figure out how to do that no matter what.

The world is changing and has changed in so many ways. I wouldn’t want my kid to smoke cigarettes. But I would want them to feel free in those same ways, to feel like they could dream and have music help them dream and feel alive in the way that a, then, 30-year old album like Exile on Main Street did for me.

“Paradise” by Durand Jones & The Indications

This album was on Allmusic’s Editors Picks for June. There are worse sins in this world than basically trying to be the Delfonics or Isaac Hayes or Teddy Pendergrass in the 1970s.

“Raisins” by Yaya Bey

I had Yaya Bey’s “slow dancing in the kitchen” on my June 2024 playlist. That song was from her record Ten Fold (2024). This track is from her latest release do it afraid (2025). Good stuff.

“Stand!” by Sly & The Family Stone

I’ve found myself coming back to Sly & The Family Stone a lot this year. This was happening even before Sly passed away last month at the age of 82. The more I’ve been listening to Sly’s music, the more I realize how far ahead of things he was—and how timeless his songs are. “Stand” speaks to the world of 2025 just as much as it did to the world of 1969.

We just passed the longest day of the year, which means June is almost over and the summer has officially begun.

Like you, perhaps, I’m not feeling great about the state of the world. Things seem more precarious than ever and I’m honestly not sure how to feel each day.

I try to think about 1968 and whether or not things are better or worse than the way the world was then. I try to think about 2001. I’m reading a book about the Plantagenet dynasty in England and so I find myself thinking about whether or not things are better than when Henry II and Richard I were roaming the Isles and a constantly shifting European continent.

Things were scary in all of those times. And this is the time I’m living in now, so I’m trying to keep going. I’m trying to maintain relativity. But that doesn’t change the fact that things feel increasingly precarious with each passing day.

This month I did more wedding planning (it never ends even if our wedding isn’t even that big), I did my first live improv comedy performance in 10 years, I pet sat, I went swimming a couple times, I started rereading Ulysses, I saw Friendship and Jane Austen Ruined My Life in movie theaters, and I wrote a bunch of dumb blogs about movies and the years they came out in. The latter has given me much joy.

Mostly, I worked though. I worked and tried to be a source of reliability to the people I’m accountable for during uncertain and precarious times. It may not be enough, but that’s what I’m capable of.

This is a June playlist for you, if you like that kind of thing.

I’ll see you next time.

“We Got the Beat” by The Go-Gos

This song always makes me think of summer. I don’t know why. Maybe it's the way Belinda Carlisle says, “hang out by the poo-ool.” A timeless track, with just a hint of melancholy in its melody, that always sounds fresh no matter how many times you put it on.

“Relationships” by HAIM

We’ve been hearing a lot of HAIM on Sun Radio lately down here in Austin. My fiancee thinks this song sounds weird, but I dig it for whatever reason. It could be the early-90s sounding production. HAIM is a funny band. I hardly think about them at all and then a song like this will pop up and catch my attention. “The Wire” feels like a million years and several lifetimes ago.

“You Can Call Me Al” by Paul Simon

I heard this song at my training gym recently and it was one of those instances, which I’ve described here before, when a song you’ve heard a million times hits you unexpectedly and you have the profound realization that “this song is fucking sick.” When what was once wallpaper somehow becomes profound again when you intentionally pay attention to it. This is an astounding production. Everything hits exactly right. The 15 seconds from 2:15 to 2:30 when the main horn and keyboard hook comes back makes you understand what people are looking for when they go to a place of worship. Don’t care what this song is about. Jubilation has never been recorded better.

“Into The Old Man’s Shoes” by Elton John

This is one of my favorite Elton John tunes. It isn’t that well known because it’s not officially on any album—it’s a bonus track on the more recent reissues of Tumbleweed Connection (1970). But this is vintage Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Everything feels dramatic and widescreen and the production, especially the drums, sounds amazing. In August 2013, I was staying in a motel in Menlo Park. I was there with some friends from college to see two of our friends from college get married. I put this song on for my friends in my motel room. They were unimpressed. Never was the knife wedged more fully in my back. You all know who you are. But, if you’ve ever had a dad, I dare you not to listen to this song and not suddenly notice that it's getting dusty.

“100 Years Ago” by The Rolling Stones

Goat’s Head Soup (1973) is no one’s favorite Rolling Stones album, but it does have some great tunes and it, more than any other of their albums, sounds and feels like a very hot summer. This track is one of the Stones’s more creative compositions—its more like two or three songs combined. But the main part has such a worn down melancholy to it, that it sucks me in every time. This song does the best job of creating the feel of what it’s like to look back on a summer from Labor Day weekend and wonder where the time went.

“Everybody Is A Star” by Sly & The Family Stone

I added this track for the playlist before Sly Stone passed away at the age of 82 earlier this month. He’s a legend and a genius, everyone knows it. Well known too, is the troubled life he led. After watching Questlove’s documentary about Sly earlier this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how few artists captured exhaustion and disillusionment better than Sly. This song has an inspirational message, but it sounds so tired as if the messenger(s) are barely holding on or can’t quite believe what they are saying anymore. And all of that combined gives this song a beatific air. It’s probably my favorite thing Sly ever did.

“One Headlight” by The Wallflowers

Bringing Down the Horse came out in May 1996 and I remember this song being huge that entire summer. At that time, I had no idea who Bob Dylan was, but I sure knew who his son Jakob Dylan was. This song reminds me of the winding drive down Christian Road from Stony Brook Harbor to Main Street on a humid night. If you know, you know. And if you don’t know, you’ve probably got something else like that you hold close to your heart.

“Read My Mind” by The Killers

Never liked the Killers all that much. I was a Strokes guy through and through and didn’t want anything Brandon Flowers was selling. When Sam’s Town came out in 2006, I was entering my senior year of college and my sister was entering her senior year of high school. I remember coming back for Thanksgiving break and she loved this album. I gave it a shot and this was the one song that really stood out to me. They’ve been playing it a lot on Sun Radio lately for some reason. And, you know what, I still think this is a great song.

“Hurtin’ or Healed” by A. Savage

A. Savage makes another appearance! I had slept on his 2023 album, Several Songs About Fire, but have been listening to a lot this spring. The more I listen to him, the more I think he’s the successor to Jonathan Richman. This is a nice drifting summer song.

“Tomorrow” by Wings

Talk about songs tailor made for summer! This is another one of McCartney’s overlooked gems. It’s from Wild Life (1972), which most people hate, but I happen to like. (I even like the title track.) This song is all effortless melody and lots of fun.

“You Only Live Once” by The Strokes

This song came out almost 20 years ago. It’s hard to believe because every time I hear it, I am immediately put into the large, somewhat Brutalist, library at the University College Dublin where I was studying abroad in the fall of 2025. I used to go to the library, not to study, but to get internet access on my beat up Dell laptop. I’d go there to log onto AIM to talk to my friends in America and really to spend time on Strokes message boards looking for bootlegs. This was in the period between Room on Fire (2003) and First Impressions of Earth (2006) when a gap of two years felt like forever to wait for a new record from a band that you loved. My friend Erik and I would talk on AIM, trawl the message boards looking for any kind of bootleg recording of a new song from a live show in Argentina or Brazil or some leak from the new album, and then immediately share it. When I first got my hands on this one, I was convinced that The Strokes had done it. They had figured out how to make their sound bigger and better and were about to release a third album that everyone in every country would love and that would bring about world peace. Didn’t quite turn out that way. But whenever I hear this track start, it still seems possible.

“Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo

I had a friend named Ryan Scales (I still count him as my friend even though I haven’t talked to him in awhile) that I spent a lot of time with in my twenties. Serializing fiction on Substack is a big topic of conversation now. And we had big dreams of making a website to do that back in 2008. Never went anywhere. He was the only person I knew who used to talk about Oingo Boingo. This song is so sick. Whenever the chorus starts, I can’t help but see Danny Elfman doing vocal takes as Jack Skellington.

“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds

OK, now here’s where you say, “What? You’re putting this song on one of these playlists. This is one of the most overplayed songs of all time.” And, look, you have a very good point. But let me counter with this: I heard this on the radio driving home from the gym on a day when the heat was subsiding nicely into the evening and the light was getting to that nice orange and pink it does here in Texas and thought, “Fuck, this is such a good song and its so weird.” Listen to this song a little closer this time. The whole composition and the way it comes together is sort of strange for a hit.

“Sowing The Seeds of Love” by Tears for Fears

We’re keeping it with some great bands from the 1980s. This is a Tears for Fears track where they are really just trying to be The Beatles from Magical Mystery Tour (1967).

“When I Get Home” by The Beatles

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of John Lennon as a horizontal songwriter and Paul McCartney as a vertical one, as outlined in Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head (1994). Once you start thinking about it that way, you can’t stop hearing it in every song. Lennon insists the melody into the rhythm of a song, while McCartney builds a song from melody. This is a great example of this concept. There’s not much of a melody to this song, but the way Lennon sings this song creates melody, creates hooks. In listening to this song so many times, I realize this is why Lennon remains probably my favorite vocalist ever. He’s not the best singer, but what he does to a lyric through his vocal makes him so powerful. Here he unleashes his unparalleled way of saying “c’mon” like a weapon multiple times. He also manipulates the words “more” or “her” to do his bidding. He also uses the word “again” to display his unique gift of gliding syllables into a melodic hook—displayed best probably on “Imagine” or “A Day in the Life” or even “God.” No one else could sell the throwaway line, “I’m gonna love her til the cows come home.” Plus, McCartney goes absolute berserk in his early days screaming voice throughout the song on the backing vocals and that, paired with Lennon’s lead, make this song delightfully unhinged.

“Put A Little Love In Your Heart” by Jackie DeShannon

I was passing the time on Reddit, as I do, and was served up a thread on the Beatles subreddit about songs that sound like the Beatles but aren’t the Beatles. How could I resist? This one was mentioned several times. And, you know what? The Beatles subreddit community is right. This sure does sound like a 1967-1968 Beatles composition and production. A wonderful song.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” by Trini Lopez

On a recent flight to New York, I finally caught A Complete Unknown (2024). For what it was, I thought it was a solid movie. Chalamet was good and so was Elle Fanning even though she didn’t get much to do. Monica Barbaro’s performance as Joan Baez was overhyped though. Didn’t see much there, but that’s not her fault.

Anyway, it made me want to watch No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s 2005 documentary about Bob Dylan’s career up until 1966. It was better than I remembered—and I thought it was amazing when it first came out. When you put it up against the more recent Rolling Thunder Revue (2019) it’s kind of astounding at how sincere he was able to get Dylan to be in this documentary. He must have caught Dylan in a slight resting place in his self-mythologizing.

Anyway, this version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Trini Lopez caught my ear during this rewatch. It’s a little cheesy, but I like it.

“Lonesome Track” by Bob Marley & The Wailers

Earlier this month, I saw Walter Martin, formerly of The Walkmen, talking on Substack about an early Bob Marley & The Wailers vinyl that’s hard to find. He said it was his favorite album in his collection. This got me in the mood to listen to early Bob Marley. This is such a fun song. You can see how this sound influenced Paul McCartney. There is no “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” without this song.

“Train in Vain (Stand by Me)” by The Clash

We have something of a train theme here. I heard this one in my training gym recently and it, again, was one of those cases of a very familiar song just hitting you the right way. I was driving home and I had some profound thought about this song, but now it’s lost to me. Rarely do you hear songs that sound and remain so alive like this. The Clash are an amazing band. Every year I love them more and more.

“Healing, Pt. 1” by Todd Rundgren

When I was staying at my parents house on Long Island at the end of May, I decided to rewatch Worst Person In the World (2022) for some reason. It was a good decision. That movie is phenomenal and was even better on a second watch.

But what it gifted me was hearing “Healing, Pt. 1” by Todd Rundgren. This song is on the soundtrack, but I didn’t notice it when I watched the movie in the theater when it came out.

It’s well known that I love Todd Rundgren. But I don’t know every inch of his extensive catalog and this one was new to me. But after hearing it, I kind of locked onto it.

On one of my last days at my parents house, I went to the local beach with my sister and my two nieces. It was perfect Memorial Day Weekend weather. We splashed around in the cold water of the Long Island Sound, built sandcastles, dug holes. Eventually, the tide went out and the sand bars the beach is known for began to emerge. I pointed them out to my six year-old niece and told her we could go out to them.

We walked through the cold water. Several times she got scared because we were getting far from shore and wanted to turn around. When it got too deep I carried her. Eventually, the water turned shallow again and we were standing on mounds of sand with shallow, lapping, translucent waves rolling across them. She loved it. Just the way I had loved it when I first moved to Long Island when I was nine.

Later, my sister dropped me off at my parents house. I was tired from the sun and the swimming and went for a jog to get some energy back. I jogged the way I usually do: down around the bend of Setauket Harbor called Scott’s Cove, through Poquott, until I reach Port Jefferson Harbor at the end of Washington Street.

The tide was low there too and kids were playing in the shallows with life jackets on, fresh from a kayak trip with their parents. I saw them playing and looked out over Port Jefferson Harbor to Pirate’s Cove. I gazed, not thinking, but constantly aware that a time would come when I would no longer be able to so easily see the world from this spot.

I jogged home. I listened to music. For some reason, I put on “We Are the Champions” by Queen. I hadn’t listened to that song in years. I let the melody of the song carry me, I let the song urge me on, to find that well of energy that only music can seem to pull from you when you are jogging for miles.

When I got back to my parents house, the sun was shining on the lawn and the grass was an impossible green. So I lay down on the grass and put on “Healing Pt. 1.” I lay on grass, looked at the sky, and pressed my palms against the earth. Listening to the music, I felt as if I could cry. Everything that had passed in my life had already passed. I would never be able to get it back again—not the way I once was, not the way I was as a child with my parents, not the way I was amongst my friends in my twenties.

And this place, this small corner of Long Island, would never look the same to me as it once had. But even so, it was so beautiful at this time of year and I was grateful that this was where I was able to begin to form my view of the world. I was so thankful for everyone I had known.

It would all be over at some point for me. It would no longer belong to me the way it once had. But it would continue, days like this, for other people until nothing was left.

“Healing Pt. 1” is about all of that. Because its about how music belongs to you. The lyrics and the music themselves are one thing—but what it lets you “meditate” on is something else entirely; something even more powerful.

I’ve never listened to a song that so encapsulated what music has done for me than this one.

“Til I Die” by The Beach Boys

I hadn’t planned to put this song on here, but then Brian Wilson died earlier this month at the age of 82 and I had to.

You can and probably have read plenty about Brian Wilson, his genius, his importance to music, and his importance to the very fabric of popular culture in the second half of the 20th century.

All I’ll say about Brian Wilson is that when I was going through my psychedelic era in my teenage years, I was obsessed with his lost SMiLE (1967) album. For anyone who loved music, the myth around SMiLE was legendary. It was the lost record: Brian Wilson’s answer to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) that drove him mad.

I scoured the internet of the day to find the official track list as well as official bootlegs of each track to create a version of the record that I could burn onto a CD.

SMiLE still contains some of the most beautiful, thrilling, and daring music ever recorded. But “Surf’s Up” was its ultimate achievement. When I was a teenager, with his mind freshly opened, the vocal coda of that song sounded to me like whatever salvation was supposed to be in religion.

I remember being on a ski trip with my friend at his aunt’s ski house in Okemo and making him listen to “Surf’s Up” in a little attic room and telling him that “this is what I want my writing to make people to feel.”

And that was my ambition then. There were two things you could shoot for: the ending of “Araby” and the ending of “Surf’s Up.” All the truth of the world lived in those two works of art.

But the song I put here is “Til I Die.” I put it here, because as much as I loved and still love “Surf’s Up,” this song has become, I think, my favorite Brian Wilson composition.

There is nothing quite like it. Abstract and despairing to start, the song eventually becomes a moving vocal symphony about accepting the mysterious and finite nature of life.

Rest in peace, Brian.

I’m sending this one to you later in the day—and just under the wire this month.

I think that’s because its a bit of a microcosm of this month as a whole which has been filled with stops and starts and interruptions. A few of those being

• The flight my fiancee and I had booked to New York being cancelled and not rebooked by Delta

• Rebooking a flight and losing time off our trip

• Going into our offices in New York for the first time in about a year

• Trying to nail down some of the final details of our wedding—like floral arrangements, our website, and mailing our invitations. Every decision involves multiple, smaller sub-decisions that take longer than you think.

• A “supercell” storm featuring a “microburst” blowing through Austin on Wednesday night and knocking out power and Wi-Fi for over a day.

But until this last week or so, May had been wonderful. I started my second improv class and am having fun performing like that again. The end of a beautiful spring in Austin tailed off at the beginning of the month and we flew up to New York once the temperatures started to linger around the low triple digits. And we managed to catch about four days of perfect spring weather in the northeast before flying back down here.

In my time up in New York, I had the following great experiences

• Getting lunch with each of my reports one-on-one and enjoying that quality time with them as people

• Meeting one of my reports for the first time after working together for three years

• Getting to talk about the state of media with my team in person and try my best to prepare them as professionals for how work and this business is about to change in the next five years

• Having two great dinners with two old friends and their wonderful, charming significant others

• Having an afternoon drinking session with an old boss and wondering what the hell we are going to do with our lives

• Playing bus driver with my six- and two-year old nieces (me pulling them on a blanket for about an hour and making “stops” to pick up kids for school; its a good replacement for the sled dog pull I usually do at my trainer)

• Seeing those same nieces for four days in a row

• Carrying my six-year-old niece through the cold water at West Meadow Beach, as the tide slowly moved out to its lowest point of the day, so she could make it out to the legendary sand bar there for the first time.

• Walking with my mother down to the end of Trustees Road and talking and then taking a swim at the spot where we once lived for two weeks right when we moved to Long Island almost 30 years ago.

• Looking through photo albums and realizing that I was given and have lived a lucky and fulfilling life.

It’s no secret that the world is a scary and uncertain place right now. The global order seems to shift each week. And technology is rapidly changing how work is done. The media industry is going to completely change soon. Google is starting to play their hand a bit more. The way we use the internet is going to look different. The small changes are accumulating and suddenly we’ll look around and it will all be different.

At work, sometimes this makes me restless and frustrated. As much as I mourn for the end of things, I am excited but what the future might look like.

And I am trying to square what that all means for me, personally, as someone who values writing, books, and pieces of culture that are firmly rooted in an age that seems to be fast receding.

All of that is happening and there is so much in my life that brings me joy, that shows me that life is worth living. I don’t know what to say about that other than that it seems to be the very nature of proceeding through the world, year-by-year, as history happens within and without you for as long as you are lucky to be moving through it.

Anyway, here is a playlist if you like that kind of thing. And here’s where you can find all the playlists I’ve made so far.

See you next time.

“A Guardian at the Stables” by Field Music and the NASUWT Riverside Band

I’ve said it before, but Field Music are absolutely sick. This track is from their latest record, Binding Time (2025), which, according to Bandcamp, is “a suite of new songs inspired by the formation of the Durham Miners’ Association and performed with musicians from the NASUWT Riverside band.” If you like songs that feel like a sharp, blue, spring sky and that sound like John Cale’s “Paris 1919” meets Alan Menken’s “Belle” from the 1991 Beauty and the Beast, then this one should be right up your alley.

“Take Me” by Mamalarky

I told you Mamalarky would be back! This is another one from Hex Key, their great album from earlier this year. A breezy bit of pop that, in a just world, would be played just as much as any new Billie Eilish release.

“Sweet Talkin’ Woman” by ELO

As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world:

• Those that get what ELO is all about and think that this is one of the most ebullient and infectious dance songs ever made.

• And those that don’t.

I can’t tell you how many times I found myself, this month, mildly disco dancing to this song in the early evening while grilling dinner and watching the Texas sky slowly turn lavender and pink in my backyard.

Also, I’m fully aware there are more than two kinds of people in this world. I’d say there are probably at least like 10 kinds of people in the world if I had to wager a guess.

“Joy, Joy!” by Valerie June

I really like this new Valerie June record, Owls, Omens, and Oracles (2025). They’ve been playing this single a lot on Sun Radio the past month.

“Be True” by Bruce Springsteen

When my fiancee was out of town recently, I filled the empty space by pounding my brain with podcasts. I decided to revisit the Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott series of podcasts where they make their way through the discography of a single band. This started all the way back in 2014 with U2 and has moved on to cover R.E.M, the Red Hot Chili Peppers (sort of), the Talking Heads, and, most recently, Bruce Springsteen. These podcasts are incredibly silly and filled with some of the stupidest jokes you can imagine. And I love the shit out of them. It was a good reminder of when I used to listen to dumb comedy podcasts every day to get me through a job where everyone clocked in, sat at their desks, and never spoke a word to each other during the day.

Anyway, these podcasts are also great for song-by-song discussion of an entire discography and I really enjoyed making my way through Springsteen’s entire catalog again.

I hadn’t listened to Springsteen records in awhile and I still think Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) is tops for me. This song isn’t from that record but Bruce was on fire (no pun intended) from like 1978 through 1984 and “Be True” is an example of a song that never made the cut for an album but could’ve been the best song on countless records.

“Everybody” by Madonna

Heard this one out somewhere this past month. Can’t remember but I Shazamed it so it must’ve been when I was distracted at a restaurant or coffee shop or store. Another reminder of how sick Madonna was at her best.

“Take A Chance With Me” by Roxy Music

When I was in New York this month, I had dinner with my old roommate from when I lived in Williamsburg and his wife. We ate at a good new Georgian restaurant in the West Village (Laliko) and talked about lots of things.

Naturally, old stories from when my roommate and I used to live together came up. We remembered how, at 22 or 23, we used to eat Entenmann’s chocolate frosted donuts for breakfast as well as toast with pesto (this was 2008-2009, long before toast with stuff on it became a thing). And how my roommate, working on a Van Leeuwen ice cream truck at the time because we all went to college with Ben Van Leeuwen and people needed jobs during the great recession and Ben was building an artisanal empire before our eyes, used to bring home ice cream and we’d put a spoonful in our coffee.

We spent so many hours together in that large, square white tiled kitchen on Grand Street east of the BQE. In that kitchen, I had a crappy Crosley record player with speakers built in and a meager collection of records I’d inherited from my parents. One of the records was Avalon by Roxy Music. My roommate used to spin this one and tell me how “Take a Chance on Me” was the best song on it. And he was right.

What an album Avalon is! Absolutely taken for granted as this point, it basically invented the way pop sounded in the eighties.

“Men in Bars” by Japanese Breakfast

My fiancee and I saw Japanese Breakfast in Austin recently. The show was the first date on the tour for her 2025 record, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women). A couple of things stood out: first, she has great stage presence; second, you could see how her stage show would translate to a bigger arena; third, there is a lot of Roxy Music in her songs. I’d never really noticed that last bit until seeing her live.

This particular song doesn’t show the Roxy Music influence that much, but it is my favorite song on the new record. It features a kind of random duet with Jeff Bridges.

“Charlie’s Garden” by Djo

OK, I never realized Joe Keery, of Stranger Things fame, made music. But apparently he does under the name Djo and this song is from his new record The Crux (2025). I like this guy even more. He really should be getting a bigger feature star push than he is. But I guess doing cool movies about Pavement is maybe better.

The whole album is a fun listen and produced really well. This track in particular is a perfect imitation of Ram-era Paul McCartney. And there is a melodic hook at about 2:20 that drove me nuts trying to place for several days, until I finally did.

“Hello It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren

I finally placed the random hook at about 2:20 in Djo’s “Charlie’s Garden” as the bridge chords or connecting chords (I don’t know anything about music) that you find several times in the verses of Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me”—the first time being at about 42 seconds in. Solving that mystery got me listening to this absolutely strange and unorthodox pop song for the first time in a while.

When you actually listen to “Hello It’s Me” you notice it pulls off a great trick of being somewhat shapeless for a top ten pop hit. There’s no real chorus. The hook of the title comes at the beginning of verses and it's more of an exercise in shifting moods of longing or melancholy than anything else.

“Baby, You’re A Rich Man” by The Beatles

This has become, if not my favorite Beatles song, then one of my top five or 10 favorites. An absolutely undeniable Paul McCartney bass part, inventive drumming from Ringo, and a Lennon vocal that is persuasive in its winking intelligence (singular to him) will do that.

In Ian McDonald’s Revolution in the Head he absolutely destroys this song and uses it as part of his analysis of the Beatles acid-fuelled malaise in the summer of 1967 after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—the period in which they began to rely too much on randomness and chance in their work and over abusing their intuitiveness to the point of self-indulgence that McDonald believes characterizes most of their late period work.

“While the group were obviously excited about the track as a sound-event, there is a stoned sloppiness about the writing…which spoils the effect. Drugs and overconfidence here fool The Beatles into accepting their initial inspiration as a creative ‘found’ object. Gone are the days when, as McCartney recalls, they sweated over ever bar of a song. Even the didactic lyric, which Harrison insists was intended to show people that they were rich in themselves, mixes clarity with cloudiness.”

Now I obviously don’t agree with that assessment, but I find it fascinating to read. And its yet another example of Revolution in the Head containing some of the best writing on culture I have ever read.

“Itchycoo Park” by Small Faces

When I was about 16 years old, I was the only person in my town burning CDs of Small Faces songs and listening to Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (1968) all the way through. I wore this fact as a bright badge of honor.

At that time, I was fascinated by psychedelia and the 1960s. This song, a single from 1967, was, to me, was such a perfect distillation of what I wanted in a song: buoyant music that soared and seemed like a bright vision of the world, fluid bass playing that somehow made your stomach feel full as if you were coming up, and production with echo and fading that simulated the aural experience at the peak of a trip.

Even still, this song with its chorus of “It’s all too beautiful!” places me into a perfect May day—the afternoon and early evening somehow lasting longer than you can imagine—where anything is possible.

“Citadel” by The Rolling Stones

Another flavor of psychedelia from 1967. This is one is from The Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), which was a blatant attempt to create an answer to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

It is a messy album full of interesting experiments and quite a few pleasures. This song being one of the latter. It has one of the most primordial riffs ever put on a rock record and it ranks as maybe one of my top five Stones riffs.

“Thawing Dawn” by A. Savage

I like the Parquet Courts enough, but I’ve spent more time with A. Savage’s excellent 2017 album Thawing Dawn more than any of his main band’s records. This, the title track, is the closing song on the record and is a poignant mini-suite that I never get tired of.

“Building a Mystery” by Sarah McLachlan

Heard this one on the radio one Sunday when my fiancee were driving from East Austin up to the Domain to shop for my wedding suit. Scary drive, but my fiancee was a pro as usual.

This one took me back. When I was 12 years old, this was on the radio constantly. Sarah McLachlin, to me, is not synonymous with sad ASPCA commercials but with that magical time when Borders was a place to spend hours of time browsing books and standing at CD listening stations to hear what Blues Traveler, Dave Matthews, Deep Blue Something, Oasis, Alanis Morisette, and so many others were up to this time.

This is a 90s nostalgia trip but also a rock solid bit of Americana that stands up to top notch work by Lucinda Williams and Sheryl Crow.

“Dumb Feeling” by Mei Semones

I read about Mei Semones’s 2025 album Animaru on Allmusic. Its a solid album and this is the opening track. A nice mixture of tropicalia and chamber pop.

“The Road to Somewhere” by Louis Philippe

Another 2025 release I read about on Allmusic. This is the kind of adult-oriented pop music (in the vein of Tears for Fears, peak Elvis Costello, Crowded House, and latter day Shins) that I’m a sucker for.

“Truck Stop Girl” by Little Feat

I was catching up with an old friend on the phone (more on him later) and we got to talking about Little Feat. He’s forgotten more about music than I’ll ever knoew, but he hadn’t spent much time with Little Feat’s catalog. And it had been some years since I’d listened intently to their records, even though Lowell George is one of my favorite songwriters.

So I turned Little Feat’s self-titled 1971 on one evening when I was cooking. It truly is one of the high water marks of American music in the 20th century and doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. This song, in particular, is a masterful little bit of American songwriting—muscular where it needs to be and then suddenly incredibly delicate and literate. One of the joys in life is texting with an old friend about Little Feat’s “Truck Stop Girl.”

“Deveraux” by Car Seat Headrest

Don’t get this one confused with the jingle for Deveraux Wigs from Season 1 of Detroiters. Its actually from the new Car Seat Headrest The Scholars (2025). I’m not super into Car Seat Headrest or anything (I think “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” from their 2016 album Teens of Denial one of the best anthems of the past 10 years) but I like the fact that Will Toledo and his band make American rock music like this in the year 2025.

“old yeller” by Nick County

Like I said, I was catching up with an old friend recently. We were long overdue.

Our call came about because he’d recently released some new records that I had seen him promoting on Instagram in the passing moments when I scroll through the feed on my laptop during the work day to research what people are even doing on social media these days.

In my twenties, I was surrounded by friends who were all trying to make it as musicians. In fact, it seemed like I was the only person in our friend group who couldn’t play an instrument or write a song.

Because of that, I took a certain pride in being involved in their creative processes by being someone who would listen to their music deeply and give them input as someone who loved music and the history rock and pop music in the 20th century in particular.

As time went by, it was hard to keep up with everyone’s records and shows. Everyone had shifted from trying to make it, to simply trying to keep making cohesive albums in an increasingly hostile music industry. And meanwhile I was trying not to lose my way as a fiction writer creating work in a vacuum while I maintained various day jobs. I had stopped writing long email missives to them about every new EP or LP release.

There’s something in the water about the challenge of male friendships today. (I know because I did a better job writing about it almost over four years ago.) I don’t know what keeps friends close or distant from each other. My hang ups are different from another man’s.

What I know is that, for this first time in years, because I felt a certain level of guilt as an absentee friend, I spent time engaging with a friend of mine’s recent creative work and it made me feel good. I realized that I had been following my friend as a singer and songwriter for almost twenty years. His voice was in my head not just as a friend—but as an artist in his own right.

So I sent him a long email about his work and he called me on a humid and moody Friday afternoon in Austin. I sat on my screened in porch talking to him about his music and then his life and my life and our shared experiences and our uncertainty in navigating the world today and trying to even make a life for yourself. All of this while storm winds blew and threatened but the storm never came.

This song, “old yeller,” is one of the finest compositions my friend has come up with. I told him it reminded me of a Lowell George song. And it does. There is a deceptive throughline of the American songbook in the track’s structure even if it isn’t obvious from the production. There’s something of Webb, Parsons, George, Nilsson, even a bit of Prince Rogers Nelson.

I know the song is about something else. But in the chorus when my friend sings, “I don’t know if anybody told you, but I still care/ I don’t now if anybody hurt you, but I’m still here / I don’t know if anybody warned you it isn’t always fair / I can’t live, live with regret” to me its an unspoken message, a wavelength, from me to him or any of my other friends who used to be in my life in a different way than they are now. I don’t know everything or anything anymore, but I’m still here and I still care—and I can’t live with regret.

“Ol’ 55” by Tom Waits

Earlier this year, another friend of mine, a guy I used to work with, tipped me off to the movie Eephus (2025). It’s by the same people who made Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (2024), which I think is an absolutely sick movie, especially if you’re from Long Island the way I am.

Eephus is a slow, boring movie about a bunch of grown men playing the last game in an amatuer baseball league in New England somewhere. I think its supposed to Massachusetts. Naturally, I think this movie is amazing.

Like Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, this movie is more of mood than an actual movie. It stretches on long a long fall afternoon when all of a sudden the evening is here and its starting to get cold. There is a shot at the end of the movie of men walking the edge of the baseball diamond in the New England darkness that made the feeling of October in the northeast palpable in my Texas living room in the near-80 degree heat. This movie is alive.

It’s probably about a lot of things—time passing, the end of certain traditions and ways of living and existing in the world—but I’m not qualified enough to say.

All I know is that when Tom Waits’s “Ol’ 55” hits at the end and the credits start to roll, you certainly feel like you’ve just experienced the end of something. And its not just because the movie is over.

Sorry for the radio silence for the last two weeks.

While my fiancee was away I spent most of my weeknight evenings and most of my weekend time working on my novel manuscript so I got out of my regular newsletter rhythm.

And then, when I tried to get back into the rhythm, I didn’t really feel that interested in writing about media and media business stories. Everyone needs a break I guess.

I might start cutting back on sends a little bit and/or mixing in some other writing here from time to time. Life’s too short to just send thoughts about the media industry and how the way we receive and consume information is changing. If that causes any of you to say “goodbye” that’s fine with me and I understand. This is free after all.

April’s gone by pretty fast. My fiancee and I are about five months away from getting married and there’s lots to do all the time. The spring in Austin has been beautiful—but the temperature dial is slowly cranking up. I started an improv class at a local theater. It’s been 10 years since I’ve done any improv performing and about 8 since I performed sketch comedy live. It feels very low stakes and very good for me.

As the news swirls every day and work is work and my lack of creative achievement attempts to put me in a bad mood, I try to stay grounded and appreciate that I have a lot of good things in my life—in fact, some evenings it feels like an overwhelming abundance and I don’t know what to say. All I can think, though, is that I am grateful and will try not to forget that the next time I inevitably lose my patience or feel bad about something.

Here’s an April playlist—if you like that kind of thing. See you next time.

“Nausicaa (Love Will Be Revealed)” by Cameron Winter

Cameron Winter made my list last month. But, this year, I’ve discovered a few wonderful new releases I’ve been spending a good amount of time with so I’m going to start double dipping from them a little. This song is so deceptively constructed. It stumbles to a start, shuffles along unassumingly and then all of a sudden it’s building and building to a cathartic peak. The vocals may not be for everyone, but Winter is modern day slurring Todd Rundgren—an idol for sickos like me.

“Can We Still Be Friends?” by Todd Rundgren

Speaking of Todd Rundgren, here is the Hermit of Mink Hollow himself. Nobody does it like Todd. I’ll always have fond memories of being self-obsessed and depressed as a college senior and listening to his albums (primarily A Wizard, A True Star from 1973) really loud while I was drunk in my studio apartment on Broadway in downtown Saratoga Springs where I lived alone above a women’s clothing boutique.

“Mega Circuit” by Japanese Breakfast

Funny story: I thought I had tickets to a Japanese Breakfast show last week. But get this: the show is actually this week. Crazy, huh? She’s got a new record out and, you know what? It’s very good. I’m excited to see her live and will report back.

“Desire” by Talk Talk

I graduated from college in May 2007. The following spring, I was living at home with my parents, working in my dad’s warehouse, and trying to find a job in New York during the height of the Great Recession. I was also in love with a girl who was living in Spain. We’d talk via iChat either by text or voice immediately when I got home from work, which was right before she was going to bed. One morning, I woke up to an email from her telling me that she’d fallen in love with someone else.

At the time, I was listening to a lot of Spirit of Eden (1988) by Talk Talk. I’d never really heard anything like it. The first three songs are something of an extended suite, so it feels odd plucking one of them out to include on a playlist. Whenever I listen to the album now, it places me back in that period of late March and early April. I especially can see the mornings as they looked from one of the windows of my childhood bedroom: faint grey light, the grass mossy and still close to the ground, low flowers starting to rise, the trees in the thicket behind the house still bare. I remember every morning from that period of time being unusually foggy. And this album, if it is anything, is like the low fog hanging above the ground as the day begins to break.

After my heart was broken, I managed to get a job as a paralegal/personal assistant for a real estate and matrimonial lawyer who shared an office in the Flat Iron with a solo practitioner of employment law and an attorney who focused on large judgement collections. One of my responsibilities was serving as a shared receptionist for all of them. Seems quaint now.

With an actual office job lined up, I moved to Williamsburg and then embarked on, what were at the time, probably the best and most exciting four years of my life.

“Lorelei” by Cocteau Twins

My trainer has been playing a lot of shoegaze playlists lately. He had this song on one of them. Not a Cocteau Twins guy myself, but this one stopped me right in the middle of a hex bar dead lift. Whoever figured out how to make those keyboard sounds that are like church bells (used so often used on songs in the 1980s) is a genius. For my money, one of the most evocative sounds in the pop idiom.

“(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” by Burt Bacharach

Right after I moved to Brooklyn in the spring of 2008, there was a good batch of mushrooms making the rounds among my friend group, one that would add a glow to the edges of that entire summer.

My current roommate, my freshman year college roommate, and I secured some of said mushrooms. One Saturday afternoon, we went to my freshman year roommate’s apartment in Murray Hill. We ate our dosage and waited for them to kick in while listening to music.

As we officially came up, this song began playing. At that time, I’d never heard the Bacharach version. I am not exaggerating when I say that I will remember hearing this song for the first time under those circumstances for the rest of my life. At the time, it seemed to me that, when the chorus kicks in and the backing singers and the music both reach their crashing crescendo, I was listening to the actual sound of exultation.

Maybe it was that experience’s imprint on my mind, but I can not listen to this song now without feeling the most utter sense of abandon. When the backing singers sing the chorus and Bacharach is just hammering at the piano, I want to fling my limbs in every direction like a cartoon character. And, in truth, I am not very far from a cartoon character.

“Paradise Alley” by The City

My fiancee and I made it to the part in Season 2 of Gilmore Girls where Carole King makes a cameo as the owner of a new music shop in Starr’s Hollow. That led me to put Now That Everything’s Been Said (1968) by The City back into my rotation. This album comes after the end of Goffin-King and before Tapestry (1971) and is one of the great overlooked records of all time. This song is methodical in delivering its pleasures—just absolute mastery at the level of what McCartney and Lennon were up to around the same period.

“Duchess” by Scott Walker

I wish I was a real Scott Walker head, but I’m not. I don’t have the courage to truly follow him into the depths he explored. But this track, to me, is the closest any song has come to a perfect expression of actual poetry. The images, the economy, the suggestion of an idea—its all there in wonderful form. The production and actual composition meet the words perfectly: it is a slowly brightening candle of epiphany.

“Winter Rose/Love Awake” by Wings

For the love of God will you listen to me?! Paul McCartney has given us all more than we’ll ever know. This amazing composition is buried on Back to the Egg (1979).

“Stumbling Through The Dark” by The Jayhawks

Rainy Day Music (2003) came out right before I started college and it received a good amount of play around my freshman dorm. My friend Kevin, especially, loved them and when we had a radio show he’d always pick Jayhawks songs to add to our programming. I will always associate this record and this band with the start of meeting several people who made major impacts on my life.

“Joseph’s Dream” by John Hartford

When I was in high school, my friends and I were into jam bands. As part of that world, we became interested in bluegrass music. This was mainly driven by my friend Chris who, because he had an older brother that lived in Boulder and was an amazing bluegrass guitar player, would play us lots of bluegrass records. He and his brother even got a bunch of us to go see a concert by an artist named Buddy Merriam and his band Back Roads in Westchester one time.

One of the songs we used to listen to the most was John Hartford’s version of “Old Home Place.” In fact, we’d spend time with girls who, for some reason liked being around us, and listen to “Old Home Place” with them. We were 15 or 16 years old and putting on bluegrass music for girls. We were absolutely out of our minds.

Anyways, this is a fun John Hartford song from his 1976 album Nobody Knows What You Do.

“What’s Left of Me” by Neal Francis

Neal Francis has made it on one of these playlists before. There is nothing new about what he is doing, but god damn I eat up his synthesis of so many different artists who peaked in the 1970s. This song is like something Elton John, Billy Joel, Jackson Browne would’ve written together for some reason and then given to Jeff Lynne to produce. If you understand what any of that means, you’ll like this.

“Another Night” by Real McCoy

My fiancee and I were out somewhere at the beginning of the month (can’t remember where) and this came on. I just had to bow my head solemnly and nod in respect. An absolutely formative piece of music from my childhood.

“The Guardian of Sleep” by Field Music

Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t exactly kept up with every one of Field Music’s releases over the last 10 years. I know you probably have, so sorry if I’m not as good as you.

I own Open Here (2018) on vinyl and Field Music (Measure) (2009) was one of the albums that my friend Erik (my roommate when I lived in Williamsburg from 2008-2012) and I bonded over when we lived together.

This song is from Limits of Language which came out last year. This song is sick. A good example of what Field Music is possible of at their absolute best.

“Finest Worksong” by R.E.M.

I’ve never methodically gone through R.E.M.’s catalog. I don’t know why, I just haven’t. They were never one of “my” bands. But I kind of like randomly hearing or discovering one of their songs and realizing just how many good songs they made like a complete dumb ass.

“Burn the Boats” by Hamilton Leithauser

I wrote about Hamilton’s latest record last month. It’s so good that it deserved to have a track on this month’s play list as well.

“Death Valley High” by Orville Peck and Beck

Oh man, they have been playing this one a ton on Sun Radio. I think for a few weeks I heard it almost every time I was in the car. A fun little “Elvis in Las Vegas”-inspired exercise.

“Broken Bones” by Mamalarky

Read about this one Allmusic. Had never heard of Mamalarky before, but apparently they have a few records. Hex Key (2025), the album this song is from, is good from start to finish. I just happened to pick this song, which leads off the album. I have a feeling Mamalarkey might show up on another one of these lists soon.

“Free Man in Paris” by Joni Mitchell

There’s a part in the documentary Inventing David Geffen (2012) where this song plays when, I think, David Geffen steps away from Asylum Records because he’s been working so hard or something. It’s before he backstabs all the artists he promised to take care of and sells them and their rights to Warner Brothers. Anyways, that part of the documentary constructs this narrative where Geffen says, “Fuck it, I’m going to take a break from the rat race” and for some reason I hold space for that moment in my brain.

It could be that, as a person who works in an industry that is attempting to manage decline, sometimes I think about wanting to step away from it all. I’d like to be a free man in Paris. Or it could be that deep seated thing, that I am so afraid of, in all of us that just wants to constantly be able to walk away from things whenever we get sick of them (the heat doesn’t even need to be around the corner) and start over.

But as David Geffen and Don Draper and everyone else who has given into that impulse has realized—wherever you go, there you are.

“A Little Honey” by Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats

I don’t know anything about Nathaniel Rateliff or The Night Sweats. I’ve just heard this one several times on the radio and I have to admit I like it.

“My Life Is A Country Song” by Valerie June

I also learned about this one from Allmusic. I’m glad I did. Valerie June is another artist I know nothing about. But her latest record—Owls, Omens, and Oracles (2025)—is one of the most interesting albums I’ve listened to in some time. There’s something about the mix of styles, the production, and the way she uses her voice. Every aspect of the album is very familiar but it somehow manages to create a very distinct sound.

“Claire de Lune” by Organist Giles Taylor

While my fiancee was away, I watched the movie Giant (1956) to fill in a major gap in my movie history knowledge.

All I knew about Giant before watching it was that it was James Dean’s last movie before his death, that he was amazing in it, that it was a classic, and that it had been filmed in Marfa, Texas.

I didn’t know that it was a sweeping epic that is partly about what it means to be a Texan or that Elizabeth Taylor’s character is a woman from the east coast who moves to Texas and builds a life with a man she is in love with.

Giant is a unique movie. I’m not sure if it's great, but there is something singular about it. When you watch it, you almost feel as if you are seeing a change in pop culture occurring in real time.

Most of that has to do with James Dean. He is absolutely unbelievable in this movie and he is clearly doing something different than anybody else in the film. He almost feels like an alien or someone who has come from the future, back to the past. When you watch him, you are watching someone in a contemporary film but everyone else in the movie feels as if they are working in a completely different medium or at a completely different speed. It’s fascinating and it works for Dean’s character in the movie: as a young man he is something of a lovesick loner and outcast and over the course of the film he ages into a rich, lonely, and heartbroken old man.

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor are great in their roles and what they do in the film is right for their characters and the movie they are supposed to be in. It’s just that Giant has a foot in two different eras as a work of art and I don’t think that was the intention of the film even if it is about time passing and one generation giving way to another. The story it tells is much more straightforward, but because of when it was released (almost at the dividing line of the culture of the first half of the 1900s and the second half of the 20th century) and because of what James Dean was able to do as an actor the result is far stranger.

Anyway, one of the characters in the movie is always playing “Clare de Lune” on an organ in the giant mansion Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor and their family live in. And, luckily, Organist Giles Taylor happened to have a version on Spotify that sounds just like the one in the film.

I hope everyone had a good weekend.

This month has flown by. It was SXSW here in Austin, but you could’ve fooled me. Most of March, for me, was spent planning things in my personal life.

The main thing I spent time thinking about was patience. Being more patient at work, being more patient with my partner, being more patient with life, being more patient with myself.

I often think about the character Pete Campbell from Mad Men and how I never want to be like him. And so I often think about the moment when Don Draper says to Pete, “I know you want everything the minute you want it. Sometimes it's better to wait until you’re ready.”

Here’s a playlist for you—if you like that kind of thing. As I’ve said before, I’d write these even if nobody reads them.

Good luck out there this week.

“Magnolia Mountain” by Ryan Adams & The Cardinals

Can’t really talk about Ryan Adams anymore, but there was a period of time from about 2004-2014 where the music he made was incredibly important to me.

In 2005, specifically, he announced he was releasing three albums. Those albums ended up being the double album Cold Roses, the country homage Jacksonville City Nights, and the singer-songwriter record 29. During that time he also released a few “joke” albums under pseudonyms—like Hillbilly Joel by The Shit, which is also an incredibly important piece of art to me. Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights are two all-time albums for me.

I listened to both of them countless times driving around Saratoga Springs or in the dark to and from Long Island on Interstate 87. “Magnolia Mountain” is the opening track of Cold Roses and it sets the tone for one of the most ambitious years in Adams’s career—apparently he released 5 albums in both 2022 and 2024.

“Fist of Flowers” by Hamilton Leithauser

A friend of mine, shocked by the fact I listed Everybody Wants Some!!! (2016) as one of my best movies of the last 10 years (totally fine, we need visionaries like myself for a reason), sent me the trailer for Eephus (2024) and told me I’d probably like it. I watched the trailer and said, “Cool, they used a Hamilton Leithauser” song. He wrote back: Who’s that? He’s 8 years younger than me, so this made sense. I told him that Hamilton Leithauser was the lead singer of The Walkmen and was incredibly important to men who are now 39-49 years old. I got a laugh out of that one.

Hamilton Leithauser is back with a new album. It might be his best one as a solo artist and it certainly stands up with the best of the Walkmen albums. Plus, get this: It's just 30 minutes long. Now, that’s a true artist. Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s Leithauser but whenever I hear his voice, a shock of electricity goes through my body and I’m 22 years old again and everything feels as if I’m about to realize something important for the first time in my life and nobody can stop me from sitting in a bar for a little longer than I probably should.

“Nobody ’Cept You” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan comes up a lot in my group chat with my childhood friends. Probably because one of them is obsessed with him. I was helping said friend, who claims to be obsessed with Bob Dylan, figure out what songs were on each disc of The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 (1991) and in doing so remembered how much I loved listening to that box set. And then I remembered this little warbling, muttery gem from Dylan in the mid-70s.

“Get What You Give” by The Men

In 2014, if you’d have asked me who the best band in the world was, I would’ve told you The Men. Their album Tomorrow’s Hits (2014) is still one of my favorite records of the 21st century (and it’s only 36 minutes long—geniuses) and, at 39, it hits me the same way it did when I was 28-29. This album was a lifeline for me when I was tethered to a desk at a job where no one spoke to each other and I had a daily quota of fact-checking at 15-20 reviews of books by self-published authors. You need music at a time like that.

“Little Bit Closer” by Sam Fender

Let me tell ya: Sam Fender took a class on Jeff Buckley’s Grace (1994) and passed with flying colors! This little tyke ain’t half bad. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t even really like Jeff Buckley that much.

“I Can Love Her Anyway” by Ross Miller

A random bit of 1970s detritus I found on the byways of Spotify. Sounds like it could be a theme for a forgotten cop show or game show from 1974. This’ll probably be in Tarantino’s last movie whenever it comes out.

“Crackerbox Palace” by George Harrison

This is one of my 10 favorite George Harrison compositions. Yeah, I’m including Beatles songs in there. I don’t know what to say! For whatever reason, I find this song completely captivating and moving every time I listen to it. Harrison manages to convey the shambolic and mystifying quality of life in a (somewhat) goofy three minute song. I fucking love this thing.

“Chan” by Ramasandiran Somusundaram

This one is another song I happened across while perusing Spotify. Another lost track from the 1970s that brings me back to my days of scouring blogs for .RAR files of obscure records. Look, we’ve all got skeletons in our closets OK!

“Bad Times” by Sunny War

Read about this album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress (2025), on Allmusic since it was one of their Editor’s Choice selections this month. A nice bit of contemporary psych-rock.

“Dark Star” by Crosby, Stills & Nash

To be honest, I only put this song on the playlist because of the next song. But I will say that diving into the extended universe of albums from the CSN guys is a fascinating journey. Most of Neil Young’s albums are canonically great, but Crosby, Stills, and Nash have such a mixed bag of weird, awful, and great stuff (as Tom Scharpling dove into five years ago). This song falls into the latter territory.

“Praise” by Panda Bear

Big month for people who moved to Williamsburg in 2008 and were super into the major indie bands of that period! The period where Animal Collective was maybe the most important band in the world still feels like a fever dream. But your guy Panda Bear is back with Sinister Grift (2025), one of his best records—including all of the Animal Collective albums. On this one, Panda Bear leans into the CSN side of his hippie influences vs. Smile-era Brian Wilson or The Grateful Dead. Just so happy to have him back in my life. Sorry, just have to…wipe…the tears…from my eyes.

“Jupiter” by Nao

Another Allmusic Editor’s Choice here. Some solid neo-soul here. I think you’d call this neo-soul. Maybe I don’t actually know what neo-soul is.

“Magneto And Titanium Man” by Wings

The last song was called “Jupiter” and this song is from the Wings album Venus And Mars (1975). See what I did there? As I’ve mentioned, I just finished the second 700 book about several years in Paul McCartney’s life, so I spent a lot of pages reading about the recording sessions for Venus And Mars. Much of the album was recorded in New Orleans but this song was influenced by Paul reading Marvel comics on vacation in Jamaica. Let me tell you: This song is absolutely absurd and I freaking love it. But I’ll tell you something else: There is no musician, no human being on the planet Earth, who could sell the lines “Magneto said ‘Now the time come / To gather our forces and run’/ Oh no...This can't be so…” and make you feel something like Paul fucking McCartney. This song also sounds absolutely amazing.

“Leave It” by Mike McGear

Mike McGear is the pseudonym for Mike McCartney—Paul McCartney’s brother. You wanna guess how The McCartney Legacy, Volume II (1974-1980) starts? Yep, that’s right with Paul helping his brother write and record songs for his 1974 album McGear. This is one of the better songs on that album.

“Humanhood” by The Weather Station

I like the Weather Station. You have to admire a band who use Joni Mitchell’s Hejira (1976) as their mood board.

“Mystery Achievement” by The Pretenders

Back-to-back appearances by The Pretenders on these monthly playlists! Heard this one in my training gym. This song rocks.

“Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against The Wall)” by Mystikal

I also heard this one in my training gym. This song is absolutely bonkers. The production is peak Neptunes era stuff—absolutely wild. Ya know, life is very strange. Nothing brings me back to the anxious middle school dances with awkward sexual tension of my youth more than the sound of Mystikal’s voice. Is Mystikal my madeleine dipped in tea?

“Angel Eyes” by Alan Price

Speaking of legendary reveries. One day, I was in my kitchen doing something inefficiently, as I usually do, when my mind wandered. “Remember that day,” my mind went, “when you had finished getting your haircut at Gasper’s on Leonard Street and it was a beautiful early spring day in New York when it seemed like the city was starting to come alive and you had the itch to play pickup basketball but it was too late in the day to get your act together for that so instead you decided to go into a record shop on Metropolitan and linger and buy a few things and in that record shop you heard a strange, large 1970s sounding production come on and you couldn’t place it but you noted the lyrics and looked it up later and it was ‘City Lights’ from Between Today And Yesterday (1974) by Alan Price? Yeah, that was awesome—it’s been awhile since you listened to that.”

Alan Price was the keyboardist in the original Animals lineup who went on to have a modest solo career. “Angel Eyes” is a fun little song with a keyboard that sounds like a cat meowing. (If my friend Freimuth is reading this—Freimuth you’ll get a kick out of it.) The real heads will want to listen to “City Lights”—the swelling production that begins at 2:07 is the stuff people who love overproduced music from the 1970s dream of.

“Windy” by The Association

March has been very windy in Texas. This has caused several outbreaks of wildfires. We’ve been lucky not to be impacted. One windy Sunday, this song came on at our favorite local coffee shop. It made me think about a few things.

First, I asked my fiancee if they taught the phrase “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb” in Texas.” Being from the northeast, this was a very important phrase for me as a child in terms of learning the rhythm of the year. She said they didn’t learn that in school.

Second, I thought about the song “Windy.” I was born in 1985 and my elementary school education was filled with references and signposts that carried the fading patina of the 1960s and 1970s. And I often wonder if my fiancee, who is seven years younger than me, experienced any of that. Maybe I watched Forrest Gump one too many times or something but, as a child, it always felt like the world around me was pointing to the earth tones and sounds of the 1960s and 1970s and how that way of life was beginning to recede with each new Dell or Gateway computer that was hauled into a middle class Long Island home.

In the third grade, we had a Grandparents Day ceremony at my elementary school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. My teacher, Ms. Lane, had us sing “Wake Up Little Susie” to our grandparents. I know that’s from 1958 but, because it was the Everley Brothers, it was already gesturing toward 1965.

When I was a little older—about ten or 11—they had us sing “Windy” in chorus. I remember at the time finding it to be such a strange song. But it was a distillation of a feeling I still have a hard time articulating—of recent cultural history collapsing on you in a way that leaves a scent of what was once in the air but can never be revived.

I guess, like, if I taught kids how to sing Mystikal in a chorus class today that might be the same thing?

“Temple Bar” by Will Stratton

Read about this one on Allmusic as well. You give me a white guy singing a slightly melancholy song that’s produced like a track any of the Beatles would’ve released from 1968-1971 and its guaranteed to find its way onto one of these here playlists.

“Little by Little” by Suzanna Choffel

Turned on my car one afternoon and caught the tail end of this one on Sun Radio. Good tune.

“Love Takes Miles” by Cameron Winter

In March, Substack started serving me Notes from Walter Martin, the multi-instrumentalist and co-founder of The Walkmen. One of his recent Notes was about seeing Cameron Winter. Sure enough, after I finished listening to the new Panda Bear album one day, Spotify served some Cameron Winter up to me. A perfect distillation of the current moment: AI or algorithms serving content directly to you and cross-checking that content with the recommendation of a reliable human curator.

I like Cameron Winter—he’s a slurring Todd Rundgren. That’s high praise in my book.

“Suo Gân” by The Ambrosian Junior Choir

I intermittently listen to the Blank Check podcast. I don’t love the hosts as personalities but I find them amusing in doses. What sells me is the fact that they produce three hour long conversations about movies that I think are sick—such as Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

They’re revisiting the early films of Steven Speilberg right now (they did Speilberg’s entire filmography back in 2017) and a recent episode saw them covering Empire of the Sun (1987), which is one of my favorite movies.

This may be a controversial take but I think Empire of the Sun is one of Speilberg’s best movies. You might say it's a little messy in places, that it’s potentially emotionally manipulative, or that he refined his epic wartime storytelling in Schindler’s List (1993) or Saving Private Ryan (1998) but to that I’d say you’re missing the point.

This movie has the kind of Odyssey-style storytelling that I absolutely adore. A large journey filled with episodic encounters with universal character types that adds up to something more than each episode alone provides. Plus, it has the best child acting performance ever from Christian Bale. They articulate the unique quality of Bale’s performance well in the Blank Check podcast: When you watch him in this movie, you are not watching a child actor—you are watching the miniature version of adult Christian Bale. His performance now serves as an amazing time machine that allows you to live both in the past and the present simultaneously. There are moments in this film when he is doing things he will later do in Ford vs. Ferrari (2018). There is honestly nothing like it that I can think of.

John Malkovich’s performance in this movie is one of his absolute best. Malkovich’s energy within Speilberg’s vision is something to behold. Would’ve been nice to see them do something together another time.

This song is actually a Welsh (shouts to John Cale, Lloyd Alexander, and Fluellen) lullaby that is used to great effect as a kind of theme for the film which is about the Japanese invasion of China during World War II.

I’m not sure what it says about me that sometimes this tune comes into my head at random moments and I want to put a knee to the floor and weep.

Good morning.

February is almost over.

Here in Austin, the weather is bouncing back to the 60s and 70s after, potentially, the final cold snap of the winter brought things down to 19 degrees last Thursday morning.

I spent the entire month here in town, which was good to do after a lot of travel in December and January. I’m hoping to stay put for another few months.

My modest life updates are even more modest this month. The main thing you need to know about February is that the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. The final score will be marked as 40-22, but in reality the actual final score was 40-6.

Other than that, my fiancee and I are making progress on planning our wedding in September.

I take each day and its news as I can and try not to get too far ahead of myself. I try to limit my dosage of news and what forms in which I take it so that I can remain clear-headed. Each day I remind myself that even if I haven’t read everything, even if I don’t know everything that happened in a given day, I’ve still consumed more information in my waking hours than any average person living at any other point in human history.

And that still seems like a lot.

Here is a playlist for you. Like I always say, I’d write these even if no one read ’em. They give me great moments of joy.

See you next time.

“Now is the Time” by Norma Tanega

This is the opening track on Norma Tanega’s 1971 album I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile. I had no idea who Norma Tanega was before I read about this album on Allmusic.com. I love the sound of this record and this song especially. It has the feel of the Kinks’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One (1970)—that hard, crunchy, but also loose and acoustic feel happening at the same time. Plus, hearing someone repeat “try to get together, you gotta do it because now is the time” feels kind of soothing.

“Don’t You Cry For Me” by Ronnie Lane

Ronnie Lane is one of my treasures. He’s the often overlooked bassist from The Small Faces and The Faces who was outshone by Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. I was maybe the only person at Skidmore College listening to The Faces in 2003 and after I listened to that group’s entire discography, I wound my way through the solo work of each of its key members. I listened to Ronnie Lane’s solo albums (hard to find then, but enough persistence led you to ways of downloading them) all the time in my senior year of college. And this still stands as my favorite composition of his. It balances the kind of downtrodden, loveable loser vocals Lane was expert at with a sense of confidence and hope (this dark horse might just come in) in the melody. His best songs all maintain that balance so well.

“Sooner Cheat Death Than Fool Love” by Cass McCombs

Been spending time with 2013’s Big Wheel and Others for the first time in a long time. Loved the record when it came out and still love it now. Always appreciate when an artist stretches for a double album. This was one of my favorites then and it remains one of my favorites now.

“It’s Only A Love Song” by C Duncan

Read about this record on Allmusic.com. Great, sophisticated piano-driven pop in the classic sense.

“Saraab (feat. Mahin Amid)” by Anoushirvan Rohani

At the end of January, I took an Uber to the Austin airport to catch my flight to Long Island for my grandmother’s funeral. We were stuck in some traffic (don’t worry I left with plenty of time and we’re not too far from the airport anyway like maybe 18 minutes with no traffic so it was really, completely fine) and as my mind wandered with anticipation for the flight, the trip, and the funeral, I found myself focusing on the music playing in the car for a moment. It was this song. I don’t know how you’d categorize this music, but I like it.

“Captain Jack” by Billy Joel

If you grew up on Long Island, this song is a form of eucharist. It is an absolutely absurd production—its length, its over-the-top choruses, its lyrics, and the way Billy enunciates them—but I will always love it.

Like Tony Soprano, I spent my time in the suburbs around New York City during the turn of the 21st century and I certainly felt like I came in at the end of something. At my grandmother’s funeral, I looked at a collage of pictures from her life. The pictures spanned the 20th century. They were pictures of my extended family. And as I looked at them, I saw a world, a time, and a way of being in the world and even a way of being between members of my family that was all gone. This song makes me think about that: Long Island as a place I heard about and imagined when I looked at worn Islanders t-shirts and jerseys at my grandparents’ house when the Islanders couldn’t hope for a sellout at the Coliseum in the mid-90s.

This song reminds me of guys I knew, guys who I was friends with as a teenager, who lived in their parents’ basements during high school and college and then went to rehab or died.

And still, the chorus comes in and the organ swells and even though Billy Joel was Jewish he knew how to arrange an church organ part (apparently Michael Omartian played it, according to ChatGPT) like a Catholic and something I won’t ever get rid of comes alive in me.

“Take The Long Way Home” by Supertramp

There are certain songs in your life that have a funny place. I remember downloading this one on Napster for some reason when I was like 15 years old (right in the thick of my classic rock education via the The Book of Rock) and thinking it was the deepest song I’d ever heard. Another one that reminds me of a wood-panelled basement in Huntington or Hicksville, not far from the LIRR or a neighborhood that gives way to an empty school yard and you feel like you could go long for a touchdown if anyone was still around to throw one to you.

“One of These Nights” by The Eagles

On my way to the airport to fly back to Austin from Long Island, I stopped at a deli to get a chicken cutlet sandwich for my journey. There’s a place on 25A called International Deli that I go to because the more famous Se-Port Deli (just down the road) has expanded far too much over the last 20 years and has too many sandwiches that confuse me. When I was waiting for my sandwich in the empty deli on a cold Saturday in January, I watched as an older man mopped the kitchen floor and sang along to this song when it came on the radio. No matter what, life goes on.

“Primitive Painters” by Felt

My college roommate has always loved Felt. Me? Never really gave them a second thought. I see why he loved them.

“Love Between the Lines” by Pocket Sun

Read about this one on Mandy Tamm’s Substack. Nice bit of electropop.

“Anything Can Happen” by Wyclef Jean

Heard this one in my training gym. In 1998, Wyclef Jean’s Carnival and Busta Rhymes’s Extinction Level Event represented the peak of music to me. This song is still pretty fun.

“25 Kisses” by Joan Armatrading

Joan Armatrading’s new album is ABSOLUTELY sick. What an artist! I highly recommend giving this one a listen. I have not spent enough time with her entire body of work—I’ve only scratched the surface. She is phenomenal.

“Ain’t That Peculiar” by Fanny

On Valentine's Day, my fiancee and I went down to the Alamo Drafthouse to watch the new and first officially authorized documentary about Led Zeppelin. (Don’t worry we had like a whole plan because going out on Valentine’s Day is for suckers and I’d done a lot of cooking already that week and I wasn’t gonna try to au poivre anything and it was President’s Day weekend and really I asked her several times if she was sure.) The documentary is called Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025) and there’ll be more on that later. But before the movie they were playing old rock performances from 1970s TV broadcasts. This was one of them. No one talks about Fanny. I was gonna pitch an article about them once but then I remembered no one likes my article ideas.

“Again And Again And Again” by Wings

I’m reading a 700 page book about the years 1974-1980 in the life of Paul McCartney. I’ve already read a 700 page book about the years 1969-1973 in the life of Paul McCartney. You didn’t think I was going to put a song from Back to the Egg (1979) that was written by Denny Laine on my fucking February playlist? What’s wrong with you?!

“Allison Road” by Gin Blossoms

I had a friend named Buzzy when I was growing up. I’d say we’re still friends. He’s one of those people you spent such good time with when you were younger that it’s always kind of still there between you even if you don’t speak or see each other and may never see each other again depending on how life turns and especially because you don’t use social media anymore. Buzzy used to like Gin Blossoms for more than their singles on the radio. I heard this song on the radio the other day and really enjoyed the experience.

“Tonight With The Dogs I’m Sleeping” by Bonnie Prince Billy

Not the biggest Bonnie Prince Billy guy over here. But I listened to his latest album because it was an Allmusic Editor’s Choice recently and I liked this one a lot.

“Don’t Get Me Wrong” by the Pretenders

Heard this one on the radio recently and really liked it. Have you listened to all of the Pretenders albums? I haven’t and its always one of those bands that I’m like, “I need to plow through their discography one slow Friday at work” but then I’m like “My man, you’re not 26 or 27 or even 28 anymore, you don’t need to do stuff like that…plus the Eagles just won the Super Bowl less than a month ago and there’s still plenty of podcasts to listen to about that just be kind to yourself.”

“In The Mood” by Robert Plant

Like I said, my fiancee and I saw the new Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin on Valentine’s Day. This is the first documentary authorized by the living members of Led Zeppelin and John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant all gave interviews and appear in the documentary. There’s good stuff that comes with that (access to some great early footage and one of the only recorded interviews with John Bonham) and bad (whole thing is pretty puffy). After reading two books about Led Zeppelin in August 2023, I was reminded about how deeply fucked up their whole situation was once they got famous. There won’t ever be a good documentary about them maybe ever.

Being Led Zeppelin covers the band up until they completely broke out near the end of 1969, which is only about a year or so after they formed—a good construction done best by the Supersonic (2016) about Oasis’s rise to world dominance. No matter how problematic you know Led Zeppelin are, no matter how many bad things you know they did, if you hear a song from Led Zeppelin I or Led Zeppelin II played loud in a movie theater it hits you as if you just heard one of their songs for the first time. And the power of Led Zeppelin is that hearing one of their songs for the first time, no matter when you do, feels like anyone hearing their music for the first time, which is something the documentary gets across very well.

Before we went to the movie, my fiancee and I stopped for some burgers. In the restaurant, I heard this moody and vibey Robert Plant song come on. It’s from his 1983 album The Principle of Moments. Listening to it, I sort of had to marvel: Robert Plant released this song three years after Led Zeppelin broke up and about thirty years after The Principle of Moments he released his second album with Allison Krause. If anyone in Led Zeppelin could have sat back and been a one-trick pony it was Robert Plant. Instead, he has pushed on as an artist for over thirty years.

“Just Like a Baby” by Sly & The Family Stone

This month I also watched Sly Lives! (2025), the documentary on Sly & The Family Stone directed by Questlove. This documentary is better than Being Led Zeppelin. They definitely do different things, but this is just a more interesting story. Questlove’s earnestness rubs me the wrong way a bit these days, but you can get past it in this documentary because Sly is that interesting, the music is that good, and the perspectives he gets from other musicians and people in Sly’s life are that insightful.

Sly & The Family Stone are probably a bit underrated at this point. Watching this documentary made me realize just how much they shaped music and culture in the second half of the 20th century. Truly, their influence is up there with The Beatles in terms of changing how people not only made music but also dressed, talked, and acted in the world.

Wesley Morris knocked the doc for feeling like an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music. But I’m not sure what else he was looking for? This is a sad story and Questlove captured it as succinctly as he could. The joy and hope that brought Sly and the band to fame at the end of the 1960s soured into disappointment, depression, and paranoia in the 1970s.

When “Just Like a Baby” plays over the ending credits, you’re left feeling empty, worn out, and sad. And you desperately want to get back to whatever it was that was happening in the world and in their lives that drove Sly and the band to write a song like “Everyday People,” a song we have become numb to over time but which is beautiful in its message and its musicality.

This has been a strange month of stops and starts.

I started the month staying in my friend’s sister’s apartment in Park Slope and I’ll be ending it attending a funeral on Long Island. In between, I took a trip to Oaxaca and Puerto Escondido. On our way to Mexico, our flight turned around midway because there had been a helicopter crash at the Oaxaca airport. On our way back from Mexico our flight got delayed by a winter storm in Austin, which caused us to spend an abbreviated night in Mexico City. Amid all that I worked and tried to start a new year with optimism.

I’m going to a funeral because My grandmother passed away last week. She was 97 years old. You might remember that my grandfather passed away almost two years ago, also at the age of 97. I wrote about him. And I’ll probably take some time to write about my grandmother as well.

She was a very important person to me. She was a loyal reader of this newsletter and I could count on her to send me an email every other week saying that she had no idea what I was talking about half the time but she was always glad to hear my “voice” when reading these newsletters. She especially liked the Swimming Issue. I saw her for the last time on Christmas Day. When she saw me, she said, “I like getting your newsletters but you’re so worried about things all the time.”

Now, I don’t think that’s exactly how I’d classify what’s happening in these newsletters, but that was very much my grandmother to the end. She lived a great life and had a great quality of life. She was living on her own up until the very end. If she had lived any longer it was probably going to get harder and she was probably going to need more people to help her every day. And something tells me she wasn’t going to like that.

I was lucky to have three grandparents that lived up to and into their nineties. I had close relationships with all three of them. When I’m at work and my team has trouble balancing their work and their priorities, I use my time with my grandparents as an example. Being able to spend time with people you love and learn from them while they are here is the most important thing you can do. Work and everything else comes second.

Here’s a playlist for you. As I say, writing these is some of the most fun I have. I’d write ’em even if nobody read ’em. If you do read ’em, thank you.

“Do It Again” by Steely Dan

I heard this song on the radio while driving in Austin this month. Or maybe it was when I was in New York City at the turn of the year. I honestly don’t remember. I’m always hearing this song somewhere and have been for my entire life. On some level I don’t quite yet understand, the vibe of this song reflects the vibe of this January—for me at least. Everything seems a bit surreal and confusing. There's fog everywhere and it's not just from the fires ravaging Los Angeles and changing the very history and trajectory of that city. We’re all the lotus-eaters and we’ve forgotten too much to ever get back to where we came from.

“Ordinary Pleasures” by Toro y Moi

One day at my training gym, my trainer asked me to pick the music. I’ve said this before, but I get a little frazzled when he asks me to do this. For some reason I told him to put on Caribou radio on Spotify. He did and the results were fantastic. This was one of the songs that came on. Never heard this one before. I like it. Something about it feels fitting for whatever this moment we are about to enter into.

“Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles

I’ve been thinking a lot about endings lately. It could be because of a book I read, it could be because everything is video now, it could be because of AI, or it could be because as each year goes by I (naturally) encounter a little bit of loss at a time.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about endings. Things that are actually ending or things that are beginning but that are actually the ending of something. This song is about that I think.

Every second of this song has something interesting happening. And yet it is one of the most melancholic dance songs I’ve ever heard. You try writing a song that manages to feel poignant but also makes you imagine you and everyone you love dancing at your wedding. This one will last for a long time.

“Cynical Girl” by Marshall Crenshaw

Heard this randomly at the gym. This is the stuff right here. Perfect songwriting.

“From Red to Blue” by Billy Bragg

As I’ve said, my fiancee and I are watching Gilmore Girls right now. It’s my third time through the show and her first time. One of the most amusing parts of rewatching it this time is the AUDACITY of the needle drops on the show. ASP was on a fucking heater in the early seasons. When Rory goes to her first Chilton house party they are listening to Billy fucking Bragg. No joke. In what world?! God I love the balls.

All that aside, this is such a phenomenal song. I listened to this on the day my grandmother passed away and every time the organ swelled it was hard not to cry. The song’s not even about anything remotely close to that kind of grief. But the playing and the melody are so powerful and true it makes you feel whatever you feel as strongly as you possibly can.

“Living In Sin In The USA” by Oakley Hall

One day I was reading something and I saw the shape of the word “oakley” and it reminded me of this little chestnut from 2006.

I still have a vivid memory of this track sitting in my Kazaa library. I must’ve read about Oakley Hall somewhere—Pitchfork, NME, Stereogum—and gotten excited about their record.

I can recall myself sitting in a dorm room in Upstate New York and listening to this and pining for some girl that didn’t even know me (or maybe even exist) or care about me. Nothing much came of Oakley Hall, but this song still works.

“This Evening So Soon” by Bob Dylan

A Complete Unknown was nominated for eight Oscars this month, which is probably the crowning achievement on Bob Dylan’s legacy. Very happy for Bob, for Timmy, for Joan, for Monica, for Pete (RIP), and for Eddie (you been a nut since day one my man, keep acting up a storm). This movie will probably win all the awards that Inside Llewyn Davis should’ve won for doing a much better job conveying the historical and historical importance of a thing like “Bob Dylan.”

In any case, I been listening to lots of people on podcasts talk about Bob Dylan and ask each other questions about their favorite Bob Dylan period. Tough question, but if you’re asking me it's the 1967-1971 lying-low period that starts with the motorcycle accident and kind of concludes with Bob’s appearance at The Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971. That, to me, was when he was at his most enigmatic and trying—if often imperfectly or imprecisely but maybe that was on purpose—to get at the heart of his own experiment of American mythmaking and the recurring nature of history.

And soundwise it's the period that draws me back the most consistently. Call me when you get a vibe as good and a sound as true as the one on “Alberta #2” and maybe we can get together sometime.

This song is a reworking of a Bob Gibson song called “Tell Ol’ Bill” (1958) and is from the period of bountiful outtakes around the Self Portrait, Nashville Skyline, and New Morning albums. As Joan Harris once said (talking about cocaine), this song always makes me feel like I just got a piece of very good news.

“Hands of Time” by Margo Price

Heard this on the radio one day by chance as I was driving home. Had to sit in my car to let it finish. As Shaq once said of Paul Pierce: Margo Price is the truth.

“Trying to Make a Fool of Me” by The Delfonics

The first time I fell in love with The Delfonics was in the fall of 2006 when I was heavily into Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star (1973) album. There’s a mini-medley at the end of that record that includes a cover of “La La Means I Love You” and that was my entry-point. The absolute best of Philly Soul. As cinematic as it gets.

“Morning Broadway” by Keith Mansfield

It’s vibes, ALL vibes from 1969.

“Congoman” by The Congos

On a three hour van ride from Oaxaca City to Puerto Escondido my old roommate from my four years living in Williamsburg put an album by The Congos on. Had never heard of this stuff in my life. Just a persistent groove for six minutes straight. The kind of stuff Joe Strummer was hard after circa 1980-1981. Thank god for friends.

“No Es Tan Solo La Mitad” by La Adictiva

This one was on my Shazam most likely because I picked it up along the way somewhere in a Oaxaca restaurant, ice cream stand, print shop, or boutique. I don’t know what the formal genre for this kind of music is but it sure as hell sounds like a good pop song to me.

“Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan

Everyone thinks Paul McCartney sings this song but c’mon guys, O’Sullivan sings more like a BEE GEE than a Beatle. No knock on the Bee Gees (who are great and really know how to put on a wonderful Christmas party) but that’s a big difference and you can hear it if you’re a pro like me.

This is an absolute gem of a song that was playing at a vegan breakfast spot in Puerto Escondido on a hot, humid morning along the Pacific coast of Mexico.

“Mi Arbolito” by La Sonora Santanera

Another entry from my Shazam that I can’t place. Great harmonies and melodically feels like something from 1965. I’m not sure what that means exactly but it makes sense to me.

“With A Little Help From My Friends - Take 1/False Start and Take 2/Instrumental” by The Beatles

This outtake from the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club expanded re-release in 2017 is my version of jazz. I think that tells you all you need to know about me.

I’ve been re-reading Ian MacDonald’s seminal book Revolution in the Head (1994), which reviews every song the Beatles recorded in chronological order. When I read certain passages in this book, I sometimes think it may be some of the best writing ever. It certainly contains some of the most precise critical writing about music I’ve ever encountered: it is honest, acidic, earnest, and empathetic all at once. And there’s also a bittersweet and sad quality about the writing as well. Almost as if MacDonald knows he is documenting the slow end of a certain way of life. There is something of the lonely historian’s heart in his words: a Pausanias or Tacitus of the 1960s and its aftermath.

An example from his entry on “You Never Give Me Your Money”: “For McCartney, the group was a make-believe world in which he could be forever young. His colleagues, feeling too old for such frivolity, sourly declined to play shadows to his Peter Pan…To anyone who loves The Beatles, the bittersweet nostalgia of this music is hard to hear without a tear in the eye. Here, an entire era…is bravely bidden farewell.”

One of the best observations MacDonald makes about the Beatles is that John’s songs are written horizontally while Paul’s songs are written vertically. I believe that might be the most concise way to explain the differences in their aesthetics without getting into subjectivity or hyperbole. Once you think of their songs in that way it makes a lot of sense. “Strawberry Fields” is horizontal. “Penny Lane” is vertical.

And when you listen to this version of “With A Little Help From My Friends” you can tell it was a Paul composition. This is a vertical song.

In his entry for “With A Little Help From My Friends,” MacDonald explains the song’s lyrical genesis in a session at Paul McCartney’s apartment where he and Lennon played the song on piano and invited friends to shout out lines. “At once communal and personal, it’s a song of comfort—an acid lullaby. Touchingly rendered by Starr, it was meant as a gesture of inclusivity: everyone could join in.” The most enduring line, according to MacDonald is “What do you see when you turn out the light?/I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine.” He goes on to say, “These words had the appearance of emerging from beyond the rational mind and, in 1967, seemed convincing precisely because of that. No accident, then, that chance determination was becoming central to The Beatles; and no mystery that they would soon begin to lose their ability to discriminate between creativity and self-indulgence.”

Like I said, I’ve been thinking of endings lately—endings themselves or endings disguised as beginnings. There is something in this song, in its creation, that speaks deeply to me. As I’ve listened to this instrumental version over and over it seems as if the melodic meaning of the song becomes even deeper.

There is something so bittersweet in the actual song’s bones. There is melancholy. There is an ending in sight, even if unconsciously. You can get by with a little help from your friends. But for how long? And for how long are those friends going to be with you in the same way they once were? Change is inevitable, even for the biggest Peter Pans among us.

"Coral Reef (コーラル・リーフ)” by Shigeru Suzuki

On our three hour ride to Puerto Escondido, my friend also put this album on. No clue something like this existed. This is what friends are for: showing you the countless worlds that exist beyond your own.

“You Can Do Magic” by America

There is a local cafe chain here in Austin called Civil Goat. It’s not really a chain because there’s only two locations. We live close to one of them. My fiancee and I were having breakfast in one recently and they were playing an absolutely stellar soft rock playlist (probably autogenerated by Spotify for maybe the legendary AI DJ, the one and only DJ X). This was on it. Didn’t know America did stuff like this.

“It Takes a Woman’s Love (To Make a Man)” by Kansas

This song played over the credits of the final episode of Somebody Somewhere, further cementing that show’s genius.

Kansas was a staple of the Napster/Maxell burnt-CD era when people I went to high school with were plowing through classic rock bands as if the 1970s had never ended. Because of that and maybe the 1977 episode of VH1’s Behind the Music that chronicled the rise of “corporate rock”, I identify Kansas as a band that sucked.

But you can not DENY this song. It has the flamboyant mid to late 1970s organ sound championed by Keith Emerson on “Karn Evil,” the dumbest riffs ever, and vocals and lyrics that could just be copied and pasted from any Foreigner song.

This song wasn’t on “Freaks and Geeks” but it probably should have been. It puts you right in that time.

“Join Together” by The Who

I heard this one day in my training gym and for some reason it made me sad. This is not one of The Who’s best songs, but it is from the tail end of their Who’s Next/Lifehouse peak in 1971.

It just got me thinking about The Who. The truth is they probably aren’t going to make it. As time progresses they are going to fall by the wayside.

When I was growing up, we were about 30 years removed from their heyday, but The Who still felt like a crucial touchstone for music education.

Now? Nobody talks about The Who anymore and I don’t see much of a reason for that to change.

Not a real tragedy or anything to be sad about. Just got me thinking about how things disappear in time.

“Cherub Rock” by The Smashing Pumpkins

Another training gym song. Someone must have put Smashing Pumpkins radio on Spotify. I can’t pretend to be a Pumpkinhead or a Corgaholic but I do believe this is the best song this band ever did.

“Don’t Cry” by Guns N’ Roses

This song came on in a very fine and average cocktail bar in Oaxaca that my friends and I went to for a nightcap after a great dinner at Cocina de Humo.

I’ve never been too partial to Guns N’ Roses. Like any regular person, at New Year’s parties in my twenties I made sure that someone put on “November Rain” so that the guitar solo (which might be the best guitar solo in any song in the “rock” canon) coincided with the ball dropping. And, I mean, I appreciate them for sure but I didn’t spend hours listening to their albums.

I think my favorite Axl Rose mode as a vocalist is when he’s doing his downbeat voice. Sure he can’t help himself and when he hits the higher notes his voice still sounds like a cat meowing for wet food. Yet he manages to get at something when he pushes himself in the direction of remorse and regret.

December is almost over, which means 2024 is almost over.

This month has gone by fast and I’m getting ready to head to the northeast for the holidays. I’ll be spending time with loved ones on Long Island and then a few days in New York City.

The weather in Austin has been rainy. We also had our first freeze. And this week has felt like a pleasant stretch of late summer weather up north.

My fiancee and I have been watching (rewatching for me) the first season of Gilmore Girls, which has felt surprisingly cozy and seasonally appropriate. Upon rewatching, I was reminded of this XTC (under the name of The Three Wise Men) song, which was featured in the episode “Forgiveness and Stuff.”

It is absolutely INSANE that this hasn’t been a Christmas staple. I honestly can’t think of a single Christmas song that’s better than this. Seriously! Listen to this song!

I’ve also been trying to cram some final book reading into this year. One of the books I’m reading right now is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

I always wanted to read Meditations but now felt like an especially good time. Why? Because so much in the world and at work feels uncertain, I wanted to read something that has been around for a while. I find that reading older novels or works of non-fiction ground me. Because as much as we feel like things are new or changing, for the most part things that have been true will generally always be true.

Or maybe I’m just beginning a mid-life crises that sees me getting SUPER into the online stoic community.

Either way, I want to share this passage that I’ve found very useful:

“To my soul: Are you ever going to achieve goodness? Ever going to be simple, whole, and naked—as plain to see as the body that contains you? Know what an affectionate and loving disposition would feel like? Ever be fulfilled, ever stop desiring—lusting and longing for people and things to enjoy? Or for more time to enjoy them? Or for some other place or country— ‘a more temperate clime’? Or for people easier to get along with? And instead be satisfied with what you are, and accept the present—all of it.”

I’m trying. I’m trying all the time.

Once again, I have a playlist for you if you like that kind of thing. Here’s what last year’s looked like. I would make these playlists and write about the songs on them even if zero people read these posts.

See you next week.

“House of Woodcock” by Jonny Greenwood

To me, the four essential Christmas movies of the last 50 years are: Diner (1982), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and Phantom Thread (2017). I watch these movies around Christmas every year. In their own way, each one perfectly captures the feeling of the holiday and the slow turn over toward the remainder of winter.

Phantom Thread was released on Christmas Day in 2017 and this composition by Jonny Greenwood is my favorite bit of music from the movie. It immediately sets a mood. Listen to it and try not to imagine snow falling outside of a tall window with perfect molding and an expensive, but tasteful, set of drapes.

“Friends of Mine” by The Zombies

Back in the winter of 2003-2004, Odyssey & Oracle (1969) by the Zombies was still an overlooked masterpiece that was on its way to being appreciated. I discovered it during my winter break from college.

(Odyssey & Oracle and the 1970 album Parachute by The Pretty Things are probably the two best Beatles albums the Beatles didn’t make.)

This track, in the “Penny Lane” school of pop, sounds like a bright snow day when the pack is soft, but still firm and sleddable.

“London Town” by Wings

This song, the title track off 1978’s London Town, is one of my favorite Wings songs from perhaps my favorite Wings album. It really just depends on the day. This is top-notch McCartney. Phenomenal vocals, a complex but catchy melody, punches of Rule, Brittania horns. Whenever I listen to this song, I am walking in London and I think I might’ve just felt snow fall on the shoulder of my pea coat.

“Material Girl” by Madonna

It’s present season and everything in this country is for sale. We’re all material girls. And, fuckin’ shit, can you believe how good Madonna was off the bat and how fun this still is to listen to?

“If You Were Here” by Thompson Twins

Heard this song out at a restaurant or coffee shop. Should’ve jotted down exactly where I heard it. Not familiar with the Thompson Twins or this song. Nothing beats surging and triumphant synths with a slight hint of melancholy. That’s what I always say anyways and usually the guy waiting for me to tap my card to pay at the counter is like, “OK, man, hurry it up.”

“Under the Milky Way” by The Church

This one’s been in heavy rotation on Sun Radio here in Austin over the past two months. Moody 1980s rock doesn’t get much better than this.

“Last Christmas” by Wham!

My fiancee and I stopped off for some P. Terry’s on the way to a Wilco concert downtown at the beginning of December. It had been a long week of work and we never really get fast food, so we figured why the hell not have some P. Terry’s.

While we were sitting and eating in the mid-century modern dining room looking out at the line of cars idling for the drive-thru, I heard a little girl (probably about 9 or 10) singing this song while chewing on a burger.

Gotta believe George Michael could’ve never imagined how this song was going to live on when he wrote it.

“Father Christmas” by The Kinks

I love this great little Kinks number about a santa being mugged by kids. There is transcendent glockenspiel work done on this song.

“Horn” by Phish

For some reason, this has always been one of my favorite Phish songs. It could’ve been because it was on a 1993 show I had a burned CD of that I used to listen to all the time in high school while I drove my 1992 Chevy Blazer.

There’s something atmospheric about this song that, to me, feels unique in Phish’s catalog. It’s almost like Paul Westerberg co-wrote the song. Plus, for my money, it has one of Trey’s most tasteful and memorable guitar solos.

For me, this song sounds like one of those cold nights on winter break when you’re sitting in a car on a dead end street with your friends.

“My Darling” by Wilco

I’ve got more to write about Wilco later but I put this one on here because to get into the holiday/winter spirit, my fiancee and I have been watching Gilmore Girls. It was her first rodeo. This is my third or fourth time through the series. “My Darling” is one of my many inspired needle drops from the first season of the show. They were just operating on a different level than so many other TV shows back in 2000. I heard this song and it reminded me that I hadn’t listened to Summerteeth (1999) in such a long time and that this has always been one of my favorite Wilco songs. Tweedy (and Jay Bennett) manage to create a sequel to “Cry Baby Cry” by The Beatles with a dash of mid-60s Brian Wilson.

“Meadowport Arch” by The Ladybug Transistor

The 1990s were really so rich with bands who fucking loved Revolver (1966). This is a great approximation of the 1965-1966 Beatles sound.

“Thinking of You” by Soccer Mommy

The new Soccer Mommy album kind of slipped by me this past fall. I was trying to catch up with it this month. There’s less noise than the band’s previous records, but she’s still good at writing a tune.

“Main Title Theme (Billy)” by Bob Dylan

Perhaps my favorite Dylan instrumental. The sleigh bells give it a yuletide flair, even if it was part of the score for a Sam Peckinpah western. Wes Anderson liked it so much he used it in Royal Tenenbaums (2000) in the scene when Royal gets kicked out of the house at Archer Avenue in the snow.

“Christmas Must Be Tonight” by The Band

This song was one of the “Bonus Tracks” on my CD of Northern Lights-Southern Cross (1975) along with a demo version of “Twilight.” I always thought this was a fun Christmas song that no one ever really talked about.

“Waiting On a Song” by Dan Auerbach

I could not give two shits about the Black Keys. Never did and never will. Absolutely think they are complete phonies with nothing interesting to offer. Could never fucking touch The White Stripes no matter how hard they tried.

That being said, I heard this song and the radio and liked it immediately. When I learned it was Dan Auerbach, I had to bite my tongue and nod my head. This is note-perfect California country rock in the Flying Burrito Brothers—>Eagles tradition. This kind of stuff, when done well, never gets old to me.

“Simple Song” by The Shins

Port of Morrow (2012) is really a very under appreciated modern pop album, the kind that Elvis Costello was so masterful at releasing in the 1980s. I loved it from the start and still love it over 10 years later. The Shins didn’t age well for a lot of people for some reason, but James Mercer can write a song. The whole album is full of great tracks, but they’ve been playing this one on the radio lately for some reason.

“Growing Up and I’m Fine” by Mick Ronson

Mick Ronson is primarily known as the guitarist who gave character shade to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era songs as well as randomly being in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue band and adding a strange, druggy, afterglow to the live performances of some of Dylan’s folk classics.

But his 1974 album, Slaughter on 10th Avenue is a great mid-70s rock record in its own right. This song is worth the price of admission alone. Bowie wrote it, of course, and you can hear it immediately in the way the vocals are arranged. But Ronson’s production is fantastic. I could listen to this song for a thousand years.

“Venus Stopped the Train” by Wilco

My fiancee and I saw Wilco at ACL Live in downtown Austin at the beginning of December. On the way to the venue, we ran into an old friend of hers from school. We made small talk and eventually the question of how many Wilco shows I’d seen came up. I realized that I was in the double digits and that I’d seen them more than any other band. Had never thought about it that way before.

During the show, I was buzzed and enjoying myself. My fiancee has been stressed out at work and I could tell her mind was elsewhere. During the eight years we’ve been together I’ve taken her to three Wilco shows and one solo Jeff Tweedy show. I sort of felt bad sitting there enjoying the show. Like I was pleasuring myself.

And I sort of was.

If left to my own devices, my spirit drifts to the melancholic. I am historically enchanted by the pain of nostalgia. With my buzz, I took videos of songs and texted them to friends. Friends I probably don’t talk to or keep up with enough but think about all the time. I texted them and my mind drifted to how Wilco has served as a through line for my life since I was 16 years old.

Wilco basically defined my time in college. The summer before college, my roommate and I exchanged emails about what we liked. Wilco was one of the things we had in common. During the first week of freshman year, I realized I picked the right college when my suitemate was playing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on his stereo system (receiver and wire connected speakers and everything). A Ghost Is Born came out in the spring of my freshman year. Wilco played at my school in October of 2004. Kicking Television (especially the live version of “Remember the Mountain Bed”) got me through loneliness and heartbreak during my study abroad semester in the fall of 2005. I was baffled by Sky Blue Sky in the spring of 2007 but then learned to love it as I listened to it over and over on iTunes at one of the desktop Macs in the college library while I revised my first novel manuscript at the hurried end of senior year.

I once reviewed The Whole Love (2011) on my old blog and used it as a way to write about getting older and watching one of my best friends get married. He was my first friend to get married. We were 26 years old. That was over 13 years ago.

In April 2022, I flew to Chicago so two of my best friends from college (my old freshman roommate and one of the first friends I made in our dorm because we walked from campus to town about once a week to pick up packs of cigarettes) and I could see Wilco play the entirety of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot live.

I put this song on the playlist because it reminds me of a very specific time in my life. The fall of 2003 when I started college. Back then I tried to get my hands on any kind of bootleg Wilco material I could. I bought a crappy VHS of Wilco’s TV appearances up to that point at a local record store. And my friend, one of the ones I went to Chicago to visit, had a bootleg of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot outtakes and demos. “Venus Stopped the Train” was on there.

My friend was and is a good guitar player. He used to play this one on guitar in his dorm room and I’d sit as he sang it with this girl we were friends with (she liked the line about “smoking Christmas tree”) and who I stayed in touch with into my early twenties (I even saw her perform in a experimental theater adaptation of the Oregon Trail video game at the KGB theater in Manhattan) but will probably never see again in my life.

He’d play this song and “Reservations” (also from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) outside of our dorm room. We’d sit on benches and smoke cigarettes and drink beer or stupid mixed drinks most nights of the week.

I don’t miss that stuff all that much. I’m thankful for it. There’s not a lot of pictures of that time for me to look at. But I can listen to this song and I can see it all in my mind as if it were still happening—as if that life was still going on out there somewhere even though I’m here now and not in that life and almost forty years old.

The morning after the Wilco show, my fiancee and I were doing errands around downtown Austin in a persistent drizzle. We passed by the ACL Live building and there were about five or six people waiting on line for the Wilco show that night. I figured it was because they were doing unique set lists every night—no repeats.

Probably all means just as much to them.

“Lullaby” by Laura Marling

Read about the new Laura Marling album Patterns in Repeat (2024) on Allmusic.com and it reminded me of the fact that Laura Marling is one of the songwriters I’ve always wanted to spend time with, but somehow never made enough time for.

The title says it all. This is a beautiful lullaby.

“Brighter!” by Cass McCombs

I haven’t listened to Cass McCombs in some time. But I was reminded of him recently for some reason. You know, the idle thought that comes across your mind: What’s going on with Cass McCombs these days? Happens all the time.

And when it did, I thought about Big Wheel and Others, his 2013 double album and how I listened to it on repeat at my miserable fact checking job at Kirkus Book Reviews. Big Wheel and Others covers a lot of ground and there are so many great songs on it. This one happens to be one of my favorites. And something about it kind of feels like a Christmas carol or hymn.

“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Nick Lowe

Nick Lowe’s 2013 Christmas album, Quality Street, is one of my favorite Christmas albums. I still have fond memories of hearing him play songs from it on the Christmas episode of Comedy Bang Bang back when he released it. This is actually a cover of the 1973 original by Wizzard (led by Roy Wood of The Move and early-ELO fame) that went to number 4 on the charts.

“Thanks for Christmas” by Jon Graboff

Spotify doesn’t have the XTC version of this song which, as I noted above, deserves to be played on the radio every hour each December. So instead I had to add this random instrumental I found. Cheers to you, Jon Graboff!

“Ding Dong, Ding Dong” by George Harrison

George Harrison’s 1974 album Dark Horse has historically gotten a bad rap because of the quality of George’s voice on the record. It’s often referred to as Dark Hoarse.

(George was in a bad place in the mid-70s, alright? Let’s cut him some slack. I wouldn’t recommend listening to Extra Textra from 1975 but, I mean, also I absolutely would.)

Even so, the album contains a variety of charms. There’s the title track for starters as well as the excellent “Simply Shady” which is one of the best compositions George ever came up with.

And then there’s “Ding, Dong,” which I believe has only 30 distinct words and 5 unique lines in its lyrics. It is an absolute trifle of a song. But what a trifle it is! George goes in his bag to pull out those “Savoy Truffle” horns, some of those sharp 1967-1968 guitar licks, children’s backing vocals, and puts it all together into a wonderful little song about ringing in the New Year.

There’s just something fun about this song and I think it makes a fitting end to a December playlist.

It’s hard to believe this week is Thanksgiving. 

There’s only one month left in this year—2024 is almost over. Each year, increasingly, feels more and more like a dream. I can’t believe THAT happened in March—I thought that happened two years ago.

This was a tough year professionally, but only because of the challenges at work. Luckily, I was able to keep my job and find ways to push myself and the people I manage to do good work at my company.

As I told my team last week, “This has not been an easy year. There have been plenty of well-documented challenges. There have been plenty of changes. But each of you has rolled with them, managed the highs and the lows…focused on what you can do and how you can grow…and have been able to do amazing work…So thank you. I am thankful.”

Friends turned 40 in 2024. Friends had their second child. Friends have gotten engaged. Friends have gotten pregnant with their first child. My nieces turned five and one. My grandmother turned 97. My mother retired from a 20 year teaching career—which was not even her first career.

Things have been good and things have been bad. But like an old friend of mine and I used to say, “I still want to see what happens next.”

Hope you all have a good holiday week and weekend. Here’s a November playlist for you if you like that kind of thing. And if you REALLY like that kind of thing—here’s what last year’s list looked like.

“Reelin’ In the Years” by Steely Dan

I don’t know what it is, but the galloping start to this song always makes me think of walking into a very good party that’s already in full swing. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies. Maybe I’ve watched too much TV. Maybe I’ve been to and thrown too many parties. In any case, this feels like an essential Thanksgiving song to me.

“Everybody’s Missin’ the Sun” by Grin

Dark out there isn’t it? 6:30 starting to feel like 11:30, huh? Yeah, I know. So did Grin. This track from their self-titled 1971 album captures that November feeling of accepting the darkness. One of my many failings is that I haven’t spent nearly as much time with Nils Lofgren’s entire catalog as I should’ve.

“Right Back Where We Started From” by Maxine Nightingale

In the past three to four years, I’ve embraced Slapshot (1977) as one of the best movies of all time. The movie is an absolute masterpiece of establishing a place and vibe. George Roy Hill does an amazing job directing—but I kinda wish Altman had made a move like this. Slapshot be Paul Newman’s best performance. Or, at least, its the pinnacle of middle-era Newman when he mastered the art of the charming loser. This moment MIGHT be the best acting in any movie ever.

“Go Now” by The Moody Blues

I’ve been listening to a lot of Wings’s One Hand Clapping (1974) album, which came from a studio recording session/movie that McCartney made to showcase the second iteration of the Wings lineup. They do a great version of Denny Laine’s “Go Now’ from his Moody Blues days. I just felt the original fit here better.

“Savoy Truffle” by The Beatles

It being Thanksgiving season, I had to put a song about food on here. And what better song to pick than one about the dangers of eating too many desserts. This is probably my favorite song about food. And it has that great Beatles White Album sound: a little dry, perfect sounding while still seeming messy, and a low-lying darkness underneath everything as if things aren’t quite right.

“The Great Pumpkin Waltz” by Vince Guaraldi

My favorite Guaraldi composition. Peak autumn.

“Jigsaw Puzzle” by The Rolling Stones

This could be the best Rolling Stones song no one really talks about. Most likely because it sits on an album with “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.” This is one of Jagger’s last attempts at imitating mid-60s Bob Dylan: the best examples of those songs being this song, “Sympathy,” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” (The worst being several things on Between the Buttons even though I love that album beyond belief.) I know its blasphemy, but I can listen to this song a hell of a lot more than I can to “Sympathy for the Devil” at this point. It’s less self-serious and more surreal and that, somehow, I think makes it more meaningful.

“Mirror, Mirror” by Whiskeytown

Can’t talk much about Ryan Adams anymore but from about 2005-2008 his music was very important to me—especially that run of albums he did with the Cardinals in 2006-2007. One of my best friends in college introduced me to Ryan Adams and his first band Whiskeytown. We had a radio show together for a couple semesters and we used to spin this one on there from time to time and when were hanging out a hell of a lot more. A great example of the kind of Revolver-inspired pop that bands were pumping out in the 90s when that record was being reclaimed as the best Beatles album.

“Change of Heart” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

On October 20th, Texas Sun Radio devotes an entire day to playing Tom Petty songs. They call it—get this—Tom Petty Day. It was a Sunday this year and I happened to be in the car a bunch. Listening to Tom Petty in a car on a sunny day is a real treat. Everyone should treat themselves to this probably once a quarter—it’s good for personal and professional development. This song, from 1982’s Long After Dark, absolutely rips. It got to 21 on the Billboard Top 100 in April 1983. This was prime Thriller time so understand that it couldn’t get to number one, but c’mon what the hell was everybody thinking that this couldn’t get into the Top 10 in April of 1983.

“Balinese” by ZZ Top

Not a big ZZ Top fan but I always like how this song was used in Dazed and Confused (1993)—just kind of in the background at the party scene. My dad had the Dazed and Confused soundtrack and we used to listen to that thing all the time in the car in 1995 and 1996. But “Balinese” wasn’t even on the main Dazed and Confused CD—it was on the Even More Dazed and Confused CD. We didn’t even have that one! An indie movie spawning two separate soundtrack albums filled with songs from the 1970s aimed at people’s nostalgia for their teenage years. A true 1990s phenomenon.

“The Long Run” by The Eagles

Like any good middle aged white guy, I’ve softened my stance on the Eagles in recent years. (I mean the Eagles the band. I will never soften my stance on the Philadelphia Eagles—and that stance is they have to win or my life is ruined.) And this song, as polished an example of mainstream late 1970s soft rock as it is, always hits the spot. It’s warm, ambling, the horns sound fantastic, and just feels like a good time.

“Althea” by The Grateful Dead

Like Al Franken, “Althea” has become probably my favorite Grateful Dead song, joining the ranks of “Jack Straw,” “The Other One,” “Greatest Story Ever Told,” “Dire Wolf” “Terrapin Station,” “Ramble on Rose,” “Bird Song,” “Slipknot/Help on The Way>Franklin’s Tower,” “Morning Dew,” and probably some other favorite Grateful Dead songs I’ve had that I’m not remembering at the moment. 

I’m sure I’ll probably have another new favorite in another year or two.

“Another One Goes By” by The Walkmen

In the summer of 2006, I had just finished my junior year of college. I was feeling particularly lost and disenchanted.

Several of my friends in the grade above me had graduated that spring or dropped out of school. I’d let some of my friendships from freshman year wither. I couldn’t get a good internship at a publishing company in New York or even Hoboken. I wasn’t in love with anyone and didn’t feel particularly like I could be loved.

So I came home to Long Island and considered a job in my dad’s warehouse—but he, rightly, said it’d be better for me to not to fall back on a known path. I considered a job as a strawberry picker at a farm. Instead, I ended up working as a camp counselor at this place called the Knox School in Nissequogue while taking an internship helping a woman run a local Long Island fitness newspaper called New Living.

By day, I herded a group of 5th graders between activities. By evening, I interviewed people like Victoria Ricaino about their fitness and diet habits and transcribed interviews while my boss received reiki treatments on a table behind me. (Yes, this actually happened.) By night, I got too drunk and fell asleep on people’s pool furniture.

The Walkmen released their third album A Hundred Miles Off in May of 2006, right at the start of my summer break. That album became the soundtrack of my summer. The album was full of dreamy optimism (“Louisiana”), angst (“Emma, Get Me a Lemon”), and anarchy (“Always After You—Til You Started After Me”). And it was also full of epiphany—like in “Another One Goes By.”

This song is actually a cover of a Mazarin song, but the Walkmen made it their own. I don’t know what the hell it's about, but it sounded like an epiphany to me. Like being exhausted and knowing that things won’t always go your way but that there’s always another chance at something, another chance to change.

And as I listened to A Hundred Miles Off about a hundred or so times that summer I began to get over my ennui and start to realize that life was pretty good. I realized that by spending time with school kids all day and seeing how easily they laughed and how they didn’t take things so seriously and how well they reacted when you spoke to them and treated them not like kids or like adults, but like developing people who maybe actually knew a thing or two and could take a joke.

For whatever reason, that helped me immensely and made me focused and devoted to rebuilding relationships in my senior year of college and to putting my head toward writing and producing something. I wrote a novel that year. Nothing came of it: but I wrote it. And, as I’ve gotten older and been able to forgive myself a bit more, I’ve realized that’s what matters the most.

“The Last Worthless Evening” by Don Henley

They played this song in a montage in one installment of the Live from Saturday Night documentary they made for SNL’s 40th anniversary. I used to see that documentary on TV and I always liked this song. It has a nice, poignant autumn feel to it.

“Fortnight” by Taylor Swift and Post Malone

Heard this song on the radio one night driving around Austin. For some reason I had a flash of the fall nights of my youth: leaves blowing up and down curbless Long Island streets by the Sound while in thickets of trees and brush golden lights glowed in small-paned windows of old colonial homes.

“Super Rich Kids” by Frank Ocean

I fell in love with Channel Orange in the blurry period of late October and early November in 2012. I distinctly remember listening to this in my friend’s garden apartment on DeGraw Street while she hosted a Sunday afternoon party when she served everyone oxtail stew.

“Mountain Brews” by Mountain Brews

Vampire Weekend covered this song when I saw them at UT in October. I have no idea who Mountain Brews is or are but this song sure as shit sounds like the Grateful Dead if Trey Anastasio was singing lead vocals. I fucking love this shit.

“Saint Dominic’s Preview” by Van Morrison

Lately, when I feel overwhelmed by the great emotion I feel for the people in my life that I know or have known, I turn on “Saint Dominic’s Preview” by Van Morrison.

In March 2023, I was riding the LIRR to my family’s house on Long Island. My sister was about to go in for her pre-planned surgery to deliver her second child. A week later, I would be moving to Austin after living in Brooklyn for 15 years. I was overcome with worry for my sister and thought about her going in for surgery and giving birth and the experience she’d have that I’d never know. And so I listened to this song.

I listen to this song often when I leave my family or loved ones behind: usually on a train heading somewhere else.

I suppose it's because the song sounds like something ending. And that something ending is sad, but it's not necessarily the end of the world. Van Morrison, at this time, couldn’t help but sing like he was full of the entire riot of life.

Or maybe it's this bit of lyric that always stands out to me: “Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, we’re trying hard to make this whole thing blend.” No matter what happens, no matter how bad things get, there’s always someone out there trying to make things work. And you’ve got to do the same thing.

So feel whatever you feel right now—and then keep moving forward, looking out onto St. Dominic’s Preview. Whatever the hell that is.

It’s been a hot October here in Austin even though I spent the first half of the month on Long Island and in Upstate New York.

This past Sunday, my fiancee and I ate lunch outside and looked for plants and flowers to pot at our house. Later, we went for a jog around town lake, a swim at Deep Eddy pool, and then had pizza and wine at All Day Pizza and Flo’s Wine Bar over in Tarrytown on the west side of town. 

Even I had to admit that the pizza had gotten better since the last time we were there about a year ago. Even I had to admit that they’d gotten something right about the dough. The crust was indeed good now. It perhaps…maybe…if you closed your eyes…tasted like…

A lot of bad out there and a lot of people going through hard times professionally, personally, romantically. My life is good and I don’t take that lightly. I cherish it and try to hold onto and keep those small moments as present as I can.

Hope you can in your own way too. And if you ever want to talk about it, just send me an email.

Here’s a playlist if you like that kind of thing.

See you next time.

“Out On The Side” by Dillard & Clark

At the end of the trip I took to Upstate New York with my fiancee’s family, I was riding the Metro-North south from Beacon. The train was crowded, so we all scattered to sit alone or in pairs. The only true veteran of the East Hudson line, I snagged a seat by myself on the river side of the car. Earlier on the trip, I’d driven from Beacon to Hudson on I-87, a stretch of highway I knew all too well from my drives up to college. And being around the Hudson always fills me with ghosts of the early part of my college career when I took a course called Landscape and Literature and we read World’s End (1987) by T.C. Boyle and The Pioneers (1823) by James Fennimore Cooper and learned about Thomas Cole and all the art and mysticism of the Hudson Valley’s history. Thinking of all that, I put on The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, which was an album that I discovered and cherished around that time in my life. Out the window, I watched a golden line of sunset stretch across the Hudson and sank into the opening track of the album: “Out On The Side.” That’s what you do with this song—you sink into it. Or maybe it envelops you. I’m not sure. Either way, this song is like an unexpectedly cool early autumn evening. I have a good friend named Nick that I met in college. Nick knows a hell of a lot more about books and music than me and we agree on a lot of things. But he once told me he couldn’t stand Gene Clark’s voice. Still don’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“On A Real Good Night” by Bobby Bare

This track is from a great Bobby Bare album called Sleeper Wherever I Fall (1978). In fact, the album’s title comes from this very song. And this song is an EXCELLENT late-70s studio country rock production. Amazing sound, amazing lyrics. And it feels like a peak fall night, one of those nights where you always seem to be outside somewhere and seeing the lights glowing from within.

“Ridin’ In My Car” by NRBQ

Wish I’d known about NRBQ when I was in high school. Only learned about them in my thirties. This song has one of my all-time favorite lyrics. “Well, I went to the place where everybody hangs out / to see what everybody was talking about.” That’s fucking genius. How much time have you spent going down to the place where everybody hangs out to see what everybody was talking about? Pretty much spent all of high school doing that. (Usually it was a parking lot behind this place called Tutor Time.) A song to listen to if you have fond memories of hanging out underneath the bleachers at football games and being glad you brought a coat.

“The End” by Chime School

Don’t know nothing about Chime School. Read about them on Allmusic.com. I’ll tell you one thing though: jangle rock never gets old. So many similar sounding bands but it always hits the spot.

“Big Dreams” by Susanna

Read about Susanna’s new album Meditations on Love (2024) on Allmusic and gave it a spin. This is the kind of record to listen to if you like Joanna Newsom, Fiona Apple, or Julia Holter. In October 2022, my fiancee and I saw a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the Washington Irving Estate. Afterwards, we walked down a wooded back alley to Irvington. It was a breezy night with rustling leaves that had me checking over my shoulder for a certain horseman. This song makes me think of that night.

“Strange Apparition” by Beck

No one talks about Beck anymore except for I guess the fact that he kind of looked like Michael Cera when he performed on Everybody’s In L.A. earlier this year. The more I think back on it, The Information (2006) is criminally underrated. Great album and this is probably my favorite song on it. The piano manages to get that sound that I’ve only really ever heard on The Stones’s Beggars Banquet (1968).

“Flower Moon” by Vampire Weekend

Got a chance to see Vampire Weekend at the Moody Center over there at UT this month. They put on a really fun show. They didn’t play this song, but for some reason it was stuck in my head after the show. I also kept thinking about the Drake album review that Ezra Koenig wrote back in 2013, which is probably the funniest piece of writing in history and makes me jealous every time I read it. Thanks, Nick, for showing that to me back then. Sidenote: I like how people talked about the new Vampire Weekend album and the fact that songs on it reference other songs in their catalog (“Pravda” on Only God Was Above Us melodically references “Flower Moon” on Father of the Bride, amongst other examples) was like a revelatory thing. Ever heard of a fucking little song called “Glass Onion” from 1968 by a fucking little band called The Beatles? Vampire Weekend already did this trick on “Harmony Hall” for god’s sake (referencing “Finger Back” on Modern Vampires of the City)! That’s the shit you’re supposed to do once you’ve built a catalog and a history as a band. 

“Once I Had A Love (AKA The Disco Song)” by Blondie

This is an early version of “Heart of Glass” that I heard in a book shop in Hudson, New York on a sunny and crisp October day. This is better than the final version. Or I like it better at least.

“Elected” by Alice Cooper

Sometimes I think about what life would’ve been like if I was somewhere in the age range of 17 to 23 in 1972 and thought that Alice Cooper was the best fucking musician in the world. Seriously, I think about stuff like that. Billion Dollar Babies (1973) is like Alice Cooper’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). I have no idea what that means but it makes sense to me. In October 2009 or 2010 my friends and I got super into Alice Cooper and used to listen to this record a ton. “Elected” is tied with “Hello Hooray” for the best song on the album and maybe the best song in Cooper’s catalog. Sometimes I also think about what life would’ve been like if I was a professional wrestler (or even an e-wrestler) and this song was my entrance music. This music hits and you know the Nassau Coliseum is going nuts as you run out to the ring.  

“I Lie Around” by Wings

I’ve always loved this great little Wings B-side sung by Denny Laine. As you know, I like to take a dunk and this song starts with a great audio recording of someone jumping into a swimming hole out in the country somewhere. Denny Laine’s vocal is great and then Paul comes in on the last verse like a maniac singing across multiple octaves. You don’t listen to me, but I swear none of us know how much he’s done for us.

“Sheraton Gibson” by Pete Townshend

Pete Townshend’s 1972 solo album is a record more people should know about. It is excellent. I have it on vinyl and listen to it a lot. “Sheraton Gibson” is a great melancholy song with the right dose of the synthesizer sounds that Townshend was into around the LifeHouse/Who’s Next era. In basically one three minute track, Townshend distills down everything Almost Famous (2000) was about: the vibes, the time in history, the themes, everything.

“Gentle Persuasion” by Doug Hream Blunt

This song is super weird. I heard it in Hudson at a restaurant called Lil’ Deb’s Oasis. Over the din of the restaurant, I thought it was Dire Straits. My fiancee’s father told me I was wrong. Shazam was the arbiter and my fiancee’s father was proven right. Sure does sound like Dire Straits if you ask me though.

“Down to the Waterline” by Dire Straits

I’ll tell ya what: Doug Hream Blunt segues nicely into Dire Straits. Really sounds a lot like ‘em if you ask me.

“Romeo And The Lonely Girl - Acoustic” by Thin Lizzy

There comes a time in every young man’s life when he gets super into the entire Thin Lizzy catalog. What? That’s not a well-established rite of passage? Huh. Strange. Fighting (1975) is probably my favorite Thin Lizzy album but “Romeo And The Lonely Girl” comes from Jailbreak (1976). This acoustic version of the song is actually better than the original to my ear. It fits the song better and it's a great performance.

“Harvest” by Yasmin Williams

Read about Yasmin Williams and her new album Acadia (2024) on Allmusic. Listened to it while driving around Upstate New York this past month and it was a perfect match. I’d turn it on right now before we round the corner to early winter.

“King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” by The Band

Had to go for the “harvest” tie-in here. Plus, I was just in Upstate New York near Band-territory. I’ve written some about my relationship to The Band and Upstate New York before so I won’t go into it here. I’ll just link to some amazing footage of The Band playing this song at their peak.

“(On My Way Back Home) Again” by Catawba River Fox

Never heard of a Catawba River Fox, but I found this one browsing the New Releases section of Spotify. I like this one coming right after The Band.

“You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In” by MJ Lenderman

Read a profile of MJ Lenderman in The New Yorker this summer, seems like a nice guy. Cool that he’s only 25. This song is also (maybe?) a nod to the name of a Band song from 1970, so there’s some kind of through line going on here.

“Sweet Lucy” by Michael Hurley

This might be the John Prineiest song that John Prine never wrote. I’d recommend putting this song on and rolling around corners on quiet, laid-back streets with your windows down on a nice sunny day. 

“Somebody Knew” by Three Sacred Souls

Learned about Three Sacred Souls on Allmusic. I’m not sure how I feel about this song. On the one hand, it sounds great. On the other hand, it sounds exactly like a MoTown record from 1965-1967. As impressive as that is, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

“Hummingbird” by Wilco

I didn’t realize this until I was writing this post, but almost exactly 20 years ago Wilco played in the gym on my college campus. At the time, this was probably one of the five biggest moments of my entire life. I can’t emphasize how big of a deal this was to me. I was the only one of my friends in high school who knew about or liked Wilco. When I got to college, much to my surprise, I met other people who loved Wilco. Those people became my friends and we bonded over music in ways that probably weren’t entirely healthy. But what the hell else are you supposed to do at college? That fall of 2004, Wilco were touring in support of A Ghost Is Born, which looking back at it now signaled the end of one era of the band and the beginning of a new era. I’ll always support every new Wilco record, but even I can admit that they were never quite as good or surprising as they were on A Ghost Is Born or on Kicking Television, the live album they released from this tour era. (Though I’ll argue for 2011’s The Whole Love as one of their great achievements.) Anyway, “Hummingbird” is a song that I’ll always love. It’ll always remind of Saratoga and Upstate New York and some vague vision of a fall where things are young and the feeling of approaching the crowd and noise of house party in the crisp dark of October is one of the most thrilling feelings in the world and I’m still discovering what friends and things will stay with me in life

“All The Tired Horses” by Bob Dylan

I’ve written about this song before. One of my favorite Dylan tracks and probably will be until the day I die. There’s nothing else quite like it in his catalog. The more you listen to it, the more it becomes a bit of poetry from an unknown poet lost to time or an earthquake in 553 B.C.E. A perfect final track—even if it is the first song on Self Portrait (1970).

At the start of September, I came back from traveling in the Northeast and in Europe, where I was lucky to have perfect weather wherever I went, and stepped right back into temperatures in the high 90s here in Austin.

Instead of getting that melancholy end of summer sensation, it feels like no time has passed at all since the beginning of May. The hot Texas summer, it seems, is a perpetual state of being. Kind of like the dragging New York winter.

I’m still getting used to the cycles of the seasons down here. It’s obviously different from the Northeast. The seasons don’t change much, but there are nuances and I’m only starting to understand and notice them.

After a break from driving for about a month, getting back to having that as part of my weekly routine has been an adjustment, but I feel better about driving here than I did a year ago.

My fiancee and I also have a wedding date now, which we’re happy about.

Work continues on, the world continues on, life continues on. I wrote two posts this month that people seemed to like.

And I put a playlist together. Take a listen if you like that kind of thing. Or take a listen to what was on last year’s September playlist and see if I accidentally repeated anything.

See you next time.

“P.F. Sloan” by Jimmy Webb

My college roommate gave me a vinyl copy of Jimmy Webb’s 1969 album Words and Music several years ago for my birthday. That was the first time I heard “P.F. Sloan” and I admit I hadn’t thought about it for some time until I put the vinyl on recently. The solemnity and melancholy of the end of summer don’t hit as hard here in Austin as they did in New York, but this song is a “changing of the seasons” song if I’ve ever heard one. I have no clue what this song is actually about but I like the way it’s written. The first line is “I have been seeking P.F. Sloan / but no one knows where has gone.” It’s like one of those stories where the narrator is focused on the main or titular character: The Great Gatsby, Austerlitz, The Grand Budapest Hotel, All The Kings Men. Plus there is a wonderful lyric that goes, “the last time I saw P.F. Sloan / he was summer burned, he was winter blown” and there is one part where Webb sings woefully out of tune and forces his voice and he sounds all too human. It’s perfect.

“A.M. 180” by Grandaddy

The same roommate who gave me the Jimmy Webb record used to play this song on repeat during the fall of our freshman year in 2003. I haven’t listened to it at least a decade. But it brings me back to that singular September in my life.

“Living Without You” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band

“Living Without You” is a top-tier Randy Newman song that Harry Nilsson perfected on Nilsson Sings Newman (1970). However, I was reading Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (1975) and, in his section on Randy Newman, he cites this cover as the definitive version of the song. I don’t know what the hell Greil was thinkin’ back then. This is a cool cover, but it doesn’t touch the Newman original or Nilsson’s divine rendition.

“My Love, My Love” by Beachwood Sparks

Beechwood Sparks are the type of band that always loom large from the page: their albums read like the best music ever—or music that has everything I love in it—but nothing about them has ever really stuck. They have a new album out and I thought this was a good song.

“Snowqueen Of Texas” by The Mamas & The Papas

The Mamas and The Papas, like Simon & Garfunkel, have a confusing and disjointed discography. They maybe have 1.5 good albums. But they have lots of great scattered songs. Doesn’t get much better than “I Saw Her Again Last Night” in my book. This one is really a John Phillips song that would’ve fit on his self-titled solo album John Phillips (The Wolf King of L.A.) which is an all-time record for me despite the fact that Phillips is an all-time awful human being. He had a clear point of view as a songwriter and composer and “Snowqueen of Texas” is a perfect distillation of his unique sound and cadence. This track finds the cut and lays in it. This is the kind of song you dream of walking into a bar and hearing right before having about four good regular beers and maybe playing one game of pool.

“Parker’s Band” by Steely Dan

Is Pretzel Logic (1974) peak Steely Dan? Hard to say. This song feels like they are in full control of their early-period powers. This one gets going and doesn’t stop.

“Magic” by General Lee

I’ll tell you, I have no idea who General Lee is. (I mean, I know who General Lee is, just not this General Lee.) And, I’ve got to say, I don’t remember where the hell I heard this one. But it is atmospheric and the groove is incessant. 

“If The Sun Never Rises Again” by Johnny Blue Skies

How is everyone feeling about Sturgill Simpson these days? I still think he’s great and feel like there’s not too many people making contemporary rock or country rock or Americana or whatever you want to call it who are on his wavelength. This latest record, released under the name Johnny Blue Skies, is great. The production sounds great, his voice sounds great, it's just a good album. I love the main riff on this song—I can picture walking down 2nd Avenue in the East Village a cooling September night whenever I hear it.

“Clams Casino” by Cassandra Jenkins

I like all of Cassandra Jenkins’s records. Her first album, Play Till You Win (2017), is definitely more straight ahead roots rock and that’s probably my favorite record. But An Overview of Phenomenal Nature (her last album from 2021) and My Light, My Destroyer (her most recent record from earlier this year) are both fantastic and feel kind of like twin releases. There’s an overlay of Ditch Trilogy-era Neil Young and Berlin Trilogy-era David Bowie to what she does. This song is more of the latter and sounds kind of like a missing track from Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born (2004).

“Thank You” by Clairo

Look, I think Clairo is pretty great! Her latest album Charm is a completely professional and well-produced album that would’ve really meant something maybe even 10 years ago. There’s gotta be a lot of Clairo fans out there right? Probably somewhere on the internet I’m not.

“Scenic Route” by Brijean

Read about this one on AllMusic.com. A slick bit of contemporary disco.

“It’s Not The End of the World?” by Super Furry Animals

When I first listened to Rings Around the World by the Super Furry Animals during my senior year of high school, it felt like an entire world opened up to me. At 17, I was in a moment of collecting all the contemporary bands that would have lasting meaning for me. I couldn’t believe how good the production on this song was, how ambitious it was, how much it sounded exactly like what the Beatles on Abbey Road would’ve sounded like if they’d manage to continue on. Gruff Rhys is one of the most underrated songwriters and composers we have. As a whole, his songwriting work can stand next to George Harrison’s. I fully believe that.

“Happy Ways” by Joe Walsh

When it comes to Joe Walsh, September is usually Barnstorm (1972) season for me, but this year I’ve been listening to The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get (1973). You can’t really go wrong with Joe Walsh from 1970-1980. During the September of my senior year of college, I lived in a wood-paneled studio apartment on Broadway in Saratoga Springs above a women’s clothing store. The back windows of my apartment opened onto a little roof. In the afternoons, I used to lay a sleeping bag out there, drag my speakers to the windows, lay down and listen to The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get. Let me tell you, listening to “Happy Ways” at 21 years old and laying in the sun on a sleeping bag on the roof of the first apartment you’ve rented by yourself is a feeling that everyone should have once.

“Giving It Up For Your Love” by Delbert McClinton

Heard this one on Sun Radio (that’s 100.1 if you ever find yourself down here and in need of a dial turn) when I was driving one day. I told my fiancee to Shazam it and she asked me why I was yelling.

“21st Century Rip Off” by The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

God, I loved discovering bands. The Soundtrack of Our Lives were a garage-rock revival band from Sweden that came up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I read about their album Behind The Music (2001) in Rolling Stone in 2001 and downloaded the album. I loved it so much—I cherished it and the burnt CD I listened to in my 1992 Chevy Blazer. I was the only person on Long Island listening to Behind The Music by The Soundtrack of Our Lives in 2001 and 2002 and you can’t convince me otherwise.

I hadn’t thought about them in years until I saw a poster for a show they were playing when I was in Stockholm in August. This song is a straight Rolling Stones rip-off but I don’t fucking care. Songs like this will always sound good.

“Live Close By (Visit Often)” by The Mavericks and Nicole Atkins

This is another one I heard on Sun Radio. The Mavericks’s latest album, Moon & Stars is pretty good. I’ve collected a few songs off that one.

“Cum on Feel the Noize” by Slade

Heard the Twisted Sister version of this song in my training gym recently. Thought about how Dee Snider lived in my town growing up and the fact that I went to high school with his son. Then I thought about how much I love the original version by Slade. There is something slightly wistful about it that makes its dumb rocking that much more interesting. And this is dumb rock music at its very best. This song is triumphant, but by the end you feel slightly deflated for some reason. Maybe that’s just me.

“Happiness” by The Heavy Heavy

The Heavy Heavy have a new record out and this song has been in, no pun intended, heavy rotation on Sun Radio. I think it’s very good. AllMusic.com gave their new album four stars. That’s high praise.

“Cross My Heart” by Phil Ochs

This is a big playlist for my college roommate! He gave me Phil Ochs’s Pleasure of The Harbor (1967) on vinyl for my birthday maybe a decade ago at this point. This song is the first track on the album and what an opening song it is. Ochs’s voice is so distinct and the production is so perfectly 1967, which makes this song an absolute treasure. Google AI Overviews should generate a picture of the cover of Pleasures of The Harbor and start playing this song when you search “autumn.” If AI was any good, it would do stuff like that.

“And It Stoned Me” by Van Morrison

When I was in college, a friend of mine named Brian (who we called Chief—this was college after all) used to keep tapes in his car. By the fall of 2004, you could connect an iPod to your stereo, but Brian liked to play tapes. He had several albums that were facts of life in there and Moondance was one of them. I listened to Moondance so many times in that car. 

And I picked up his idea of keeping tapes in the car the summer after I graduated from college when I taught at Brewster Academy in New Hampshire. I had Abbey Road, Purple Rain, Thriller, and some other albums on tape. I used to drive a mini bus full of students from Thailand around New England (to Boston, to Rockport, to Manchester, to Concord, to Portsmouth) and make them listen to the Abbey Road medley, “The Beautiful Ones” and “Darling Nikki,” and “Human Nature.” Part of my job was to prepare them for prep school and college in the United States. Pretty sure making them listen to sick albums with the bus windows open was part of my remit.

Anyway, I came out of the gym one day recently and heard this song on the radio and, driving back to my home on a slow-developing Sunday morning in Austin with people strolling on sidewalks before the heat of the day while bikers casually wheeled down quiet streets, I thought, “Dear God does this song sound good. Is this maybe the best song about water ever written?”

I’m back with a playlist for August. Because last month’s playlist was kind of themed, this pulls together music I heard and listened to in June and July.

This past month has been a blur. Not much has happened, but it's been full of planning and things to do. 

The summer in Austin has been gentle. Depending on who you ask, we haven’t officially had a 100 degree day yet. It’s rained several times. My fiancee and I have been able to sit on our screened in porch on certain days. Last week at dinner, she looked at me and sighed and said: “Our neighborhood is so pretty at sunset.”

We’re making progress in planning our wedding. Despite any doubts, it will happen.

A few things that happened this month:

• We pet sat for my fiancee’s parents for a week.

• My fiancee got a promotion.

• We figured out two plans for a wedding approach and now we just have to choose one.

• I flew to Long Island to see my parents, my 96-year-old grandmother, my sister and my nieces.

• I got to see an old friend I haven’t seen in many years get married on Shelter Island.

• Got to swim on Shelter Island.

• I made good progress on a new novel manuscript.

August is going to be busy. I’m heading to Rhode Island to stay with a group of friends I’ve had since I was about ten years old. We haven’t all been together like this in 5 years. After that my fiancee are going to Europe for a month.

The world is crazy but life is good.

Here’s a playlist for you. See you next time.

“Help on the Way / Slipknot!” by the Grateful Dead

“Franklin’s Tower” by the Grateful Dead

These two songs may be one of my favorite sequences on any album. That’s probably because they remind me so distinctly of the summer of 2003, which was the summer I graduated from high school. After our prom, my friends and I got on a party bus that took us out to Montauk to party at a friend’s aunt’s old beach bungalow. On the way out we listened to Blues for Allah (1975) by The Grateful Dead and it was the first time I’d ever listened to the album all the way through. We were also doing some other things and needless to say I ended up watching the sun rise from the lawn of the Montauk lighthouse.

The rest of that summer I believed I was in love with a girl (and maybe I was) and we listened to this album all the way through in my backyard by my parents’ pool and lived in the world like only you can when you’re sixteen or seventeen years old. As soon as “Help on the Way”starts I am placed immediately into the threshold of a thick and humid Long Island night smack in the middle of the summer where everything that could still happen might happen.

“4 American Dollars” by U.S. Girls

I heard this song somewhere and I can’t even remember. I know nothing about this song but it works really well coming out of “Franklin’s Tower” (I think) and is just kind of an incessant groove that feels like it should be playing by a pool at night.

“Gravel Pit” by Wu-Tang Clan

Something about me: Never really got into the Wu-Tang Clan. My friend wanted Wu-Tang Forever for her twelfth birthday so I had to convince my mom to buy it. I was too busy listening to Harlem World and No Way Out. Can’t really talk about that stuff anymore. Anyway, this song rules.

“Come on Over Baby” by Christina Aguilera

This song came on at a restaurant and I forgot how much I liked it. In my mind, the summer of 1999 was kind of the “Genie in a Bottle”/Christina Aguilera summer but I forgot that this was actually the fourth single from Aguilera’s self-titled debut album and that it got most of its play the following year. That whole time kind of blurs together. This song still sounds great. 

“Every 1’s a Winner” by Hot Chocolate

You can’t ever go wrong putting this song, but it feels especially right listening to it when its really hot out.

“Fly and Spider” Wolfgang Kafer

There’s this Japanese lunch place here in Austin called Sa-Ten. We eat there on the weekends usually. Sometimes I’ll be sitting enjoying my tofu lunch plate and all of a sudden I’ll realize that whoever is controlling the music has been on an absolute run. I heard this one on one of those cases. Just great electronic music.

“Fertilizer” by Frank Ocean

We bought some flowers to pot on our front step on a near-100 degree day recently. When I tossed the bag of fertilizer into our trunk this song came into my head. This song is like smelling something baking in the oven but never getting to try it. Blonde came out eight years ago.

“Dandelion” by The Rolling Stones

This has always been one of my secret favorite Rolling Stones songs. I love that little period when they were really trying to be The Beatles. There’s so many great weird songs that aren’t necessarily “good” because they don’t lean into what The Stones do well, but I think this qualifies as a good piece of 1960s psychedelia.

“You’re Too Weird” by Fruit Bats

The Fruit Bats aren’t talked about too much. In fact I hardly ever think about them. But I’ll hear a song on the radio or in the store and I’ll Shazam it and often it will be a Fruit Bats song. They were kind of overshadowed by The Shins in that era when Sub Pop was kind of synonymous with Beach Boys revival pop. (To me, at least.) In my freshman year of college, I used to go to a girl’s dorm room and she’d play the Fruit Bats Mouthfuls album and we’d talk about Elliot Smith stabbing himself in the heart—because that had just happened. 

“Rill Rill” by Sleigh Bells

One Saturday when we were driving to South Austin, my fiancee asked me why I put this on my playlist. I told her it was because I’d heard it in a second-hand store when we were shopping. And I explained that I didn’t really like the song but felt that it fit. She said the song was kind of repetitive. And I told her that whenever I hear the hook from the Funkadelic original I’m immediately transported because “Can You Get to That” might be the most cinematic song that’s ever been recorded. When you hear it, no matter what you see, a movie starts playing in your head. Even when you hear it in sampled form, the same thing happens.

“Bound” by The Ponderosa Twins Plus One

Can’t talk about Kanye anymore but “Bound” is still one of my favorites and sampling this song was a master stroke. Hadn’t thought about “Bound” in a long time—for obvious reasons—but was reminded of it after hearing this song at a restaurant. Just a great little gem that you hold close and bring out every once in a while to impress friends. That’s why it got sampled.

“Marlene” by Peter Richard

This came from someone on an amazing playlist run at Sa-Ten on a Saturday. When I heard it, I thought it sounded like a song that played over the credits in some 1980s movie I’d never seen.

“Imitation” by Judge Funk

Another song from a Sa-Ten session. Don’t know you Judge Funk, but thank you for your service

“I Look Around” by The Rain Parade

Got a lot of blind spots by the Paisley Underground bands from the 1980s are one of the major ones because this kind of Beatles-derivative shit basically is my wheelhouse. There are worse things to be than derivative of Revolver-era Beatles.

“I Like The Way You Walk” by The Donkeys

Know nothing about The Donkeys, but I found this sound because I was at this restaurant Batch one Saturday eating their kolaches and heard some Grateful Dead sounding song come on over the speakers. Couldn’t Shazam it fast enough so I Shazamed a song after and then tried to start a Spotify radio channel based on that song in order to find the song I had missed. In doing that, I discovered this song. See, when you set your mind to something…

“Say You Love Me” by Wilco

New Wilco from a special summer EP. Reminds me of The Whole Love-era Wilco when they try to reach back to their pre-Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sound only it would be impossible to get back to a time when Jeff Tweedy was only beginning to figure how far he could stretch his songwriting.

“End of the Line” by Hurray For the Riff Raff

I’ve learned that I look Hurray for the Riff Raff. I like this song. I mean who wouldn’t? It sounds like Being There-era Wilco, which means it sounds kind of like classic Neil Young.

“Get Off Of My Cloud” by The Rolling Stones

I know this is the second Rolling Stones song. But I had to put this one on after I heard it at my training gym. There is a certain kind of miracle I live for. It comes when you hear a song that you’ve heard so many times in your life for the first time in many years. You’ve built up a resistance to the song and it no longer makes an impression on you in any way. But then, hearing it after many years, the immediacy of the first time you heard it comes back to you and you can almost imagine the first time anyone heard it. This song is all adrenaline. It is moving so fast and so impulsively it doesn’t know what to do with its arms and legs. It clunks, juts, sprints and stops. It’s the Stones about an inch away from veering into White Light/White Heat Velvet Underground territory. It’s a phenomenal song.

“Sarah’s Flame” by Drive-By Truckers

For me, the Drive-By Truckers are one of those bands that I never know what to do with. They’ve got lots of albums and they make a brand of rock music that I should love. But I just never cleared my schedule to spend enough time with their work. I love this song from their album The New OK (2020). It’s a little number that could’ve worked on The Band (1968) or Stage Fright (1971).

“Love the Way You Walk Away” by Blitzen Trapper

I put a lot of faith in Blitzen Trapper from 2007-2011. They had potential, but they never quite got there. This is a nicely written ballad with the right amount of schlock on it. I think Lowell George would’ve liked it.

“Please Please Please”  by Sabrina Carpenter

“Espresso” is the song of the summer but I fucking love “Please Please Please.” I think the production is some of the best I’ve heard on a pop song in a long time. And this song is legitimately funny. Good stuff.

“Thirteen” by Big Star

I’ll be honest, I only put this song on because there’s a point in the chorus of  “Please Please Please” where Sabrina Carpenter says “oh” and it sounds almost exactly like the way Alex Chilton sings the end of the second line of each verse in “Thirteen.” Is it just me?

And of course this song is still poignant and beautiful no matter how many times you listen to it and it makes you think about summer ending everywhere at the end of August and that school is about to start for everyone somewhere.

“After the Ball/Million Miles” by Wings

I’m begging you. Absolutely begging you to listen to me when I say: Paul McCartney is fucking insane. The genius buried this beautiful mini-suite on an album called Back to the Egg (1979) that he recorded in a castle. Like, this suite is on the same record as freakin’ “Rockestra.”

“After the Ball” is a pseudo-gospel ballad with very simple, repetitive lyrics that can be applied to anyone. And that is what makes them truly great pop lyrics. There’s something about the music and the words that makes you see a party, any party, that you’ve been to. The party is winding down and you’re feeling that emptiness that happens when a party is ending and its late. What happens now? Are you alone? No, after the ball there is someone out in the hall, someone who’ll love you—after the ball. 

That song fades and “Million Miles” comes in. This is just Paul playing concertina and singing lyrics that don’t really say much but evoke such an amazing sense of longing. It’s a hymn.

Paul McCartney has given us so much.

Good morning.

It’s the Fourth of July and I hope you’re out enjoying the day doing whatever it is you like to do on the Fourth of July.

This month’s playlist is coming early. And it is heavier than it usually is on older songs. And it kind of actually has a theme.

That’s because I saw the perfect opportunity to time a playlist to this American holiday. This group of songs is meant to represent a kind of road trip across the country covering, if not every state, than almost every region of the country through a song.

Some of these are from a playlist I made in 2020 when I was living here in Austin for six weeks at my fiancee’s parents house. That was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and we had, probably foolishly, all taken a “family” road trip from New York to Austin starting on Memorial Day weekend.

Our route took us from New York, to a night in Washington D.C., to two nights in Brevard, North Carolina (right outside of Asheville), to a night in Nashville, to a night in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and then back to Austin.

I look back on that trip very fondly—even if it was ill-advised. It feels like another world. I remember driving on a near empty I-95 from New York to Washington, DC. I remember eating dinner in a cavernous restaurant in the town of Bristol on the border of Virginia and Tennessee and thinking it was OK because the front windows of the restaurant were completely open. I remember eating tacos in trendy, crowded Mexican restaurant Little Rock and thinking, “I don’t know if I should be this close to people.” And I remember waking up in a little lake house AirBnB outside of Hot Springs, brewing coffee, and sitting out on the wood dock before my fiancee and her family got up and feeling incredibly happy to be out of New York.

Most especially, I remember a damp evening in Brevard and my fiancee’s father helping me to find dry wood to make a fire in the backyard of our AirBnB. Once he and I got the fire lit, we all sat around the fire pit and drank beer and looked at fireflies.

It made me think of the road trip across the country I took 15 years before that. In August of 2005, me and two of my best friends drove from Long Island to Columbus, Ohio, to a campground in Wisconsin, to Montana for two nights in Big Sky, to a camping ground in Grand Teton, to Boulder, Colorado for several days to stay with another friend and his older brother. Then we went south through the San Juan Mountains to camp near the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. And then to the Four Corners and over to Moab and then back south again to camp at the Grand Canyon for a night. 

We headed back east through New Mexico, camping at a camp ground not too far from a federal prison, and shot across the very top of Texas and into Oklahoma where we camped somewhere near Norman after one of my friends got a speeding ticket. And then we drove across Arkansas and stopped in Memphis for a night. After that, we pushed further east, driving through Asheville and the Great Smoky Mountains and stayed in Shenandoah for a night. Then we made the final push back to Long Island to wrap up the pale end of our summer vacations. 

We were 20, 19, and 19 respectively. And that both feels like a lifetime ago yet at the same time I can call up sense memories from that trip easier than things from my early thirties.

Our mothers at the time said we’d never get another chance to do something like that and that we should enjoy it. We didn’t believe them. But they were right.

Or, mostly right. Until I got to take that more abbreviated trip with my fiancee’s family in the middle of the pandemic right at the cusp of summer in 2020.

See you next time.

“Wild Mountain Nation” by Blitzen Trapper

I wanted to start this playlist off with a couple songs that felt more broadly thematic. I’ve always thought of this song by Blitzen Trapper as a modern American classic. But then I realized it’s almost 20 years old now and that I’m ancient. When I first heard this song, I thought Blitzen Trapper was going to be an updated version of The Band. Those are the kinds of things you used to think when you were 22 years old in 2007.

“4th of July” by Paul McCartney and Wings

None of you will listen to me, so I’ll say it again: Paul McCartney is FUCKING insane. This is another song that’s never formally been released. It was only thrown in as an extra track on the 2014 Venus and Mars (1975) deluxe edition. A strange and beautiful song where Paul asks “Why am I crying on the Fourth of July?” multiple times. I’m telling you, we don’t fully understand just how much this one man has given us to enjoy, how great his talent for song writing really is.

“Sister Golden Hair” by America

Like anyone else, I grew up thinking that America sucked. I still do mostly. But, god damn, this song just sounds so good.

“Old Cape Cod” by Patti Page

The first time I ever heard this song was in the fourth season of Mad Men in the third episode of the season called “The Good News,” which came out in the spring of 2010. Don is slow dancing with his “niece,” Stephanie during one of his trips to California. Whenever I hear this song, I think of Mad Men. They both give me a similar aching, searching feeling in my chest.

“Coney Island Baby” by Lou Reed

When I turned 15, my dad gave me a CD called Different Times: Lou Reed in the 70s (1996). This was the last song on the album. That CD served as my introduction to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and started my journey in really exploring and piecing together music history. This Lou song (and probably “My Friend George”) will always remind me of my dad.

“Philadelphia Freedom” by Elton John

I’ve never put together a list of the songs that will always put me in a good mood, but this one would certainly be on it. I alway get swept away when the tune changes keys and the crunchy guitars first come up in the mix at about 1:14 and then the song moves into the chorus and begins to soar. Elton John from 1970-1975 really was something else.

“Baltimore” by Nina Simone

An absolutely devastating song written by Randy Newman and adapted and performed to perfection by Nina Simone. If you never get around to watching The Wire, you could probably listen to this song and get the gist. Just take a look at the lyrics. There is such a purity and economy of feeling to the way Simone sings the following lyrics: “Get my sister Sandy / And my little brother Ray / Buy a big old wagon / To haul us all away / Live out in the country / Where the mountain's high/ Never gonna come back here / 'Til the day I die.”

“Birmingham” by Randy Newman

You could put together an amazing playlist about the United States composed of only Randy Newman songs. This is maybe one of my five favorite Randy Newman compositions. From the piano melody that I can only describe as Rag Time-meets-Ken Burns-Civil War-documentary to the brilliant lyrics (“My daddy was a barber / a most unsightly man / was born in Tuscaloosa / died right here in Birmingham” “Got a big black dog, his name is Dan / Lives in my backyard in Birmingham / meanest dog in Alabam’ / get em Dan”) this song is a work of art.

“Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight & The Pips

I mean you can’t leave this song off an American road trip themed playlist.

“Dixie Chicken” by Little Feat

I’ve already covered the fact that I love Little Feat and Lowell George. This is probably their best known song and one of the best Southern Rock songs. Little Feat remain probably the best American band that no one really talks about anymore.

“New Madrid” by Uncle Tupelo

As someone who got deeply into Wilco at the age of 16, Uncle Tupelo is deeply important to me. I made my way through their catalog mainly during my freshman and sophomore years of college. I always love going back and listening to young Jeff Tweedy sing. This song is actually about an earthquake that was predicted to hit the New Madrid fault line that runs around the borders of Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

“Cleveland Rocks” by Ian Hunter

A couple months ago I was thinking about The Drew Carey Show. I was such a sicko for watching TV when I was a kid I’d watch shows like The Drew Carey Show or The Jonathan Silverman Show just because they were on. That’s why I never really liked the Jon Stewart Daily Show. The original Daily Show was satirical—it was just another show that was on every day. Jon Stewart made it something with a purpose.

Anyways, on The Drew Carey Show they used to do these involved opening credits from time-to-time where the whole cast would dance and lip-sync to the theme song. They would promote the unveiling of the new credit sequence as a big event. They did it for this song because The Drew Carey Show took place in Cleveland. I had no idea who Ian Hunter was. I had no idea, really, why Drew Carey was even famous. He was just on TV. 

Now that I think about it, things haven’t changed too much.

“Right Down the Line” by Gerry Rafferty

Ostensibly this is when the road trip across America would be getting right to the middle of the country. So I figured why not throw this one on here? A song that has quietly become more present as years go by. You hear it in bars, stores, parking lots more than you’d expect. I think this is a song that will somehow find a long afterlife. There’s something appealing about it that makes you feel as if you are discovering a secret for the first time that will prevent it from ever sounding too old.

“Blue Moon of Kentucky” by Elvis Presley

First heard this song via the Al Kooper cover on his debut solo album I Stand Alone (1967) but it's obviously a bluegrass classic written by Bill Monroe in 1945. Elvis obviously made it incredibly famous in the 1950s.

“Kansas City” by Little Richard

To me, Paul McCartney’s screaming vocals on the Beatles version of this song will always be definitive. But Little Richard wrote the thing and Paul was always trying to be Little Richard so you have to give credit to The Real King of Rock n’ Roll.

“Wichita Lineman” by Glen Campbell

I could’ve also put “Galveston” on here. I like that song better but Wichita Lineman fit in the flow of this journey across the country and is probably Glen Campbell’s most favorite song. When I was driving from New York to Austin with my fiancee’s family during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in May of 2020, there was a stint where her father and I were driving alone in one of the two mini-vans we rented. I was worried about running out of things to say, so I asked him about the city Galveston because I knew the Glen Campbell song “Galveston.” That got the conversation flowing again plus I learned a lot of great history! Last month at a sushi restaurant my fiancee and I sat next to a couple in their mid-forties who were out for the night, leaving their daughter at home with a baby sitter. The woman said she was from Galveston and asked me if I knew were that was. I said, sure, because of the Glen Campbell song. She’d never heard of it. 

“Louisiana Rain” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

This is the album-closer to Damn the Torpedoes. It’s an excellent example of the anthemic album closing song. Of course Tom knew how to fucking sequence. I’ll always have a soft spot for this song even if it isn’t one of his absolute best. There’s a deep well with Tom Petty.

“Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson

Still never been to Luckenbach even though I pass the exit for it every time we go back and forth to West Texas. Though I am now more familiar with the rich tradition of German immigrants coming to Texas and establishing towns. I’ve been to Gruene and Gruene Hall at least!

“Albuquerque” by Neil Young

Only been to Albuquerque once. Arrived in to the airport late at night on my way to a family vacation with my fiancee’s family. The entire family needed somewhere to eat. I found this truck. The food was really good. I don’t know if this song makes me think of Albuquerque in any specific way but it's one of my favorites from Tonight’s the Night (1975). There’s something unsettled and unresolved about the whole thing and maybe that’s why it sticks with me.

“Santa Fe” by Bob Dylan

One of my favorite Basement Tapes era Dylan songs. One time, maybe ten years ago though you could tell me it was 50 years and I’d believe you, some close friends of mine were going to stay up late at a friend’s parents house in New Jersey and make and record music in the basement. I couldn’t do it because I had work. They asked for pitches for a cover. My mind immediately went to this song.

“Colorado” by Stephen Stills

Say what you will about Stephen Stills, but sometimes he just brings it. This is a sturdy, melancholy mid-tempo ballad with some excellent instrumental work. The drums, piano and pedal steel are fantastic on this song.

“Portland” by The Replacements

I don’t know too many songs about the Pacific Northwest. Maybe you know a few? I needed one to put on there. Why not a little chestnut from The Replacements that has become one of my favorite tracks of theirs?

“Mendocino” by Sir Douglas Quintet

My friend Nick used to have a band called Forest City. I used to love seeing them play in Brooklyn at places like The Brooklyn Rod and Gun Club and Union Pool. They used to play this song as a set closer at a lot of shows. Back then I didn’t know much about Doug Sahm but now I know a lot more. After Forest City broke up, I collected assorted recordings they’d made and put them together into a record. It’s still one of my favorite little things I’ve done.

“San Francisco” by Foxygen

Foxygen. Funny band. Remember when they were on the come up? Feels like it happened in a different world. Always liked this song.

“I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman

Like I said, you could put together an entire album of songs written and recorded by Randy Newman to try and capture a road trip across the United States. I think I did pretty well limiting myself to using only three. How can you not like this song? It’s hysterical, entertaining, never gets old, and somehow, if you just go with the energy of the song, seems somehow poignant.

I’m back in Austin after ten days in New York City. We lucked into visiting during an absolutely beautiful stretch of weather. A brief list of some things I did while there:

• Took my five-year-old niece to the Transit Museum.

• Visited a (sadly now former) co-worker and her 10 month old daughter in Park Slope and talked about what the hell to do with our careers amongst other things.

• Had dinner and drinks with my old roommate and his girlfriend in Ridgewood.

• Spent some time in the office at 1 World Trade and had lunches and coffees with some new reports and a couple of meetings with some great co-workers of mine that helped inspire me to do better work and be a better manager. Also made me feel a little shitty about being full-time remote and away from my team and the collaborators I really value at work.

• Ate at Dhamaka because you can’t really get a meal like that anywhere else. It’s better than Semma, don’t lie to yourself.

• Took long walks through my old neighborhoods of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.

• Had slices from F&F in Carroll Gardens which is much better than Lucali. If you wait in line for pizza you are delusional.

• Ate at Libertine for a second time and was unfortunately very disappointed after a flawless first visit in January.

• Went to Jacob Riis and swam in the ocean.

• Had a five-hour picnic in Prospect Park.

• Had dumplings and wine on a roof with a very old friend I hadn’t seen in three years and talked about how to continue living an artistic life while getting older, not feeling like artists, how we didn’t look too bad for almost 40, being young in New York, and lots of other things. I loved every minute of it.

• Had Father’s Day dinner with my father and mother at Walter’s.

• Ate at Place de Fetes in Clinton Hill and didn’t love it.

• Got Levain Cookies. The new caramel coconut ones are perfect.

We were staying in Williamsburg in my fiancee’s sister’s apartment. She lives in a great spot in that part of town and I walked around the streets of Williamsburg feeling a little like a ghost moving through my own life.

I lived in Williamsburg from 2008 to 2012 on Grand Street between Leonard and Manhattan. When I saw a friend last weekend she said to me, “You were like the King of Williamsburg once.” I don’t think that was ever true. What she actually meant, she later explained, was that she associated me so strongly with that part of her life.

One night during our stay, my fiancee and I were walking along Manhattan Avenue back from Greenpoint to her sister’s apartment. I passed by what used to be Enid’s (Enid’s is gone now like so many other things) and was overwhelmed with the sense memory of walking back that way so many times late at night and early in the morning during my twenties. 

Another evening, my fiancee and I went for a jog on the McCarren Park track. My roommate and I used to do evening jogs there several nights a week. I’ll always associate that place and its chaotic flurry of athletics (sprinters, circled exercise classes, organized soccer games, handball players, uncoordinated kids kicking balls) with the very beginning of my time living in New York.

At times, it felt as if my heart would explode. It was like watching my own life play again in front of me, except I wasn’t in it. Or, rather, it was actually seeing just how much New York City, like life, continues on and evolves and changes without you and that life is always just beginning for somebody.

My fiancee and I asked each other many times if the other regretted moving. Or if we should move back. She put it best when she said, “I can’t tell if I miss living in New York, or if I miss being in my early twenties.”

I’m not sure if I miss either of those things, but sometimes it can be hard to tell. And maybe all that you can ask for is the chance to be able to feel things or miss times from your life that are no longer present. You can’t watch a movie for the first time twice.

Here’s a playlist if you want it.

See you next time.

“Southern Girls” by Cheap Trick

I’m not really a Cheap Trick guy. Love the idea of them, but never spent a lot of time with their music. This song always makes me smile. Perfect summer song. Waxahatchee used it as their entrance music to start their show in Austin in May. Thought that was a nice touch.

“I Lost It” by Lucinda Williams

Speaking of Waxahatchee, they covered this song during the encore at their show in Austin. When I listen to this song I can picture it being written, practiced, and recorded. That doesn’t mean it sounds written or over produced. On the contrary, when I hear a song like this I hear how hard it is to make a song sound as easy and as always there as this one does.

“Ice Cold” by Waxahatchee

An actual song by Waxahatchee. Like I said, I saw them in Austin back in May. I’m not the biggest Waxhatchee fan, but I really like their music. This show was one of those strange ones you sometimes go to where the audience is immediately in sync with the performer and they’re feeding off each other in a heightened way. Emily Crutchfield couldn’t hide her happiness at performing and the crowd felt that and their enthusiasm for her and her music seemed to increase after each song. The show-goers had been able to listen to Tiger’s Blood, Waxhatchee’s latest record, for a few weeks and were ready to sing the songs back into the air. It was while hearing the chorus of “Ice Cold” played live that I noticed how much it soars, and it was in that moment that I was fully tuned into what kind of show I was attending.

“Hanginaround” by Counting Crows

Counting Crows were one of those bands that kind of passed me by in the ’90s. I watched the video for “Long December” a million times like every other kid that had a crush on Courtney Cox in her Ace Ventura/early Friends era and “Mr. Jones” was always playing somewhere, but I never really thought Counting Crows were all that great. People had patches on their backpacks or quotes in their AIM profiles but you couldn’t have paid me to care about them in the early 2000s. I heard this one on the radio recently and it is an undeniably fun song. So much so that I’ve found myself craving it on certain days.

“Living in the Material World” by George Harrison

Possibly my favorite solo George Harrison song. It has some of the best self-referential lyrics by any of the four Beatles, the bass (Klaus Voorman) and drums (Ringo, natch) sound incredible, and it’s one of the few solo George songs to purely rock. This song is perhaps the best articulation of George’s basic philosophy on life as well: he wants enlightenment but can’t stand how much of a drag life and people can be, which in turn makes him feel like shit and do shitty things which in turn makes him want to work toward enlightenment all the more. One of my favorite songs to listen to when I feel put upon.

“Dirty Work” by Steely Dan

In May 2010, I started my first stint working at Conde Nast. It was my first job at a real company. Before that I’d served as a paralegal/assistant for two years for a real estate attorney who ran her own practice. I worked at W Magazine which was in the 350 Madison office—not the old legendary 4 Times Square office. My boss was a great guy and I learned a ton from him. But I remember the first time he asked me to press on some editors to move their passes through the issue closing. It was for the September issue and he told me to make sure some editors were doing what they were supposed to. I was still learning how to separate my natural introversion from the extroversion I needed in order to be the person I wanted to be at work. And I remember feeling shitty about being told to do someone else’s dirty work. I was 24 years old. What did I do when I left work? Put on “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan as I walked to the 6 train.

“The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite” by R.E.M.

One of my major blind spots is R.E.M. I understand their importance and I love a lot of their songs, but I don’t know their discography inside and out. I heard this one while I was waiting for the Waxahatchee show to start. There is a magic moment in this song when Michael Stipe breaks after singing the following line of lyrics, “A candy bar, a falling star, or a reading from Doctor Seuss.”

“Levii’s Jeans” by Beyonce

I don’t really like Beyonce. “Drunk in Love” is the kind of modern day experimental pop that I get behind, but a lot of her other work doesn’t really grab me. I find this song irresistible. It makes me think of the wide, extended pink twilights I’m starting to appreciate about the evenings in Central Texas.

“Slow Dancing in the Kitchen” by Yaya Bey

Read about this album on AllMusic. Gave it a listen. Really liked this song.

“Gypsy - Early Version” by Fleetwood Mac

A friend of mine showed me this version a couple of Octobers ago when we were apple picking in Kingston, New York. For some reason, I’ve been thinking about it this month. In this early version of the song you can hear Lindsey and Stevie going for something closer to Springsteen than Fleetwood Mac. I like hearing that.

“On Melancholy Hill” by Gorillaz

One recent unseasonably humid afternoon, my fiancee and I were sitting outside at a counter service restaurant. This song came on. She asked me if I knew it. I said I didn’t. A lot of the Gorillaz catalog is kind of hazy to me. She said she listened to it all the time when she was younger. We’re seven years apart in age.

“Moss Garden” by David Bowie

Of all the ambient pieces on Bowie’s Berlin trilogy of albums, this one might be my favorite. For some reason it’s always reminded me of lying down at the beach on a cloudless day and looking up at the blue sky and noticing a vapor trail.

“Carmen” by Lush

Heard this one in a vintage store looking for chairs. Apparently Lush were show gaze trailblazers. Huh. Never knew that.

“Dawn Hush Lullaby” by Lightheaded

This is another one I read about on AllMusic. Nice little genre hopping album by a band I’ve never heard about. Will jangle pop songs ever get tiring? Not to me.

“You and only You” by Erlend Oye and La Comitiva

All hail AllMusic! This is another one of their recent Editor Picks. Great website they’ve got there. I think this record is a little gem. This track in particular is a composition that the Beatles were absolutely nailing in 1964. The production is obviously different but it is similarly light and sophisticated pop. 

“Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club

I heard this song while walking in New York earlier this month. Then a few days later I had time to kill before meeting up with my fiancee for dinner. It was early evening—about 7:30—and I was strolling around Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens where my fiancee and I had lived together for the almost four years before we left New York. I turned this song on and walked up and down streets I’d walked so many times, turned corners I’d turned hundreds of times, gazed at parlor and garden floor windows I’d enviously turned toward on so many warm nights. I’d never listened to this song deeply before and have no idea what it’s really about and don’t care. I love the lines “loving would be easy if your colors were like my dreams/red, gold and green” because they can mean whatever you want. In that moment of walking and listening to this song, I felt such a great sense of joy welling within me at all the things I presently have in my life while also a sense of loss at what I’d left behind moving from New York. Yet, seeing people eating on long front patios in Carroll Gardens and watching the sky turn pink and purple and feeling the cooling evening coming on I couldn’t help feel so thankful for all of the unknowable life rising and moving around me as I walked along, murmuring, “red, gold and green; red, gold and green.” And I realized that unknowable life was also spreading out in front of me—just as it always had.

“A Guitar and a Bottle of Wine” by The Mavericks

One of those old-timey Everly Brothers style songs that never gets old.

“Strawberry Flats” by Little Feat

I love Little Feat. Lowell George was from Los Angeles but I always thought he was from Texas. Maybe it's because of songs like this, which abstractly talk about living a certain kind of life in Texas in the late-middle 20th century. This is one of my favorite Little Feat songs and it's a great song for driving in the summer.

“Sweet Virginia” by The Rolling Stones

I heard this song come on in a vintage store while looking for furniture. I realized it’d been maybe ten years since I last listened to Exile on Main Street in its entirety. I stared out the window remembering how alive I used to feel listening to it when I was 16, especially when I was driving down Nicolls Road in my 1992 Chevy Blazer, smoking cigarettes with the window open, after finishing taking the PSAT at Centereach High School on some lost Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2002. Exile on Main Street was 30 years old then. Now it’s been over 50 years since it came out. It can still make you feel something if you want it to.

“A Rose And A Baby Ruth” by Al Kooper

Al Kooper is kind of lost to time but he was a part of some of the most important recording sessions of the 1960s. His solo albums are little treasures to me and I recommend listening to any of them. This one is a cover of a George Hamilton IV song from 1964 that he released on his Easy Does It album from 1970.

“Plainclothes Man” by Heatmiser

My fiancee and I heard this eating outdoors on a hot night at the very end of May. The night had just cooled enough to enjoy our food at an outdoor table. You can always tell an Elliot Smith song as soon as it starts.

“Big Swimmer” by King Hannah and Sharon Van Etten

This was an AllMusic recommendation. Back when I worked as a paralegal from April of 2008 to April of 2010, sometimes I’d come back to my apartment in Williamsburg and my roommate was practicing songs at our kitchen table with Sharon Van Etten. They did a few two person shows at Zebulon. I don’t know anything about King Hannah but when this song gains momentum it really carries you along.

“Tie Up The Tides” by Quilt

This is a great bit of modern psychedelia that I’ve loved since 2014. I don’t remember how I found this song but it struck me the first time I heard it. I used to live to find songs like this. Ten years later, I’m even more impressed by the production. A nice song for a summer afternoon.

“The Wire” by HAIM

Speaking of the early-mid 2010s, remember when this one first came out? Thought HAIM were going to be the biggest things ever. But they were really coming in at the end of something—kinda like Tony Soprano. This song is still great and sits perfectly beside all those summer anthems it felt like you were handed, like photocopies in class, if you came of age in the 1980s or 1990s.

Good morning,

The spring in Austin has been long and beautiful. We’ve had storms and baseball sized hail in places, but luckily our home and car have been spared.

But you can feel the heat coming now. The temperatures are starting to touch and reach into the nineties a bit more frequently. And you find yourself saying, “OK, 92, that’s still pretty cool” out loud when you look at the Weather app on your phone.

We’ve been in Austin for about a year now and have started to have friends and family visit over the last few months. It’s starting to feel like maybe we actually live here. Though, I’m still trying to decide what it means to actually live anywhere. We have not been planning our wedding but we have been planning a month in Europe.

This month, I read a post by Ted Gioia, which was a helpful reminder to keep writing what entertains me. Which is why I even do this Substack these days. I spend too much time at work thinking about where the media is going to not write about it some. And I like music and movies and other things that make life worth living too much not to write about them some.

And, because it's May, I read this transcript of Chuck Klosterman’s commencement speech at the University of North Dakota. I shared this with my reports at work. As I told them, your mileage may vary with a) commencement speeches and b) Chuck Klosterman but I happen to like both.

The crux of the speech is that most of us will be forgotten to time so what matters is how you remember yourself and your own life. This is the thrust he ends the speech on.

Try to remember everything. Try to remember every detail of your life, even if it seems kind of unimportant. You know, you’re moving out of an apartment or a dorm now; remember what that place looked like. Remember who were the people you interacted with on a day-to-day basis. You’re going to have to get jobs, and you can remember those first days for a few weeks, and they might just dissolve; but try to hang on to them.

Maybe I’m getting sappy or even more solipsistic as I tuck into middle age, but I found this moving. And it’s kind of why I do these playlist posts.

See you next time.

“Mother and Child Reunion” by Paul Simon

Paul Simon knew what he was doing when he made this the first song on his self-titled solo debut. He also knew what he was doing when he enlisted members of Toots & The Maytals to play on it. No matter how many times I listen to this song, it sounds incredible. Sometimes my mother will tell me she’s dreamt of me. And in her dream, I am who I was as a child. In my head, I picture myself at 5-7 years old in her dream. I imagine my mother dreaming of what it was like to be who she was when I was that age. I imagine my mother dreaming of the child I was at that age and the fact that her dream allowed her to be briefly reunited with a person she loved that no longer exists. I think of that whenever I hear this song. I think of the pain and joy that so many mothers must feel at time passing all the time.

“Mama’s Little Girl” by Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney is absolutely insane. This song was never released, but it could have fit on any album from The Beatles (The White Album) to Band on the Run. From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Paul could just knock songs out like this effortlessly. Hearing this next to “Mother and Child Reunion” puts the fundamental differences between Simon and McCartney’s greatnesses on display.

“Romantic Ageru Yo” by Kim Bo

When it comes to this song: if you know, you know.

“Play The Game” by Queen

I was putzing around my kitchen one day and this song came into my head like a little miracle. I’d forgotten about it for years. Just an absolute peak Queen production. Though it does share a little DNA with some of ELO’s best stuff. Only got to number 42 in the U.S. in 1980. What was everyone doing?

“Clash City Rockers” by The Clash

I love The Clash and I think Joe Strummer is a comic genius for the way he chooses to emphasize the syllables in every verse on this one. A GREAT and barely-hinged rocker.

“Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” by Solomon Burke

Back in 2002, I may have been one of the only 17-year-old guys on the planet Earth to ask for Five Guys Walk Into a Bar…, the comprehensive box set covering the brief run of the legendary boogie rock band The Faces. In that box set, I was introduced to “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” via a mini-medley of “Hi-Heeled Sneakers/Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” Hearing Rod Stewart sing the song, you know it had to come from somewhere else. And I fell in love with the Solomon Burke original soon after. Less a song and more of an undeniable sermon, this track serves as the bedrock upon which so much music of the 20th century was built.

“Opportunity”  by The Jewels

A little chestnut, as they say. This one pops up in The Last Days of Disco (1998) when the characters leave the club to hang out in a regular old bar. Genius needle drop selection by Whit Stillman.

“Knock on Wood” by Amii Stewart

This one was also on The Last Days of Disco soundtrack. An absolutely inspired cover. Should’ve been putting this on playlists long ago.

“So Many Planets” by St. Vincent

St. Vincent has had a very interesting career. I first heard about her when she asked an acquaintance of mine, who was also a musician, to drive her to the airport in 2008 or 2009. And then I heard about her again when she played some songs on the Comedy Bang Bang podcast in 2012. I started listening to her records as they came out. I think her self-titled record from 2014 may still be her best—“Severed Crossed Fingers” is an all-time song for me. Saw her at King’s Theater in 2017 and she was great. But she’s kind of been workmanlike for the past seven years or so. Maybe I just got older. She’s a big artist, but is anyone talking about her music these days?

“The Weakness In Me” Joan Armatrading

I’ll admit, I don’t know a ton about Joan Armatrading except that whenever I hear her songs, I like them. This one is tucked into 10 Things I Hate About You (1999). 

“Trouble Me” by 10,000 Maniacs

This song came on the radio one day and it was like the second time in a month I’d heard Natalie Merchant’s voice after not hearing it for maybe almost 20 years. I tried to explain to my fiance how present Natalie Merchant was in my life from about 1995-1998. This is an absolute jam from her 10,000 Maniacs days.

“Losin’ Patience” by GospelbeaCH

Don’t know much about GospelbeaCH. Saw their latest album on AllMusic’s Editor Picks and checked it out. This is a nice jangly one for high spring.

“Mandolin Wind” by Rod Stewart

Man, I love Rod Stewart. He’s going to be lost to time for sure (will “Maggie May” survive?) but people shouldn’t overlook the quality of the albums he was associated with from 1968 through 1976, whether with the Jeff Beck Group, The Faces, or on his own. No matter how many times I listen to Every Picture Tells a Story this song always sneaks up on me. It may be his best.

“Miss O’Dell” by George Harrison

Living In the Material World (1973) is probably my favorite George Harrison album. This track was tacked on as a bonus on the CD version I got back in 2007. A little joy of a song.

“My Golden Years” by The Lemon Twigs

The Lemon Twigs wear basically every musical influence from the 1960s and 1970s a band could possibly have on their sleeves. Nothing is subtle. But what can I say? I love it. These guys are from Long Island like me. If I had any musicality at all, I’d probably make music like this.

“The Hum” by Margo Guryan

A great songwriter in the Carole King vein, Margo Guryan is kind of a cult figure. This is a good example of what she’s capable of. A singalong track that basically summarizes Watergate. Once this song builds momentum you can only be carried away.

“World on a String” by Jessica Pratt

This one is from Pratt’s new album Here in the Pitch (2024), which was an AllMusic Editor’s pick. In the AllMusic review, they cite Pet Sounds as an influence which OF COURSE hooked me. But while there are glances and nods toward that album’s sound in the song arrangements, it's nothing really like that. But this is a quiet, tender listen. Good one for when you open the windows and clean the apartment or house.

“Look to the East, Look to the West” by Camera Obscura

I’d heard of Aztec Camera, but Camera Obscura!? Another Allmusic Editor’s pick, this album of the same name is one of those very solid and very good middle of the road contemporary rock albums that seem to come and go these days. (You could call them alternative rock or indie rock or whatever but this is just a solid rock album that’s a bit on the softer side.) This is the title track of the record and it concludes the album. A great album closer that fits here too.

“Ready or Not” by Shakey Graves

Heard this one in the car on the way to Alamo Drafthouse on the way to see Civil War and then heard it in the bathroom of the Alamo Drafthouse after seeing Civil War. Strange coincidences like that warrant inclusion on a playlist. Plus I think it fits in on this last leg.

“I Need Love” by Barbara Mason

Another chestnut pick from Whit Stillman. This one’s from Metropolitan (1990). Can you tell I was brushing up on my Whit Stillman this past month?

“Nothing to Say” by The Kinks

This may be the most devastating set of lyrics that Ray Davies ever wrote—and that’s saying something. To me, this is the closest that any song comes to a Joyce short story: the blunt reality, the specific details of time and place that tell you something even if you don’t know exactly what they mean, the sadness. For years, I listened to this song and always thought about it from the point of view of the son character, but now I’ve started to listen to it from the perspective of the father character in the song. And it makes it even more devastating: imagine being faced with a child who feels this way about you and not understanding why and feeling somewhat disappointed with the cruel and judgmental person they’ve become. And all of this happening while The Kinks are just absolutely rocking through a textbook production from their peak era. What a song.