Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)

Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing

A few minutes after yesterday’s post I learned the sad news about Christine McVie.

+ The process of writing a song for Susie

At the airport pasting a picture

The weather siblings the poem the bomb

My longest running bandmate, Jon Rauhouse, has been told he is no longer terminal with cancer.

Hello readers.

There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect.

Hi Everyone, First - I’ll be vacationing with my family next week, so I’ll check in from the road next Wednesday - and most likely there will be photos of Lake Michigan :-)

Hello, from the other side

Loners,

And I recorded it. Here's "Sailor's Song."

Part 12: The End

1997-03-31, Memorial Stadium, St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada

Plus re-recording "Chimes of Freedom" with Bob himself for a '60s-themed TV show

Why I can't let go of "Into The Wild", and why perhaps you can't, either.

Paid subscribers only

a.k.a. Having spent 2023 doubling down on the ridiculousness of 2022, the genre currently sits in a rather uninspiring place.

a.k.a. Talking politics and protest with writer and journalist Vincent Bevins, plus a round-up of the latest electronic music news and a fresh slate of new track recommendations.

let them make their mistakes

When you can’t hear the song through the trees

Two and a half years after the release of Glow On, Brendan Yates reflects on an intense period of change, adaptation, and growth—all while protecting his sensitivity against the harsh glare.

His first band copied D.R.I., but his next act upended every hardcore norm we had and changed the culture forever. Thirty years later, Tim Kinsella is still your favorite outsider's favorite outsider.

It’s official. We are in the studio

Another Q&A (and a demo of the song Blame the Kids)

Behind Every Successful Woman are Two Men... Enough Said.

for young musicians

I am posting this because people have asked me to. Emily Rose Marcus was born on December 10, 1969, in Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley. It was a forceps delivery, and she came out with bruises on her face, yet she lived her life as a woman who prized beauty—in fashion, her own sense of style, furniture, art. Following her beloved uncle Dr. William E. Bernstein, she chose a death with dignity, and died on January 31, 2023, in her apartment in Oakland, where she had lived since 2007, after more than two years fighting against a terminal diagnosis of appendiceal cancer she had received in September 2020. Our hearts are broken.

So it was two days later with an unidentified voice running down what attentive listeners could expect to be told over the next hour: “Kamala Harris has experienced a surge of support—but now the backlash has begun.” That there was no evidence that this was true was no matter. This is how things are supposed to work. Some person...

An essay about the darkest days of my creative life.

An American tradition has returned....Join me in reading through ALLLL the nominees for the MTV Video Music Awards, and hear some of my predictions for who will win what (and why.)

26 February, 2021.

"Rock’n’roll means escape and freedom."

Listen to Roger Nichols's long-awaited "Second Arrangement" cassette

How the alternative newspaper shaped the future of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—and music itself

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thoughts on forgetting, plus new albums by Not Not Fun, Kevin Richard Martin, and K. Freund

The nomadic electronic musician untangles the secrets behind his cryptic and hypnotic productions

Following a rigorous survey (of my own bookshelf), a definitive canon

A dispatch from ground level, with a bit of aerial view.

On Weathervanes, death, love and listening like a mother

...unless it's in a song by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. Then it's great news.

so far it doesn't hurt

Sweat on the Mean Streets of Beverly Hills

S/O to DeWhatitdo for the ask.

A conversation about how moving the one can change a groove.

An algorithm

In which I try to scrape the “ick” off an otherwise promising song I’d abandoned ten years ago.