Category: music
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start with the soundtrack
If you’ve been paying attention, you probably know I’m working on a movie. I’m still writing it. It’s roughly ninety pages of a final draft document, a hundred or so post-it notes tacked out on my bedroom wall, a series of scribbles in a few different notebooks, and about eighteen…
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the water we swim in
A few months back, Fall Out Boy dropped a cover of the Billy Joel classic, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” but with verses rewritten to describe news events from the past thirty years. Detailing everything from the Kurt Cobain’s suicide to Trumps dual impeachments, the song is sprawling in its…
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…if it kills me
Years and years ago, a dear friend told me The Mountain Goats “This Year” was his favorite New Year’s song. “Nah, man,” I told him. “That’s not a New Year’s song. That’s a song for November, when you’ve been beaten down by the year and you’re crawling towards the end…
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times like these
I was ruminating this morning on which Bayside record is my favorite. If you’re a regular around these parts, you know I have difficulty trying to define “favorite.” Most emotionally resonate? Best technically? Worth returning to? Ultimately, I realized comparing one Bayside record to another is a fruitless task. Despite…
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a good detective story
Brian Koppelman recently had a great conversation with Lenny Kaye, famous as the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. Kaye had a great little nugget to offer regarding an entire cultural scene functioning like an Agatha Christie-style detective story: To me, it’s a process and you usually have about five…
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records worth returning to
I’ve been playing Death Cab For Cutie’s Asphalt Meadows on repeat since it came out last fall. The fact the band released an acoustic version of the entire record has helped reinforce some of the songs in my consciousness, but more than anything, I’ve been struck how this record feels…
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run the other direction
One of my favorite things about My Chemical Romance: they established their look early. They found what they were doing and branded it: black suits, red ties, peacoats, pinstripes. It was dark. It was edgy. It was cool…at least, thirteen year old me thought so. Flashforward five years and a…
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the music videos that made me
My last semester of college, I took a class on MTV. Sounds crazy, but it was one of the capstone credits for my major in American Studies, a discipline I always tell people was like majoring in sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In all honesty, American Studies was more…
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“do your early stuff”
I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid. It’s a popular myth in my family that at six-years-old, after seeing a behind-the-scenes special about James Cameron, I decided to make my own version of Titanic. I made storyboards, asked my dad to be the camera man, and shot…
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Ben Gibbard on taste and identity
In his recent appearance on the podcast, Broken Record, Ben Gibbard spoke with Justin Richmond about a variety of subjects: writing the Postal Service’s Give Up and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, the best iteration of a song not necessarily being the recorded version, and breaking down other people’s music…
joshua chamberlain 