joshua chamberlain

Category: music

  • my favorite thing about Weezer

    For the second time in a row, Weezer announced an album, then put out something entirely different. After 2016’s The White Album. the band’s frontman, Rivers Cuomo, announced the band was going to release a follow-up entitled The Black Album. But as they started the recording process, Rivers changed his…

  • the face of rejection

    I’m recently submitted a few applications to grad schools. I got my first rejection yesterday. When talking with an old friend last night, he said, “What else can you do in the face of rejection but sing?” He immediately brought up Amy Grant’s “Hopes Set High,” one of the songbook…

  • what to keep, what to leave out

    I’ve been a Bon Iver fan for over ten years now. Justin Vernon’s work as a musician and artist is unparalleled, from the emotive experience of For Emma, Forever Ago to his collaborations with Kanye West and Taylor Swift. One of my favorite things I’ve seen Vernon do is perform…

  • the infinite playlist project

    In my last semester of high school, I decided to make a mixtape commemorate each of the four previous years. The result was one of my favorite projects I’ve completed, a soundtrack to a few of the defining moments in my life. “The times you lived through, the people you…

  • succeed on your own terms

    Every so often, in a half-hearted attempt to engage in a conversation, my parents will ask me about “selling out”: “Did [insert name of a band here] sell out when they released this song or this album?” My definition of selling out had changed quite a bit over the years,…

  • the shape of things

    I spent a while at the art museum the other day, studying Saul Steinberg’s Mural of Cincinnati. While trying to recreate select bits and pieces in my notebook, I remembered a drawing teacher I met once who was fond of saying “Everything is made of simple shapes.” It’s easy to…

  • why feel guilty?

    There are a fair amount of things I enjoy that aren’t cool. They’re not culturally bulletproof, they’re cheesy, they’re sentimental. They’re not high art. These are the things we might call “guilty pleasures.” “The guilty pleasure is always the enjoyment of some form that is not high art,” says Fran…

  • why i love musicians

    I truly envy musicians. A friend of mine from college used to talk about hanging out in the studio while recording music and how it fostered collaboration. One time I expressed my jealousy. “But dude,” he said. “You’re a writer. The world is your studio time.” Fair point, but landing…

  • “be patient”

    A few years back, I went to see a Broadway play. Afterwards, I hung around outside the stage door and wound up talking to the director. “Be patient,” he said when I asked for advice. This is something at which I’ve never excelled. Be it waiting for a break, waiting…

  • writing and living

    While plowing back through some of the old voice memos, I found a quote from a dear friend of mine, writer and musician Michael Winn. We were talking about writing and developing characters and he explained why he’d had such trouble capturing human life on the page: “Living your life…