(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ 𝓢𝓱𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀𝓼 𝓸𝓯 𝓡𝓮𝓬𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓐𝓵𝓫𝓾𝓶𝓼 ♥

**note: I’m linking to Spotify on these even though I’ve personally switched over to Qobuz… I want it to take as few clicks as possible for the majority of people to get these tunes into their actual ears, no matter their current platform choice… That being said, I do not endorse Spotify from like, an overall moral perspective lol - Qobuz has been pretty good to me so far and I do recommend it!

Ratboys - Singin’ to an Empty Chair

The last couple of years have put most of us through the meat grinder and, subsequently, in therapy—and Chicago’s Ratboys seem to be no exception. The album title references a therapy technique, “talking to an empty chair,” that involves the patient (therapee?) engaging in a one-sided conversation in hopes of finding some sort of resolution. Theoretically a sappy concept for a record, but in the competent, riff-rich hands of the Rat rockers it becomes something solid and sacred. As I stood watching the band members jam on the Mohawk outdoor stage last weekend, tears streaming down my face, I did sort of get the feeling they should be billing us all for a sweat-soaked, cigarette-scented therapy session.

hemlocke springs - the apple tree under the sea

No one is doing it quite like hemlocke springs. On her debut full-length album, the alt-pop siren beckons us into her fucked-up fairytale world, bedecked with spooky melodies, haunted Biblical references, and, as the stunning album art suggests, poison apples. She’s like a grimier Grimes, roughing up her pop hooks with fuzzy basslines and vocals that cut sharp corners into the occasional growl. In a just world, this release would be hurtling hemlocke springs up into the stratosphere of stardom, but regardless, it’s a delight to hang out with her down on the creepy, trippy ocean floor.

Katzin - Buckaroo

This album takes me to Shins-land. The manic whimsy of the guitar strums, the weird little bleeps and bloops, the asymmetric rhythms, the absentminded chord progressions—it’s all heavily nostalgic. The twist, though, is that Katzin’s voice on Buckaroo carries a completely different flavor of nostalgia for me—it’s got a clear, ringing earnestness and insistent breathiness that makes me think of, honestly, Dashboard Confessional. Throw a bunch of cowboy-themed song titles in the mix, and it’s almost like, what are we doing here exactly? And yet I can’t help but be calmed, transported, and immensely charmed by the net result. I mean, if you make music that sounds like it could have been on the One Tree Hill soundtrack, that’s kind of a shoe-in for me.

MX LONELY - ALL MONSTERS

Loud and sullen trio MX LONELY make wallowing sound good on this irresistible rock record. Like their sonic neighbors Fleshwater, the band’s giant guitars hack fresh new paths through the undergrowth of an almost-saturated shoegaze market, making way for the alternating vocalists’ meandering melodies, yells, and whispers. If you’re going to be this angsty—”I’m in love with adderall and validation,” both frontpeople sing on the chorus of “Shape of an Angel”—you’d better make it sound as sharp and alive as ALL MONSTERS does.

Cardinals - Masquerade

Guys

I’m sooooooooooooo sorry

But this is MY blog and I need to speak MY truth

I’ve fallen in love with another album that reminds me of vintage Bright Eyes. :(

Twisted Teens - Blame The Clown

If you haven’t dipped your toe in the punk pool recently, may I recommend Blame The Clown? And if you have, may I also recommend Blame The Clown? The New Orleans duo’s latest offering has all the punch and crunch I want from a punk record, wrapped in fresh, crackling pedal steel and blown-out garage fuzz. It’s the kind of music you wouldn’t be able to pull off unless you’re really, really from the South, but they are, and they do, and it’s the best of multiple worlds.

Morgan Nagler - I’ve Got Nothing To Lose, And I’m Losing It

Oh, a Phoebe Bridgers co-writer put out an existential alt-country album with crunchy electric guitars? Yeah I’ll listen.

Other notables:

Underscores - U (catchy bratty hyperpop)
Bill Callahan - My Days of 58 (hot old guy music)
Yumi Zouma - No Love Lost To Kindness (guitar&bass&drums alt-pop)
Grace Ives - Girlfriend (POP x10000)
Gregory Uhlmann - Extra Stars (weird chill jazz)
Victoryland - My Heart Is A Room With No Cameras In It (post-rock sauteed in The Killers)
Otto Benson - Peanut (calming, buoyant lo-fi folk)
Mon Rovia - Bloodline (Bon Iver’s biological son (not actually))
Courtney Marie Andrews - Valentine (thoughtful, pretty ruminations of an Emmylou Harris acolyte)
Madi Diaz - Enema of the Garden State (precisely, and in every aspect, the acoustic guitar covers of Blink-182 that 16-year-old me wishes she could’ve done)

Anything big I missed? What have y’all been rocking with this first part of the year? Lmk!

I’ve tried to get into Wednesday so many times since I saw them play at Mohawk on May 1, 2023. It was the last night I spent married—like, really married. I mean, I legally was for two years and 22 days afterward, but only legally. Time and memory get sloppy in the wake of grief, and although I wouldn’t find out the information that would blow apart my life until the following day (May 2, 2023), in my mind the Wednesday concert has always been streaked with that same sick feeling that bowled me over the following day. I mean, it’s not like we were having a great time at the concert, either—something was way off, and I could feel it. Wednesday’s chugging chords, frontwoman Karly Hartzman’s woozy vocals, the Lonestar moat I poured to keep the monsters at bay—the last two years, it’s all been tied up in Wednesday’s music for me. That is, until the other day at Austin’s Levitation Festival, when I saw Wednesday live again, and the curse was broken.

Well, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say a curse was broken, because nothing really…got better. It’s perhaps truer to say that some sordid prophecy, commensurate with the band’s dark motifs, was fulfilled: the music that had never made me feel anything but nausea before, all of a sudden flooded me with blood-hot sorrow.

“They’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside, they’ll meet you outside,” howled Hartzman in the Palmer Events Center, at the top of her lungs. Tears streamed down my cheeks in the darkness of the crowd; I didn’t understand what the song was about, but her raw emotion felt like a stab to a scar. I’ve been trying my best to heal, to move on, to get over the one who broke my heart. I’m tired of trying to ascertain if it’s working, and some nights, all that’s left is the screaming void.

The way people talked about Rat Saw God, Wednesday’s acclaimed 2023 album, made me sick that year. It was impossible to describe then, and I didn’t make a big deal about it because I didn’t want to seem contrarian over something that could barely be characterized as a real opinion. People enjoyed its grit, it seemed, and while I sincerely liked the concept of grungy Southern goth rock, I couldn’t linger with the album long enough to glean anything other than Karly Hartzman saying Stuff That Sounded Edgy and Cool. For reasons I couldn’t articulate, it felt like a mockery of my personal pain. May 1st. May 2nd. The amount of times since that I’ve sat in my hot car and screamed and screamed and screamed.

The Levitation show last weekend wasn’t technically the first time I’ve given Wednesday a second chance. A couple months ago, I’d listened to the new album’s first single, “Elderberry Wine,” and cautiously enjoyed it. The gentle guitar strums and pedal steel won me over where the band’s prior discord hadn’t. But I was still highly skeptical that the new album, Bleeds, would be able to offer me anything Rat Saw God couldn’t.

I was wrong. Since Wednesday’s Levitation set the other day, I’ve been listening to Bleeds nearly nonstop. I can’t speak to the rest of the band’s catalog, but I feel like I finally understand Hartzman as a narrator now. Where I was expecting snark, I found tenderness. The point is not her grotesque, eloquent small-town vignettes—interesting as they are. It’s the humans inside them.

I like all the songs on Bleeds, but the six-song run from “Candy Breath” to “Carolina Murder Suicide” has particularly knocked me on my ass. Right in the middle of it sits “Pick Up That Knife,” the song that made me cry at Levitation. “When you pick up that knife you’re askin’ for a fight / mouthed off to those bikers at a vacant stop light,” Hartzman sings, setting the scene for the first round of “They’ll meet you outside”s. Death of a loved one is always just a knife slice away, on the other side of an uneasy night of drinking. She describes water that won’t go down the drain, winter that won’t give way to spring. At the end of the song, a treatise on loss:

Thought you’d get shipped home in a full-body cast
Never could get your head out of your ass
Baptized to freedom and born in bondage
Had to bury you deep to keep the dogs from digging

They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside

They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside

They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside
They’ll meet you outside

Grief is gory. A corpse the dogs can sniff out. “I freckle and you tan / I find comfort knowing angels don’t give a damn,” sings Hartzman on “Elderberry Wine,” sneaking a gut punch into a song that’s seemingly easygoing. I freckle, and he tans, and now we’ll never know what could’ve been.

I cried again when I first listened to Bleeds’ penultimate song, “Carolina Murder Suicide.” How could you not? “The house collapsed, but the fire kept on burning at the scraps / and I wondered if grief could break you in half.” I don’t know if it’s a real story Hartzman tells in the song, but it’s a true one. Not just about what happened to me, or to her neighbors, or to any one of us specifically. But about the wound that burns at the middle of everything, that bleeds in all of us. The flood that tore the band’s hometown of Asheville apart this time last year. The Texas flood that killed my grandparents’ friends in June. The horror of a world that gets sicker every day. Looking it all in the eye isn’t a mockery; it’s a way to honor our experience as survivors of the wreckage. “If you need to scream, there’s a part at the end of this song where you can,” Hartzman quipped deceptively lightly before “Pick Up That Knife,” the final song of the festival set. “And it feels rea-lly-fu-cking-goooood…”

Howdy, and welcome to Good And Good For You, a newsletter about music and other stuff. I don’t know if you know this about me…but…..I have a rotating playlist called Special Sauce. The parameters: it must be fifteen songs at any given time—no more, no less; it’s always best played in order; it’s roughly based on what I’m digging at the moment. I got the idea from my friend Pete, who has his own 20-song version of this called Cafe Pete (hi, Pete). Give Special Sauce a follow on Spotify if you think you can handle the flavor!

This is about sauce (Special Sauce), but it’s also about drinks.

As someone who feels ambivalent about both soda and most flavored coffee drinks, I’ve never really felt the compulsion of the “little treat” beverage. That is, until recently.

When you are broke, like I have been this summer, a drink is the perfect indulgence. Portable, cheap, satisfying. Refreshing or bracing, or, in the case of some, both. Perhaps even restorative and healing (that one tweet that’s like Blue Gatorade is a sacred medicine in white people culture or whatever, lol).

I’ve been working on savoring the little things, because sometimes that’s all we’ve got. For me, recently, that’s mostly been drinks and songs. Each of these tracks has given me cause to sip and savor, to meditate on its place in a sequence, to let it wash over my thirsty heart in the absence of other, larger miracles.

So… Without further ado… This is………

SPECIAL SAUCE AUGUST 2025: THE LITTLE TREAT EDITION

Here is the link to the playlist!

1. “(There’s Gotta Be) More To Life,” Stacie Orrico

2003-2005 is my favorite era of pop. The emotional urgency, the electric guitars, the powerhouse girl vocals. It’s also when I was in middle school and got my own radio for the first time. COINCIDENCE??????

I drank an Arizona Green Tea from the 7-11 after a hot downtown delivery shift - it’s still just $1!

2. “It’s A Long Way To The Top,” Lucinda Williams

I heard this on our local college radio station, KUTX, with the AC blasting chilly air at me after a sweaty catering delivery in 100 degrees. And the grit felt just right.

I drank a regular Arizona Sweet Tea after a swim. I was so thirsty and that can was so cold

3. “No Front Teeth (feat. Aldous Harding),” Perfume Genius

This new album from art-pop master Mike Hadreas puts his gorgeous melodies over fun, crunchy stuff like pedal steel and crashing cymbals. I would die for Mike Hadreas, a hilarious treasure of a human being and, yes, I believe a genius.

I drank too much water from my Nalgene after discovering a water bottle fill station at Shipe Pool. It was my first time there, and the last day it was open for the season, and I chugged until my stomach was full.

4. “You Found Me (From the Netflix Series “Too Much”),” Waxahatchee & Kevin Morby

I drank a Lone Star at Barbs and I held it in the air while the whole club, myself most of all, sang along to “Like a Prayer”

5. “Life Signs,” Water From Your Eyes

When I first heard this song, I had been listening a lot of Fugazi, and when the manic drums and bassline came in, for a second I thought, Oh, this is that Fugazi song I put on Special Sauce.

I drank sink water from my battered plastic bottle, left in the freezer for a couple hours. Slushy shards hit my nose for the first few sips.

6. “SUGAR RUSH,” Tiberius b

This was a Hayley Williams rec. I described Tiberius b as, and I stand by this, a Björkchild.

I drank a Layback Lime & Salt non-alcoholic beer in the pool at my house when I didn’t want alcohol to dull the edge of the book I was reading (Gilead by Marilynne Robinson)

7. “It’s Amazing To Be Young,” Fontaines D.C.

I’ll tell you what’s amazing, Fontaines D.C.: listening to this song with the windows down at dusk when the magic hour hits! (I am not young)

I drank another Layback Lime and Salt on the winding way up into the hills of Lost Creek. It’s thrilling to drink a (non-alcoholic) beer behind the wheel

8. “Repeater,” Fugazi

The other day I was feeling so angry at the world and the people in charge of it, and then I remembered that I can listen to some actual furious DC post-hardcore about that. I love when that happens.

I drank a really good drip coffee given to me in a paper to-go cup for free by some cafe employees when I picked up my catering delivery

9. “Sonic Bloom,” Tripping Daisy

Another KUTX gem! I Shazam’d this when I was listening to the radio in my car one day. I thought it was Pavement and was like, what’s this Pavement song I like more than normal?

I drank this wine that was not actually a wine but some sort of cider, but not technically a cider either, and I can’t really give you any further substantial information about it because Strangelove’s 8/9 menu isn’t anywhere to be found online, but it tasted like I always imagined when the Redwall author would describe the delectable-sounding contents the critters’ flagons

10. “Float (feat. Jim Adkins),” Jay Som

Do you ever hear a song and think I wish I could clone this song 1000 times and just only listen to all of those songs? That’s how I feel about this song. The tense guitars, warm harmonies, and punchy drums are THE Katie-likey recipe.

I drank a mid-morning Guinness with my siblings at the sports bar, chased with a shot of Jameson that my favorite bartender insisted on pouring me (he’s in love with me, I’m sure of it)

11. “Off Rez,” Ribbon Skirt

Ribbon Skirt put out one of my favorite albums of 2025 a few months ago—thudding bass, talky/punky femme vocals, and crunchy drums—and this track in particular keeps getting stuck in my head.

I drank my daily Folgers in a blue mug at my house on my front porch (we have front porch furniture now)

12. “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Fugees

According to Spotify (sorry for still using Spotify I promise I’m working on it), this is the song I have put on the most playlists.

I drank Pecan-flavored drip coffee from my 7-11 that I took with me to the park in my neighborhood where I went and sat in the heat for five days straight, waiting for some part of the experience to heal me (I don’t think it *didn’t*)

13. “The Well,” Smog

“I could NOT work,” says Bill Callahan. And I felt that.

I drank a Blue Gatorade Zero in the heat of the day. My sugar-free savior. Hydrator of my body and soul. I’d have undoubtedly died without it.

14. “Dollar Store (feat. Waxahatchee),” Ben Kweller

My friend and I were leaving the movie theater and we had our windows rolled down in the velvet night and he queued this after “Nettles” by Ethel Cain and I took the long way home up back streets because I didn’t want the feeling to end.

I drank a couple glasses of Ercole Bianco Monferrato wine while I caught up on the final two Gilded Age episodes of the season and felt happy by myself for the first time in a long time

15. “The Field (feat. The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar),” Blood Orange

It would be impossible to pick a favorite Last Special Sauce Song of all time, but this one’s gotta be up there. It’s sunset in a song, drifting over those unmistakeable Durutti Column guitar parts, smelling like faint barbecue embers and pecan leaves green-baked by the blaze of the day.

I drank hibiscus iced tea: not too sweet, not too plain, smooth, light, and, of course, it’s that irresistible crimson color. I made some more and I drank it again. A small luxury I am learning to exalt. The blood of summer salvation, poured out for me and you.

“My ribs are metal cages to guard my heart,” it went this morning, as I felt the hand of consciousness press down on me. I’ve never been a morning person, really, and mornings are the worst lately. Well, except for the nights.

It’s been a rough summer.

When Hayley Williams released 17 songs without warning on Monday, July 28, 2025, they were in no particular order. In fact, they were scattered across the home page of her website, hayleywilliams.net, in a vignette designed to look like an early-2000s computer desktop. You could access this desktop view, littered with pixelated mp3 icons, by entering a 16-digit code, accessible through the purchase of one of her hair dyes. Or you could “ask a friend” for it, according to the password prompt.

They’re on streaming services now as 17 individual singles, and I’ve tentatively settled on my preferred track listing. “Hard” is first. There are multiple songs in the project that have the feel of a thesis statement, and there are moments when this one’s probably mine. It has the grit of a Paramore song, but flipped on its head: where once there were nimble drums and soaring guitars to guide Hayley’s voice, now there’s heavy, ringing tones and crunchy drum machines. It feels like chewing on sugar-coated gravel. It's a catharsis of thirty-something angst.

“Armor’s heavy, never suited me at all / but it’s the devil I know,” she admits before the final chorus. It’s how I feel this August: I wake up exhausted, I look for jobs, I say no to invitations and I do my schoolwork instead, I sweatily lug a bag of catered meals up to a pristine cool office on a fifth floor, I look for jobs, I stare at my phone. I have 82 spam voicemails about loan offers that don’t exist. I sift through them one by one. I deliver more meals. I sweat. I wait. I sleep. I wait.

So hit me, I dare the universe again, in Hayley’s words this time. I can’t afford anything, especially not being soft.

Paramore’s first album, All We Know Is Falling, turned 20 last month. At the time, in the shuffle of negotiations around it, the band—well, technically just Hayley—got locked into what’s known as a 360° record deal, the first of its kind. Panos Panay, CEO of online music platform Sonicbids, has said:

If you want to find out the future of 360° deals, look at Motown in the late 60s. ... They owned your likeness, your touring, publishing, record royalties, told you what to wear, told you how to walk ... Eventually all these artists left ... There’s two things we know about creativity: you can’t force it and you can’t really control it.

For the next 20 years, Paramore were bound by this shit deal with Atlantic, without control of multiple revenue streams that would have been theirs otherwise, stuck playing tours they may not have wanted to, perhaps even putting out music that wasn’t entirely on their own creative terms. Hayley toughed it out, fighting all twenty years for the integrity of her vision, of her bandmates’ vision, of the simple wish for Paramore to be a band, not just a Hayley. It was a long 20 years and now it’s over. What comes next?

Well, a bunch of singles released on a label called Post-Atlantic, for starters. The themes of the song collection, titled Ego, are deeply personal: on “Whim,” she mournfully repeats “I want to believe in love,” and on “Hard,” she admits that she’s “Always ready for the piano to fall / Always ready to be left out in the cold.” It’s a sharp detour from the mood of Paramore’s last album, This Is Why, which documented the three remaining band members’ loyalty to one another, including Hayley’s to her then-partner Taylor York. Well, I say that… That’s the thing, no one knows if they’re still together. Not since the singles dropped. On self-described “Paramore Twitter,” I’ve watched fans run themselves in circles trying to figure out exactly how breakup-y these songs really are—while trying to maintain a healthy level of restraint, because these are, after all, people we don’t really know. But it’s hard not to speculate a little, when she’s singing things like “You had me, why’d you let go?”

There’s a legend in Paramore fan lore: that Taylor York is really the one who’s continuously been in Paramore the longest. Between their 2013 self-titled album and their 2017 release After Laughter, Hayley supposedly called it quits, but Taylor (according to a quip in an interview) coaxed her back into it, reminding her of all the things she loved about what they’d built, about performing, about art. But all the hearsay aside, York has co-written Paramore songs since 2003, jamming with Zac and Hayley as the very first iteration of the band. What is Paramore without Taylor? These new songs have fans uneasily wondering.

But really, the question we should be asking is: who is Hayley without Paramore? (At least, without the Paramore that existed under the Atlantic Records deal?) It’s the current reality, no matter how ephemeral or permanent this solo era ends up being. She’s proven that she can write great songs on her own, but it’s not historically what any of us—herself included—ultimately wanted. “I’m in a band, I’m in a band, I’m in a band,” she yells on new track “Ice In My OJ,” mood inscrutable on a sentiment she used to take deadly seriously. Twenty-plus years into Paramore, is she being serious? Is it over? Does she want it to be? Is it even up to her?

If only the songs were in a particular order, fans speculated, we might be able to trace a narrative—to find answers on Paramore…only to subsequently realize that perhaps she meant the track list to be scrambled, for that very reason. Post-Atlantic. Two decades after All We Know Is Falling. Nothing or everything ahead.

Who are we, after all this time?

It’s a question, in regards to myself, that fills up my days and nights and brain. As much as I try not to, as Jemima Kirke says in the much-memed screenshot, “think about myself so much,” it’s hard to ignore the disorienting feeling that I’m in uncharted territory.

When I first started listening to Paramore, and shortly thereafter dubbed them my favorite band, I was 15. This August, I’m 33 and a half, divorced and jobless and waiting in the sweltering Austin heat for someone, something, anything, to show me who I am now.

—

My track list gets tricky at the end, and I’ll tell you why: on every other Paramore and Hayley solo release, the final track has been a BIG ONE. An obvious one. From the melodrama of “My Heart” on All We Know Is Falling to the sky-scraping shred of “Thick Skull” on This Is Why, it’s always a massive gut-punch bookend, sonically and narratively.

The closest I’ve gotten to selecting a worthy final track on my own playlist is “Glum.” It’s my favorite of the collection, and it feels, to me, the most like a conclusion. The song opens with a beat not unlike trip-hop, and Hayley’s voice, shrunk and distorted like a little alien, layered later in the verses with her own ethereal harmonies. On the chorus, she bursts in with her signature alto over four plain sorrowful chords: “Do you ever feel so alone / that you could implode / and no one would know?”

But it’s still not a resolution. How’s “Does anyone know if this is normal” for a takeaway? What does it mean for us, the unglamorous, the untalented, if multi-hyphenate Hayley Williams feels this way?

Like she says in the chorus, I wanna go back to wherever we’re from, whatever we’re from, and I used to look to Hayley as living proof that perhaps somehow I could. But no, she’s just like me now. “On my way to 37 years / I do not know if I’ll ever know / What in the living fuck I’m doing here / Does anyone know if this is normal?” I realize, with a sinking heart, that in the wake of all this career success, she feels as alone as I do. And neither she nor I know what to do about it.

Ego doesn’t have bookends. And even if I’m supposed to choose my own, I’ve found it impossible. There’s a story in the songs, but I can’t find the end. I’m starting to think Hayley can’t, either.

—

A few days after the singles got uploaded to streaming platforms, I checked Instagram and saw that Hayley had posted a story.

In it, she proposed that fans build their own track order of the 17 songs and tag her in them, and that she’d like to see how everybody else thought the compilation should go. There would be an Ego physical release at some point, she assured everyone, but she thought it would be fun to let the fans decide how it gets assembled.

“The truth is, I didn’t set out to make an album, I just needed to write, and I ended up with all these songs,” she says in the post, from the driver’s seat of her car that’s stuck in nasty Nashville traffic.

“And I have never known,” she continues, slowly and thoughtfully, “I’ve never really known what I think the full experience of all of it should be. But I kinda just wanna understand how you’re experiencing it.”

To think about my hero, one of the most listened-to artists in the world not only currently, but of all time, admitting that she’s never really felt connected to an album release. To see her feeling the freedom, for the first time ever, to redefine the artistic process, to explore, to experience curiosity in how her work is received. It felt like a kind of softness, a kind of openness I’d like to emulate. It felt like a way forward.

—

“Sing us a song,” goes the chorus of “My Heart,” the final track of All We Know Is Falling. “Sing us a song / and we’ll sing it back to you,” wrote Paramore twenty years ago. It feels full-circle, this new request for our interpretation of Ego. This time, she wants us to sing back to her. “This time,” she said on “My Heart,” and she said in not so many words on her Instagram story, “I will be listening.”

I feel stuck here, in this endless summer in this cruel city. I feel overwhelmed at the vast nothingness ahead of me: what am I going to do for work the rest of my life, with the world changing at the pace it is now? Am I still a writer? Am I the same girl who’d cry in her car to Paramore after school? I’m not sure, but Hayley’s songs are reminding me that there are ties that still bind—in music, in myself. Is Paramore still a band? Who is Hayley post-Atlantic? Who am I now? I’m not sure. But the one thing I am sure about, is that back and forth, Hayley and I, and all of us, we’ll figure it out. Even if it feels like starting over.

—

Here’s my version of Ego. Honestly, it’s still a work in progress.

Heading to New York marked a shift: although it wasn’t perfect, it was the first significant, positive landmark of my single life. Everything else has felt like that scene in Hot Rod where he falls down the hill, and then he keeps falling down the hill, and then he keeps falling and falling and falling. I onomatopaeia’d it to a friend the other day in a downward “kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk” motion, like tumbling down an “up” escalator. Everything has felt like that since about this time last year, when my marriage ended for real and I moved my shit out on a shitty day when it was pouring shitty rain. And the months wore on, cooped up in my parents’ house, missing my old life and hating my job and doing my best not to succumb to all the quicksand.

And the state washes over me
And the dust from the cars and the cussing in halls
And the trucks and the shards and the spoiling stars

My memory fades,
My memory fades,
And every day
It gets so hot, so hot, so hot

The music of New York singer-songwriter Laura Stevenson has been my companion often throughout the past year, especially the past few months. She sneaks tightly composed poetic meter into meandering melodies, wrapping it all up in a homey haze of soft garage-band guitars and drums. The songs off her self-titled 2021 album, alighting on themes of grief and motherhood, aptly feel like a braid of lullabies and nightmares, all full of dread and comfort and warmth and sadness. Perfect for my late lonely nights of work that makes me feel less than human. Perfect for my heart that needs soothing, but not too sweetly. 

I was sick for the whole second half of my time in New York, forced by my body to step back from the reckless edge of my vices, to nap often, to go to bed early. Guiding myself through the avenues and tunnels in a haze of cold medicine. Trying to listen to myself about what I need in a given moment. Still trying, despite the setbacks, to give myself the chance to be weightless for a while. Taking a reluctant crash course in caring for myself, to reckon as lovingly as I could with the animal of my body and the wraith of my mind. 

Despite my shattered state, I still saw things you wouldn’t believe, experienced the city’s full litany of miracles. I slept each night in a glowing sanctuary in Crown Heights; I stumbled into a crystal store that sparkled all the way up to the ceiling; I danced with a stranger; I raced my friend’s dog under a full moon. I drank wine on a rooftop at 4 am. I chugged DayQuil and tried to feel young again, before the frightening unknown of my new life in Austin kicked off. I cried and cried, and I felt moments of startling joy, and I freaked out about the state of the world, and I tried to let a few things go.

In “Continental Divide,” Stevenson’s ambitions of care, like mine for myself, hit hurdles:

What could I do right to keep you safe all of your life?
To keep the waves from rising higher than the cities and their sights?
What could I do right to keep you weightless for a while?
You know I’d take this all away from you, I’m trying to

In his 2021 piece on Laura Stevenson, Dan Ozzi wrote: “Pending motherhood allowed her to reflect on the anguish of the difficult preceding year with more perspective, and even some hard-earned peace of mind. She describes the record as a purge and a prayer—at once a primal scream and a meditation on the tranquility that followed. ‘I was looking at the events retrospectively, through this new lens, having this person inside me that I need to protect,’ she says. ‘So there’s this crazy anger, but a serene and protective vibe.’”

Stevenson wrote the album about a close loved one’s traumatic experience, the timeline of which collided with her own pregnancy. It’s a meditation on the roles we imperfectly play for each other, and perhaps even for ourselves, in the wake of disaster.

“With all of my worthiness shook, you stood unmoving / Please, please throw your mercy at me,” she begs some unconventional saint in “Mary.” It’s how I felt in New York, and it’s how I feel being back, as I struggle to believe there are good things ahead. What can I do right to keep myself weightless for a while? To bring back what’s been lost?

It’s sneaky, and impossible to satisfy, this need for restitution. It’s the bargaining stage of grief. Maybe if something new is powerful or fulfilling enough, I won’t have to keep being sad. I trick myself into thinking my grief is a debt that can be paid off, with enough joy or adrenaline or certainty about the future. 

“You would say, ‘Hear me, clear voice, my steady foot upon the effete earth / watch me not learn / war of mine, no one dies,’” she sings on “Wretch,” bearing witness to the wild edges of despair amidst gut-wrenching strings.

This is all just a bad dream, right? I’ll pay my dues and wake up and go back to normal soon. If I’m fast enough, I can outrun the sorrow that claws at my ankles. If I’m light enough, I can walk on water. 

It’s an urge that’s untenable, but understandable. That spark of self-compassion that shines through the layers of grief and denial is what has guided me out of the darkness, in Austin last year, and then in New York, and now in Austin again. Even without any guarantee, I still owe it to myself to try. To give myself the world in the biggest snowglobe I can afford, to shake it up even when things don’t feel like glitter.

And even though it’s briefly
And though it’s not completely
I can feel you reading
Reading me to sleep

And oh the water’s beating into me
I’ve left out a lot of things
Hung like trophies stolen in defeat
I watch you wait for me

When no one’s reading me to sleep, I listen to Laura. When the world around me is burning. When the water’s beating into me, I have to remember those weeks in New York. That even when it was stupid or kind of bad, it was also good. And that I’m the one who chose to keep the door cracked open to it.

“I’ll take a small jar of the honey,” I said while paying out at a fabled Yemeni restaurant in downtown Brooklyn I’d forced myself to try, even though I felt like shit.

“Have you ever tried Yemeni honey? It’s from the mountains,” he said with a bit of reserve, but ending with a flourish he couldn’t suppress.

“Fifty dollars for the small, ninety for the large.” Ah, so I understood the reserve. 

Instead, he offered me a sample—the little plastic spoon dipped in gold, poised thick and undripping for a moment longer than normal honey would. It tasted rich, a little smoky, compounded by a subtle savory undertone. I understood, then, why a jar cost $50. A taste was enough, though. For a moment the sweetness made me weightless.

(っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ 𝓢𝓱𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓡𝓮𝓿𝓲𝓮𝔀𝓼 𝓸𝓯 𝓡𝓮𝓬𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓐𝓵𝓫𝓾𝓶𝓼 ♥

Ben Seretan - Allora

“What I want could fill the world up,” chants Ben Seretan on “Bend,” in a clear voice not unlike Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold’s, but distorted through a hazy kaleidoscope of wild yearning. I’ve been thinking a lot about Wanting recently. And what I’ve determined is: well, not much, but this meandering, enchanting, weird rock album has underscored my aimless musings wonderfully.

Cusp - Thanks So Much EP

My friends and I couldn’t decide if the playing card on the table—a Joker—was a good or bad omen. Regardless, Cusp sounded great as they brought their recent EP to life in that soggy Bed-Stuy backyard last weekend. Vocalist Jen Bender’s warm alto devolves into sing-song yelps when the moment demands, punchy drums and power chords always at the melodies’ helm. These songs take dream pop and turn it into something a little sharper: the sound of an indie rock band playing their cards right.

Kississippi - Damned if i do it for you EP

This feels odd to say, but this EP sort of has the Taylor Swift sauce. The first song, “Smaller Half,” brims with honeyed, emphatic vocals over synths, complete with a sugary, low-register bridge—sound familiar? However, the comparison wanes as Zoe Reynolds, who performs as Kississippi, wades beyond pop on “Jesus Freak,” a catchy bubble-grunge track, and the moody “Bird Song.” Like that one blonde girl in her best moments, Kississippi gets sweet, confessional, and a little cheeky while pushing the loosey-goosey confines of pop.

Macseal - Permanent Repeat

It’s no small feat to successfully collage early 2000’s pop-rock influences, but Macseal rips pages from the era’s most beloved books—including Third Eye Blind and Fountains of Wayne—with beguiling ease. If you’ll indulge me: I even heard hints of one of my favorite extremely cheesy, teen-movie-coded tracks in the soaring falsetto notes of “Golden Harbor” and “Beach Vacation.” If my Summer 2024 was a breezy wistful romcom, this effortlessly, infectiously catchy rock record would be the soundtrack.

Angélica Garcia - Gemelo

I’ve been waiting for Angelica Garcia to make *this* album since I fell in love with her larger-than-life 2019 single “Karma the Knife.” Gemelo is everything I want from her sound: dark, mercurial, high-key witchy, but decidedly pop. The record is a potent ascent through the fogs of grief, weaving through a moody first half and blazing upward toward ecstasy on the second. If you’re in Crown Heights this month, there’s a non-zero chance you’ll see me strut-dancing down the sidewalk with “El Que” (a strong contender for my song of the year) blaring its phoenix incantation in my airpods, summoning the fire back into my blood.

Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

I love songs or albums that sound like what they’re called. The latest from singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins is that, painting a portrait—with airy synths, pearlescent melodies, and wry, quietly gutting confessions—of a bright love that’s left a burn. Special shout-out to the lizard lyrics on “Petco”:

It’s become my second nature
To wander through the pet store
I’d stare into the sideways gaze of a lizard
Doesn’t always make me feel better,
Just less alone, less alone

As a fellow lizard girl lingering in the blackened crater of all I’ve lost, I feel seen.

What’d I miss? What have you been rocking with?

Talk to you soon!

Katie xoxo

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”

–Anne Carson

In 2007, I was browsing my friend’s CD collection. I picked out, as I so often had, a few CDs to borrow and burn. One of them was Memory Man by Aqualung, an artist our mutual friend had put us both onto.

When the wall of drums and electric guitars hit 13 seconds in on the first track, “Cinderella,” I remember feeling a little disoriented. This wasn’t the woozy, sleepy piano pop of Strange and Beautiful, the first Aqualung album I’d listened to. Strange and Beautiful can be pretty well summed up as Grey’s Anatomy music (complimentary, to an extent). No, Memory Man immediately felt darker and more tragic, and it quickly became one of my teenage staples. I was in love with the owner of the CD, and he was dating somebody else. The album felt like it fit, because I thought I knew sadness. 

These days, I never hear anybody talk about Aqualung, the one-man project of British songwriter Matt Hales. A part of me understands: musically, his wistful voice and pop-rock arrangements are nothing revolutionary. But there’s another part of me—aglow with grief and love in the dusk of my life—that still finds these songs extraordinary.

The second track, “Pressure Suit,” was the first to truly capture my attention. It’s about feeling distant from someone, perhaps because they’re not meeting you halfway. “Two spinning spheres, we spin together, and we spin alone,” he sings at the song’s beginning and again before the bridge. The bridge where he chants, “I can’t stop loving you,” over and over again—ten times, I counted. “Somewhere underneath your pointed tongue and teeth is where you really are,” he says amidst U2-esque guitar tones that eventually wind back down to just his piano. To see something in someone that they cannot see themselves: to die a little death every time they betray your vision. To love, alone. To grasp at the impossible past. It’s the burden of the memory-keeper.

My favorite song off the album, when I first started listening, was the fourth track, “Glimmer.” In my loneliest teenage moments, I’d steep in the song’s lullaby-like cadence and hope-fraught lyrics:

There’s a mirror in the old place
The place we used to stand
And wonder at our sweet, sweet selves,
Smiling hand in hand
This wasn’t what we planned

Though the night has fallen
I close my eyes and imagine
A tiny glimmer
Flickering on the horizon

Now, at 32, I’m drenched in memory, like clothes made heavy by a downpour. The weight of all I’ve lost wounds me over and over until I feel like I’ll die. C.S. Lewis said of grief, “The same leg is cut off time after time.” “I had a whole other life, you know,” I have to bite my tongue from saying to every new person I meet. A life where I had a little freedom, a little love, a little apartment of my own. I was married, I find myself compulsively explaining. I lost my job and all my money. I had a dog who died of old age. I left behind a peony plant without knowing if it would ever bloom again.

A razor-thin violin sends the melody up into the atmosphere above the second chorus and bridge. With its ascent into the last chorus, the sun seems to rise for a moment, until he starts to ask “Can you see it?” See what? Oh. See what. It isn’t there, it was just a dream, and it’s still night. The violin arches for one last tragic note, as high and as quiet as the song goes. The glimmer is gone now. But that doesn’t negate the fact that we saw, that we felt it for a moment. 

Listening to this album feels like lingering in the edges of a dream, wandering a house that I no longer have the key to. This is where we set up the Christmas tree. This is where we watched LOST. My Penny, my constant. It’s easy to get lost in the mirrored hallways—the impossible past—forgetting, for just a moment, all the cruelty that justified moving out.

March 19, 2024 was the 20th release anniversary of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In it, a broken-up couple opt to erase all memories of their relationship (because there’s like, a way to do that in the movie) and end up walking back through all the vanishing moments one more time right before they fade. It’s a movie about the exchange rate for pain: you’ve lost, and now you might be able to mitigate the sorrow of that loss. So what’s the downside?

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders,” quips Kirsten Dunst’s peripheral character in the movie. But by the end of the film, it’s not so clear if she’s wrong or right. 

The fifth track of Memory Man, “Vapour Trail,” softens the blow of “Glimmer” with a wandering time signature and wistful guitar plucking that escalates in the chorus. A lot of the songs on this record read like Keane or perhaps a slightly more muted Snow Patrol—part of a moment in mid-2000s British rock that was particularly radio-friendly, but not yet soulless. It’s the kind of thing that the era’s critics scoffed at, but, if you grew up with it, very likely taught you how to feel.

Throughout the album, Hale’s staccato piano keys feel like a fluttering heartbeat, like the winter thawing. He’s a piano guy first and foremost, setting drums and guitars on top of what are, at their core, piano songs. But what I love about Memory Man, compared to the other Aqualung albums I’ve listened to, is that the keys are just the bones. The uncertainty of “Something To Believe In” builds and then breaks into a flurry of major chords for a moment in the chorus, and then winds itself back up into a frenzy of hope and desperation. “Black Hole,” the album’s eighth track, throws distorted piano up like paint on a wall behind a manic drum machine. Where does the time go? Where does the love go? These are questions that demand to be answered with layers of production, rhythm, and gravity.

Black holes bend time, devour it, in a way that none of us understand. At least I don’t. I know there’s something about them being heavy, or things that enter them getting heavier, maybe. The weight of the darkness is crushing when you used to know light and warmth.

You say I’m a black hole, 
a singularity
An old supernova, 
a blazing blind catastrophe,
Oh but once I was a star
And a long time before that, 
somebody’s sun

It’s strange to think about the different kind of sadness I once felt as a teenager listening to the songs on Memory Man. I gravitated toward the more urgent-feeling, pop-leaning tracks: “Glimmer,” “Rolls So Deep,” “Outside.” Just recently, I revisited a track I used to always skip, “Garden of Love.” It clocks in at almost 6 minutes; something I wouldn’t have had the patience for at 16, but now don’t mind. 

“So we pushed and we pulled with our nerves of steel / You had the pedals and I had the wheel / and the terrible truth is we never knew where we were going,” someone who’s not Hale sings, and his voice is so grand and compelling that it momentarily stops my heart. Google says it’s Paul Buchanan, the late frontman of Scottish alt-pop band The Blue Nile. I once knew someone who joked that every time he’d Shazam a good song, it ended up being The Blue Nile. We were in our ambient-pop era then. One of countless rooms I’m locked out of but, paradoxically, can’t leave behind.

I have a friend who loves that Anne Carson quote as much as I do—the one about “where can I put it all down.” He’s lived just as many lives as me, and more: family rifts, severed ties with religion, a desperate attempt to make a marriage work. When he was in the thick of his former marriage, still deeply Evangelical, he once took a hiking pilgrimage with a huge rock in a backpack, because he thought that carrying it would somehow absolve him of his struggles. I learned this because he still had the rock in his room when I met him.

Letting go isn’t how people think it is. You can’t just erase a memory. You’ll be somewhere normal, at a soccer match, for example, and then all the sudden the black hole opens up and you’re somewhere else. You’re a portal, a conduit for the very thing you’re supposed to heal from. The lights are blaring and people are cheering and you’ve lost so much that you still somehow cling to. And I know I need to open my hand and loosen my grip, but despite the water rising, I’m finding that I can’t let go just yet.

On April 2, 2022, I had written in my little email newsletter about my life traveling the country in a camper, a life that seems fantastically foreign to me now:

Today, on the verge of tears, I told him that I just wish I had more time---but for what? To delay the inevitable?

It's just that the world is so scary right now. And this little bubble we've created for ourselves here in North Carolina this winter has felt so safe. 

There's this song, this album, that I liked in late high school; it's not cool, or anything that I'd expect anyone here to know or care about, but it's been playing in my head the past couple of days.

This is a story about the three of us
Down by the water and the tide keeps rising

This world is burning and I'm terrified
I need a little more time with you

Oh I just need a little more time with you

I've never known specifically what it's about, but it's always been with me during the rare moment when all I could think of to do was wish for a little more time exactly where I was. I'd play it on piano over and over and over.

I just need a little more time. I'm not ready.

I'm sorry. I'll write something funny or hopeful soon. I just need a little time. Just a little more time. 

I originally used to skip Memory Man’s final song, the one I quoted in the email, until I carelessly left it on one day in college and struck what felt like gold. “Broken Bones” is slow to start, with a weird quiet intro that sounds like it’s wafting out of an old tape player. The whole first verse is nearly a whisper, the chorus easing in on piano chords:

This is a story about the three of us
Down by the water and the tide is rising

“Who’s ‘the three of us?’” one of my newsletter readers asked at the time. “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. We lost our dog Richie almost exactly two months later, and our marriage a year after that. I never gave the Memory Man CD back. The mutual friend who’d introduced us both to Aqualung has been dead for almost 13 years. The same limb severed again and again, and not once have I ever been ready.

This world is burning and I'm terrified
I need a little more time with you
Oh I just need a little more time with you
Oh please just a little more time with you

In the last scene of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the two main characters are talking in a house that’s gradually disintegrating. It’s their final remaining memory together, one that’s on the verge of being erased, and despite being initially so sure that they wanted this fresh start, they’re now fraught with grief and panic. Perhaps they are not so panicked about losing a real, present relationship as they are about losing the years of memories. Please, just a little more time. I know I have to let go, but I need a little more time. Heavy as it may be, I am not quite ready to put it down.

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When Jimmy Eat World released Clarity—on February 23, 1999—I was in first grade. I didn’t listen to it until about a decade later. 

From a macro perspective, Clarity occupies an odd space in Emo as a genre—there’s something open-ended about its sound and feel. Oldhead journalists will say it’s pop; the average mainstream millennial at an “emo nite” has probably never heard of it. Perhaps that’s why the album has always felt like home to me; so much of the music that matters most to me falls under the Emo umbrella, and yet I have never felt like I belonged wholly with emo purists, nor with mainstream pop-punkers. The albums that imprinted on me as a teen, and that I still love the most today, are the ones that creatively bridged the gap and, in doing so, established themselves as cultural landmarks in their own right.

I started listening to Jimmy Eat World because I started listening to Paramore. Since I was 15 years old, Paramore have been my favorite band, and since the members of Paramore were around 13 years old, Jimmy Eat World has been their favorite band. Well, one of them, at least. In 2007, there were only two Paramore albums, and I was desperate for more music that sounded like them, instrumentally. Jimmy Eat World does because, of course, Paramore’s founding members were students of the band’s ringing seventh chords, thoughtfully-employed distortion, and—for lack of a better word—twinkling guitars. The butterfly that Clarity, in particular, so carefully captures in a jar. That ephemeral meeting place where second-wave emo and pop punk brushed shoulders. It’s a mystery I could live in. Have lived in, for almost two decades now.

It surprised me to learn, as a teenager reading up on Clarity, that it was Jimmy Eat World’s second album on a major label. In my mind, at the time, it didn’t quite add up that a major label would have been interested in the meandering bass lines and reflective guitar melodies of songs like “12.23.95” or “Just Watch The Fireworks.” I would have expected their mainstream-breakout 2003 album Bleed American, which had multiple radio hits, to be the one on a label like Capitol. And in retrospect, despite having next-to-zero knowledge of the music biz, my instinct wasn’t too far off, because Capitol did drop them after Clarity. As journalist Ian Cohen explained in a 2019 Stereogum article:

Jimmy Eat World were arguably the first emo band on a major label when they released Static Prevails in 1996, and three years later, Capitol still had no idea what to do with them in a market dominated by teen-pop and nu-metal. Other than dropping them, that is … “Capitol didn’t give a shit about us,” Adkins joked later on, and it cut both ways — Jimmy Eat World were free to make this spacey and experimental album while knowing Capitol wouldn’t give it the time of day.

Free of commercial constraint, Jimmy Eat World carved out a liminal space where rock meets pop meets the crystalline corners of an orchestra. Clarity is a portal into a spacious sideways dimension where time slows down. Where incongruous sounds, feelings, and stories can coexist, can bounce off each other without collapsing.

The album starts slow, with the understated “Table For Glasses.” I’ve never really understood what this song is about, lyrically. There are actually quite a few songs on this album of which I could say the same. The repetitive drum hit for the first minute and a half of the song feels almost hesitant, and when the strings and bass roll in, all at once, and then double down around minute 3, you sort of understand why: this is holy ground. Approach with reverence. 

Clarity’s signature bells kick in toward the end of “Table For Glasses,” showing up again in “A Sunday,” and, of course, the 16-minute album closer, “Goodbye Sky Harbor.” Critics at the time bemoaned the bells, calling them saccharine. Perhaps the most scathing was Pitchfork, in a now-defunct review that rated Clarity a 3.5/10 for being, essentially, too soft and sweet. To my teenage ears, however, the bells revealed that rock music could have orchestral depth, could have light, frosty textures, could have emotional subtlety. The bells sounded like the sparkles looked, on the water on the album cover. 

The second track on the album, “Lucky Denver Mint,” picks up the tempo, alongside lyrics that set the stage for the album’s emotional theme of feeling small. It may be the most musically-profound song I know about a small night out in Vegas: “Somewhere I made a wish / with lucky Denver mint / you’re not bigger than this, not better, why can’t you learn?” Jimmy Eat World are no strangers to betting metaphors—although “Big Casino,” one of my favorite tracks from their 2007 album Chase This Light, has a slightly sunnier demeanor.

I agree with Cohen that “Your New Aesthetic,” Clarity’s third track, is the only somewhat-skippable song on the album; it’s not bad, but it’s trying a little too hard to Say Something. The next one, “Believe In What You Want,” feels like a return to the initial mood. The guitars and drums pound behind Adkins’ thinly-veiled frustration toward Capitol. “What you ignore is priceless to me,” he nearly shouts, a line that, even detached from context, always grabbed my attention as a lonely teenager. Chugging bar chords weave in and out of bells and strings on the contemplative melodies of “A Sunday,” clearing a path for the emotional urgency of “Crush.” 

“Crush” was one of my favorite tracks right off the bat when I first began listening to Clarity. Unlike some other songs on the album, it requires no patience upon first listen, launching immediately into noisy drums and guitars. And as a serial crusher myself, how could I refute its subject material? It’s the first time on the album the band brings out the big guns—i.e., the electric guitar string bend on top of a drum breakdown. We hear it a few crucial times on the album, and it’s a sound that I could probably listen to again and again a hundred times and never get tired of. A sound that’s been used a hundred million times by a hundred thousand bands but, to me, is very Clarity-specific.

Fluttering static softens the mood as “12.23.95” descends into a song that, as a 16-year-old, I loved but didn’t understand. I followed its delicate edges, its softly-ringing guitar notes, its simple confession over and over again in my mind, feeling the sadness as familiar, but the experience as strange. I’d never left anyone hanging on, all alone. I’d never had a Christmas dyed blue with sorrow. Now, as someone whose marriage has ended—now I have; now I know. I etched out my own “Merry Christmas, baby” in my mind a hundred times this last December. But, of course, as the song explains, I didn’t know what to say.

So many sentiments in this album have taken root for me that way over the past fifteen-odd years of listening. I’d look up into the deep expanse of my inner sky as a teenager, feeling the gravity of songs like “Ten,” but unable to trace the patterns yet in my own experience. I loved the sound, the starry guitars. I loved the inscrutable quadrant on the album’s cover. I retreated into Clarity to feel a sense of depth, emotionally and musically, whether or not I even knew what the song was saying, which I often didn’t. The layered vocals washed over me and I’d catch phrases here and there, like “What giving up gives you, and where giving up takes you,” in “Just Watch The Fireworks.” My little narratives of unrequited love and loss, my high school life shrouded in loneliness; I picked up the songs’ bits and pieces that mattered to me then. Now, decades deep, they offer well-worn grooves for my mind to fall into in the midst of real loss. The through-line of feeling truly small, truly alone.

“For Me This Is Heaven,” the album’s most-played song on Spotify, is also, I sometimes think, its best. More than any other song on Clarity, it alchemizes older emo and newer emo in streaks of bright, layered resonance. “Can you still feel the butterflies?” the chorus asks, a phrase that made its way onto the back of the physical CD packaging. The guitar riffs, piano keys, bass line, and drums circle around each other, layering and looping asymmetrically until we’re wrapped up in sound. The crux of the song is a quote: “This is what she says gets her through it / If I can’t let myself be happy now, then when? If not now, when?” I have never really gotten who Adkins is quoting, and why it sounds so sad. Perhaps she’s trying to convince herself that the happiness will come once she allows it. Perhaps the happiness is at his expense. I’ve never understood the song’s narrative, and I kind of prefer it that way—it’s a microcosm of how this album has always felt for me: a place where emotions are safe to roil, to settle, to stratify, without needing to be solved.

With “Blister” and the title track, Jimmy Eat World remind us that they’re still a rock band. I saw the band perform “Blister” in 2008, when they were touring for Chase This Light. It was, and remains, my dream tour: Paramore opened for them. Imagine you discover your favorite band, you get really into their favorite band, and then almost immediately after, learn that the two will be touring together! I’ve considered the possibility that my music-enjoying career peaked then. Anyway, I was ecstatic that they played “Blister,” which I considered at the time to be my favorite song off Clarity. The aforementioned guitar bend reappears in the second-to-last chorus, accentuating a moment of softness amidst the song’s unsettled ruckus. “And how long would it take me to walk across the United States, all alone?” Adkins howls. I loved—still love—the song’s apocalyptic loneliness. 

Before the infamous “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” “Clarity,” ironically, paints uncertainty across a canvas of urgent drums and sharp guitars. In the version of the album I once listened to religiously—a burned copy without the two bonus tracks—it was a farewell missive to the strands of post-hardcore that wove in and out of the preceding eleven tracks. By the time Sky Harbor arrives, we’re ready to deconstruct, piece by piece, everything Clarity has built.

As a teen, I didn’t know that Sky Harbor is the name of the Phoenix airport. To me, it sounded—in the context of the sixteen-minute song’s deep sense of mystery—like a sci-fi reference, or a metaphor. The repetitive, ringing guitar notes and drums fade out, and another set fades in, like layers of the stratosphere you’re passing through on your way up, up, up, into the cool dark twinkling night. After all these years, there’s something in the stars I still can’t trace. But this album will always remind me that perhaps there’s a bit of heaven in the mystery.

The past oh, I don’t know, five or six years, I’ve updated and shared two playlists for Valentine’s Day. One for the lovers, and one for the… non-lovers.

If you know me well, you might be able to guess where this is going.

I made the Love playlist, “If devotion is a river,” from a first-person perspective. I have always loved love, and for the past 10 years, I loved being in love. Or, at the very least, the idea of being in love. What has my life been, if not an endeavor in romance? It’s in my bones.

“If devotion is a river” comes from the depths of my soul, and it plays to every single one of my strengths. I can make a hell of a playlist. I made a hell of a wife. “If devotion is a river” was, and is, a concise ode to what I simultaneously had, and wished I had, most of the time all wrapped up into one. Life is a rom-com, the playlist argues. And, startlingly, I still cannot bring myself to fully disagree.

In my decade of partnership, I always gave my very best effort to sympathize with the singles in my life. The other playlist, the one for the non-lovers, sums up those attempts quite nicely: I wanted to present a benevolent Valentine’s offering, something for everyone; perhaps, at its core, an attempt to assuage what I always assumed was bitterness and jealousy aimed at the Lovers’ World from the Single World.

It was……….a nice effort.

But I’m looking at the playlist now and it is NOT GOOD.

It’s true, I always knew it wasn’t a cohesive playlist like its counterpart. No matter how hard I tried, how many times I tried to imagine what I’d want on a Valentine’s playlist if I was single, I could hear it in the song progression, feel it in the mood: something was off.

I know, I know: we can never truly know how it feels to stand in another person’s shoes until we’re in them. I know I don’t need to apologize for not knowing what it was like out here. And yet, the magnitude of my not-having-known feels immense. I’m 32 and just now single and I don’t know where to even begin mapping that out.

Last week, at the Grammys, Joni Mitchell performed her song “Both Sides Now.” (I haven’t watched it yet. I don’t think I can.) It’s one of my all-time favorite songs, one of the first songs that made me feel the true heft of my heartbreak this last summer. It’s also, incidentally, a defining song of one of my favorite rom-coms, Love Actually.

“To continue your emotional education,” reads the note from Alan Rickman’s character to Emma Thompson’s character as she opens her Christmas gift, a Joni Mitchell CD. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the implications. She excuses herself to the other room and cries and her heart breaks wide open and “Both Sides Now” is playing, and then she brushes her tears away and goes back in the other room and finishes what needs to be done as if nothing ever happened. But we know, she knows, she’s journeyed across a line that can’t be uncrossed. “And if you care, don’t let them know,” implores Joni in the song’s second verse, as Emma’s character weeps. “Don’t give yourself away.” But we lovers know: regardless of how any story of ours ends, that’s a foregone conclusion.

This year, for the first Valentine’s Day in 11 years, I will have looked at love from both sides now. My emotional education has taken me in a direction I never imagined, and I find myself struggling to stop the bleeding of pure, unfiltered despair. Simultaneously, though, I find myself hopeful—if only in the very briefest of moments—that romance can still be found in a million other places and people. I find myself full of a rage so deep and dire it threatens to eat me alive. I find myself giddy with the possibility of a new crush. I find myself unbelievably cynical at what the world of dating seems to offer. There’s so much on this side that I’m only just beginning to experience, let alone understand. I’m finding that, like Joni says, I really don’t know love at all.

So, this Valentine’s Day, I don’t have a foil to offer in conjunction with my lovers’ playlist. The lovers’ playlist remains; it’s one of the best I’ve ever made. I can only hope to, one of these Valentine’s Days, make one just as good from the other side.

I went to my first doom metal show a few weeks ago.

I am not typically a metalhead. However, my brother’s longtime best friend, Will, is. In fact, he’s been writing and playing brutal tunes with his bandmates in their project Umman Manda for many years now. My brother Alex was, by nature of the art form’s volume levels, privy to their early writing and practice sessions back when he was Will’s roommate.

Ever since I moved back to my hometown in late 2022, integrating with my siblings’ lives has been a top priority for me, and in doing so I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know some of their friends better, including Will. So, I’d been meaning to go to one of his shows for a while. Plus, I’ve been wanting to meander off my beaten path when it comes to live music—what better way than supporting a pal, hanging out with my brother, and visiting a place I haven’t been before?

I walk into Coral Snake and immediately spot Alex—we’re two of a handful of patrons this Wednesday night. We get to work on some pale ales while Umman Manda sound check. The band doesn’t seem to mind that there’s not a huge crowd; and yet, Will beams enthusiastically when he sees us. From what Alex has told me, he’s in it 1000% for the love of the craft—no real marketing plan, no aspirations of fame and fortune. Just heavy music and good vibes.

Coral Snake is on a pretty chill stretch of East Cesar Chavez, with a few other low-key-seeming bars around, and the hustle and bustle of East Sixth a few minutes’ walk north. The venue is a simple layout, but not uninviting: dim, red ambient light at the room’s edges, with a stage setup at the back of a square-ish room. It used to be called Longplay: Will jokes (apropos of nothing) that he can sense ghouls in the walls—the spectre of Longplay!

The band takes the stage, and Alex and I dutifully put in our earplugs. This is the first time I’ve ever actually used earplugs at a show (I know, I know), but Alex does it every time. He’s a sound engineer, and his ears are his biggest asset. I’m a dumbass, and my ears are terrible because of how many loud, unmitigated concerts I’ve been to.

The first thing I notice when Umman Manda start playing is that there are two bass players, a drummer, and no guitarist. Oh yeah, that’s what Alex told me about their band, right. The second thing I notice is that Will is playing a fretless bass. I respect the fuck out of anyone who plays a fretless string instrument—that’s an extra dimension of skill.

Burly and bearded, Will is wearing dark navy work coveralls with a Texas flag patch on the tricep, his titanium-hued wedding ring gleaming in the low red light. His wife Annika is at home; I can’t remember why my brother said she couldn’t come to this particular show. We all went to private Christian high school together, but you perhaps wouldn’t know it based on our appearances, and that’s probably intentional on all of our parts.

Umman Manda’s melodies are repetitive and primal - I start to feel a little entranced. Hearing the same note over and over again that many times taps into a deep part of me. Melodic repetition lets you play around with tempo, I realize—they change the tempo at least three times in every song. All three of them trade off vocals, and it’s not as much guttural screaming as I expected, although there is some. Mostly, the singing, or yelling, feels like a backdrop to the crashing, methodical drums and incisive bass solo trade-offs.

I elbow Alex and nod with a chuckle to Will’s weathered brown Merrell clogs. “He’s had those Merrells as long as I’ve known him,” Alex shouts into my ear. So, like, at least 15 years. This is also apparently the first time Alex has seen Will play a show with shoes on.

After the set, Will thanks us profusely for coming out. As a cheerful foil to the ruthless shredding we all just experienced, the mood is jolly. In between pouring our pints, the bartender dips into our conversation. We are talking about bodies of water in the Austin area. “A river otter fell out of a tree in Wimberley when I was there the other day,” Bob the bartender seems excited to tell us. “They’re coming back!” Alex and I are astonished that there are, or have ever been, otters in Texas, all the more so that they’re apparently making a triumphant return. How fun, to learn something totally new about the biome we grew up in. And isn’t that the thing I love about Austin, anyway: after all this time, this city still finds ways to reward curiosity.

Check out Coral Snake’s Instagram for upcoming shows. I also (since beginning writing this) have been to one of their Monday karaoke nights and highly recommend it.

New-ish Music!

Music, with a capital M, is starting to heat up now that we’re fully past the holidays (and thank GOD—both for the music, and the holidays being over. Sorry, I’m a grinch).

One of my new year’s resolutions has been to listen to, see, and write about more local music, so you may notice a few Austin artists in here! Other than that, just stuff I thought was worth sharing that came out either this week or within the past few weeks. (in the vein of “graphic design is my passion”) ✌🏻Chaotic Curation Is My Passion.✌🏻

Albums

Katy Kirby - Blue Raspberry
With her sophomore release, TEXAS LEGEND Katy Kirby hones her lyrical and musical craft with this collection of deceptively sturdy ballads about her most fragile feelings.
RIYL: Lucy Dacus, Ratboys

Large Brush Collection - Off Center
This eclectic Austin group offers a crisp, creative take on folk that feels fitting for 2024: meandering vocals, plaintive woodwinds, and a warm, acrobatic bass line leading the charge.
RIYL: Big Thief, Florist

The Smile - Wall of Eyes
You know ‘em. You love ‘em. Come and get your slop (in the most complimentary way possible), all my fellow Radiohead-heads!
RIYL: Radiohead, Radiohead

Stalefish - Stalefish Does America
I stumbled upon this band’s album release show last week while aimlessly frequenting Hotel Vegas—isn’t that some East Sixth serendipity? Stalefish Does America is serving loose but catchy bass-and-drums-driven rock realness, with the occasional wacky drum machine or scuzzy guitar appearance.
RIYL: Pavement, Superchunk

glass beach - plastic death
Released last week, plastic death is a crazy amalgamation of math rock, post-hardcore, and completely wacky early-2000s-esque indie rock. Frontperson J. McClendon describes the record as “the Pacific garbage patch: cultural trash strewn together seemingly by accident, standing in stark juxtaposition to each other.” There are songs I don’t love, but overall, it’s a theatrical, impressive rock album that I highly recommend trying out, especially for music nerds.
RIYL: Radiohead’s weird shit, The Dismemberment Plan

Office Dog - Spiel
This one’s for the rockers.
RIYL: The Vaccines, The Districts

EKKSTACY - EKKSTACY
I saw this guy at last year’s SXSW and he had CRAZY star power. This debut album features big names like The Kid LAROI—definitely one to watch.
RIYL: Listening to pop punk-adjacent music that makes you feel like a teen for a second

Goth Babe - Lola
Jury’s still out on how I feel about this one, personally, but I have no choice but to acknowledge anybody with their own sailboat on their album cover. (I was a sailor in a past life.) Plus, I feel like some of y’all would fw this, so I figured why not throw it in.
RIYL: Vacationer, COIN

Not Albums

Grace Cummings - “On and On”
Another fabulous Texas artist! Just kidding, she’s from Australia. Her second album, Ramona, comes out 4/5. She is one of my absolute favorite new artists from recent years: if you check out ONE release from this email, it should be her. A voice—and I do not say this lightly—like no one else.
RIYL: Nico, Sharon Van Etten

Odie Leigh - “No Doubt”
Via Ann Powers’ Instagram: “Only a few times this century have I seen an artist with such a command over her audience at the beginning of her career: blackfootwhitefoot was one, julienrbaker was another, .fun was another. All went on to huge success. odieleigh is in that category. Watch this one.”
RIYL: Indigo De Souza, Aimee Mann

Flowerbomb - Gloom Scroll, Vol. 1 EP
Grungy guitars + femme vocals is my bat signal.
RIYL: The girl band in a 2000s teen movie

Creekbed Carter Hogan - “If I Was”
Haunting, older-than-the-hills-sounding alt-country from a delightful Austin artist. His album, Creekbed Carter, comes out 3/22.
RIYL: Milk Carton Kids, Gregory Alan Isakov

Empress Of - “What’s Love (ft. MUNA)”
If it features MUNA, I WILL be listening. Her next album, For Your Consideration, comes out 3/22.
RIYL: MUNA (obviously), Kelela

Sheer Mag - “Moonstruck”
This groovy, punk-tinged song has been doing some HEAVY lifting on behalf of my mental health this last week or so. Their upcoming album, Playing Favorites, comes out 3/1.
RIYL: Pre-chorus yelling “Well c’mon you son of a bitch!”

I had a few more I thought about including but unfortunately, I’ve gotta get back to work (to my boss: I was NOT writing this during work hours!!!!!).

Talk to you soon,

Katie

What the hell has been going on with Paramore?

Real heads know that this Substack started out as a Paramore newsletter, because I’m working on a book about them. So, in that spirit, here’s a little band update.

On December 26, Hayley Williams’ birthday-eve, all of Paramore’s social media accounts—including the band’s Instagram and Twitter, and Hayley’s personal Instagram account—suddenly got wiped, leading to speculations about the band breaking up. Their website, paramore.net, also went down (and still is!), and then the next day they canceled a late January festival appearance.

Then, on Wednesday, they posted a trailer teasing their involvement with A24’s “Stop Making Sense” Talking Heads tribute album. The teaser features Hayley running in, looking absolutely miniscule next to a giant (or perhaps regular-sized?) cardboard box, and pulling out a big grey blazer before telling bandmates Taylor and Zac, “I got a tape I’d like to play you,” and popping a Stop Making Sense casette into a boom box.

In the clip, Hayley debuts a new hairstyle—a mullet of sorts. It bears uncanny resemblance to my hair I had in high school when I cut it myself in my bathroom in an attempt to emulate her Riot-era hair. Can I get an ouroboros in the chat!!

The end of the video drops a few seconds of a Paramore cover of “Burning Down The House.” HUGE development for not only Paramore fans, but also those of us whose introduction to the Talking Heads was Matty’s dance routine to “Burning Down The House” in 13 Going On 30.

OKAYYYYY, so in retrospect it seems pretty obvious that their social media wipe and festival cancellation weren’t as dire as some of us had thought. Their 20-year (??!!!!!) contract with Atlantic Records just ended, which is, especially now with this Talking Heads project announced, the likely reason they seemed to drop off the internet the other week. I’m kind of an idiot when it comes to music business but from what I understand about the record deal—the first of its kind for a new artist, and one that resulted in years of band strife and stress—it kinda sucked and it’s probably a good thing that it’s over. The current hypothesis is that their website being down, etc. is something to do with legal stuff. Here’s hoping they get everything resolved to their liking!

P.S. If you’re interested in following along with updates on my Paramore book, the best way to do it is to subscribe to THIS very publication, the one you’re reading RIGHT NOW~~

Subscribe now

Linda Ronstadt biopic

We’re getting a Linda biopic! I love Linda. I was just listening to Heart Like A Wheel the other day. I’m a bit skeptical of the Selena Gomez casting choice, but I’ll try to be open-minded. Here’s my favorite picture of her with some piggies:

Josh Wine

For those of you not pathologically online, I wanted to share the moment that Josh Wine is having on Twitter. Here are a few of my favorite Josh Wine tweets:

And last but not least, the one that made me laugh the hardest for some reason:

Bands that will re-enter the music zeitgeist in 2024

Been thinking about this lately. Here are my predictions:

• Beck

• Foo Fighters

• Coldplay???

• Imogen Heap (like, her whole catalog/her as an artist, not just “Hide and Seek”)

If you have other artists/bands to add to the list, I’m curious to hear them.

Hanif Abdurraqib’s Very Good Playlist

I’ve listened to quite a few people’s EOY playlists the past few weeks, and this one has REALLY stood out to me. By “loosies,” he means like, singles or one-offs. Not only is it bangers on bangers on bangers, but SO MANY of them I hadn’t heard before. Hiiiiiighly recommend, and it’s shuffle-friendly.

Music I’ve been vibing with

There hasn’t been a ton of new music in my rotation recently—there are a few albums coming out in the next few weeks that I’m VERY hype about, but currently I’m in a new music lull—so here’s the (mostly) older stuff I’ve been listening to:

• “Right Back To It,” Waxahatchee ft. MJ Lenderman (the only new one on this list) - Okayyyy we get it, true love is sooo amazing, yada yada!!!! No seriously, this song is really lovely and I’m VERY excited for the album. And wow, I’m convinced Katie Crutchfield’s voice can turn any harmony into magic.

• “Mirror,” IDER - Rediscovered this when I was listening to a 2018 playlist the other day. I never felt super passionately about anything else this band did, but this is really one of my favorite songs of the 2010s, and it’s been nice to bring it back into rotation.

• Knock Knock, Smog - I’ve been on a bit of a Smog kick recently, and this album is really hitting. Its meandering melodies have a way of slowing down my anxious mind.

• Highways, Denetia - I remembered this 2022 album earlier this week. While her soft, crystal-clear voice doesn’t bear much resemblance to Katie Crutchfield’s twang, I def recommend this album to anybody who likes Waxahatchee’s 2020 album Saint Cloud—they’re both dreamy, zen-forward folk-country bliss.

• Bananasugarfire, Golden Apples - This album smacks of a very specific type of late 2000’s/early 2010s jangly indie rock that I’m SUCH a sucker for. And it came out just a few months ago? What a time to be alive!

Well, that’s all I’ve got this week… Thank you for hangin’ around! I hope at least one really nice thing happens to you this weekend.

With love,

Katie

On May 1, the night Wednesday played at Mohawk in Austin, Texas, I saw a shooting star rip down the sky above the stage while the band played “Quarry.” I’ve never seen a shooting star from light-polluted downtown Austin and, frankly, didn’t know it was possible to. But there it was, searing the sky behind the band of the year, burning for one urgent moment, arching down toward the skyline. In the moment, I didn’t register it as ominous, but the next day was the worst day of my life. And that is why I don’t like listening to the band Wednesday or their acclaimed 2023 album Rat Saw God. But I’m really happy for all of you who have seemed to enjoy it a lot.

This year was awful for me. Through it all, music was the only thing that continued to make sense and give my world color.

I wanted to share this list less as less as commentary and more as curated recommendations - that’s what I typically look for in a list like this, anyway - so most everything is presented without specific comment. But please know that if I had unlimited time, brain power, screen real estate, and reader patience at my disposal, I’d have something lovely to say about every single artist, song, and album on all of these lists. Each of them played their own role in my survival and (relative) sanity in 2023.

But before we get into the lists of it all, here’s a little thing I wrote about my album of the year, originally published on Swim Into The Sound.

KT’s AOTY: Lucky For You, Bully

I am trying to wrangle this blurb into something that’s not jarringly tragic. And honestly, it might be a futile effort. After all, Lucky For You is about a dead dog, about breakups, about the end of the world as we know it. When you lose your dog, your marriage, or your career, there’s grief, of course, and also, there is rage. A sensation that resonates with hoarse yelps, the slamming of cymbals, chugging, distorted electric guitar chords. With Lucky For You, Alicia Bognanno of Bully has turned the shards of grief and anger into grunge-pop melodies that are as unflinching as their subject matter deserves: she lost her beloved dog Mezzi last year, after more than a decade together. These songs are the sound of her attempts to process life’s stock-in-trade heartbreaks—romantic wounds, crippling self-doubt, and the horrors of living in America—without her best friend by her side.

There have been days this year when singing along to “Days Move Slow” in my car at the top of my lungs has felt like a conversation with a friend who understands: a friend who’s a step ahead of me, who’s cracked the code of alchemizing despair into melody. Even before I knew that “A Wonderful Life” was about a pet’s death, I felt Bognanno’s warm, punchy words in my bones: “What a wonderful life / my heart’s breaking on the bathroom floor” quickly became the refrain, this last summer, for my own life falling apart in real-time.

Bognanno’s vocals have a retro quality, evoking charismatic pop-rock voices from the early 2000s, like Michelle Branch or Sheryl Crow in her louder moments. But she’s not content to cash in on basic pop blueprints: like its 2020 predecessor SUGAREGG, Lucky For You leans into distortion, thick bass riffs, and, at times, full-on yelling, like in the Bikini Kill-esque final track “All This Noise.” The last two songs of the album zoom out on the sociopolitical factors that tally among Bognanno’s sorrows: the latter torching the American government in a blaze of rage, the former, “Ms. America,” a soft, piercing reflection on the improbability of the dream of motherhood in a rotten country like ours, where there’s endless funding for weapons manufacturing and none for healthcare or schools or even clean water. I listened, a hundred times over, when she sings, “All I wanted was a daughter / try my best to raise her right / but the whole world’s caught on fire / and I don’t wanna teach a kid to fight.” All that we’ve lost this year, so many of us. All that 2023 unceremoniously stomped against the curb. I’ve watched it all slip through my fingers, and I’ve carried my dog’s old collar in my backpack when I’ve bounced between temporary homes, and I’ve listened to Bully like a prayer, knowing that despite how it sometimes feels, I’m never really alone.

FAV fav albums

(More or less in order)

Lucky For You - Bully
The Land, The Water, The Sky - Black Belt Eagle Scout
This Is Why - Paramore
Javelin - Sufjan Stevens
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You - Caroline Polachek
Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? - Kara Jackson
Cartwheel - Hotline TNT
Jaguar II - Victoria Monét
Paint My Bedroom Black - Holly Humberstone
The Window - Ratboys
Time Ain’t Accidental - Jess Williamson
Weathervanes - Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
A Cat In The Rain - Turnpike Troubadours
I Don’t Know - bdrmm
Bad Dream Jaguar - Sun June
All Around You - Subsonic Eye
The Greater Wings - Julie Byrne
Rabbit Rabbit - Speedy Ortiz
Zach Bryan - Zach Bryan
Heater - Phony

Familiar folks I enjoyed spending time with

(Alphabetical by artist)

boygenius - the record
Gregory Alan Isakov - Appaloosa Bones
Jorja Smith - falling or flying
KC Rae - Think I’m Gonna Die
MJ Lenderman - And The Wind (Live and Loose!)
Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We
Miya Folick - ROACH
Palehound - Eye On The Bat
Squirrel Flower - Tomorrow’s Fire

New friends that won me over

(Alphabetical by artist)

Abby Hamilton - #1 Zookeeper (of the San Diego Zoo)
billy woods & Kenny Segal - Maps
Broken Record - Nothing Moves Me
cero - e o
Golden Apples - Bananasugarfire
Greg Mendez - Greg Mendez
Hello Mary - Hello Mary
Josaleigh Pollett - In The Garden, By The Weeds
Kate Davis - Fish Bowl
L’Rain - I Killed Your Dog
Mali Velasquez - I’m Green
McKinley Dixon - Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!
ML Buch - Suntub
Parannoul - After The Magic
Star 99 - Bitch Unlimited
Steve Marino - Too Late To Start Again
Vagabon - Sorry I Haven’t Called
yeule - softscars
Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World

Bangers/heaters/rippers (individual songs of note), complete with my favorite lyric/aspect of each (where applicable)

(In order of personal significance to me)

“Lucky” - Abby Hamilton
“Don’t drop me on a limb just to watch me break / oh, for heaven’s sake”

“The Window” - Ratboys
The whole fucking thing idk

“Not Strong Enough” - boygenius
The part from the bridge into Lucy’s chorus

“Unknown / Nth” - Hozier
"Do you know I could break beneath the weight / of the goodness, love, I still carry for you? That I’d walk through fire just to take the injury of finally knowing you”

“Cubic Zirconia” - Katy Kirby
The way her voice lifts me up like a late spring breeze and makes me feel like my sadness or mania might not be so ugly after all

“One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones” - The Japanese House
"No one’s ever gonna love me / like this dog lying in my lap… Sometimes I think without you life would lose its bones / But really, day to day I’ll still just be walking in the park / with my little Joni Jones”

“Lagunita” - Lizzie No
The guitar parts and the melodies and every lyric but especially “And I’ve come to love / the sinner and the sin / see the brush in the painting / taste the calf in the gelatin”

“Independence Day” - Palehound
The whole first two verses before the chorus

“The Beginning” - Shamir
The fact that it makes me feel like I’m in an early 2000s rom-com

“get him back!” - Olivia Rodrigo
The part where she says she wants to tell his mom that her son sucks

“Kill Me” - Al Menne
"Kill me now, please, please, please”

“Leaving The Light” - Genesis Owusu
Prob the chorus I guess - just in general I will always associate this song with hyping myself up for shenanigans while meandering the streets of Lisbon

“Bang Bang” - Momma
"Press My Luck” - Blake Mills
“Touched You With My Chaos” - Cherry Glazerr
“enknee1” - hemlocke springs
“MINE” - SUSU
“Little Faith” - Ryan Beatty
“Psychic Dance Routine” - Scowl
“The Freedom To Fuck Off” - Petey
“Dumbest Girl Alive” - 100 gecs

If you made it this far (whether in the email or just like, in general, as a subscriber to this newsletter): THANK YOU, from the bottom of my heart. I feel honored that you entrust me with your eyeballs and attention.

Love you all. I see the way forward dimly, as if through a dark tunnel. I hope you will accompany me.

Katie

It feels strange to say, but life feels a little slower and more solid here in Manhattan. I have to walk to get places. There are no frantic drive-thru lunches, no hurtling up and down I-35, no Keurig at my parents’ house on the way out the door that spits out just enough watery caffeine to get me through the morning. I have to plan out every step of every day, practice a microdose of mindfulness to make sure the keys are in my pocket, think through the amount of phone battery needed to buoy me to my next location. I exist, physically, miraculously, on a sidewalk, in a city. An act of grace.

Public transportation isn’t a haphazard pseudosecret like it is in Austin; it’s a normal, reliable thing—a backdrop, not usually a hassle-filled event unto itself. Not a last resort. The thought brings up my same old anger that in Texas cities we’re told it’s an unattainable myth; Bigfoot, Chupacabra, a robust transit system.

I haven’t witnessed anything sad or shocking yet in the city, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this Twitter thread I saw a few months ago. I don’t remember the wording exactly, so I know I’ll never be able to find it again. But it was a picture of a bird on a sidewalk that had died from colliding with the glass exterior of a skyscraper. The tweets explained that large reflective surfaces like skyscrapers are a common cause of death for migrating birds. And the thread ended with something like: how unbearable, that an innocent creature was killed trying to navigate this heinous monstrosity of a world that we humans have imposed right in the middle of its ancestral flight path. How unbearable, to look upon a dead bird and know that in a different kind of world, one where we had never intruded in such an ugly way, it might still be alive. How unbearable, this microcosmic portal into the graceless abyss of the world’s cruelty.

I’ve spent the last month in various degrees of drowning, of falling. I’ve been in the city ten days now, and the first few I spent in a haze of sorrow. I planned this trip to happen on the immediate tail end of a bunch of unsavory necessary things, on purpose, in an attempt to purge the inevitable sorrow from my system, rattling shiny toys in front of my wailing heart to get it to shut up and give me half a second’s rest. The week leading up to the trip—the move-out—was torture. I had to pause multiple times from sorting through letters and photos, books, packing up old empty ceramic pots, to weep in a way that felt like free falling into an endless, pitch-black well. A week later, I found myself, as planned, in New York City, wondering what do I do with all this sadness, as I passed the Subway (sandwich franchise) and the fallen leaves and the glass buildings and the people holding each other’s hands. What do I do with all this love.

Reckoning with shared music is the crux of any breakup. Or, at least for me it is. What do I keep, what do I discard, what open flames to I acquiesce to touch with my soft, bare fingers, because I can’t imagine doing anything else. Jeff Buckley’s album Grace has fallen into the third category; I put it on and let the warm waves of his despair break over me in this Lower East Side apartment as the 4pm light begins to disappear. Jeff wrote songs about being in love at the end of the world, being in love at the end of love. Where is my love? Lilac wine, I feel unsteady. Oh my love, I feel unready.

I made wine from the lilac tree, put my heart in its recipe, it makes me see what I want to see, and be what I want to be, sang Jeff in the softest iteration of his mustang-wild vibrato. I’ve been drinking too much on this trip. It feels like falling down the well again. Listen to me; I cannot see clearly.

And now I’m crying in this Greenpoint coffee shop. Crying in public is okay in New York, I’ve heard. The hefty realness of the city draws out the hefty realness in people, bringing them together in tiny spaces, strangers kissing on couches in bars and girls crying in little cafes. People’s eyes have been surprisingly kind here. Turning away when I need them to. Meeting mine when they can.

“Hallelujah” starts with a sigh. Then the soft electric guitar notes meander into the chords we all know, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift. Jeff was that triple threat I often worship: classically-talented lyricist, vocalist, guitarist. Although, of course, the lyrics to “Hallelujah,” specifically, weren’t written by him. They’re his, though. Surely, Cohen has enough to spare a few.

Jeff Buckley died in a river in 1997, at 30 years old. More than any other dead artist I love, his ghost torments me. I cannot believe I can’t think of any better way to say this, but he had the voice of an angel—ethereal, soaring over and whispering under his guitar strums, until he whips it into a loopy, almost psychodelic vibrato without ever missing a note. It’s unfair that we didn’t get more of him.

When “Hallelujah” fades out, the most gut-wrenchingly sad and gorgeous organ chords you’ve ever heard waft in, followed by his warm, soft guitar and voice on my favorite song of the album, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over.” It’s a song that sounds and feels exactly how you’d think, based on the title. It’s hard to believe such beautiful lyrics as the ones in this song exist; the most gorgeous words you could imagine, from a dead man, from an era of my life I never thought would end. I feel too young to hold on, the dead man howls; but I’m much too old to break free and run. That line, an unmerciful razor that refuses to kill me. My kingdom, all my riches, all my blood, he begs to bargain. Bargaining is one of the five stages of grief, you know. A bottle of lilac wine poured down a bottomless well; a bird lying dead on the sidewalk; a lot of years I don’t know what to do with. It’s never over, Jeff sings, with such impossible conviction. I love him, but he’s wrong. And I think, despite the tenderness of his words, he knows it, too.

The album then winds its way through the ghostly “Corpus Christi Carol,” out into the wilds of “Eternal Life’s” frenetic grunge, then back into the Weird Brooding Zone for “Dream Brother” and “Forget Her” to close out side B.

Grace’s surreal, meandering melodies offset by grunge guitars—it feels exactly like New York City does right now, the end of November. Cold, and crystal-clear. Pierced with crazy golden sunlight for precious few moments until the long night begins, all black steel and concrete and stone. But a more material black—not a shapeless, dizzy abyss. A solid black. A bottom to the well. Something that might, against all odds, be able to finally break my fall.

New Music Out Today

• Squirrel Flower - Tomorrow’s Fire (album)
  For fans of Lucy Dacus, Wednesday, putting your makeup on/fixing your hair up pretty/meeting me tonight in Atlantic City

• Holly Humberstone - Paint My Bedroom Black (album)
  For fans of Gracie Abrams, Samia, bedroom pop (no pun intended)

• L’Rain - I Killed Your Dog (album)
  For fans of listen I’m not even gonna try with this one it’s very weird and difficult to compare but it’s trippy and entrancing and bizarre without being off-putting so if that’s your thing, give it a shot

• The Menzingers - Some Of It Was True (album)

  For fans of Spanish Love Songs, The Hotelier, being angsty

• Bad Bunny - nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana (album)

  For fans of reggaeton, a moodier take on ass-shaking, extremely handsome young fellas

• Land of Talk - Performances (album)
  For fans of Wye Oak, early The xx, yearning, taut indie pop with a Julien Baker endorsement

• Boygenius - the rest (EP)
  For fans of Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridgers, ever heard of them???

Other New & Notable

• This essay about grief and Sufjan’s (unbelievably beautiful) new album

• The NBA is back, babyyyyy. And ICYMI Jimmy Butler is emo now. Sorry I can’t embed tweets it’s horrible

• Ben Affleck is up to his little tricks again

• These baseball guys almost kissed i guess

• Kesha got dumped :(

• Year end lists have officially begun

• SZA described Justin Bieber in the funniest way imaginable

• And, finally, last but not least, a modern classic gets its due

Love you, mean it, have a good weekend xoxo

-Katie

When Mitski said “I bet on losing dogs,” do we think that maybe she was talking about the National Basketball League’s Portland Trail Blazers? Those are the losing dawgs I bet on (metaphorically; I’m no sinner), and it’s always felt natural. Rooting for the underdog runs in my blood: I grew up with my dad, Mr. Texas Tech, shaking his fist at all the adverse circumstances that were keeping our football and basketball teams from finally hitting their stride. Plus, you get a lot of (frankly insane) hate for being a Red Raider in Longhorn Town (UT is a state school too, for crying out loud. You’re not fucking Harvard! Get over yourselves!!). Cheering for a scrappy, unpredictable team—in red and black, no less—feels as natural to me as breathing. Where’s the fun in winning every time?

People who know me well will say I haven’t always been a sports fan. Besides my fervent but mostly latent emotional tie to Texas Tech sports on account of my dad, that is true.

I moved to Portland, Oregon, in October of 2016 and didn’t give a shit about any of the city’s teams until April 2019. I’ll get to that in a second. This post is about Damian Lillard, Trail Blazers legend and former point guard, but before I can talk about him, I have to talk about Texas Tech basketball again.

Toward the end of March 2019, Tech had made it to the NCAA Final Four. We decided to, uncharacteristically for us at the time, watch the game at a sports bar. It was a special occasion, and we hesitantly cosplayed sports fandom for the night, motivated mostly by boredom and duty. By the end of the night, screaming with raw delight at the cutthroat win against Gonzaga, I knew something had changed in me. THIS was what people liked about sports, I realized.

Tech lost the championship, and as quickly as I had stumbled into basketball ecstasy, I plunged into its agony. It might have been a short-lived affair, my basketball fandom, if not for The Shot a few weeks later.

If you’re a Trail Blazers fan—or, let’s face it, even if you’re not—you know where I’m going with this. After a fraught 5-game NBA semifinals series, Damian Lillard hit a three-point buzzer beater to win the Trail Blazers’ home game against the Oklahoma Thunder, sending Russell Westbrook—who had been on his biggest butthole behavior—packing. It wasn’t really The Shot that won me over, though. It was The Wave.

It wasn’t points or plays that cemented me as a sports fan. It was The Wave. It was Dame.

In the weeks and months that followed, I eagerly consumed all the Trail Blazers media I could get my hands on; followed dozens of new accounts on Twitter; showed up at pop-ups and watch parties. To my astonishment, every encounter was immensely warm and welcoming. Not at all what I expected from a city that had, to be honest, heretofore treated me pretty coldly.

Moving to a new city—to a West Coast city—is fucking hard. I’ll get a cute little job in a plant shop, I thought. WRONG. Portland, for better or worse (mostly worse), is a much smaller city than it seems, and getting a job anywhere is a nightmare when it all boils down to who you (don’t) know. Eventually, I clawed my way into an entry-level role at a tech company, mostly by luck, but never really felt like I belonged in that world, either. Making friends was hard, too. I used to explain it to people by pointing out that I always thought I was outdoorsy growing up in Austin, but to me, that means being out on the lake with a beer; in Portland, that means climbing a fucking mountain. I joked about it, but secretly cried. I felt I’d never belong in the city I’d risked it all to try.

Trail Blazers fandom gave me a place to belong. Dame was easy to love; the underdog ethos of the team was one I understood at the deepest level; jumping into the Twitter sphere was effortless. By that point in my Portland tenure, I had a collection of wonderful individuals I called friends, but Blazers Twitter gave me a community.

And, of course, Damian Lillard, at its center, its beating heart of larger-than-life lovability, providing endless fodder for our adoration. I’ll never quit my addiction to his impossible half-court shots; when you watch one sail in, for just a second it doesn’t matter if the Blazies are down to the worst team in the league—it’s still good to be alive. He was always up to something off the court, too: throwing an unbelievably adorable birthday party for Dame Jr.; goofing around on Instagram Live with his partner in crime CJ McCollum; schlepping cars at Lillard Toyota that we all jokingly daydream about buying. Feeding our elusive, ever-present hope that maybe, just maybe, TBAGTWTC (for the uninitiated: The Blazers Are Going To Win The Championship).

It physically hurts to think back on that long, slow autumn. That season of Portland that treated me so beautifully. Games at—what was that one place on Dekum?—Tough Luck, with the fantastic fried chicken. Nurk’s purple suit while we waited for his leg to finally heal. I was always shy to go to the full Blazers Twitter meetups (one time I went to that hotel bar near the Moda and saw everyone and got so nervous that I walked right back out), but online, we were great pals.

We had tickets to the early March game in which Nurk was supposed to make his return. Uncle Nurk, as Dame (and Dame Jr.) called him—in return labeled “Babo” by his friend, which is Bosnian for “daddy.” We were supposed to see Nurk finally play again. And then, the world shut down.

I wondered if the NBA players kinda liked quarantine. On Instagram, we saw glimpses of Dame in his mansion, finally getting some god damn peace and quiet with Kay’la and the rest of his family. In our popcorn-ceilinged apartment, bringing in a friend to live with us to avoid going into debt, we binge-watched Succession and The Bachelor and anything else that would numb the pain of the world, as we knew it, ending.

And somewhere in the midst of the virus, we also took to the streets of Portland to protest police brutality and other injustices of racism. We didn’t know that much about Covid yet, so logically, there was the chance that getting sick could cost us our lives. Still, there was, Dame, out at the front of the crowd, leading the march. I’ll never forget looking over as we tried to find our place, seeing him in the flesh with us, yards away, knowing in that moment that he was, and always would be, my hero.

When the NBA “bubble” finally happened, I swore I’d never take basketball for granted again. Slowly, the league resumed operations to varying extents, Gobert shenanigans aside. While basketball went back to sorta normal, my personal Portland never did. Shattered by the loneliness of quarantine and irreparably disillusioned by the city I never planned to stay in forever anyway, I put in my successful bid for us to wish it all goodbye.

Three years/eons later, a song catches my attention in this Austin coffee shop. It’s a cover of one of my favorite Billy Joel songs, “And So It Goes.” I feel like it’s not cool to like Billy Joel??? But I can’t help it. I’m listening to the song, and I’m thinking about how it hasn’t hit me yet that Dame is actually leaving. I watched a goodbye video this morning and honestly felt nothing. I read a gorgeous Rolling Stone piece by Corbin Smith and felt nothing. To be fair, I’ve been a little inundated with feelings about other things recently. Losing your career and marriage will do that to you.

The lyrics of the song struck me, though. “And every time I've held a rose / It seems I only felt the thorns,” Joel wrote. Portland, City of Roses. That’s how it feels to root for a team, a hero that only ever breaks your heart. “And so it goes, and so it goes / And so will you, soon, I suppose.”

Perhaps another part of my emotionlessness about the Dame trade is that, like my Twitter friend and Roman Roy have said, maybe I’ve pre-grieved?

The day Dame requested a trade, Twitter broke. Literally. It was down for hours, and I was forced to cry alone, because I couldn’t participate in what surely would have been the social media pity party of the century.

I couldn’t be on Twitter, so I cried alone. I cried and cried. I cried for the lost years in Portland that were supposed to be fun, but weren’t. I cried for the marriage those hardship-riddled years eroded. And yes, I cried for all the frustrating fucking losses I’ve watched this team take, and every time we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that at least we have Dame to lead us into the frightening unknown. Casual fans may not know, but he’s a boxer at heart. It was his first love, before basketball. Damian Lillard, forever a fighter, drumming up inspiration where others would only see adversity. Holding a torch, holding a rose. Holding the promise that when all else fails, we’d still have basketball and loyalty and a place to feel like we belong.

But isn’t all this why I became a sports fan to begin with? Perhaps it makes me a masochist, but I can’t imagine the glory without the pain.

How boring, to root for a team that always sweeps. How dull, to love the one who you are not afraid to lose.

Billy Joel said it better than I could:

So I would choose to be with you
That's if the choice were mine to make
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break

And maybe I’m not talking about Damian Lillard anymore. Even though he did fully break my heart, the bastard. But he also made me a sports fan. My money will always go to the underdog—surely, one of these days, it’s got to pay off.

P.S. Go Bucks.

P.P.S. Fuck Miami hahahahahahaha

Howdy, and welcome to Good And Good For You, a newsletter about music and feelings. I don’t know if you know this about me…but…..I have a rotating playlist called Special Sauce. The parameters: it must be fifteen songs at any given time—no more, no less; it’s always best played in order; it’s roughly based on what I’m digging at the moment. I got the idea from my friend Pete, who has his own 20-song version of this called Cafe Pete (hi, Pete). Give Special Sauce a follow on Spotify if you think you can handle the flavor!

It’s honestly been forever since I’ve updated Special Sauce, and it’s not because I forgot about it. Au contraire! It’s been simmering in the back of my mind, ideas for it flitting in and out and never quite settling in. Well, I finally finished rewatching High Fidelity (Zoe’s Version) and there were a few needle drops that finally gave me the inspiration I needed to get back on the playlist-making grind.

Special Sauce: September 2023

Let’s get right to the point: here is the link to the playlist, so you don’t have to go digging for it. We pride ourselves on convenience ‘round these parts!

1. “Autumn Is Your Last Chance,” Robyn Hitchcock

Can I get a hell yeah from the Fall-lovers in the chat???? A fellow Substacker introduced me to this song recently by way of an Autumn Songs list—but now I can’t remember who it was!! If it was you, speak up, because I now LOVE this track and am indebted!

2. “Losing My Religion,” Soccer Mommy

I accidentally discovered the transition between the last song and this one and knew they belonged back-to-back. The original version of this song is one of my all-time favs, and Ms. Mommy imbues it with the reverence it deserves.

3. “Trust Your Gut,” Worriers

Starting a playlist off slow makes me a little insecure. Please don’t leave! Or fall asleep!! Here, I lined up something peppy to reel you back in. This Worriers album has been giving me so much energy recently: it reminds me a bit of how I felt about Torres’ Thirstier from a couple years ago.

4. “Scabs,” Speedy Ortiz

I’ve fallen under this album’s spell the past few weeks. Vocalist Sadie Dupuis’ voice sprinkles surprising sweetness over scuzzy guitars and drums with iconic lines like “Who do you wanna prove you’re a big dog to?”

5. “Can You Get To That,” Funkadelic

This one I lifted straight from the High Fidelity soundtrack. I don’t remember which scene the needle drop happened in; I was moderately drunk for the last couple episodes. The important thing is that it made its way from Shazam to this playlist somehow, innit?

6. “It’s Alive!” Ratboys

You ever just listed to this song over and over and never get tired of it? Yeah, same.

7. “Chain of Fools,” Aretha Franklin

A lot of the songs on here are on here because of vibes. And this one isn’t NOT here for the vibes. But, please, don’t be mistaken: it’s also serving insane amounts of realness. I mean, I heard it the other day for the first time in a while and it was the best kind of gut punch. Been singing this one a lot in the car recently for…reasons.

8. “Kill Me,” Al Menne

I’m really liking this debut album from Al Menne, collaborator of Christian Lee Hutson’s and, by association, part of the Phoebe Bridgers Extended Universe. When he said “Kill me now, please, please, please”—I felt that, you know?

9. “Alley Light,” Squirrel Flower

I wrote (sorta) about Bruce Springsteen recently, and, speaking of Bruce, Ella Williams—aka Squirrel Flower—cites him as an influence on this song. It’s a bleak Atlantic-City-esque tale of being broke and wasting time in the company of a disillusioned beauty. “I was gonna take her out tonight / but all her favorite spots closed down,” Williams croons. As an Austinite, I feel that.

10. “Erasure,” Corinne Bailey Rae

I’ve been really enjoying this highly-anticipated album, especially its noisier tracks, which could not be a more stark departure from the folky chart-toppers that catapulted Rae to fame in the early 2000s. I thought this one was a nice transition between a couple of more-or-less brooding moments in the playlist.

11. “Cubic Zirconia,” Katy Kirby

Katy Kirby, I’m in love with your voice and your words and the way your music makes me feel. This wistful, sparkling single has me pining for more, but until she comes out with more new music, it will have to do.

12. “Flirted With You All My Life,” Bright Eyes

Oops, I tripped and fell and my finger slipped and hit “add to playlist” on an insanely sad song! I had, admittedly, never heard of Vic Chestnutt until 2021, when I heard this Bright Eyes cover of his song “Flirted With You All My Life,” the original released the same year he died. The lyrics address Death as an off-and-on lover—haunting in the context of Chestnutt’s passing. ………..Don’t be mad; the Sauce called for a little sadness! I’m just following the recipe!!

13. “Press My Luck,” Blake Mills

I thought this wobbly, groovy track was the perfect on-ramp back to lightness from the last one’s emotional wreckage. I’m like, actually obsessed with this song. It’s a little wacky. In my opinion, more songs should sound a little wacky.

14. “So Emotional,” Whitney Houston

Okay, now we’re done with the sad-sad portion of the playlist and we’re on to the sad-dancey portion of the playlist. Is this song sad? I dunno, that was my first thought, which probably says more about me than about the song. Unfortunately for me, and for anyone listening to Special Sauce, I’m absolutely addicted to yearning and need to be sent to rehab immediately.

15. “Babylon,” David Gray

As this song ended on KUTX earlier today, the DJ said, “Babble…on… That’s what we’re trying not to do here at KUTX,” and folks? I couldn’t agree more. (…She says after babbling on for hundreds of words.) I hope you enjoyed this edition of Special Sauce. Get it while it’s hot!

It’s Bruce Springsteen’s birthday today. He is 74 years old.

Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics are inked on my arm: “C’mon, baby, the laugh’s on me.” It’s one in a highly exclusive set of two identical tattoos, the only ones like them in the whole world, belonging to two different bodies, two people who fell in love to the sound of Bruce’s voice, who have always trod their path together to Bruce’s tune, and who now diverge, roadless, but forever marked with Bruce’s words on their skin.

I went out by myself last night. On the way to East 12th, I heard Zach Bryan for the first time in my Uber. I know, I know—I’m a few weeks late. I usually try to give these non-Republican country guys a try, with mixed results: f Stapleton, marry Isbell, kill Childers, so to speak.

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Anyway, his newer release “Sarah’s Place” reeled me in last night on that ephemeral, solitary ride out to the bars. “Your picnic chair is just sittin’ there in the yard / and I had to sell my old guitar,” he sings with a campy rasp that was almost an instant pass for me—but he wasted no time pulling me back in with the story, with the kind of rom-com narrative that’s like drugs to me, of a hometown guy selling his guitar to—he reveals in the last line—fly to New York to see her. Get a-load-a this guy! I thought. It seems he’s just my speed.

This morning—well, at like 2pm; I woke up mildly hungover and simply HAD to lay around for hours looking at my phone before doing anything—I put on Zach Bryan’s new-ish self-titled album for the first time. It almost immediately won me over, and I’ve been thinking about why: it’s because it reminds me of Bruce.

I’m not ready to talk about Bruce quite yet, at least not directly. The pain is like staring at the sun. But I’ll tell you how I feel about Zach. Like Bruce, he wastes no breath: there’s not a single line that feels like it’s in the song just to rhyme. Like Bruce, his voice is a little jagged. Like Bruce, you’re not really sure he’s quite as doggedly everyman as he insists, but his stories are so good you don’t trouble yourself with doubt that he’s authentic in the ways that matter.

The arrangements were the second thing that impressed me on the Zach Bryan album, after the lyrics. So much so that I actually Googled who produced it and: it was HIM! That’s right, the album was entirely self-produced. I love every bit of the mood he evokes with his modest litany of instruments. His use of fiddles and harmonicas feels refreshingly organic, and I love how the unpolished guitars and pianos make me feel like I’m just listening to a guy play in a room. In fact, I’d go so far as to say Bryan has broken the curse of mediocre mainstream folky guys that Mumford and his Sons cast on us nigh a decade ago.

Speaking of those guys from that era, I actually like the Lumineers feature on “Spotless,” although it’s probably the least memorable song on the album for me. My favorite feature, by far, is not Kacey Musgraves (although that one works beautifully), nor Sierra Farrell (also lovely)—it’s The War and Treaty on my current favorite track of the album, “Hey Driver.”

The War and Treaty are a criminally under-appreciated husband/wife folk duo comprised of Michael and Tanya Trotter, whose golden voices, particularly Michael’s, elevate Bryan’s yearning ode to the South. Another thing I love about this song is that it’s (surely intentionally?) a nod to Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter”: perhaps not melodically, but thematically. “Hey driver, I’ve been feelin’ like there ain’t no point at all / the Klonopin ain’t kicked in and I missed my sister’s call,” Zach sings, refracting Cash’s homesick sentiments into a 2023-tinged lament. Connecting things back to Johnny Cash songs is my secret superpower. Hey driver, hey porter. Take me back to what I fear I can’t go back to; prove me wrong. I’m lost and far from home and, like Zach says, I’ve been gamblin’ with more than just my cards. Why wouldn’t I when I’ve got nothing left to lose.

I’m thinking about Bruce on his birthday. I hope he’s doing okay, in light of some health struggles that prompted him to cancel a run of shows this last month. We never got to see him in concert together, and that was always a fear of mine, but because I thought he wouldn’t last much longer, not the other way around.

I explained my tattoo to someone recently. It’s a line from “Dancing In The Dark,” I said. I need to work on reclaiming Bruce.

Bruce was always yours, he replied.

I hope to God that’s true, because I hear him in everything.

With the advent of Barbie this summer, we’ve found ourselves in the Roaring Matchbox Twenties. Well, if you’ve found yourself remembering how much you love “Push,” may I interest you in a revisit to “Iris”? 

In 1998, with “Push” still in heavy airwave rotation, Matchbox Twenty’s contemporaries, the Goo Goo Dolls, were cooking up their own iconic singalong jams. It’d be a few more years until I heard them myself, once I got a Sharper Image combo CD player/alarm clock/radio in middle school, my portal to KISS FM (96.7) and, therefore, all the faux-edgy alt-pop I’d been missing all my life. It was 2004, and melodramatic, earnest dudes ruled the airwaves with a sensitive fist.

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When “Iris” would come on the radio, it caught your attention immediately with those haunting, jangly first notes. Then, the opening line busts in like an angsty Kool-Aid man: “And I’d give up forever to touch you.” Has any real, normal man ever actually said this? Eleven-year-old me certainly didn’t know, or care. What I cared about was the way the song made me feel: like life could be gorgeously, dangerously thrilling.

I’ll never forget the look of exasperation on my guitar teacher’s face when I played him “Iris.” He taught kids to play by picking out the chords of a song they’d bring him and teaching them to play it—ideally, making instrument practice fun. A very cool idea! But it was written all over his classic-rock-loving face: this was pop garbage, and he wished I’d have picked a different song. 

“Uhh, this isn’t guitar,” he correctly assessed of the first few notes (it’s a mandolin). “Can we pick another song?” 

I felt foolish. There was no prettier song than “Iris,” I had thought, though I could now tell Van didn’t agree with me. I wanted to play it; I wanted to sing it; I wanted to feel it running through my veins. WHEN EVERYTHING FEELS LIKE THE MOVIES!, I’d scream along when I had my radio playing and my mom was out running errands. YEAH YOU BLEED JUST TO KNOW YOU’RE ALIVE! I had no idea what the song was about, but I couldn’t get enough. But that day made me reconsider: maybe “Iris” was just pop garbage. 

Last winter, almost 20 years later, I was camped out at my neighborhood 24-hour coffee shop when I heard the unmistakable stair-stepping guitar notes of “Slide,” the album’s other massive hit. It warmed me up from the inside out: the urgent tempo, the mellow tambourines, the full band that crashes in for the strumming guitars that strum, strum, strum in lieu of a lyrical chorus. Guitarist/vocalist John Rzeznik’s husky voice floats over the ringing, simplistic chords, most of the lyrics lost to a case of the mumbles until the bridge crashes in with “Wanna get marrieeeeeed and run away?” A bold proposition! But one I’ve always loved. They simply don’t make men like this anymore—that want to wake up where you are. That won’t say anything at all. The flickering mirage of the Himbo leads us further and further into the desert, I fear.

Then, to my surprise, the album kept playing. More Goo Goo Dolls songs. I’d never really thought to listen to this whole album—had assumed its primary function was as a vehicle for a few sappy-sweet radio hits. But as the tracks kept rolling in the dimly-lit cafe, they continued to pique my interest. It was the night I realized that Dizzy Up the Girl, in its entirety, is worth a bit of pondering. It’s paradoxically both vapid and sincere, basic instrumentation occasionally coalescing in moments not unlike brilliance. 

For all his melodrama, Rzeznik actually has a very rich, pretty voice, and it’s the thread that weaves this improbable album together. The catch? He’s not the record’s only lead vocalist. After the first three tracks, all of which sound consistent with the Goo Goo Dolls of “Iris” radio fame, Guy #2—bassist/vocalist Robby Takac—takes the mic and 180’s the vibe. Track 4, “January Friend,” could easily be a shitty Green Day song. And I don’t mean “shitty” like, cool shitty; I mean like this song is kind of dumb. And yet! There is something kind of endearing to it, and it oddly provided a breath of fresh of air between the cloyingly sweet double-punch of “Broadway” and “Black Balloon.” Takac’s dollar-store Billy Corgan impression serves as a bit of a palate cleanser and, in my opinion, makes the album interesting. It time-stamps Dizzy Up The Girl in 1998 and grounds it in a little much-needed rock context, no matter how clumsily. 

Then, all of a sudden, Rzeznik and his twinkly harmonics are back for “Black Balloon,” the third radio hit of the album. I can’t help it, I love this song. It’s pretty, pop-ballad perfection. I’d pay one million dollars to dance to this with someone sweet at a hypothetical school dance in 1999. It’s a cheesy, sparkling four minutes and nine seconds of pure cinema. 

Flat, crunchy electric guitars break the spell, kicking off “Bullet Proof,” which redeems a slow start with a nice Rzeznik chorus. The next one, “Amigone,” hands the vocals back to Takac, with mixed results, again in the vein of a Green Day with no strong opinions. In the coffee shop, though, it was strangely kinda hitting: like before, the cadence of the album’s vocal tradeoffs kept things lively. I mean, how seriously was I really going to take this anyway? The band’s name is THE GOO GOO DOLLS (a name I have always disliked). 

Speaking of dolls, maybe it’s recency bias, but I can’t help but listen to Dizzy Up The Girl in the context of Barbie. As much as the film purports to be about women—and in many ways, it is—Barbie is a movie about a guy with really big feelings who is, against all odds, wildly endearing. And what is the secret to his charm, his “Kenergy”? It’s all about silliness. This is a guy completely freed from the shackles of ego. He’s got his earnest moments, and he’s got his unhinged moments, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. Like his musical number says, He’s Just Ken. 

It’s why “Push” fits so exquisitely in Ken’s character arc. Because, despite the contextual jab at Guitar Guys, there’s something so acutely satisfying about seeing Ryan Gosling put his entire ass into these nonsensical lyrics—just like Rob Thomas does in the original. It’s something this era of Top-40-alt-boys knocked out of the park: a certain level of guilelessness. And it’s charming, because how many men do you know who you can sincerely call guileless? 

Contemporary reviews of Dizzy Up The Girl were largely unfavorable. They took issue with its unseriousness. Rolling Stone accused the band of “wandering into the minefield between maturity and schmaltz,” and called “Iris” “one big hunk of summertime cheddar.” (Which I think they meant as an insult, but sounds amazing, actually.) The reviewer for USA Today said Rzeznik’s “unfortunate tendency toward sentimentality smother the trio's lilt and kick.” What that verdict doesn’t account for is that sentimentality is a viable currency of the heart. 

As the album unfolded and my coffee mug grew cold, I realized that the two Guys of this album need each other. Guy 2, Takac, is the shot—he tempers the syrupy ballads and keeps Dizzy an album that’s playable in a grungy coffee shop. Guy 1, Rzeznik, is the chaser. He brings the sappy magic. The duality of man: each vapid and sincere in equal measures.

The third-to-last track is “Iris,” the album’s—and the band’s—great crescendo. It’s a song that’s almost gaudy, but its unbridled strings, absurdly too-long bridge (do NOT attempt this song at karaoke!), and audacious lyrics pull off the stunt. And, of course, the song wouldn’t work if Rzeznik wasn’t a genuinely good singer. It’s a gorgeous, outrageous song about nothing. When everything’s made to be broken, he wails, I just want you to know who I am. Like Ken, he roams the bright fields beyond ego’s constraints, beckoning us to follow.

In the final two songs on the album, as if “Iris” cast a spell, the dust settles on the two Guys’ tradeoff. In “Extra Pale,” Takac gets a short, choppy grunge joint, finally dialing in his weird singing to the point where it sounds like it belongs next to some ballads. To close out Dizzy, Rzeznik reenters with a few actually interesting guitar riffs and a soaring final chorus. Shot, and chaser. It’s a fitting coda for an exaggerated moment like “Iris.”

For maximum “Iris” enjoyment, I highly recommend this YouTube video of the Goo Goo Dolls’ 2004 performance of the song in Buffalo, NY—Rzeznik’s hometown. Nothing could possibly match the song’s melodrama better than pouring rain, and our brave boys not only endured the elements, but embraced them, shaggy wet hair drooping down over furrowed brows, the set going off miraculously free of any electrocution indicents. 

The beleaguered, soggy crowd shrieks with renewed delight when they realize that the show will not only go on amid the downpour, but to the tune of their favorite hit. While some bands resent having to play their Big Song over and over again, Rzeznik’s face shows delight in the duty. He scans the crowd every few seconds, clearly drawing energy from their enthusiasm. Perhaps this performance’s magic originated with them, the rain-soaked crowd waving their arms in time with those three lilting chords. Takac’s ratty pink hair flies as he diligently headbangs his way through the set, roaming the stage and absorbing his share of the audience’s fervor.

At 2:28, right before the weird, long instrumental (the Karaoke-r’s Curse, as I call it), the side-stage camera takes over—and Rzeznik, smiling, motions for it to turn away from him, toward the crowd. Dim through the dark sheets of water, the audience responds with a cheer. 

About a minute later, the music slows, and Rzeznik exhorts the good festival-goers: “I want you guys to take this one home, alright?” And, of course, they aced the assignment. Wet to the bone, each one of them screaming the words of that silly, humongous radio hit like it was the needle drop on the imaginary movie of each of their individual lives. A thousand deluded, joyful main characters, Rzeznik and Takac not least among them.

The hits from Dizzy Up The Girl endure not because they’re in any way cool; quite the opposite. In fact, in the cultural shadow of ‘90s Cool giants like Kurt Cobain, these songs provide the inverse of aspirational coolness: conspicuous sincerity. A good, corny, life is a movie kind of song is actually a rare gift, and this band—alongside a couple other silly-boy hitmakers of the time—gave us several, lovingly peppered amidst a hodgepodge of oddly charming rock tracks.

There’s something about this Goo Goo Dolls era that I (and, I suspect, many others who aren’t brave enough to say it!!) find irresistible. Let the endearingly imperfect album ring through our broken nation’s coffee shops; let the beloved hits maintain their foothold in our favorite playlists. In a cruel world that punishes our sentimentality, these songs bring, as one review described in an attempt to be derogatory, a “passionate ordinariness” that rewards it. It’s insane that the reviewer meant that descriptor as an insult; I think it sounds lovely.

It was 5th grade. So we were what, 11?

I’d asked what some lyrics were from. Cally Brown, the coolest girl in my class, looked me straight in the face and said, “What, you haven’t heard of Death Cab For Cutie?” and I’d never felt so humiliated.

Now, of course, I realize those blonde girls with glossy lips and razor-thin eyebrows knew these ephemeral, edgy names from watching The O.C. It’s a clarity that helps elucidate why it was Cool when they liked bands, but not, a few years later, when I decided I fell in love with rock, scrounging up new favorites on Limewire and lovingly uploading pixelated album art.

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I get Cally flashbacks sometimes when I see stuff about “emo nite” events, when I read Elliott Smith thirst-tweets from hot twenty year olds. Whether you’re a millennial like me or a young bucko, liking certain emo shit is cool now. And while it’s no less surprising to me than any other old thing being new again, it’s a bit of a mindfuck sometimes. Especially when I see old discourse patterns starting to reemerge from the Internet bad-take bog.

I literally, actually cannot believe I’m still seeing music writers acting like they’re too cool for Olivia Rodrigo. Or, if they like her, feeling some need to qualify her as real emo. Twenty years later, how does it STILL feel embarrassing to say I like rock-leaning pop?

There have always been very limited confines to the kind and amount of earnest media girls can consume, whether set by time, or the bounds of a show soundtrack, or even the arbitrary rules of a clique. There are socially acceptable parameters for loving Big Feelings Music.

(Now, that’s where fandoms intercept—they create a group setting where it’s mutually agreed that geeking out is criteria for belonging. But that’s also different than just liking bands on a personal level, using music as a portal into yourself, not necessarily into community.)

When I was a teenager, it was NOT cool to like Paramore. I say that with the utmost conviction. While their first three albums obviously did well enough to earn them stardom and decent critical reception, there was a very cut-and-dry crowd who liked Paramore, and it was ~alternative~ teens. I’d be lying if I said I was ever actively made fun of for liking Paramore, Jimmy Eat World, Thrice, Blink-182, or even the acts that didn’t age as gracefully, like All Time Low or Hellogoodbye. But it was very clearly understood in the social wilds I traversed that unless the other party was also wearing Vans and straightening their bangs to a conspicuous extent, it was no use trying to talk about my favorite bands; TV soundtracks and Top 40 radio were the acceptable music discovery venues.

Even worse, though, was the other side of the fence—the music blogs I worshipped so vehemently, my doorways into a world where edgy shit was cool—they shunned emo music, too. We’re talking Strokes era, for context—and the sounds were all intertwined, really (that’s another essay)—but in 2009, it would have been UNHEARD OF to see a cool music writer talking about Paramore or My Chemical Romance the way they do now. (And I internalized that shit!!)

The truth is that a lot of earnest music about feelings is, and always has been, the domain of weirdos. Especially if it’s melodic, or sung by a girl, and especially, especially if both.

Being 𝓟𝓤𝓝𝓚 has always been a loophole, on the industry side.

However, the pitfall there for fans—that we’re seeing play out in realtime right now with the Olivia Rodrigo discourse—is that the bar is incredibly nebulous. When it comes to Paramore, I’ve watched that target move for decades now. Even today, for every culture writer who claims them, there is one who scorns them for being too poppy—perhaps they’re not the ones writing their publication’s Paramore review, as most reviews these days are positive, but the opinion remains common nonetheless, especially among oldhead (cough*men*coughcough) critics.

I never stopped loving the bands I loved, but I always felt there was an unbridgeable divide on both sides—whether among my high school peers or culture critics, emo simply wasn’t as popular as modern nostalgia would have us believe.

But isn’t that the story of so many nostalgic favorites? Whether they’re musical gods or fantastically corny, so many artists that pass time’s test weren’t by any means universally beloved in their heyday. My dad indoctrinated me and my siblings with ABBA songs growing up, and my mom made fun of us all—ABBA?? REALLY???? was her bewildered cry. We used to make fun of the people who listened to them, she’d insist; they were really not cool.

Well, a kid on TikTok in the year 2023 would beg to differ.

Time’s a buffer, it seems. Liking music that’s earnest—even cheesy—the implications soften under nostalgia’s gaze. Of course, we all liked emo music. We were young and angsty, weren’t we? I can’t help but feel like Emo Nites are full of girls like Cally. The ones who wrote the tacit rules about which edgy bands were acceptable and which ones were too much.

And yet! At a certain point, it becomes impossible to parse. My social experience as an emo teen may have been clear-cut, but music never is. If the Callies of the world, who mocked Hayley Williams in the 2000s, claim GUTS now—even implying, perhaps, that they always would have—who am I to summon ghosts to prove a point? Perhaps more importantly, on the other side of the coin, if “all american bitch” is the closest thing to rock a 13-year-old today has ever listened to, who am I to tell them she’s not punk enough?

Like what you like now. It just might be cool in 15 years. Or not. Who gives a fuck.

It’s 2023, and most everyone loves my favorite band, Paramore. It’s strange, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Let’s dance and scream and revise history so we all had choppy self-inflicted side bangs. I really don’t care if music critics think they’re truly punk (I would argue: yes) or if they really were universally beloved by the 2000s everyteen as the Internet claims (I know: no). I care that their music, every note, every song, every CD liner note, made me who I am. And I know that I wouldn’t love them so dearly if they hadn’t been, for so many years, so uniquely, dorkily, ardently mine.