You also didn’t know that, in a few short years, your parents would discover your stash of illicit hip-hop and hard rock tapes.
My mother crooned “Poetry Man” in the car between errands and have-to-be’s as in, “We have to be home by six,” or, “You have to be at piano rehearsal at three thirty.”
I’m meeting a friend for drinks and a Friday night concert; work is days, a train ride and a major city away.
We are intrepid travellers hunting – or rather haunting – the square. We are exhausting the place of its details.
One house had a parrot that never stopped talking.
I’m a white middle-aged mom driving through a mainly white college town listening to a now-dead Jewish hip-hop artist whose video for “Self-Care,” released right around the time of his death featured him trapped in a coffin. I’m older now than I’ve ever been. Obviously. Who cares.
I’m at Guitar Center to buy a Fender. I run through the metal heads doing their best Guitar Hero impressions to the only white Telecaster hanging on the wall.
You’re in Miami and you're driving under the banyans and the palms and you're heading away from the tennis courts by the water and you're looking at the sky above the parkway and you're heading home and sometimes it feels like you'll always be in Miami.
And while I could mythologize those years as a win for self-actualization—I did start that band—it was also a time of anxiety and frustration.
The word that comes to mind is delirium.
It took a month of working together for Luke to start talking to me.
I’ve bought more used Automatic for the People CDs than I can count.
We fell asleep in our tent listening to coyote songs.
Badmotorfinger wasn’t the first time I heard Soundgarden, but it was the first time I really listened to them.
Moaning
Moaning
Release Date: March 2, 2018
Label: Sub Pop Records
Length: 33 minutes
When you’re twenty-two you do stupid shit.... more
Damn.
Kendrick Lamar
April 14, 2017
Top Dawg
54:54
The first time I visit Southern California, it’s for work. I get lost out of LAX... more
“Get in here!” yelled Grandma. “Carrot Head is gonna sing!”
You joined in, and told Danielle that she should only serve us drinks in diamond pimp glasses.
Some songs sound best under the sun. Some are night-blooming. These you hear clear in dark-dark; maybe there are stars.
“I Go To... more
Two years later, I fell in love with a boy whose devotion to The Smiths matched my own.
Picture this: It’s 2004. I’m living in Berkeley, California. I swear I am a cool girl. I’m dating a rapper who has had some success. He’s got massive dreadlocks that differentiate him from everyone.
I lost track of Ben while I was married. Seven years. I hadn’t seen Ben in 7 years. Ben refers to those years as my... more
I turn the knob to the right, bang my hands against the steering wheel, and deafeningly inform the world that I’m out of my cage and doing just fine.
A 400-page collection of poems in fours sections: Nicki Minaj Songs, Bob Dylan Songs, Elliott Smith Songs, and 90s Riot Grrrls Songs.
ON SALE for only $5 through June 15!!
FOUR NEW ESSAYS BY CHLOE CALDWELL! Plus the original essays that made you fall in love with Chloe!
ON SALE for only $5 through June 15!!
Saul Stories is a linked collection that explores the relationships between a forty-year-old female artist, her teenaged daughter, and her daughter's friends. With ferocious realism, the book interrogates how children of differing classes and races are treated in the U.S., and the salacious and skeptical ways the current culture views cross-generational friendships. But most potently—in narratives taking place in Denny's and movie theatres and living rooms and cars—Saul Stories wonders what it means to be a woman and an artist and a mother, all at once.
