I’ve started to clench my teeth before falling asleep. 

When I was young, I never kept a journal. Instead, my understanding of the world—and myself within in it—got wound up in 500-plus battered tapes that have followed me through life.

Most nights I would take communion with Willis Alan Ramsey, a one trick pony like me, but I hadn’t even run yet.

“Recorded learned and mixed in two days” sounds like exactly the sorta shenanigans we were all about.

Anthology
The Clean
Released 1/21/2003
MERGE
134:52

It’s from a distance that I see them, and they look exactly like what they are:... more

Kathy doesn’t know the band but she wants to know me more. 

Collective Soul have always sucked, but Everclear was once the only band in the world.

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.”

Open mic, meet open wound. 

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!”