Patience is one virtue that me and Wayne both got in spades.

In jazz, woodshedding refers to the shed you sequester yourself in, as a young musician learning the craft, a private space to develop your own style, away from prying eyes or critical ears.

Nate and I were in a band together throughout high school — screamo with keyboards.

Sometimes, he gives me tips. Most of the time, it is this: “Take your time.”

As a 10-year-old boy I found ways to explore. Moisturizing with lotion helped. 

The idea that relationships are verses in the song of a life, or that grace notes can be found in ruined loves, struck a chord of latent sentimentality.

You find yourself crying on the phone to your manager, telling them you don’t know if you’re in an emotionally abusive relationship or not. That probably deserves certainty.

It was revolution by music. The world would never be the same.

Manic yet aware, a foot-stomping Nashville show, a sight to behold. They hit the road. They barely made it. They broke up. Such is life.

The song on repeat, singing to Scout, for some reason stranded, standing on the patio table, dead-center, like a reanimated roast, and my father, drunk and shirtless, passed out in a pile of mulch in the yard.

I hope you’re still unsatisfied. I hope you’re keeping your nose clean. 

There’s a complex mythology to this album, one that plunges the BÖC back catalogue into a cauldron of secret histories and magick mirrors and extraterrestrial visitors.

That chorus, the coda of “Famous Last Words,” which closes the album except for the gimmick bonus “Blood,” pretty much saved me.

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.