My 11-year-old son thinks Imagine Dragons is the greatest band in the world. Maybe ever. I learn about his new passion in the most disturbing way.

It’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.

The bartender gives relationship advice in the alley behind the bar every Thursday night while the piano player does her thing on the baby grand.

Gender in the Long 19th Century ends at 4 p.m., which leaves enough time to raid the liquor store on Cowley Road. A and K and I go early, J and S join later.

We’re sitting in a pit. It’s deep, well above our heads—a half-finished bunker, really, begun in the heady days when imagined snipers lurked behind every dune...

When I was a teenager, I got robbed a lot

The driver laughed when you couldn’t pronounce the name of your destination. It’s a cobblestoned European town the same as every other cobblestoned European town you’ve seen so far.

I’m supposed to be on my way to Timbuktu, not stuck here, listening to a man sing about the place

I wanted landscapes I could sink back into. I needed mountains to wrap around, rivers to rest naked upon, fields to drown in, an old snake skin stuck to the bottom of my boot

A man sits in a bar in a no-name town in a flyover state. It’s late. He’s alone. A double whiskey sits before him, sweating on a cheap cardboard coaster. The bartender knows his order by sight.

I assume you have a regular route on your nightly rounds, those eagle eyes scanning for any lock popped daringly up like a gopher from its hole.

Loretta Lynn
Coal Miner’s Daughter
11 songs, 29 minutes
1970

The place is too small, but we don’t care. I don’t care because I’ve always liked small spaces (if I were an animal, I’d be one with

She focuses on efficient point accumulation: jam, 12 points.

But every time I listen to Brothers, I can hear her voice.

It was a year well-lived, but glamorous only in its simplicity– I had 6 roommates, all of us year-long volunteers packed into a one story house, where minus rent and Costco we each earned only $100-a-month in stipend.

I’m behind a snow plow, tonguing salt and exhaust fumes, white-knuckling a compact car, and screaming at a hamper of clean clothes to just keep from crying. Tom Waits is with me, wailing as we swerve, any of these songs seeming appropriate soundtracks to crash quietly into the ditch with.

And oh god it’s wonderful sitting here, drinking too much coffee, eating too many pastries, and loving everything about this moment. 

Still, he wants me to keep strutting down my freak lane, says “Gucci” like “Coochie” on “White Freckles”.  

My brother always comments on how big the sky is in my little stretch of western Kentucky. We crane our necks and peer at the sickle moon, the unblinking stars.

But John Prine was bigger than memory. John was never tainted. 

Fine Line
Harry Styles
Released: December 13, 2019
Label: Columbia and Erskine
Length: 46 minutes, 12 songs

My review is best summed up by alternative titles for each track because this is

Before Sasquatch’s girlfriend got into rats, she had dogs. I don’t remember how many exactly, but a lot. One dog was called Pee Dog. Whenever I fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy, he soaked my leg

Like so many gays around the world, I remember exactly where I was when Lorde dropped “Green Light”, the first song from her 2017 instant classic Melodrama. I was in my car, on my way to work. But that’s not really all of it.

I attribute my apostasy to Michael Jackson’s HIStory

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