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.

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.