“Not Artifacts but Traces”: Dreamlife on the Road
Road trips are inherently circular, right? You go in one direction, and then, unless you’re moving somewhere permanently, you have to turn around and come back again. There’s the promise of the return even in the first seeds… Read More
Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet
January is secretly my favorite time for listening to music. I mean, I’m exaggerating a bit. I’m always listening to music, and there’s no bad time to listen to music, ever. But over the past thirteen years that… Read More
Qodèxx Recording Diary
One of the best possible examples that my dad set for me, as a creative person, growing up, was that he collaborated with people. As I’ve talked about before, it’s hard to explain exactly what kind of musician… Read More
On The Divine Comedy’s IN MAY
To the best of my knowledge, In May is this: a chamber opera for one voice, its narrative unfolding as a series of letters from a youngish man dying of cancer to his father who is living in… Read More
Fifteen Thoughts About Jimi Hendrix on the Occasion of His Birthday
1. Rock music has, stylistically and technically, never moved beyond Jimi Hendrix. Fact. 2. My dad was a keyboard player with a trumpet fetish who mainly listened to jazz, show tunes, and doo-wop around the house, so I… Read More
The Perfect Cupcake
Late in the summer of 2010, I found myself participating in a two-day silent Zen meditation retreat. The temple that I belong to periodically hosts silent retreats of varying length—typically either two-day shorties or five-day intensives. This was… Read More
White Denim, The Cult of “Peg,” and My Musical Continuum
OK, wow, my extreme, deep, immediate love for this video of the band White Denim playing a cover of the Steely Dan song “Peg” puts me right at the center of a Venn diagram that I previously wouldn’t… Read More
Finding My Personal Best in My Best-Of Mixes
Surprise! 2015 is the bonus-track year! As I’ve documented before elsewhere, I started making year-end mixes back in 2004 as a way to avoid spending a ton of money on Christmas presents and to share some of my… Read More
What Bono Taught Me About Mesmerizing an Audience
I’ve never considered myself the biggest fan of the band U2. I mean, I’ve always liked them well enough—the big hits never fail to get my blood pumping when I hear them on the radio—but I think I’ve… Read More
Amy Winehouse and the Wholeness of Song
This is probably the dumbest thing in the world to admit out loud, but—I actually thought the recent Amy Winehouse documentary Amy was going to be about the music. After weeks of trying to get myself to the… Read More
Mark Knopfler’s TRACKER and Art in Present Time
As a bookwormy kid, I was, of course, very comfortable and conversant with the past. With the exception of The Baby-Sitters Club series, which released new books periodically that I would greedily read in one sitting once I… Read More
Pet Theories Recording Diary–Day 2
Well, it’s definitely not an important large-scale creative endeavor if there’s not one major oh shit moment! After tracking vocals all morning and into the early afternoon on Sunday, my band Pet Theories and our audio engineer Kevin… Read More
