However, over the past four months, life, or more precisely life and death, has come at me fast. And lately I’ve been sitting, and thinking, and feeling a lot about what I can only call the healing power of music. Two things have happened in these past four months that struck me so deeply that, to be honest, I didn’t even realize there was a place that deep.

So, I’m taking a pause to share those two things here.

The first is that on March 28, my brother Matt unexpectedly died.

Matt was two and a half years older than me. Over our nearly 50 years of life together, we had a deeply close and loving relationship, and also a complicated and even turbulent one. Like brothers do, but also in our own particular way. It’s something I was still working through, in my own way, right up until his death. There was a lot of pain and hurt in it. There was also a profound love that you only know as a brother and, at times, as a best friend.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that music defined our lives, and certainly our life together.

I grew up listening to and playing music with him. I remember as young kids, maybe six and eight, sitting in the back seat of our parents’ car listening to our dad’s Doobie Brothers cassettes, imploring him to drive faster and turn the music up! I remember Matt dubbing me Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard tapes and using his drawing talent to copy the album art onto the covers. I remember us listening to Tone Lōc and Young MC on repeat and spitting out the rhymes together. And I remember how proud he seemed of me when I “discovered” Faith No More on my own at nine years old.

That love of music turned into making it pretty fast. When he was around 10, in the late ‘80s, he started playing drums. Our dad had an old Gretsch kit up in the attic from his own days playing. My parents, sick of Matt beating on me, sent him up there to beat on the drums instead. And he did. And he kept at it.

About five years later, after growing up listening to him constantly play along to Led Zeppelin, and then Helmet and Rage Against the Machine, and then punk, I’d fallen deep into music myself and picked up a guitar. We took lessons at the same music shop in town. We’d practice and jam together, sometimes with our dad on keyboard for renditions of “House of the Rising Sun,” which feels like we played a hundred times.

Around then, Matt joined his first band, Swivel. They practiced in our basement, so I was home for basically all their practices. I saw and heard, up close, what it was like to start and be in a band, from the technical aspects to the friendship aspects. For some reason, they never seemed to get annoyed by me. They ended up recording their demo in our basement too, and I was around for that, getting to see the whole process, and making friends with Nick Rotundo, who engineered it, along the way. Their first show, which was in a basement, was also the first punk show I ever went to: my brother’s band, in somebody’s basement, and that was the door. I somehow even got into a bar in Wilmington where they played alongside local bands Lean and Nine.

Incidentally, Swivel, Lean, and Nine broke up shortly afterward, and some of their members, including my brother, went on to form Boy Sets Fire. They also formed and practiced in our basement. I still have a photo of my journal entry around the time that happened. Here it is:

From there, our music lives ran alongside each other for years. I started bands, Network 34, Eldritch Anisette, Dorian Gray, and joined DC-based Midvale, playing with BSF dozens of times throughout. Eventually, I ended up touring Europe with BSF in nearly every capacity, first as a guitar tech, then with my own band Dear Tonight, then as a drum tech, and then joining the band itself, on bass, going on tour, writing new songs, and recording. We saw more bands together than I can remember. Some of my best memories are standing arm in arm with him, on the side of the stage at some festival, watching and singing along to Social Distortion, the Bouncing Souls, Foo Fighters, and many others. For a long stretch throughout my 20s and early 30s, my brother and I were in the same bus, the same venue, in the same band, doing the thing we’d been doing in the basement since we were kids.

Before the recent reunion shows of Eldritch Anisette, the last show I ever played was with Matt. It was the Area 4 festival in Germany in 2012. There were over 70,000 people in the audience. It was the last show of the tour. I remember Matt and I were locked in that day. I remember jumping off his drum riser countless times, and I can still hear the blast of his kick drum.

Not long after, Matt quit the band, or was kicked out, depending on who’s telling it. And I was told to choose: him or the band. There was nothing I loved more than getting out there, each day, and playing music to hundreds and thousands of strangers. Playing this thing you helped create and seeing and feeling their reaction to it, and from that, building a connection together. But BSF was never my band. It was his band. So, I chose him. I quit.

I’d do it again. But it didn’t fix anything. Our relationship got hurt in the process too, and I walked away from the whole thing. I didn’t just leave the band. I left music. I couldn’t go to shows. I couldn’t pick up a guitar. I didn’t want anything near me that reminded me of it, because all of it reminded me of loss.

That lasted years. What finally broke it was my daughter. She was about three, and she pointed at one of my guitars and asked what it was. So I took it down and played for her. And she responded immediately, bouncing along. That was the first time in a very long time.

I didn’t play with a band again until 14 years after that last BSF show, when Eldritch Anisette got back together, almost thirty years after we’d last played. Which brings me to the second thing that struck me, although in a completely opposite direction.

On the day this past March when my parents called to tell me Matt had been moved to the ICU, I hung up the phone and picked up my bass guitar.

This was not a conscious decision. I didn’t think I should play something. My hands just went, and my p-bass was the closest instrument to me. And I played the same thing over and over, for a long time, and at some point I noticed that what I was playing had become a song.

So I recorded it and sent it to Allen and Courtney from Eldritch. I didn’t tell them anything about it. No context, no explanation of what had happened or when I’d written it.

Some time later, they wrote back. They’d each written parts. And the parts fit exactly, the emotion and the tenor of it, like they’d been in the room. Without a word from me, they knew what the song was about. When I finally told them what had happened and when I’d written it, they said they’d already understood.

The three of us and JD worked on it and made it a real song. And we played it live at our two reunion shows this past June, the first shows Eldritch Anisette had played in 29 years, and the first shows I played since sharing a stage with my brother.

Before we played it, I had to say something.

I talked about Matt. I talked about him recently, unexpectedly dying. About how we grew up playing music together, and how he was the reason I picked up the guitar. I said that the last time I stood on a stage and played live, it was with him. I talked about how I wrote the basis for the song after getting that call from my parents, and how Courtney and Allen could just tell what it was about. I talked about how it made me truly appreciate how music is a vessel, something that can hold our emotions, something we can express into and then hand to other people. That it isn’t only self-expression, it’s collective experience, and unity. How this song would never have been fully written, and we would never be standing on that stage if it weren’t for all the people in the audience who gave us the support and courage to reunite and do so. I talked about how music holds whatever you put in it: grief, joy, anger, frustration, love, all of it. That we can express our own feelings and connect to somebody else’s at the same time. And that the music can change shape as other people touch it, in ways you don’t expect and couldn’t do alone.

Then I thanked everybody, and each of the people in the band. And then I said, I love you, Matt.

And then we tried to start the song, but I was gone.

I don’t have a better word for it. I was just gone. It felt like being back on the podium at his funeral. I tried to remind myself how the song went, but couldn’t. I came in off-time. I tried again and couldn’t find it. I couldn’t remember how the song went. I couldn’t remember what time it was in. I had written this thing myself, out of the worst day of my life, and standing there in front of 1,400 people, I could not play it.

The knowledge that over a thousand people were looking at me came through clearly. So, I said out loud, I’m sorry, my emotions were getting the better of me.

And then something so unexpected and beautiful happened.

The crowd started clapping. In unison, all of them, giving me a count. And cheering. And I could hear people calling out that they loved me. A room full of people, almost all of them under 23, none of them born the last time this band played a show, holding a stranger up.

Then JD dropped in on the hi-hat, I could focus on it, and I had it. I found my footing and we played the song.

It took me a month to be able to look at that directly.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. I had just stood there and told a room that music is a vessel, that it holds what you put into it, that it becomes collective the moment you hand it over. And then I fell apart, and the room caught me and handed it back. I said the thing and then had it done to me, thirty seconds later, in front of everybody.

There’s another layer to it too. When Eldritch Anisette was playing the first time around in the mid-90s, we’d end up on bills with tough-guy hardcore bands, and we got mocked for being “emo.” Too much feeling. Not hard enough. A girl singer. And here was a new generation, thirty years on, and their answer to a grown man losing it on stage was to clap him through it. That was a do-over. It felt like healing. Not just for the band, but for what we were even trying to do, and for what I had been going through.

And a drummer gave me the count. The last time I stood on a stage it was with my brother, and my brother was the drummer. I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Several people came up to me after the show to tell me about their own losses. That’s not nothing. It’s the whole thing, actually. The vulnerability wasn’t a weakness up there, it was the door. Standing in front of strangers and being unable to hold it together turned out to be the thing that let them in.

I don’t have a conclusion for this. Grief doesn’t have one. I’m still in it, still finding my way through, and there are days it’s very heavy.

What I have is gratitude. For a room full of kids who didn’t know me and clapped anyway. For a band that heard a song and knew what it was without being told. For a brother who got sent to the attic to beat on the drums and never stopped.

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Album: Rainbows From Atoms

Artist: Lungfish

Label: Dischord Records (1993)

Runtime: 11 songs, ~40 minutes

So, I’m now three entries in on this perfect punk album series, and I think this may be one of the most controversial selections I’ll offer. Who knows, though. I’m often surprised. But I figured, I don’t want to wait on it; I want to throw this out now, and see what happens. It’ll keep me honest and push me to keep digging deep to articulate why I select what I select. I’ll warn you: this is a long one, so strap in when you have the time.

The first one I wrote about, Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County, is beloved but undervalued in large part because it’s been intentionally kept off streaming services. But it was important for me to start with a solid one that was close to home and wouldn’t be an obvious choice except for those who grew up with them (don’t worry, there will surely be a Fugazi entry). The second one, Sunny Day Real Estate’s self-titled album, or LP2, or The Pink Album, as I called it, comes from a scene heavyweight, one where it’d be a shock if they weren’t included, albeit most people talk about Diary. This third selection, Rainbows From Atoms, from the Baltimore natives and Dischord Records stalwarts, Lungfish, I suspect, may raise some eyebrows. So, let’s go.

The reason I suspect there will be some controversy is that while some friends love Lungfish, they have a reputation not just for repetition but for monotony. The standard critique is that if you’ve heard one Lungfish song, you’ve heard them all. That their albums bleed together. Or that if they start strong, they struggle to maintain that grip throughout. And while I think some of that reflects a laziness on the listener’s part, I get it. There is repetition within their songs, and a familiar motor that drives across many of the tracks. And for a series on perfect punk albums that’s built on one deceptively simple test, no skippable track, Lungfish’s musical style puts my test to the test. I believe Rainbows From Atoms passes it.

First, some background. Lungfish has been a constant. They’ve put out 12 albums from 1990 to 2012. For me, when I listen to them, I hear Baltimore all over it. It brings to mind, for instance, the dissonant runs of Tonie Joy (Moss Icon, Universal Order of Armageddon, Born Against). Baltimore has continued to produce angular, trance-leaning music to this day, as seen in the soundscapes of the avant-garde, jazz/post-rock band Horse Lords. It’s Baltimore punk to me. And growing up in the scene in Newark, Delaware, this loomed large.

I actually found Lungfish through my older sister, Melissa. In fact, she was the one who found the door to punk for both my brother and me. She propped it open, and then Matt and I barged on through. Not only did she do this by the handful of albums she had, but more through her friend network. She gave us immediate credibility in the scene (never mind even making us aware there was a scene!). Of course, Matt and I had to find our own way, but at the very least, we weren’t met with contempt or dismissal when we showed up. Since she was cool, we were given a pass. And when you’re 14, and everyone else is 19 to 25, it means everything. It was an acceptance.

I would often sneak into my sister’s room when she was out (which was often), and go through her CD collection. All these bands, with such strange names at the time: Samiam, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, Poster Children, Jawbreaker. That’s how I first found Lungfish back around 1993, and their 1992 album (and first on Dischord Records), Talking Songs for Walking.

I was drawn in immediately. But it wasn’t until the last five years or so, and, truthfully, not until I was in my free jazz and spiritual jazz deep dive, which brought me to Indian ragas, that I could truly appreciate them and have the ears to hear them. Because here’s the thing about Lungfish, and about Rainbows From Atoms in particular: the repetition is the point.

With Lungfish, you know what you’re going to get. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes, it can feel repetitive. But it’s meant to be. It’s meant to be meditative, a way to lose your sense of time and place and self inside a rhythmic sound. The repetition isn’t a flaw the record survives. It’s the whole design.

Which is exactly where it collides with my test, and I want to be honest about the collision rather than smooth it over. The whole point of a Lungfish record is to sink in and lose yourself, to let the tracks blur into one long meditative flow. But “no skippable song” asks the opposite question: does each track stand on its own? Those two things look like they’re at war. A record built to dissolve into a single trance shouldn’t also be a record of eleven distinct, essential songs. And the quiet miracle of Rainbows is that it’s both at once. You can drop the needle and let all forty minutes wash over you as one continuous thing, and you can also go track by track and find that every one holds its own shape. Sink-in and stand-alone, in the same forty minutes. That’s the needle it threads, and it’s why it passes.

And before anyone calls the sameness simple, try to actually play it. Pick up a bass and hold the line from “Open House” steady, for the length of the song, without drifting, without your hand cramping up. It is hard. For Rainbows, repetition isn’t the absence of effort. It’s a discipline, the same muscle as sitting in meditation and coming back to the breath every single time the mind bolts for the door. These guys aren’t coasting. The trance you fall into on the other side of the speakers is built out of their refusal to break the one they enter.

Understanding Lungfish the way I do now helps me make sense of the lasting impression from when I got to see them and play with them back in 1996.

The show was in Delaware with my band Network 34. It was in a church hall. There was a stage in the hall, but all the bands of course set up on the floor. I was a teenager. They were not, and that was the first thing that hit me, before a single note. These were actual adults. And on Dischord! They were legit. Grown men, calm and a little remote and cool in a way that had nothing to do with trying to be. It was honestly kind of imposing. And then they started. Higgs stood up there with this voice, this incantatory thing, his hands and arms, covered in tattoos, moving in slow shapes over the top of the drone the other three were building, and I swear a spell was being cast on the room. It was hypnotic. It was also, if I’m honest, a little unsettling. I didn’t know whether to move or hold still. I took photos that night, and even looking at the stills months and years later gave me the same feeling. I’ve seen a lot of bands and played a lot of shows, and that is still one of the strangest and best experiences I’ve ever had in a room with a band. A séance is the word I keep coming back to.

That’s the spirit of it, and it’s also written all across Rainbows From Atoms. I want to get into the mechanics of the songs though, because the drone isn’t just a mood, it’s built, and the building is the thing the “one song a hundred times” crowd never looks at closely enough.

First off, the thing that keeps all that repetition from going flat is the groove. It’s not drone for drone’s sake. It’s not one simple beat hammered over and over. The bass tracks bluesy lines. The guitar plays octaves up and down the fretboard. So the thing that’s repeating is already full of motion and blues and weight, which is exactly what lets you fall into it without it ever going dead. A single beat repeated is monotony. A deep groove repeated is a trance.

I had no words for the droning quality to when I first heard them at 13 or when I played with them at 16, but do now, because of my recent deep dive into experimental jazz. It’s the same thing a good Indian raga does, and the same thing the spiritual, Eastern-facing end of jazz does, the Coltranes, John and Alice, and Pharoah Sanders’ explorations that stop being about chord changes and start being about staying in one place until the place cracks open. Using that repetition as a meditative, even metaphysical, reaching for something beyond yourself.

You can hear the whole method announce itself in the first song. “Instrument” kicks off on spiraling guitars and a long vocal howl, Higgs’s voice quavering as he bends it downward and holds it out there in the air. No words yet. Just tone. My head bobs along, my feet move, immediate and involuntary.

Then comes “Abraham Lincoln,” layered vocals stacked on the chorus, the guitar clean but with the gain pushed up and the reverb wide open, so the whole thing swirls around your head like weather. The bass walks, and your head goes with it, back and forth. And the drums do most of their work on the hi-hats, building the rhythm as atmosphere instead of assault. No blast beats. No big crash cymbals. Which is its own quiet argument about punk, and one I’ve come to believe in: you can have every bit of the energy and the power without a single blast beat or cymbal crash. Power is a feel, not a volume.

This is also a song where Higgs’s words push up through the wash and grab you. “Will you resist the burning urge to burn? / Will you refuse your right to choose your type of execution? / That cushion that you’re sitting on.” Most of the time, you’re not parsing his words; you’re receiving them, the way you take in a chant. The words aren’t information. They’re one more loop. But every so often, one surfaces clean and lands, and it lands harder for everything around it that didn’t.

And then, so as not be pinned as pure mystic drone, they throw “Animal Man” at you. For me, it harks back to the post-punk of the late seventies and early eighties, almost a Talking Heads kind of vibe, jittery and bright and a little funny. There’s a playfulness to it. And that’s the thing you can miss under all the serious invocation: these guys are also having fun in there. Which matters, because a record that was nothing but solemn drone would be a lesser record, and a little bit of a put-on. The fun is what keeps the seriousness from tipping into drudgery.

It’s also where my worry about this band answers itself. Line up “Instrument,” “Abraham Lincoln,” and “Animal Man,” and they’re unmistakably the same four people doing the same thing, and they’re also, clearly, three different songs reaching in three different directions. Unison, but not uniformity. That’s the trick I couldn’t explain for years. The sameness is real, and the distinctness is real, both at once.

Then, there’s “Fresh Air Cure,” which has to be one of the best grooves ever laid down in punk. I don’t say that lightly. It’s the fullest version of everything I’ve been describing, the bluesy bass and the octave guitar and the hi-hat push all locked in so deep that you stop noticing the groove as a thing and just find yourself inside it. It’s the track where the sinking-in is most total and yet still playful. Which, since that’s the whole point of the record, is why it’s the peak of the feel.

With “Open House” you can hear the discipline as a shape. Everybody lays back except for Chriest (again, try playing this line). Osborne plays just two chords through the verse. And then, right before the final pre-chorus, the guitar drops out completely, and for a band this committed to keeping the weave intact, that sudden empty space hits loud. Then it launches, heavy, and the launch lands twice as hard because the drop-out loaded the spring. They build by taking away.

“Open House” is also where you should put on the headphones, because of what they do to the voice. Higgs’s main vocal comes up the left channel, and a reverberating echo of it answers from the right, so he’s on one side of your head singing across to the other. It turns your skull into a room. Or better, a cave, a space you go down into and explore, which is exactly what this record is asking of you.

“8.14.2116” lets the guitars fly. Where the rest of the record builds its drone horizontally, by holding a figure and staying in it, this one goes vertical, layering guitar over guitar until the tracks smear into a single spiraling thing. And it points forward as much as back. You can hear it setting a path toward what someone like Bill Orcutt would do years later, the raw, spiraling, abstract guitar. The raga was the ancestor. This is the descendant, showing up early.

And then “You Might Ask Me What” stopped me cold. The intro. What on earth is Chriest doing here? I sat there, a guy who’s played bass (and guitar) for over thirty years, thinking, “How is that 4/4?” I’d have sworn it was off-time, floating, landing in all the wrong places. It isn’t. It’s plain four, square as a box. The line is just drawn across the bar crooked, hung off the downbeat so the “one” keeps hiding, and it never once actually breaks the meter, so your body finds the pulse even while your brain swears something’s wrong. That’s harder and cooler than just playing in seven, because odd time announces its own strangeness, and this hides its strangeness inside the most ordinary meter there is.

In my last post, writing about the Pink Album, I went on about time signatures, “Waffle” dropping to 3/4, “J’Nuh” running through 9/8 and 7/8. That was strangeness written into the signature. This is the opposite move, and maybe the deeper one: strangeness smuggled inside standard time, without changing the signature at all. SDRE bent time by switching meters. Lungfish bends it without switching a thing.

And a note on the gang vocals on the outro. There’s a MacKaye in the pile. Not Ian, who produced the record, but his brother Alec, of Faith and Ignition, DC hardcore down to the bone. Which is perfect timing, because it stamps the record’s punk credentials right as I’m about to call it something else entirely.

So then what is all of this, really? Lungfish was advanced art school for punk music. And I mean that specifically, not as a compliment you throw at anything a little arty.

Punk started simple. That was the whole premise: three chords and the truth. Anyone can do it; there’s no gatekeeping virtuosity. But the music didn’t stay there. By Revolution Summer and on into the mid-90s, the stuff I’ve already written about here, Spirit Assembly, SDRE, was anything but simple. And out at the far edge, you had bands making it genuinely thorny, the discordant lurch of Angel Hair, the hardcore math-rock of 1.6 Band or The Crownhate Ruin. So there’s a whole spectrum of complexity in this music, running from three chords to composition.

The mistake with Lungfish, and with Rainbows especially, is to hear it sitting down at the simple end of that spectrum. It isn’t. What Lungfish practices isn’t simplicity. It’s subtraction. And those are not the same thing. Simplicity is never having had more. Subtraction is having everything and grinding it away on purpose, down to the few elements that carry the whole charge.

I’ve been revisiting Leonard Koren’s book On Creating Things Aesthetic, where he lays out making art not as divine inspiration but as a set of intentional operations: combining, reconfiguring, extending, and, crucially, stripping down. He even names repetition itself as one of the operations, which flips the whole monotony complaint on its head. What sounds like a band with one idea is actually a band whose one idea is reduction itself.

Lungfish’s songcraft, on full display here, is a process of aesthetic subtraction, and I’d map it in stages. First, reduction in size: paring the parts down until a song is two chords and a pulse, like ‘Open House.’ Then refinement, grinding away every passage that isn’t load-bearing, which is exactly why that drop-out in ‘Open House’ hits so hard. Then abstraction, the theme boiled down to its concentrate: the riff as mantra, the howl with no words, the voice as pure tone. And finally, disintegration, both in the song and in you. Which is where the subtraction and the séance turn out to be the same thing.

Because here’s what this record actually does to you, and the reason it’s in this series at all. Every album I’ve written up here has taught me something about what music even is. That you can’t hold it. That it’s a time machine. That it keeps handing you things you can’t keep. Rainbows From Atoms teaches a different one: that music can let you disappear.

Not play in the background. That’s easy, any record can be wallpaper. I mean the opposite direction entirely. If you let it, this record doesn’t sink into the background, it lets you sink into the background. You stop being a person listening to an album and become one more element in the loop, and for a few minutes, the whole exhausting machinery of being yourself just powers down. Subtraction, taken all the way to the end, is the self coming apart. Not as loss, but as a merging with everything by letting go of the ego. That is what Higgs was doing to that room in Delaware with his arms in the air. He wasn’t performing at us. He was pulling us under. A séance is a room full of people agreeing to lose themselves together and see what comes through.

Which is a strange thing to want from a punk record, a genre mostly built on the exact opposite. On asserting yourself, planting your feet, screaming I. But it’s in there, in the repetition, in the groove, in Higgs’s slow hands. The record is quietly offering you the chance to not be yourself for the length of a side. To sink in and let go.

Melissa propped a door open. Matt and I barged through it looking for noise and speed and somewhere to belong, all the things a kid wants out of punk. I did not expect one of the bands waiting on the other side to hand me a way to briefly stop existing as me. But that’s the one that stuck. That’s the one I still put on when I need to disappear for a while. And it’s always there, patient, ready to pull me back under. All I have to do is let it.

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That’s the third in my ‘perfect punk album’ series. Let me know what you think!

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As a recap so far:

#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)

#3: Lungfish’s Rainbows From Atoms

And my intro post for this whole Substack: Nothing You Can Hold: An Introduction.

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Album: Sunny Day Real Estate (LP2, but we always called it The Pink Album)

Artist: Sunny Day Real Estate

Label: Sub Pop (1995)

Runtime: 9 songs, ~37 minutes

My first jump into this series started with an album relatively close to home and not on streaming services, Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County. This time, I’m going in the opposite direction. But first, a confession:

I didn’t like Sunny Day Real Estate at first. There. I said it. I remember hearing Diary for the first time from my brother. I think it was on a CD in his car, shortly after it was released. And it just didn’t do it for me. I’d love to say, of course, I recognized and loved this genius when I first heard it. But I didn’t. The music felt slow. The production was too clean. And even though I had been listening to vocals from Ian MacKaye’s yells in Minor Threat to Blake Schwarzenbach’s guttural singing in Jawbreaker to the nasally voice of Fat Mike, these vocals were strange. This high keening thing honestly repelled me at first. I didn’t even resonate with the name. Or the album artwork. So I didn’t connect with it. And I know I wasn’t the only one, even if nobody wants to admit that now. If that’s you too, I’m here for you. You’re not alone. Your secret is safe with me.

But I don’t think that was me being slow (even at 14-15 years old), not really. I think these records were just genuinely divergent. It’s hard to remember from here, now that SDRE is carved into the canon and every band cites them, but in the DIY scene of that moment, they were startling. Truly different from everything around them. I didn’t have ears for it at first listen. And some things are startling enough that it takes a few listens before you even understand what you’re hearing.

I talked in my last post about how our relationship and association with music, or with certain songs, can evolve over time, or pull us back to that one moment, on that one couch, listening to that one song. I said music, as an art form, a communication and emotive device, is not static. It’s also not static in the sense that our own understanding of the music can change. While the song may remain the same, it comes along with us as we live and change. Things we used to love may now seem trite and insignificant. What at first might repel us may soon, or even years later, finally dawn on us and make us play it on repeat. It’s the beauty of music. We can always come back to it and give it another try. Even if we’re not ready for it at first, it’ll be there waiting for us until we are. Regardless of the intensity of the genre, recorded music, as an art form, is patient and forgiving.

That was SDRE for me. After a few weeks of giving it a go, taking a break, and trying again, which, as a 15-year-old growing up in the punk scene, is like a couple of years, it clicked, and it clicked hard.

So you’d figure Diary is the one I’d write up. It’s the beloved one, the one everybody names. But it doesn’t make this series, and I want to be clear about why. This whole “perfect punk album” thing runs on one test, as I laid out in my last post: no skippable song. And “Phuerton Skeurto” is a skippable song. I’m sorry. It just is. It might work on Jeremy Enigk’s Return of the Frog Queen (which is great, but who among us wasn’t slightly disappointed upon hearing it that it wasn’t more like SDRE?), but here we’re just waiting for it to pass. A pretty little piano interlude I’ve reached over and skipped more times than I can count. Or thought “great, I have 2 and a half minutes to step away from this record and get back in time for ‘Shadows.’” This album is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. It’s even likely to have their best songs. But one skip, and the record’s out. Otherwise, this isn’t really a test, is it?

The record that passes the test is the one that came after, the one with the pink cover and nothing else on it. No words, no photos, no liner notes. Officially, it’s self-titled; the discographers call it LP2, but my friends and I always just called it The Pink Album, so that’s what I’m calling it here. Nine songs. Everyone earns their spot.

What I didn’t know at the time but only learned years later was how this record was written pressing right up against the band’s imminent collapse. Apparently, some of the quick resolutions in songs may have been due to band dynamics and recording management rather than intentional song craft. And, thankfully, my ears weren’t deceiving me; a lot of what Jeremy sang was sound, placeholders for lyrics that weren’t written, finished, or recorded. Sub Pop released the record when the band had already called it quits.

But this type of band lifecycle was so common in the punk scene that I knew and grew up in. Bands formed, played, broke up, reformed as new entities, went off in different directions. Often enough with some of the same members. And for the really great bands, which obviously SDRE was, I sometimes think that’s the way it had to be. That amount of energy, that amount of emotional pressure and release, that amount of musical power is near impossible to sustain. It is like a supernova, where the star burns through its massive energy until its weight and gravity make it collapse in on itself, until all that force, all that energy, erupts into a massive explosion. And The Pink Album, in my opinion, captures that moment of convergence and eruption.

What I heard, knowing none of the backstory, was this: there’s a breath to the playing. That’s the best word I have for it. The songs inhale and exhale. There is space in these songs, among the instruments, whereas Diary is much more compact in sound. The drums capture it best, played with precision and skill, but also with ease. And it’s whimsical, which is not a word anyone reaches for with this band, all that anguish and grandeur, but it’s in there. Melodies that skip where you expect them to trudge. It’s across nearly every bass line. And dare I say it, there is an optimism across the tracks. The major chord progressions help, but it goes beyond these. Across the album, there is a lightness moving through even the heaviest passages, like the band is playing with the songs and not just playing them.

Two foundational elements that give it this air and movement are the songs’ time signatures and William Goldsmith’s drumming. Throughout the album, the band plays with time signatures beyond a standard 4/4. This gives both more space for runs and a swing-like propulsion that links the songs. “Friday,” the lead track, kicks it off in a 6/8 time signature. This gives the song a lilting movement and space. “5/4”, despite its name, also comes in at 6/8, although William plays it differently than most with snare accents on the third quarter note (with the kick on the first and fourth) in the verse’s measures giving it a more unexpected movement before running steady in the choruses (which is actually how he plays “Friday” as well but here it’s more isolated). “Waffle” kicks off in 4/4 and drops to 3/4. “J’Nuh” goes from 9/8 to 6/8 to the bridge, which transitions between measures of 4/4 and 7/8. There’s a lot happening here. And it’s all feel.

Which brings me to Goldsmith. His drums. My goodness. From the time signatures to his syncopation to his fills, he plays with a musicality across the record that sets the bar for everyone. Musicians and listeners alike. I don’t know a single person who can’t help but air drum some of his fills. “Rodeo Jones.” “Red Elephant.” Forget about it. His drum passages are among the most memorable parts of the songs. And with his feel, there is often the sense that he’s riding slightly behind the beat. This opens the sound up immensely, much as John Bonham would. And then there’s his drum tones and sound on this album. The snare pierces, not in an unpleasant way, but rather serves as the lighthouse across the record. Can I call it perfect? I think so.

And the words. Ok, so, a lot of the vocals on this record are not words. I couldn’t understand half of what Enigk was singing, and it did not matter even slightly. The feeling came through anyway. The voice works like another instrument, pure melody and urgency, and you stop needing the words to mean anything in particular. (Years later, I learned a lot of it really was gobbledygook, placeholder syllables that never became lyrics.) But then, out of all that wash of melody and yearning, a line will cut through clean and land like a knife. Some of the most emo lines out there. Like “You remind me of a secret, place woe” from “Waffle.” Or “Had a dream that you still loved me / is it my imagination?” from “Theo B.” These lines puncture through, right in the heart, surfacing out of a record where most of the words dissolve into sound.

That’s the texture of the whole album. Mostly, you feel it. The time signatures. The drumming. The vocal melodies and lines. Nate Mendel’s sweeping runs on his bass keep time and set the themes. Occasionally, it tells you exactly what it means, and those moments hit harder because of everything around them that doesn’t. “Emo” is a term I’ve resisted ever since I first heard it (and still find it strange being placed deep within it with my band, Eldritch Anisette), but if SDRE is the quintessential emo band, it’s not only the emotional quality of the lyrics or melodies, but it’s the feel that captures the entire sound demonstrated across this album, the way the band writes and plays. (Hint: remember this in future posts when I talk about connections between punk and jazz!)

The song that shows you the record’s whole engine is “Waffle.” I threw it on again for this, really listened, and it’s even more ruthless than I remembered. It isn’t a single build with a single payoff. It’s build, crest, gone. Build, crest, gone. Over and over, each peak lasting a few seconds and dropping away before you can hold it, the cycle tightening as the song goes. The crests get bigger. That whole back third is a dense run of the biggest ones, stacked close together, each still vanishing fast. The song spends four minutes teaching you that the peak won’t wait for you.

And then, at 4:09, it finally breaks all the way open. The biggest lift in the song, and the only one that doesn’t snap back. It resolves, and it’s just gone. Song’s over. To me, that’s release, the payoff the whole thing was climbing toward, finally given. But I get that for some people it resolves so fast it barely registers as a resolution at all, and the song ends feeling unresolved, taken. It holds both. Either way, the thrust of the song is the rising, not the arriving. The tension is the substance. The payoff is deliberately too quick to be the point, because the point was the wanting.

Then it’s on to the next song before you’ve even caught your breath. Except here’s the thing that tells you somebody really thought about the order of these songs: the next track is “8,” and it opens with about 72 seconds of quiet before it fully takes off. The album breathes for you. It knocks the wind out, and “8” hands it back. That’s a record thinking in album time, not just song time. Similar thing I was on about with Spirit Assembly, in my last post, actually. Say your piece, don’t waste a second, trust people to keep up. Different band, same faith.

Now. I have to interrupt this discussion of SDRE and The Pink Album because after this record was released, a crime occurred, and I have to talk about it. Two crimes, in fact. Let me set it up properly. The rhythm section on this record is Nate Mendel on bass and William Goldsmith on drums, and they are extraordinary. One thing this album does is put on clear display what a strong rhythm section can do for a record and a band. I can point to every song. But go listen to “Rodeo Jones.” Or “Red Elephant.” Or “Waffle.” Or “Iscarabaid.” Listen to the way they get locked into one another and just drive the entire song on both melody and rhythm. It’s hard to do both, and yet they’re destroying. Nobody can listen to those songs, “Rodeo Jones” especially, and think these are background players. And, as we all know, Dave Grohl heard them and was like, they have to be in my new band, Foo Fighters. And so, they both join. Fantastic. Yes, of course. Greatness recognizing greatness. And then, the crimes occur, one quick and dirty. The second prolonged and ongoing. Goldsmith got taken out back and shot: he spent weeks recording the drums for The Colour and the Shape (Foo Fighters’ first album recorded as a full band) and Grohl went back and quietly re-recorded nearly all of them himself. Goldsmith found out secondhand. From Nate, as it happens. His name survives on a couple of tracks. He left, and who could blame him? That part’s well-documented; it’s not me talking. But Nate stayed, and this is where the second crime occurred and is still ongoing: Nate got muzzled. He’s being held hostage. Still there, decades now, playing competent arena rock root notes, while somewhere in him lives the guy who played “Rodeo Jones” or “Theo B.” Dave, come on. Don’t be threatened. I was lucky enough to have toured the festival circuits in Europe (and New Jersey) with Foo Fighters back with Boysetsfire some years back, and I fell for the Foo Fighters then: they’re great guys, and it’s great music. And still. Who can listen to “Rodeo Jones” and go, yeah, sound like that never again? Who can listen to The Pink Album, do the right thing by recruiting these guys for your band, and then erase one literally and the other metaphorically? Dave, you knew what you were getting. You can be the frontman and still have them shine. It may be too late for William, but not for Nate. Liberate Nate!

Ok. Back to the record…

Because the record is where this ends up anyway. I keep thinking about what The Pink Album actually does to you, and it’s this: it keeps handing you things you can’t keep. The gorgeous line that surfaces once and dissolves back into the wash. The build that crests and vanishes before your hand closes around it. The payoff at 4:09 that resolves and is instantly over. Even the words, half of them were never words at all, just sounds standing in for lyrics that never came. The drum fills that come and go, making each song. Everything on this record is fleeting on purpose. You don’t get to hold any of it. You just get to be there while it happens, and then it’s gone, and you put it on again. And the fact that this was written while the band was imploding and released after they called it quits, emphasizes this even more.

Which, if you read the first thing I ever posted here, might sound familiar. Music is the art you can’t hold. This album knows that about itself better than almost any record I own. It hands you the moment and takes it back in the same motion, over and over, nine songs, no skips. Startling then. Perfect now. Perfect then too. I’m just glad I finally understood SDRE well enough in time before this album came out, so I could enjoy it for over three decades and counting.

That’s the second entry in my perfect punk album series. As a recap:

#1: Spirit Assembly’s Welcome to Lancaster County

#2: Sunny Day Real Estate’s s/t (aka The Pink Album)

#3: stay tuned…!

Album: Welcome to Lancaster County

Artist: Spirit Assembly

Label: Yuletide Records (1996)

Runtime: 8 songs, ~23 minutes

Ok. So this is the one I want to start with.

It was 1994 or 1995, and I was 14 or 15, the first time I saw Spirit Assembly. A room in Newark, Delaware, on a bill I’m pretty sure had Policy of Three on it. No stage. There almost never was. The three of them set up near one end, we stood a few feet off, and a song in, the gap between the band and the rest of us was just gone. I’d been going to shows for a few months by then. But it was already long enough to know I loved this. What it was doing to me, I wouldn’t figure out for years…if I ever have.

So, as a way to kickoff my “perfect punk album” series, I’m starting with one close to home: Welcome to Lancaster County by Spirit Assembly. Their only full-length, eight songs, clocking in at about 23 minutes, released in 1996 on Yuletide Records. You can’t stream it. It’s not on Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, none of that. If you want to hear it you gotta check out a YouTube rip or a transfer some hardcore blog put up - and at least one of those blogs keeps a note begging people not to re-up it anywhere that makes money. Keep the thing breathing, the note says, don’t sell it. Or you can check Discogs and try to get the real thing. In part, this is why I wanted to start with this record. In an era when you can pull up almost any record ever made in about four seconds, this is one you have to know about and go find.

I should tell you first that I grew close to this band, because if I’m honest it’s all over everything I’m about to say. At that first show I bought their 7”, Old Joe the Eternal, and I saw them over a dozen times after. I played shows with them, booked shows for them, got to know them off the show floor, and the short version is they were solid guys. The kind you were lucky to have been a teenager around and come up in punk with. I remember Sam was a high school teacher and I was like damn, how lucky are those kids? What’s he like in class? Later, after Spirit Assembly was done, and after my own run of bands with my best friend Tim on drums was as well, Tim went and joined Fields Lay Fallow with a couple of them. I was around for that at the start too, including in New York while they recorded. So, I’m not coming to this record cold. I never could. (And if I’m honest, I think that trip to NYC with them firmly planted my desire to move to NYC which I did in the summer of 1998. I remember sitting in Dojo’s on West 4th Street together and being like, wow, I need to be here…but I digress).

(a flyer for one of the shows I put on and played with Spirit Assembly)

There’s something else I have to talk about when it comes to music before I can write any of this straight. And it’s something that runs across anything I write here. A record is a time machine. You drop the needle, you press play, and it doesn’t just run, it hands things back to you. It excavates. It pulls things, memories, feelings, ideas, out from somewhere within you. I don’t think we recognize it consciously at first, if at all sometimes, but it’s there. The first time you heard the song. The kid whose bedroom floor you were sitting on. The person who put it on a mixtape for you, especially if you had a crush on them. What you were going through at some point while listening to it. Any and all of that. I can’t put on Welcome to Lancaster County without some of that coming back: the inserts we read till we’d memorized them, the groove we wore down to nothing. Bringing it to my then-girlfriend’s house and playing it for our friends for the first time. The memories of hearing these songs live. Dru’s arms flailing around, Gus dancing and smiling, Sam yelling with urgency. For a long time I figured that was a problem for a series like this, all that personal weather fogging up the record. I don’t anymore. It’s just how anybody lives with music. Nobody hears anything from nowhere. And the record won’t sit still while you get older. It keeps coming back around. Something almost thirty years old can hand you a version of yourself you’d lost track of, then turn into a slightly different record the next time through, because you changed, and even if it didn’t, it seems like it must have. It’s not static. Even though an album is a particular recording of a particular moment, it’s a living art. You can generate a new relationship to a song, an album, than one from the past. It can anchor and invoke and it can evolve and generate. This one does all of that for me. It also flat-out stands on its own without any of my personal attachments. Both are true. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

So let me tell you what I mean when I call it perfect, because I’m going to lean on that word all series and I don’t want to throw it around. It doesn’t have to be the band’s best record. It doesn’t even have to hold their best song. Here’s the whole test: there’s not one track on it you’d skip. Not one. And this holds up. Eight songs, every single one earns the spot. That bar is higher than it sounds, and streaming has half-trained the skill out of us, feeding us a song at a time until the album as a built thing nearly disappeared. The apparent brevity with this one - 23 minutes - is the point too. The band says its piece and gets out. There’s an economy to it I came up believing in. You earn somebody’s time, then you give it back. It’s lightning in a bottle, or in this case, on vinyl.

First thing everybody notices about this record, (other than the kinda haunting sample of a kid talking about a blood draw that kicks the record off or once they get past not being able to even find the record) is that it sounds huge. And yet there are three people making it. Three. You’d swear there were five or six of them crammed in the room. A lot of that is what happens when there’s only three of you and nobody gets to just hold down their one corner. The drums aren’t keeping time so much as articulating the album’s dynamism and urgency. The guitar covers an immense amount of ground on its own - swinging from discordant yet melodious riffs to thrashing chords. And the bass is pulling double duty - holding the floor down while it walks a melody right over the top. And on top of it, vocals that criss-cross throughout. Vocals as instruments. That demand your attention and exhaust themselves in the process. That’s the engine of the whole thing. Three people each playing like a person and a half, which is how a trio ends up sounding like a much bigger band. This fullness existed live and this record captures it.

So let me take two songs to show you how they pull it off. Start with “Continuity W/Out Question.” It opens on a guitar chord riff, drums and bass punching the accents right alongside it, and the band comes in together, full up. The chords sound like an air raid siren hitting in short bursts. The bass the shelter. The drums the bombs hitting. Then it does the thing that tells you who they are. It drops. Not into a quiet part, exactly. Into something cleaner, jangly, almost upbeat, the guitar left ringing. Except the notes are almost wrong and are that way on purpose. Angular. Dissonant. The kind of clustered, off-kilter voicing Monk would lay on a piano and dare you to call a mistake.

Here’s the move underneath it. The loud part isn’t where the tension is. The clean part is. You hang on those ringing, sour notes like a rope pulled taut, all load and no motion. Strip the distortion off and the unease climbs instead of easing, because now every wrong note is out in the open with nothing to hide behind. Vocals come through nearly breathless. It’s a break in the alert trying to get a message across to you before everything crashes again. Then the heavy comes back and you’re not relieved. You’re launched. Swinging out on the thing you were just gripping. Most bands run it the other way around. And that’s the exact moment the double vocals hit, two voices at once as the chords slam back into distortion. They save the fullest, most kinetic vocal moment for the release, not the tension. The voices are the sound of letting go.

“Nameless” wants the same release and gets there through a different door. It opens on bass chords, low and wide, followed by hi hats. Almost a call and response. Then comes in with single notes picked out on guitar over the top, the pitch sitting a hair off true, and Dru lets loose on the drums playing them musically. Not setting the time but the melody. Which is already a strange, good inversion. The bass is holding the harmony while the guitar hangs those slightly sour notes above it, the reverse of who usually does what. While the drums providing tonal texture. It starts slow. It builds. And once it’s up to full speed it just stays there, the whole band moving in blocks, Gus swinging chords instead of picking out lines. Which is a lot of why three people fill a room like five. Nobody’s playing small.

Then the move that makes the song, and it’s easy to miss if you’re only listening for volume. Everything stays loud. Nothing pulls back. But the drums cut to half-time inside a single measure, the syncopation yanking the floor out from under a song that never actually slowed down. You don’t really hear that drop. You feel it. Live, it was the thing that threw my chest forward and back, the count lurching and my whole torso heaving with it, and the record still does it to me now, decades on, sitting down or walking or wherever I am. Late in the song a quiet part opens up, then the loud ending comes crashing back through. And it closes the way it started. On the bass, alone. Opens on bass, ends on bass, everything else built and burned off in between.

The double vocals on “Nameless” - screaming around each other the way I remember them live, add rhythmic push and color. The words are doing their own work too, braided into the music instead of laid on top. “Nameless” is personal and political at once, the way the best of this scene always was, and the subject is how often heterosexual men move through the world in constant sexualization of women. “I’ll disengage your wretched excuse for a man / it makes me so ill / the ultimate body? / why can’t you hear her mind? / not what her body supposedly says / your grip attempts to hold me down / but the struggle strives on in me / I’ll never let that die / I’ll take you down.”

Put the two of them side by side and you’ve got the record’s whole method in miniature. “Continuity” builds its tension out of harmony, the clean jangle and those Monk-wrong chords, and the release is the swing back into distortion. “Nameless” builds its tension out of time, loud the entire way, the floor pulled out from under you by the drums alone. Same band. Same idea, chased down two different ways.

These dynamics - angular and dissonant guitar, melodious and thick bass, musical and textured drumming, urgent and breathless vocals and screams, composed in songs that swing from quiet, clean, and sometimes caressing like a whisper to surging, syncopated heavy sections - make this album and provide its signature throughout.

That’s what I mean about no skippable song. Every track here is good, sure. But more than that, the record keeps turning up a new way to do the one thing it came to do to you.

The not-on-streaming thing gets stranger the more you sit with what this band turned out to be worth. They never got famous. They got something that outlasts famous. You can draw a straight line of a litany of bands inspired out of this one trio. Spirit Assembly were quietly, hugely influential and almost completely uncredited, a band a lot of other bands came out of without ever saying so. And the record that holds the best of them is the one you can’t hear without going out of your way for it. So part of what this is, honestly, is just preservation.

I keep landing back in that room in Newark. The band on the floor, me at 14 or 15 with zero idea I’d still be turning this over thirty years later. That’s the time machine again. The record’s a way back to that kid, and it’s still teaching the older me, because every time I think I’ve finally got it pinned, it comes up new. So if any of this makes you want to hear it, good. You’re going to have to work for it a little. Ask somebody. Follow a link. Find it the slow way, the way we all used to find everything before it got handed to us, which was always part of how this music got under your skin in the first place. It made you come to it. So go find it. It’s worth the work.

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Nothing You Can Hold: An Introduction

This has been a long time coming. I have one of those small chat groups of long-time friends. For a couple years now they’ve been telling me I should write about music, and I’ve spent those same years not doing it. So with their nudging, and finally out of excuses, here it is.

I should tell you who’s talking. I’ve been inside music since I was 13, making it, setting it up, sharing it, listening to it, traveling on tour with it, and going to see it, mostly in the DIY punk scene. I played in a run of bands — Network 34, Eldritch Anisette, Midvale, Dorian Gray, Dear Tonight, Young Lady, and Boysetsfire — and from 1993 to 2012 I was also one of the people putting the shows on, first in Newark, Delaware and then in New York City. For a long stretch, music wasn’t a hobby I had. It was most of the structure of my life.

Then it thinned out, the way these things do. Until last weekend, the last show I played was a 70,000-person festival in Germany in August 2012 with Boysetsfire (video of the set is actually online here). After that show, which was the last one on that tour, my brother, the drummer, quit/was kicked out, and I was told to choose him or the band. So, I quit. For a long time, I couldn’t go to a show. I couldn’t pick up my guitar or my bass. I didn’t want anything to do with it. To be honest, it was too painful. I kept listening (I never stopped listening) but I stopped making anything, and with the exception of a handful of shows, I stopped going for nearly a decade.

It all seemed like a former part of myself. A distant memory, of something I once knew, but that no longer had a relationship with. That me that was living with music, seemed like someone else. Then two things happened that really changed it all.

One happened about a year ago: Eldritch Anisette got reissued by Numero Group. We reconnected as a band, started playing together again, and I realized how much I missed creating music with people I love. There is a power in creating something deep from within myself, sharing that creation with other people, hearing their response and creation, and building something new as a collective. I’d been starving. I needed the grounding of a personal connection to music and the release of making it. And then seeing the thousands of younger people out there, responding to this music we made three decades ago and creating their own music, inspired me. It made me discover a part of myself I thought I lost.

It took me a while to be able to say plainly what I’d been missing. Music is the strangest thing we make. You can’t hold it. It’s universal and yet it’s completely intangible, the one art with nothing to grab, existing only while it’s happening and then gone, which is exactly why it asks you to be there for it, present, now. Live, it does something stranger still: a room full of people agree to be present together, at the same moment, for something not one of them can keep. Your own expression meets everyone else’s, and for a few minutes you stop being only yourself; you’re part of some larger body that exists only because everyone showed up. The best word I have for that is one I’ll probably overuse around here: it’s a kind of magic. It’s also, I’ve come to believe, a kind of need.

This next part actually came first, before the band ever got back together. Three years ago I was in Portugal and wandered into a record store, and I was floored — not by punk, but by how much vast, living music I’d spent decades standing next to without ever walking into. So many musical subgenres from around the world. Whole worlds of it, from everywhere, and a great deal of jazz. Jazz wasn’t even new to me: at 15, right around when I started Network 34, I’d been discovering Coltrane alongside punk with my best friend Tim Nichols, the drummer for Network and Eldritch, who used to sit in at a jazz club near us. It was amazing watching this 15 year old kid stun the old timers in the jazz club. Portugal woke that back up. I came home and decided to actually learn the music this time, not dabble, learn it. Not just dip my toes but jump in head first. Over the next couple years, I took more than ten classes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, went to every concert I could, worked through documentaries, read more than twenty books, and bought over a hundred records.

The part I’m proudest of is how I did it: with the algorithm switched off. No “you might also like.” I found everything the old way…word of mouth, liner notes, names dropped in the footnotes of books…and by walking into stores and asking a human what I should hear next, which turns out to still be one of the great conversations available to a person. It rhymed, hard, with how I’d found punk in the first place, back before any of us were online: slow, personal, a little effortful, and therefore yours. Discovering the music was inseparable from discovering myself, the same as it had been as a teenager.

I went deepest into the jazz of the 1960s and ‘70s — the spiritual and free end of it, Coltrane and Don Cherry and Alice Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. And the deeper I got, the more I kept hearing things I already knew from somewhere else. I’m going to save that argument for its own piece, because it deserves the room, but here’s the shape to come: this music and the punk I came up in are far closer kin than almost anyone says out loud. There’s a lot more coming on that.

I’ll be honest that all of this arrived right when I needed it. Work was hard, life was throwing a few things at me, my stress was high and my bearings were off, and going this deep into music, old and new, mine and everyone else’s, put my feet back on the ground. It reminded me there was more to the picture than the part that was wearing me down, and that I need music in my life the way I need the short list of other things I don’t bother questioning. This blog is my attempt to hold onto that. Or, since you can’t hold music, to keep showing up for it.

So here’s what For Want Of is going to be. Some of it will be me thinking out loud about music and the metaphysical, because that’s where my head tends to go. A lot of it will be a series I’ve wanted to write for years: perfect punk albums. I mean “punk” as broadly as I always have — hardcore, emo, screamo, punk rock, the whole thing. It was only ever “punk” to me; the subgenres came later, and mostly from outside. And I mean “perfect” in a specific, nearly mechanical sense that streaming has just about trained out of us. In an era built to hand us one smooth, disposable song at a time, I’ve spent the past year going back to albums, front to back, and a few of them stopped me cold. Not because they’re necessarily the band’s best, or hold the band’s best song, but because there’s no skippable track anywhere on them. Every song earns its place. Nothing you’d reach over to skip. That’s the whole standard, no skippable song, and it’s rarer than it sounds.

And lastly: jazz. I want to discuss that era, that scene, the music theory, the politics, and its parallel to the DIY punk underground I keep circling back to. If I’m lucky, I’ll even get to sit down with a few of the people who were actually there.

That’s the plan. Thanks for being here for the first one, it only took a few years and a few patient friends to get me to start. The next one won’t take nearly as long.