The Private Canon: Why Some Books and Albums Become Ours
The public canon tells us what lasted. The private canon tells us what we carried: the books and albums that found us at the right time and never quite left.
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Too Young to Be This Tired: S.E. Hinton, The Replacements, and the Art of Youthful Burnout
Teenage alienation is easy to romanticize after the fact. The cigarettes look better in memory. So do the leather jackets, messy bedrooms, loud guitars, dumb fights, desperate friendships, and late-night conviction that if you could only get out of this town, this school, this house, everything might finally begin. From a distance, it can all…
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Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell as Memoir in Fragments
Some albums become difficult to write about because the conversation around them has hardened. Everyone knows the context and the superlatives. Eventually, even a great record can disappear behind the language people use to praise it. Carrie & Lowell has been written about extensively since its release, and for obvious reasons. It is an album…
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Zadie Smith on Music, Ecstasy, and the Collapse of Taste
Everyone has at least one artist they have dismissed out of hand. Be it for the voice, the style, or even just the image, you put up an immediate wall and just say “no, thanks”. Sometimes that rejection is honest. Some music does not reach us, and that is fine. Nobody needs to fake a…
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5 Essential Indie Music Memoirs That Go Beyond the Usual Rock-Star Story
Indie music has always had a romanticised mythos to it. A band forms in a basement. Someone prints flyers at work. Six people pile into a borrowed van with a broken heater and no money. Everyone smells terrible and nobody gets paid. Years later, they call it the best time of their lives. That version…
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Cold Rooms and Severe Beauty: The Icy Worlds of Fleur Jaeggy and Nico
Some artists make the first move. They give you a melody to hold onto, a character who tells you what she wants, or an emotion that arrives with its meaning neatly attached. Fleur Jaeggy and Nico don’t do that. Jaeggy writes in short, precise sentences that can feel almost unnervingly calm. Nico’s music after the…
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Men Waiting Badly: Antonio di Benedetto, Bill Callahan, and the Comedy of Masculine Drift
Some men can turn waiting into a full identity. They are beings-in-suspension. They are waiting for the transfer, the call, the woman, the apology, the promotion, the revelation, the clean beginning, the better self that is supposedly on its way and will, any day now, assume control of the situation. Until then, they endure. They…
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Summer Afternoon Reading and Sun-Drenched Indie: 5 Book and Album Pairings
There is a very specific kind of summer afternoon that deserves better than random shuffle. You know the one. A book open in your lap. A drink that used to be cold. A patch of sun that has slowly migrated from pleasant to mildly aggressive. Maybe a fan somewhere. Maybe an open window. Maybe the…
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5 Guitarist Memoirs That Go Beyond the Riffs
I can’t remember exactly when I had this epiphany, but at some point after reading dozens of musician memoirs I realized that guitarist memoirs hit differently than those by singers. Now, that is not an anti-singer position. Singers get the spotlight, the scream-back lyrics, the giant public wound, the famous silhouette at center stage. There…
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The Room You Can’t Leave: Infinite Jest, The Weeknd, and the Trap of Desire
The scariest pleasures are not the ones that get old quickly. Those are easy. They disappoint you or make you feel bad fast enough that your self-respect has time to stage a small recovery. The dangerous pleasures are the ones that work beautifully. They work so well that the rest of life starts to look…
