One day your kindergartner comes home and excitedly tells you about the Code Red drill they did at school. It’s a gut punch. One day you’re at the bank getting $2 bills for Christmas, and see something about a shooting in Connecticut. You squeeze their tiny hand a little harder. …

How hard could it be? — Best of lists…Top 10s…Desert island Discs… Reading them is a joy for me. Working through the exercise on your own? Not so much. I’m the kind of person that will spend years tweaking my picks, only to immediately regret what I’ve put out, and beg the universe for a do-over. …

100 records in 2022 challenge- #30 — You know the drill; a band finds itself with a page of erased tour dates, gets bored, and decides to fill the void by making a record. Some even did it remotely or in another unconventional setting. Some turned out to be anthems for the pandemic. Others were clearly filler while waiting to fire the tour bus back up. And some represent a return to form. Poppy, jingle-jangle college rock usually gets an automatic stamp of approval from me.

In a lot of ways, Pearl Jam’s Binaural record represents a lot of beginnings and ends for the band. The band said goodbye to producer Brendan O’Brien, and hello to Tchad Blake. They’d already bade farewell to drummer Jack irons, and Matt Cameron joined them in the studio for the first time. Mike McCready went into rehab to say goodbye to an addiction. This would be the group’s 6th studio album, and by this point they’d long left chasing chart numbers in the rearview mirror.

For someone who describes himself as a non musician, Brian Eno has had an outsized influence on music & musician both. — From his early days as a member of Roxy Music, to his own solo albums, to working with a multitude of artists and producing 100s of records, his body of work is massive. Going through them all is far beyond the scope of this essay, but writing this on his…

You might know me from my music writing, and as the guy looking out over his coffee cup at you. But there’s more to me than music, coffee, and planes. Okay, not a whole lot, but still… Here are a few things you might be surprised to find out. Does…