These are all the shows I can remember… the best I can remember them. No promises on how entertaining each post will be, but I’ll do the best I can. They’ll be in the best chronological order I can remember, but again, no promises.
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I’m proud of this record and I’m excited for everyone to hear it. It’s my story, it’s our stories, it’s the great things about the Hoosier state and it’s the bad things that affect us no different than anyone else. No place is good or bad, but it is my place. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, where you were is gone, where you thought you were going never existed in the first place. If you can get a grip on these notions, the rest of life is a lot easier to stomach. You are where you are, enjoy it the best you can and know you don’t have to stay there.
Lush appeared in my newsfeed this morning and I just thought, “Man, people don’t know this band like they should.” So, I made a (very) incomplete list of great songs that people may have forgotten about from the 90s. I just let Apple Music’s suggestions and my pinball machine of a brain take me wherever they wanted to.
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I haven’t asked Tim Carroll if he meant “Ted Sweatt” as an anti-war song, but it absolutely meets my high standards of a protest song. As a songwriter myself, I’d prefer not to know what he meant because everything you need is in the song and you, the listener, can decide whether this is just a tribute to a man from the same Indiana county as Tim, or whether there’s something more. Personally, I think this ranks up there with “Copperhead Road” on the list of great songs with social messages.
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The other night we watched the Springsteen biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought we’d be watching a biopic of Bruce making my favorite record of his, but what I saw hit way too close to home for me. That’s not to say it isn’t good, it is, and I highly recommend it, but, it made me realize that Indiana is closer to Nebraska than I intended it to be.
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To paraphrase Noel Gallagher, “the people didn’t want Jimi Hendrix, they didn’t know what they wanted, we had to tell them what they wanted.” There are two truths in that statement. One, that great art, if given a platform, will find its audience. And two, and the powers that be know this, the audience is made up of followers.
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Just music, I promise…
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Cool is not dead, it’s just much harder to find.
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Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, if I write something, it’s because I need to hear it. Whether that’s a song, a social media post, or whatever, I’m not putting things out into the world as if I’m some kind of wise guru, I’m simply saying things that are on my mind. And the decision to make those thoughts public revolve around the idea that if I need to hear these things, then maybe someone else does too.
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While this may sound like a ghost story, I believe it to be about an interaction with something more sinister. Whatever it was, it was witnessed by many and in 20 years, I’ve never come up with a scientific explanation for it.
I just watched a YouTube list video on the top 50 post-punk songs, and though the person had some great songs on the list, it was too heavily weighted to about five bands, so I thought I’d make my own.
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A quick note before I get into it: while some of these are from big artists and big records, I tried to avoid low hanging fruit. Yes, I would have loved to have written “November Rain” and gotten the paycheck that’s come with it over the last 30 years, but I wanted to shine a light on some songs that don’t get as much attention. So, this is not my “best songs of all time list”, but they are songs so good, that it burns me I didn’t get to write.
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I often think about how uncomfortable I am all the time. I begin to wish I had some kind of community or clique to fit into, some place to belong where I’d no longer feel so uncomfortable. Then I realize that, not only will this never happen, but I don’t want it to happen. It would change me in such a fundamental way that I would no longer recognize myself if it happened. You see, there are a lot of people in the world who want to be an outsider, or that who market themselves as outsiders, but they’re not. If you’re truly an outsider, it’s a lonely and uncomfortable place to be, and if there’s anything the average human doesn’t want to be it’s lonely and uncomfortable.
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We as a culture are always looking for “work-life” balance and to make things easier on ourselves. This is a privilege of 21st century western civilization. We were all made to work, not necessarily for “the man” but we were made to work.
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