My EP is streaming anywhere you might want to stream it.

Work for Waste is lo-fi indie rock made from Fender guitars, dry drum kits and the occasional facsimile of a vintage electric piano. Frequent topics include Romantic-era poets, paranoia, and the increasing probability that the bugs are going to win.

Click here to find a link to your favorite music platform.

New music about bugs and pavement and the inevitable march towards extinction

What can I say, I'm a happy guy. Production, drums and keys by Jeff of Of Heaven and Sea. Album photo courtesy of Kal at Unsplash. "Work for W.A.S.T.E." via Thomas Pynchon. Music, lyrics and guitars are me. Enjoy. Or don't. That's cool, too. Click here to listen on Soundcloud. Or view the video below.

"This is the story of every band..."

My first interaction with Virtue wasn't necessarily positive. I couldn't get past the fact that the owner of the coolest voice in rock insisted on ironically auto-tuning every other word. "For fuck's sake, Julian, why won't you sing?" I thought and that was it. I moved on.

A few days later I read an album review in Stereogum. Actually, it's not much of a review. It's more of a long-read meditation on what it's like to get older. I'm going to try to sum it up, and I'm going to fail, but here it goes:

When you're young, you form a band. Eventually that band becomes a trap you can't get out of without ruining everyone else in the band. So if you're any type of non-sociopathic human, you don't leave. You just kind of coast for the next few... holy shit... decades.

The band in question is, of course, The Strokes. But what I couldn't get over was how Nelson wasn't just writing about The Strokes or Julian or even The Voidz. He was writing about every band, every business, every partnership everyone has ever been in. Hell, some of the paragraphs could've been about a marriage.

I went back and listened to Virtue again. It was like I was listening to a whole new album. Then I read the article again. (And at 11,000-ish words, that's a commitment.) Then I listened to the album. Then I watched some Voidz videos and tried to teach myself a few of the riffs. Then I read the article and listened to the album and that's basically been how I have been spending all my free time recently.

It's probably a stretch to say that Virtue means as much to me now as Arena did in 1984. But it's pretty important.

I have always been fascinated by this observation

When you look at the top-selling music acts of the modern era, the North American ones are almost always solo artists, while the others are almost always groups. In the top 22, there are only five exceptions - mostly American rockers like Metallica, the Eagles, Van Halen and Aerosmith.

1. The Beatles - English - Group
2. Garth Brooks - American - Solo
3. Elvis Presley - American -Solo
4. Led Zeppelin - English - Group
5. The Eagles - American - Group
6. Billy Joel - American - Solo
7. Michael Jackson - American - Solo
8. Elton John - English - Solo
9. Pink Floyd - English - Group
10. AC/DC - Australian - Group
11. George Strait - American - Solo
12. Barbara Streisand - American - Solo
13. The Rolling Stones - English - Group
14. Aerosmith - American - Group
15. Bruce Springstein - American - Solo
16. Madonna - American - Solo
17. Mariah Carey - American - Solo
18. Metallica - American - Group
19. Whitney Houston - American - Solo
20. Van Halen - American - Group
21. U2 - Irish - Group
22. Celine Dion - Canadian - Solo

The trend gets tricky to track at 23, because Fleetwood Mac was a supergroup compiled from an English blues band and an American folk duo. And in the age of streaming, it's impossible to figure out where a modern star like Rihanna might fit in. But I feel like we have a large enough sample size to make for some interesting dinner party conversation.

It might be as simple as this. If you grow up watching The Beatles, you start looking for bandmates. If you grow up watching Elvis, you think you're supposed to make it on your own.

Or it might be more complex. There might be long running cultural trends at play. America's fascination with celebrity and rugged individualism, for instance. I don't know the answer. But it's fun to think about. 

What do you get when you cross painkillers, motorcycles and Flannery O'Connor

About a year ago, I got stuck on my couch for a week. I read the complete works of Flannery O'Connor and watched Ride with Norman Reedus. My head addled by Catholic allegory and open asphalt, I typed up a short story named "Get Along Fine."

It's an OK story, mostly valuable for the description of the highways between Denver and Albuquerque. But I hadn't the slightest idea who'd want to publish it. So I dared myself to turn it into a podcast. A year later, here it is.

The words and acting are obviously me, including Scratch's half-baked accent. All the music is me too, playing either a Fender Strat or an Akai MPK Mini. The photo is courtesy of ckirby on Unsplash.

The first episode is below. You can listen to the whole playlist on YouTube.

Two songs from The Optimism Delivers House Band

I'm a decent guitarist and a good poet, but I've never been able to write a song. That's something I really wanted to accomplish. So awhile back, I decided I wouldn't start any new personal projects until I'd completed a piece of original music.

The results are "Stanzas From Sober Poets" and "Devil in the Margins," which I published on Soundcloud today.

I finished writing these songs about six weeks ago. I made demos on GarageBand and sent them to my friend Jeff of Of Heaven and Sea. He generously agreed to record and mix them for me. He also gave me tons of advice along the way, and I owe him a huge debt I'll probably pay in bourbon.

The two songs tell a single story, so we mixed them together as one track, a la the Beatles's "A Day In The Life." If you're an indie music fan, you may be able to hear other influences like Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Keaton Henson, Jason Molina, Broken Social Scene, La Dispute and the Cure.

Together, the songs tell a story about a modern couple and their encounter with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the first song, two teens meet at a summer camp near the Gulf of La Spezia. The ghost of Shelley seduces them out into the water to search for the spot where he drowned. When the ghost suddenly disappears, he leaves the young lovers adrift metaphorically and literally. The betrayal sucks all the romance out of their hearts. In the second song, the man, now older, realizes the moral of Shelley's life lies not in his writings, but in his actions. He thinks about the psychopathic tricks and devilish sketches Shelley indulged in as a child. In the end, the man decides Shelley's poetry was only a distraction from the decay that defines adult life.

So yeah, it's not a real cheery piece of music. And I know I'm not going to win The Voice anytime soon. But I hope you enjoy it anyway. In addition to Soundcloud, you can stream it on YouTube.

The Come Across Artist Series: New work for the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park

Here are three videos from a new series we created for the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park with singer-songwriter Covenhoven, fashion designer Mona Lucero, and artist Will Lee-Ashley. The films were shot and edited by the team at Boyte Creative.

If you want the behind-the-scenes scoop, I did a full writeup on the VJ site. You can also check out the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park's Come Across page. Covenhoven's song is for sale now on his website. And Mona's dress and Will's art will be on display at the Bridge all summer long.

Trailer for Sin Walks Into The Desert

This is a trailer for the neo-Western, noir thriller Sin Walks Into The Desert. The music features Jeff on EBow and acoustic and me playing the lead on my Fender Strat. The voiceover is me reading from the book. Check it out on Amazon.

For the obvious reason

 

A summary of biographies of The Smiths

Between '82 and '87, The Smiths changed the world. They released four studio albums and another 30-plus singles that defined indie and redefined pop. And then they self-combusted.

A decade ago I read Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance, Johnny Rogan's then-definitive biography of The Smiths. It was a solid book. I put it down expecting I'd never need to read another word about the band.

But about two years ago, I was looking for insight on where Johnny Marr got his artistic inspiration, creative energy and signature tone. Sick of squinting at YouTube videos of Marr live in concert, I picked up Johnny Marr: The Smiths and the Art of Gun-Slinging. The author is obviously a huge fan, but the book had neither the guitar geekdom I was hoping for or any rockstar gossip.

Desperate for inspiration, I picked up the revised edition of Songs That Saved Your Life: The Art of The Smiths 1982-87. In it Simon Goddard goes chronologically through every track in The Smiths' catalog, explaining the lyrical references and recording circumstances. Calling it exhaustive is a understatement. Any normal person would have moved on. But I'm crazy and the magnum opus was still out there, Tony Fletcher's 2012 biography A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths. I bought it, but I wasn't looking forward to reading it. It's 700 pages long. It's full of meandering sentences. It includes extensive discussions of north England's housing options and manufacturing economy. And as far as rock 'n roll bad behavior, well, let's just say it ain't Dirt.

Then again, The Smiths weren't Motley Crue.

A Light That Never Goes Out is a fantastic story. I found it compulsively readable, tearing through it in just a couple weeks. (And remember, I knew how it was going to end.) It's the best portrait of The Smiths as a foursome. And it has just enough Manchester madness to satisfy fans of New Order, The Cult and all the other bands that sprang from the scene.

Knowing most people aren't going to read four bios of the same band, I'd say this: If you're a musician Songs That Saved Your Life is great, but if you're a fan read A Light That Never Goes Out.

John 5 has a new album on the way

Anytime I don't feel like practicing guitar, I go watch one of the 85 kabillion John 5 videos on YouTube. He's a virtuoso metal and country player. But what makes him stand out is his attitude. He just bleeds love and humility and passion for the instrument.

For all the inspiration he has given me, it seems like the least I could do is blog this video, via Guitar World, of John 5 recording a track for his new album. It'll be released August 12. Enjoy.

Generationals "Put a Light On" and a brief meditation on the pointlessness of everything

It's a strange and fruitless thing, embedding a favorite song on your blog. I'll watch it not here, but on YouTube like everybody else. Yet I love this video (and band) so much and posting it allows me some fictitious yet vital sense of partnership. Like I have shared something and by sharing, own one of its smaller fractions.

11 more potential band names inspired by things people have said in advertising meetings

26. Hannah and the Interns
27. A Flood of Mango
28. A Lot of Lindseys
29. No More Metaphors
30. The Fleece Situation
31. Unleashed Upon An Unsuspecting Planet

32. The Action List

33. Fall Back to Lucinda

34. Millennial Minuses

35. Soft Measures, Hard Measures
36. Own This City

[Ed. - The third installment in an ongoing series.]

That time when I heard that song

1. That time when my mom danced around the house to Silly Love Songs and I thought it was embarrassing because I was only about eight and eight-year-olds don't know anything about life. But now I do and I'm sorry.
2. That time when Jason gave me a tape with The Reflex on it and it was the first time I can ever remember thinking, "This band, this is who I am right now."
3. That time when Ben pushed the play button said, "This is music that means something," and the song that came out of the speakers was A Rush and A Push and the Land Is Ours.
4. That time when for our camp talent show we performed Kiss Off and my bandana fell off my head.
5. That time when the cops broke up our party and we ran out the back door over a golf course and wandered back to our homes through dark suburban streets singing Vincent of Jersey.
6. That time me and the first girl I ever loved listened to the whole album Ten four times in a row because we were too busy to change the tape.
7. That time when Team 1209 put on Social Distortion: Live at The Roxy and started playing drinking games and the next thing I knew four years of college had gone by.
8. That time when the only tape in my car was Rage Against the Machine and I listened to Know Your Enemy at least three or four times a day and I knew my enemies were the teachers who had taught me to fight me.
9. That time when we danced our first dance to I Know It's Gonna Happen Someday. And I know nobody else there had ever heard it before and certainly not at a wedding.
10. That time when I drove to the graves and opened my car windows so the people buried there could hear So Far Away.

[Ed. - I wrote this post in honor of Record Store Day. Which is April 20th. Support your local music dealer or Jack White will get you.]

Notes on "Somebody That I Used To Know"

Gotye's "Somebody That I used To Know" unfolds not as song, but as story. It has three acts, with character introductions, climaxes and grieving along the way.

Don't bore us, get to the chorus? Pft. Gotye spends the first 1:30 of the 4:04 song in murmur mode. He's developing a character, a man relieved that an impossible relationship has finally ended.

Conflict is introduced at the beginning of the second act in the form of the chorus. Deep inside, our protagonist is confused and angry about just how completely his girlfriend separated herself. "But you didn't have to cut me off / Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing."

The third act begins at 2:33 with the introduction of the female lead. She has her own desperations and regrets. She feels her ex demanded a complete separation, that he told her it was the only way he could go on with his life. And at the climax at 3:02, his cries spill down over hers like a mountain waterfall that will not be pushed aside by the wind.

The dénouement starts at 3:47, the boiling subdued by haunting, inevitability and loss. Unlike classic dénouement, the protagonist isn't any better or worse off than at the start of the narrative. The story concludes with the same indie hopelessness that you'll find in movies like Winter's Bone. The characters have cried without finding a shoulder, opened their hearts and found nothing waiting.

[Ed. - I don't really like the video for "Somebody That I Used to Know," but you can watch it here. And I doubt "desperations" is a word. But it seemed so perfect, defining for me that feeling that you get when you have fucked up absolutely everything, and you don't know how to make any of it better.]

The problem with effort

The problem with effort is that as you progress towards the top levels of any given skill set, you have to work exponentially harder to see incremental improvements.

Imagine a novice guitar player. It takes him a month or two to learn a few open chords and soon he is strumming his way through a selection of campfire classics. This is enough for many people to label him a "guitarist." The next level of musicianship requires him to learn moveable chords, pentatonic scales, and a few hammer-ons well enough to work them seamlessly into songs. This requires a bit more effort. But within a year or so, 90% of people will nod their heads and say, "Hey, you're pretty good at guitar." To get to the next level, he has to learn some theory, to study major and minor scales and their relationship to chords, to spend hours with a metronome, and to integrate this knowledge so fully it becomes instinctual. It may take years. Yet to the untrained ear, it doesn't sound terribly different from what our imaginary guitarist was playing before. He soldiers on and spends a decade mastering sweep picking, tapping, and palm muting. But he finds these techniques are only usable for a few seconds of any given song, and most listeners don't recognize them anyway, lumping them all into the category of "Playing Guitar Real Fast." A virtuoso - Vai, Gilbert, Buckethead, Bumblefoot - has invested tens of thousands of hours developing skills so refined that only a tiny fraction of human beings can possibly appreciate them.

In P. H. Mullen Jr.'s Gold in the Water, swimmer Sergey Mariniuk is puzzled by the same phenomenon. He finds he only needs four hours of training every week to achieve speeds that guarantee him a slot on his country's Olympic team, but he'd need upwards of 20 hours of weekly training to knock another three seconds off his time. A 500% increase in effort to achieve an almost immeasurable increase in speed. He decides the added struggle is not worth it. After all, what's the difference between seventh and sixth place?

It's not that effort is bad. It's that it is most efficiently applied to learning new skills, not refining existing ones. This is the exact opposite of the way most of us lead our lives. We jump and sweat, trying to reach the next plateau, never realizing that amazing things are easily within our grasp if we're willing to walk in an entirely new direction.

[Ed. - I am not sure I agree with my own post here. But it is an idea that has been rattling around in my head for awhile and I enjoyed writing it. I think that I think that excellence has some intrinsic value. And while effort may not be efficient, it is still worthwhile.]

Bliss and perfection are different

A month or so ago @chrisreinhard wrote something about how few songs have perfect moments in them. For some reason, the comment stuck with me, and I started making a mental list of musical moments that took my breath away.

After awhile, I began noticing that a high percentage of my list came from songs that could be loosely classified as metal. Like the gripping transition from the chanting of "Waking the Fallen" into the heavy, hooky, mute-and-release intro to "Unholy Confessions." Or the vocal explosion out of the breakdown and into the climax of "Stinkfist," a song for which there is no polite or safe Internet link.

The moments that captivated me most brought dark and seemingly irreconcilable elements together in an unexpected but somehow unavoidable moment of release.

"Release" really is the only word for it.

This construction is very like that of a horror movie, where the torturous second act exists to heighten the excitement of the third, when the victim must earn her way to redemption.

(The parallel with sex is even more obvious. I mention it only to prove that I am not willfully avoiding it.)

When you look back on the very best moments of your life, will you remember summiting a mountain after a grueling hike or deadlifting 400 after five years of training? Or will you remember something lazier: sitting in the grass on a sun-soaked summer evening? Could it be that bliss is too creeping and transitory to really captivate us, and that perfection is created by the brokenness that precedes it?

Why everybody hates Avenged Sevenfold

You walk around carrying deep and unsettling emotions that you lack the skills to articulate. When you find a band or a writer or an artist that expresses them, you feel connected to that person. They aren't just a band you listen to. They are a translator for your soul. And when that artist changes course - suddenly, radically - you feel betrayed. You didn't lose a source of entertainment. You lost your voice.

This band changed my life

It's supposed to be The Clash, right? Fugazi? The Smiths? Or maybe Big Head Todd and the Monsters, a band that I practically followed when I was in college? It's not. The only band that changed my life was Duran Duran.

Because Duran Duran was the first band I identified with that was not introduced to me by my parents.

I was barely 10 when Wild Boys was released as a single. At the time, it didn't seem like anything seismic had occurred. I memorized the lyrics. Learned the band members' names. There may have been an air band involved.

It's only now that I realize how important those moments were.

Littler kids don't even consider the existence of a world apart from their parents. What mommy and daddy like is good, everything else is dumb. The moment children discover something on their own is the beginning of their emotional adolescence. It is the initiation of a decade-long hunt for an identity.

I am so lucky that my discovery was Duran Duran, a new wave icon with real songwriting ability that has remained relevant for three decades. The band was a gateway to New Order and Love & Rockets, which in turn led to Joy Division, Bauhaus and all sorts of wonderful hallways that today sound like The National, No Age and Broken Social Scene.

In other words, it was a good gate to open.

[Ed. - Now that it is written, I think this post is almost a companion piece to I Still Have Heroes, which talked about my lifelong love affair with Miami Vice. Go '80s.]

The Walkmen Perform for La Blogotheque

Via Pitchfork and my own melancholy: