The Kyoto Kibbitzer

Note: Clothing essays have a way of sounding more intentional than the habits they describe. In reality, most personal “styles” are not carefully engineered systems but small practical decisions repeated over time until they become a pattern. Black clothing, in particular, tends to accumulate this way: one shirt becomes three, three become six, and eventually the wardrobe settles into a quiet monochrome.

The appeal of black has been noted in many places — from musicians and writers to bartenders, stagehands, and city dwellers who prefer a certain anonymity in public life. It simplifies choices, travels well, and works in nearly every setting from classroom to barstool.

None of this was planned in advance. It simply turned out that black shirts, black trousers, and a good pair of shoes made the day a little easier to begin. Over time that small convenience hardened into habit, and habit into something that might almost be called a uniform.

Epigraph:

I could listen to all my friends
And go out again
And pretend it’s enough,
Or I could make a career of being blue
I could dress in black and read Camus,
Smoke clove cigarettes and drink vermouth
Like I was 17
That would be a scream
But I don’t want to get over you

The Magnetic Fields

At some point in my adult life I realized that I wear almost nothing but black.

This wasn’t the result of a manifesto, or some deep philosophical commitment to minimalism. It simply happened. One day I looked in the closet and noticed that nearly everything hanging there was black: shirts, sweaters, jackets, trousers. Even the socks.

But the habit actually goes back much further. In high school I developed what could fairly be called a monotone sartorial program. The uniform was simple and extremely effective: a black turtleneck, black chinos, black loafers, black socks, and — for the sake of total conceptual coherence — black boxers as well.

I never felt better.

There was something immediately satisfying about the whole arrangement. No fuss, no pattern matching, no color balancing. Just black on black on black. A complete system.

People probably assumed it was a bit of a pose. High school audiences are naturally suspicious of anyone who appears to be making a stylistic statement. But black is also just a normal color, and the outfit was apparently acceptable enough that nobody made too much of it. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious or intellectual. I just liked the way it looked and, more importantly, the way it simplified the day.

The system continued into college.

At Hamilton College the core wardrobe remained black, but I added one important layer: a tan trench coat. It cost $199 at the Men’s Wearhouse in downtown Spokane and felt, at the time, like a serious investment in adulthood. The coat went over the black shirts and black trousers, and on top of that I wore a tan floppy felt hat.

That was the look.

Looking back, it probably struck some people as theatrical. A young man walking across campus dressed entirely in black with a trench coat and a floppy hat could easily be mistaken for someone attempting a role. But at the time it didn’t feel like an imitation of anyone. Later I became aware of figures like Johnny Cash, the famous “Man in Black,” or the elegant nocturnal wardrobes of Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. But when the wardrobe first appeared in my life it was entirely sui generis.

I was just doing me.

Over the years the practical advantages of black clothing became increasingly obvious. Wearing mostly black eliminates an astonishing number of small daily decisions. You don’t stand in front of the closet wondering whether this shirt matches that pair of trousers or whether the shade of blue is slightly wrong for the jacket. Everything works with everything else.

Shopping becomes easier. Cleaning becomes easier. Packing for travel becomes easier. A black shirt can be worn day after day without drawing much attention, and a good pair of black chinos can quietly carry a person through an entire week.

In this sense, wearing black is less a fashion statement than a small act of logistical efficiency.

The habit also works remarkably well in cities. Black is neutral enough to move through almost any environment without attracting attention. Restaurants, classrooms, airports, bars — the wardrobe fits all of them without adjustment.

This turns out to be particularly true in Kyoto, where I now live. The city’s narrow streets, dim bars, and late-night corners seem almost designed for dark clothing. Walking into places like ING or Mafia or Haku in a black shirt and black trousers feels perfectly natural. No one notices, and that is exactly the point.

One unexpected side effect is that Kyoto locals often assume I am a local as well. Something about the overall look apparently signals familiarity rather than tourism. While visitors frequently move through the city in bright outdoor gear and colorful jackets, the monotone wardrobe seems to blend easily into the quieter rhythms of the place.

I never feel out of place.

Which may be the real secret of wearing black: it allows you to move through the world without the constant small negotiation of appearance.

There are, of course, occasional deviations. Every now and then a pink shirt or a purple one appears in the rotation, like a brief holiday from the system. But these are temporary excursions. The gravitational center of the wardrobe remains the same.

Black shirt.
Black trousers.
Black shoes.

Some people wear black because they believe it signals seriousness or artistic temperament. Others wear it as a form of rebellion against brighter fashions. For me the explanation is much simpler.

It works.

And once you discover something that works every day, there is very little reason to stop.

Dedication:

For the LL Bean turtleneck. You rock baby.

Note: If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy this one.

Note: Until the End of the World exists in multiple versions, the most expansive being the nearly five-hour director’s cut released years after the original theatrical run. The longer version allows the film’s wandering structure — its globe-spanning travel, technological speculation, and philosophical detours — to breathe more fully, though it also requires a certain stamina from even devoted viewers.

The soundtrack occupies a special place in the film’s legacy. Director Wim Wenders reportedly asked participating musicians to imagine the kind of music they might be making a decade in the future when composing their contributions. The result is less a literal prediction of future sounds than a fascinating snapshot of major artists working at the outer edge of their early-1990s creativity.

As for the film itself, it remains a curious hybrid: part road movie, part technological fable, part romantic obsession, and part philosophical meditation on images, memory, and dreams. Like many of Wenders’ most ambitious projects, it is best approached less as a tightly engineered narrative and more as a long cinematic journey — one whose most memorable moments often arrive when the plot pauses and the mood takes over.

Epigraph

In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man
In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
We wanted the union, oh the union of the woman and the man
— Peter Gabriel, “Blood of Eden”

I love Wim Wenders. My favorite of his films is Until the End of the World, followed closely by Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire is good too, though perhaps a little chalk. The American Friend — with Dennis Hopper wandering through a Patricia Highsmith plot — is offbeat and charming in that peculiar late-70s European way.

The End of Violence is terrible.

But Until the End of the World is something else entirely: a sprawling, beautiful, occasionally baffling film that might best be described as a magnificent mess. The director’s cut runs close to five hours, and even devoted fans tend to fade somewhere around hour three. That’s not really a criticism. The movie feels less like a conventional narrative and more like a long road — something you travel through rather than simply watch.

The story centers on Claire Tourneur, played by Solveig Dommartin, a restless Parisian drifting through life when she encounters a mysterious traveler named Sam Farber, played by William Hurt. Sam is carrying stolen technology — a device capable of recording images directly from the human brain — and he is trying to reach his father, a scientist working in the Australian desert. The purpose of the machine is unexpectedly tender: Sam’s father believes it may allow his blind wife to see again by transmitting visual images through Sam’s eyes.

But because the technology has been stolen from a corporate research project, Sam is being chased by various interested parties who would very much like the machine returned. This sets the film in motion. Claire becomes fascinated with Sam and begins following him across continents as he attempts to evade his pursuers.

What follows is one of the great wandering journeys in cinema.

The story moves through Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and eventually Australia. There are gangsters, satellite technology, eccentric scientists, and the faint sense that the entire world has become one enormous road. The film is technically a thriller, but it rarely behaves like one. Wenders is much more interested in movement, landscapes, and the strange emotional gravity that develops between two people traveling together.

The relationship between Sam and Claire is itself slightly unstable. Part romance, part obsession, part philosophical partnership. At times it almost feels like a kind of mutual kidnapping. Sam keeps disappearing, Claire keeps chasing him, and neither seems entirely capable of escaping the other’s orbit.

It probably didn’t help that the two actors reportedly did not get along during the making of the film. Hurt, already an established star after performances in films like Body Heat, brought a certain American cool to the role. He had that slightly detached, inward quality that made him so effective in the early 1980s. Dommartin, on the other hand, plays Claire with an intensity that borders on obsession. The tension between them gives the film a strange electricity. At times it feels less like romantic chemistry than two people circling each other warily.

Eventually their journey brings them to Australia, where Sam’s father is conducting his experiments in the outback.

And then comes one of the great scenes in modern cinema.

Claire and Sam are flying over the Australian desert when the plane suddenly loses power. The engines fall silent. Instead of plunging toward the earth, the aircraft begins to glide, drifting quietly over the vast red landscape below.

There is no panic.

Just sky.
Motion.
Silence.

And then the music enters.

Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel begins to play.

Gabriel’s voice arrives slowly, almost as if it were rising from the land itself. The plane floats over the outback. The desert stretches endlessly beneath them. For a few minutes the film stops being a story and becomes something else entirely — a meditation on distance, longing, and the strange human desire to see and be seen.

It’s one of those rare moments where cinema and music fuse perfectly.

The soundtrack surrounding that moment is one of the most unusual ever assembled. When Wenders commissioned the music for the film, he asked the participating artists to imagine the kind of songs they might be making ten years in the future. The film itself was set slightly ahead of its time, so the idea was that these musicians would try to anticipate their own sound in the coming decade.

The lineup was absurdly strong: Lou Reed, R.E.M., Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, U2, and others. It reads almost like a summit meeting of late-twentieth-century alternative music.

The idea was that they would create future music.

But artists rarely predict the future.

What they tend to do instead is deepen the present.

Listening to the soundtrack today, what you mostly hear is 1991 at its most imaginative. The musicians push their sound slightly outward into darker, more atmospheric territory, but they’re still working with the tools they had.

And the tools were 1991.

Still, several of the songs are outstanding. What’s Good is classic Lou Reed: dry, philosophical, slightly amused by the whole strange business of being alive. Reed had an unmatched ability to deliver lines that sound both cynical and strangely tender. At one point he sings, “life’s like bacon and ice cream / that’s what life’s like without you,” which somehow manages to be both ridiculous and oddly moving at the same time.

Then there is Until the End of the World by U2, written during the band’s remarkable early-1990s creative surge. The song carries the darker propulsion of the Achtung Baby era and hints at the experimental atmosphere the band would later explore more fully on albums like Zooropa and the Passengers project. The lyrics, told from the perspective of Judas speaking to Jesus after the betrayal, give the song an almost Biblical scale.

But the emotional summit of the whole enterprise remains Gabriel’s Blood of Eden.

When that song arrives during the silent glide over the Australian desert, the movie suddenly lifts into another register. The wandering plot, the strange technology, the global chase — all of it falls away for a moment, leaving only the image of two people floating above the earth while Gabriel sings about the ancient longing between man and woman.

The future, it turns out, rarely sounds like the future.

It usually sounds like the present imagining what might come next.

Dedication:

For Lou. What’s good baby?

Note: The taxonomy presented in this essay should not be interpreted too strictly. Like most human classifications, the categories are somewhat fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, wander into Six. Cities, companions, and the general momentum of the evening all play their roles.

The individuals mentioned here — Jon Brooks, my brother Pat, my brother Mike, my father Ross, and my friends Philip and Mackenzie — are cited with affection and respect as exemplary specimens of their respective drinking styles. Any exaggerations should be understood in the spirit of barroom anthropology rather than scientific certainty.

The Simon Joyner lyric used below as the epigraph comes from one of the great chroniclers of American barroom life, whose songs capture with particular accuracy the strange fellowship and wandering philosophy that often emerge around a table of drinks.

Epigraph:

I met the drinker for the drink/ back when I was drinking everything/ but the kitchen sink.

Simon Joyner

Human beings go out for drinks for many reasons.

To loosen up after the day.
To bond with friends.
To flirt.
To seek the company of the opposite sex.
To complain about coworkers and bosses and get it all out of the system.
To chase novelty.
To see what the night might offer.

There may be pool involved. There may be a little weed involved. There may be laughter, storytelling, and occasionally the pursuit of romance. Some people even manage to get into fights, though I have always considered that an unnecessary complication.

Whatever the precise motivation, if you spend enough time in bars — conferences, faculty gatherings, Kyoto wanderings — a pattern begins to emerge.

Drinkers, broadly speaking, fall into three categories.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s remarkably reliable.

I. The One-Drink Person

The One-Drink Person possesses a trait that fascinates the rest of the drinking world: sufficiency.

One drink is enough.

Not “enough for now.”
Not “enough before the next bar.”

Just enough.

The One-Drink Person orders calmly, often something familiar.

“I’ll have my usual IPA. Just the one.”

They sip slowly. They participate in the conversation. They are fully present at the table. And then, at some point, they stand up and leave with perfect dignity while the rest of the group is still negotiating whether a second round is happening.

I know two pure examples of this species: Jon Brooks and Pat Thomas.

They are calm, stable, and mysteriously immune to the centrifugal forces that tend to expand most nights.

There is also a fascinating adjacent species in my father Ross, who is technically a Two-Drink Person. Ross orders two beers spaced exactly twelve minutes apart for what he calls the “maximum fade.” He informs the waitress of the twelve-minute interval with great seriousness, as if he were conducting a controlled laboratory experiment.

Among the other tribes, the One-Drink Person inspires both admiration and mild suspicion. Their discipline seems almost supernatural.

II. The Three-Drink Person

The Three-Drink Person represents the ideal of civilized social drinking.

Three drinks produce a predictable arc.

Drink one warms the room.
Drink two brings the conversation fully alive.
Drink three arrives at the sweet spot: relaxed, sociable, cheerful.

Then the Three-Drink Person goes home.

No drama.
No philosophical speeches.
No mysterious late-night decisions.

In theory this is the perfect category.

In practice, however, there is a complication.

Many people who identify as Three-Drink People are not actually Three-Drink People at all.

Their most common sentence is something like:

“I’ve only had four, chillax.”

Which is when the observant barroom anthropologist begins to suspect that the Three-Drink classification may be partly aspirational.

These days I am more or less a Three-Drink Person myself. But this is a relatively recent development. As recently as the late COVID years — say 2023 — I was still operating comfortably in a different category.

III. The Six-Drink Person

The Six-Drink Person rarely begins the evening intending to drink six.

In fact the Six-Drink Person almost always starts with a sentence that sounds very reasonable.

“I’ll just have one.”

But the night has a tendency to expand around them.

One drink leads to another conversation.
Another conversation leads to another round.
The stories become louder.
The table becomes friendlier.

The evening begins to acquire momentum.

At a certain point the Six-Drink Person may also say something like:

“OK motherfucker, we are going to arm wrestle!”

This is generally a signal that the night has entered its advanced phase.

My brother Mike is the purest Six-Drink specimen I know. Mike goes for it. If the night has possibilities, Mike will find them.

My friend Philip also operates comfortably in this zone. These are the drinkers who power the great stories.

They are responsible for a very large percentage of legendary nights.

Also, it must be said, a fair number of mornings that begin with a quiet promise to take it easier next time.

A Personal Adjustment

My own shift from Six-Drink territory into the Three-Drink category happened fairly recently.

One evening earlier this year I was sitting at ING and realized something unusual. I had already had two drinks. I ordered a third Negroni, and suddenly a small voice in my head said: that’s probably enough.

The old circuit was still there.

Concrete. Ishimaru. Haru.
The whole Kyoto 4-a.m. constellation.

Their siren songs were faintly audible.

But that night I did something unexpected.

I finished the third drink, paid the bill, and went home.

As Homer might say, Odysseus stayed on the ship.

The Final Observation

Most people believe they are Three-Drink People.

Very few actually are.

In reality the species are fluid. A One-Drink Person may occasionally drift into Three. A Three-Drink Person may, under the right atmospheric conditions, slide quietly into Six.

And certain cities — Kyoto among them — possess a remarkable talent for turning what begins as a perfectly innocent One-Drink Plan into something much more expansive.

Which is how, sooner or later, every barroom anthropologist eventually arrives at the same conclusion:

The taxonomy is real.

But the night always has the last word.

Dedication:

For drinkers everywhere. I love you, bro.

Note: If you liked this essay, you might also like the ones below, which also deal with Kyoto nightlife in all its glory.

Tuesday Kyoto Bar Crawl

On a run-in with Damon Krukowski in a Kyoto Basement

Note: The mixed tape described in this essay — The M.A. Blues — was given to me by my friend Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane, Washington in the mid-1990s. Kelly is now a distinguished attorney in Wyoming and will likely deny, with professional seriousness, certain details in this piece, particularly the late-night excursions to the basement to watch scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Nevertheless, a flat fact remains a flat fact.

The nickname “M.A.” came from our older friend Brent Olsen, who solved the problem of too many similar family names by assigning everyone initials: Matt became M.A., Mike M.I., Pat P.A., my father Ross R.O., and my mother Claudia C.L. Brent later went on to become a successful potato farmer in Republic, Washington, where Olsen’s Famous Potatoes now appear on menus across Eastern Washington and beyond.

The artists mentioned in the Kumamoto tapes from 1997 — This Mortal Coil, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Mojave 3, and His Name Is Alive — were central to the atmospheric indie and dream-pop soundscape of that era and formed the emotional palette of those early tapes.

As with most mixed tapes, the exact track lists have partly faded into memory. What remains vivid is not the precise sequencing but the feeling of the object itself: a hand-labeled cassette, built slowly, and handed from one person to another with care.

The first great mixed tape I ever received came from Kelly Rudd when we were juniors at St. George’s School in Spokane.

Kelly lived in what we always referred to, half joking and half in awe, as the Rudd mini-mansion, owned by his father Art Rudd the dentist and his mother Robin. It was the sort of house that made teenage sleepovers feel like minor expeditions. His bedroom was on the second floor, and that’s where the tape appeared.

He handed it to me casually.

“I made this for you,” he said. “Hope you like it.”

It was a black Maxell cassette. On the spine, written in careful handwriting, were the words:

The M.A. Blues.

“M.A.” was my nickname at the time. Our older friend Brent Olsen had decided that all the family names in our orbit sounded too similar, so he invented a system of initials: I became M.A. for Matt, my brother Mike was M.I., my brother Pat P.A., my dad R.O., my mom C.L. Brent later went on to become a well-known potato farmer up in Republic, Washington, selling Olsen’s Famous Potatoes to restaurants all over Eastern Washington. But at the time he was simply the guy who had given me a nickname that eventually ended up on the spine of a mixed tape.

Kelly and I stayed up late that night. I slept on the futon in his room. At some point we wandered down to the basement and watched scrambled Playboy or Cinemax on cable. Kelly will absolutely deny this now, as the distinguished Wyoming lawyer he has become, but a flat fact is a flat fact, baby.

The real moment, though, happened later.

Back at my own house.

My bedroom was at the front of the house, small and slightly chaotic. I had a green CD player with a tiny black-and-white TV built into it. VH1 ran constantly. I remember seeing the Replacements’ “Merry Go Round” on that little screen and falling in love with it. The room also contained a teenage anthropologist’s collection of beer bottles lining the walls. Beavis and Butt-Head ran on MTV. Seinfeld reruns. Law & Order reruns. The usual educational programming of the era.

That’s where I first really listened to The M.A. Blues.

The tape opened with George Thorogood’s “I Drink Alone.” I loved that immediately. It had swagger. It had barroom confidence.

Then came AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long.” That one hit even harder. Along with what came later on the tape, it felt strangely adult. Not scandalous exactly, but like it belonged to a slightly older world than the one I was living in.

Somewhere in the sequence Kelly slipped in Robert Johnson’s “They’re Red Hot.” Suddenly the tape reached backward sixty years into the original blues. That alone felt like a kind of lesson.

But the moment that sealed the whole thing was near the end.

Dire Straits — “Your Latest Trick.”

The slow saxophone intro.
The late-night mood.
The strange wooziness of the rhythm.

It sounded like 2 a.m. in a bar somewhere, even though I was just a high school kid sitting in a small bedroom in Spokane.

That was when I realized something important.

This wasn’t just a bunch of songs.

Kelly had built a mood.

The tape moved from rowdy blues swagger to something cinematic and nocturnal. It felt deliberate. Sequenced. Composed.

In other words, it felt like an art form.

---

Mixed tapes in those years were somewhat common, but rare enough that they still mattered. People made them for friends, sometimes for girlfriends. I never made one for my early high-school crushes Blythe or Gina, though I did write Blythe long romantic poems instead. (Those stories live elsewhere on this site.)

But the mixed tape itself carried a particular social meaning.

It was an intimate gesture.

A curated, hand-crafted artifact given and received with love.

You had to sit there with the stereo, dubbing songs one by one, rewinding, getting the levels right, deciding what went on Side A and what went on Side B. A standard cassette gave you about ninety minutes total, forty-five minutes per side. That limit mattered. It forced choices.

A mixed tape was basically a short story told with songs.

---

A few years later I found myself on the other side of the ritual.

In the summer of 1997, in Kumamoto, during the first weeks of my relationship with Sachie, I made three mixed tapes for her. They were on deep blue Maxell cassettes, and they were extremely moody.

Artists like:

• This Mortal Coil
• Cocteau Twins
• Slowdive
• Mojave 3
• His Name Is Alive

It was the full late-90s dream-pop emotional weather system.

Those tapes mattered. They were given to her within the first couple of weeks of our relationship, and they became part of the early rhythm of us dating. She would play them in her minivan, and I have the impression she played them a lot.

In the cassette era that was basically a form of romantic language.

Before texting.
Before Spotify.
Before sending links.

A mixed tape said something very simple:

I spent hours thinking about you.

---

The culture faded quietly around 2000.

Burned CDs arrived. Napster arrived. Then digital libraries and services like eMusic. I switched to digital music around that time and stopped using cassettes almost overnight.

Technologically the cassette lingered for another decade or so, but socially the mixed-tape ritual was already gone.

Today something of the spirit survives.

My friend Ian still makes enormous playlists mapping entire musical ecosystems — Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, the Dirty Three, the whole Cave universe. They’re impressive, but they often run hundreds of songs long. More like archives than gestures.

I’ve made a number of strong Spotify playlists myself — ones devoted to the Mendoza Line orbit (Shannon, Tim, Elizabeth) and another exploring the strange constellation around Michael Knott, Lifesavers Underground, and Aunt Betty’s. Those playlists really work.

But the social loop isn’t the same.

Only Ian has ever really listened to them.

That’s the quiet difference between eras.

A mixed tape once had a specific recipient. It was handed over physically. It traveled from one person’s room or car stereo into another person’s life.

A playlist floats in the cloud.

Which is why I can still picture that black Maxell cassette labeled The M.A. Blues.

It began in a second-floor bedroom in a Spokane mini-mansion and ended up playing through cheap speakers in a teenage bedroom full of beer bottles and VH1 reruns.

And when the saxophone from “Your Latest Trick” came out of the speakers, the room suddenly felt larger.

A door had opened.

Not just into music, but into the strange, beautiful possibility that songs — arranged carefully enough — could create an entire emotional world and hand it, quietly, from one friend to another.

Dedication:

For tapers everywhere.

Note: If you like this essay, you may also like the one below.

Note: This piece gathers together a series of brief encounters I’ve had over the years with musicians whose work has meant something to me. None of these moments were arranged or particularly dramatic. Most of them happened in small rooms, hallways, or outside venues with cigarettes involved. In several cases I barely spoke to the artist at all.

That’s partly the point.

Live music has a strange ecology around it. The concert itself is only the visible center. Around it orbit all sorts of smaller human moments: waiting in line, wandering the wrong neighborhood looking for the venue, sharing a cigarette on a porch, talking to a guitarist you’ll never meet again, watching a performer interact with family, or occasionally—very occasionally—receiving an unexpected gesture that lands with real human weight.

The encounters recorded here took place over roughly two decades and across a handful of cities: Flagstaff, Kyoto, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Brooklyn. They involve musicians from several corners of the indie and folk worlds, from Richard Buckner and the Thompsons to Spencer Krug, Jay Som, and Matthew Houck of Phosphorescent. What they share is not a common genre but a certain intimacy of scale. None of these moments occurred in arenas. They happened in rooms where the distance between artist and listener was small enough for ordinary human contact to remain possible.

As with many essays on this site, the goal is simply to record these moments before they fade. Music culture is full of stories about bands, albums, and movements. What interests me just as much are the fleeting intersections between artists and listeners that occur around the edges of those larger narratives.

Sometimes those edges are where the real memory lives.

Epigraph
“There’s a girl with cherry chapstick on / and nothing more.”

---

I. Richard Buckner — Flagstaff, 1999

My first close encounter with a musician wasn’t really an encounter at all.

It happened in the dead of winter in 1999 in Flagstaff, Arizona, at a tiny bar where maybe twenty-five people had gathered to see Richard Buckner. There was no stage. The gear sat right on the floor. You could reach out and scratch someone’s itch if you felt like it. Buckner warmed up literally five feet from where I stood.

At the time Buckner had just come through his small breakthrough with Devotion and Doubt, a record I loved deeply. The Hill hadn’t come out yet. For a while before the show he seemed distinctly grumpy. He mentioned he’d driven solo through the mountains, through Four Corners and across long empty roads to get there, and he looked tired in the way a touring musician sometimes looks tired—bone-deep, like the road had followed him into the room.

I got a drink at the tiny bar. The place was so small that it felt less like a concert than a gathering.

Then he started playing.

He ran through most of Devotion and Doubt, and as the set unfolded the grumpiness lifted. Something about the songs reset the room. It was one of those nights where the distance between performer and audience collapses almost completely.

I never spoke to him.

But I remember the night vividly. Seeing a musician like Buckner that close, playing songs that mattered to me in a room barely larger than a living room, felt like glimpsing something essential about music itself. Not the industry, not the mythology—just the simple fact of a person standing there singing.

---

II. Linda and Teddy Thompson — Kyoto, 2013

Years later I found myself in a very different room: Taku Taku, a small venue on the south side of Teramachi in central Kyoto.

The room is wonderful: long wooden tables where everyone sits together, cheap beer—about five hundred yen—and a kind of relaxed intimacy that suits folk music perfectly.

The show was around 2013 and featured Linda Thompson and her son Teddy Thompson.

I had actually seen Teddy there the year before with Sachie and had been impressed. When I heard he was returning with Linda we immediately got tickets.

The dynamic between them was fascinating.

Teddy opened the show and it became immediately clear that he was acting as both performer and curator of his mother’s legacy. Linda had struggled with severe stage fright dating back to the days of Richard Thompson and their partnership in the 1970s. She had even cancelled a tour the year before that was supposed to include this very venue.

Teddy’s set was upbeat country-rock, confident and generous. He handled the room beautifully.

Then Linda came out.

She had an entirely different presence—quieter, cooler, almost regal. There was something transcendent about her, something that seemed to carry decades of musical history into the room.

She sang “Bright Lights” and “Walking on a Wire.” The room fell silent in the way good rooms sometimes do.

She didn’t play two of my personal favorites—“Did She Jump or Was She Pushed?” and “Dimming of the Day”—but it hardly mattered.

After the show Teddy stood around happily talking with fans, signing things and chatting with anyone who approached him. Linda spoke to almost no one except Teddy.

Watching the two of them together gave a glimpse into the quiet gravity of family life inside a musical career.

---

III. Spencer Krug — Kyoto, 2018

Another Kyoto night, another small venue.

This time it was Urbanguild in 2018, where Spencer Krug was performing under his project Moonface.

Maybe forty or fifty people were there.

The room felt reverent, almost like a chapel.

Krug played solo piano and performed essentially the entire album Julia with Blue Jeans On. When he played “Julia”—a top twenty song of all time for me—and “Barbarian,” the room lit up completely.

Oh man was it on.

At the end of the set he apologized to the venue for one mistake he felt he’d made and joked that he’d beaten their piano to hell.

Then he stepped into the second-floor hallway for a cigarette.

I joined him.

We smoked together and talked for a few minutes. I told him how much I loved Moonface and Wolf Parade. He thanked me and talked about how wonderful their trip in Japan had been—about pasta, mountain cabins where they’d been playing shows, and the strange practical question artists like him face about housing.

He mentioned that for a working musician it’s not always clear whether buying a house is even possible.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the everyday realities of touring musicians.

That night remains the greatest musical moment of my life, followed only by Annie Hardy once playing “After the Gold Rush” on a piano in Band Home.

---

IV. Jay Som — Boston, 2018

Later that same year, in mid-December, I saw Jay Som in Boston at a tiny club.

There was no stage. Cables snaked everywhere like a rat’s nest across the floor. The band was maybe five feet away from the audience.

Thirty minutes before the show Jay Som stepped out to take a walk and see some friends. I remember briefly wondering whether she’d make it back in time.

Outside on the small porch I ended up smoking with the band’s guitarist. I offered him a cigarette made from fancy black tobacco I’d bought on 42nd Street.

He lit it and laughed.

“Man,” he said, “I haven’t had one of these in forever.”

We talked for a while. He asked my story. I told him I liked Jay Som a lot but was really in town to see Phosphorescent.

Then, for no particular reason, I told him about Isobel.

He listened patiently for several minutes, then told me about some of the women in his own life. It was one of those brief porch conversations between strangers that somehow becomes unexpectedly real.

Then Jay Som returned and everyone drifted back inside for the show.

---

V. Matthew Houck and the Phosphorescent Run

In December 2018 I followed Matthew Houck and Phosphorescent across several East Coast cities.

Brooklyn. Philadelphia. Washington, D.C. Boston.

It felt less like attending concerts than like a small pilgrimage.

---

Brooklyn

The first show was at Brooklyn Steel.

I got lost on the way because I mistakenly went to Brooklyn Bowl, where I’d seen a Hold Steady show earlier that week. I used their Wi-Fi to look up directions and the map claimed Brooklyn Steel was fifteen minutes away.

It took closer to an hour.

Eventually two guys outside an electrical shop pointed the way and mentioned that the building used to be a foundry. I walked another five blocks and found the place, still early enough to be the first person in line.

I smoked a few cigarettes, watched the roadies unload equipment, and studied the program.

The show started around seven.

The band sounded fantastic. Pedal steel, keyboards, guitars, bass, drums, Houck at the center introducing each member with his trademark warmth. I thought the highlights would be “A New Birth in New England” or “C’est La Vie No. 2,” but the song that truly stunned me was “These Rocks.”

After the show a young woman helped me borrow Wi-Fi so I could order an Uber back to my Best Western in Brooklyn. Without it I would have been completely stranded.

---

Philadelphia

The next night was Philadelphia, at a medium-sized venue somewhere between First and Tenth Street.

The crowd was rowdier than Brooklyn, which had felt a bit corporate and sedate.

The show itself was better.

It also happened to fall the night before a strange and memorable evening in the city—an encounter I later wrote about in a short story called Simona.

I’ll leave it at that here.

---

Washington, D.C.

The peak of the run came at the legendary 9:30 Club.

I arrived early enough to watch soundcheck and spent time talking with the merch girl. I bought a black sweatshirt with gold C’est La Vie lettering.

When she asked where I was from and I said Japan, and that I’d flown across the world to see the band, she smiled and said she’d be sure to tell Matthew.

The show was extraordinary.

“A New Birth in New England.”
“Song for Zula.”
“Wolves,” with Houck’s distinctive keening vocal.

After the show Houck came offstage sweating, a towel around his neck, and began greeting fans along the rope line—handshakes, fist bumps, quick thanks.

Maybe fifty people in he spotted me.

He stepped over the rope.

Then he gave me the biggest bear hug I have ever received in my life.

---

Boston

The final show was at Royale Nightclub on December 8, 2018.

After the show it happened again.

I was wearing the same C’est La Vie sweatshirt. Houck saw me in the line, stepped over the rope once more, and engulfed me in another huge hug.

The show itself was good—the third best of the run after DC and Philly—but the moment that stayed with me was the hug.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hug itself, but the certainty behind it. Most gestures come wrapped in hesitation or self-consciousness; people soften their own impact before they even reach you. Houck didn’t. And part of the weight was this: he’d been through it himself—not abstractly, not a decade removed, but in the very songs he wrote on Muchacho, the record he made after his own life had come apart. He’d talked about it publicly, openly, without varnish. So when he came down off the stage to hug me, it wasn’t fandom or performance or politeness. It was recognition—one human being who had already walked through his own fire seeing another who was still in it.

And the thing about weight is that you feel it instantly.

For a second, you’re not holding yourself up alone.

Someone else is taking on a share.

That’s why I remember it.

Not because it was dramatic.

Because it was unmistakably real.

---

Dedication:
May All Your Favorite Bands Stay Together