Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Tragic Death of Mia Zapata

Epigraphs:

Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die

—Neil Young

Here’s to Your Fuck

—The Gits

I love Mia Zapata.

Mia Zapata was the front woman of the Gits. The Gits were formed in 1986 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Zapata met guitarist Andy Kessler, bassist Matt Dresdner, and drummer Steve Moriarty. Their first shows took place on and around the Antioch campus. In 1989, the four of them moved west and settled in Seattle, landing in a shared house on Capitol Hill and quickly becoming part of the city’s developing punk scene.

The distinction between punk and grunge matters, to some extent anyway. The Gits were present for the rise of grunge and were frequently folded into the story of Seattle music, but they did not sound much like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden. They were faster, tighter, and more directly indebted to punk, blues, soul, and hardcore. Seattle claimed them because they were there, because they played with the right bands in the right rooms, and because they were plainly excellent. But they did not sound manufactured by Seattle. They brought their own aesthetic with them from Ohio.

The band released three early singles before its first full-length album, Frenching the Bully, appeared on C/Z Records in 1992. The record includes “Another Shot of Whiskey,” “Second Skin,” “It All Dies Anyway,” and “Here’s to Your Fuck.” It is not a slick album. It sounds a little muddy. The guitars press together, the drums arrive hard, and Zapata’s voice sometimes sounds as though it is being forced through a wall of noise. I don’t consider this a problem at all. In fact the opposite. It is part of the record’s appeal. Had the Gits continued, they might have worked with a larger recording budget and a producer who could have separated the instruments slightly without cleaning the life out of them. They might have refined the sound. The substance was already there.

“Here’s to Your Fuck” kicks ass. The Gits kick ass. Mia Zapata kicks serious ass. She just does.

There is no way of knowing how big the Gits could have become. This is the maddening thing about interrupted careers: their possible futures expand forever because reality never arrives to limit them. The band might have remained a beloved regional act. They might have become a nationally respected punk band with a loyal audience and a long sequence of increasingly strong records. They may have become global superstars. Any of these outcomes is plausible. What is clear is that the Gits were moving. They had built a reputation through years of rehearsing, touring, and playing small rooms. They were preparing for a nation wide tour. Tim Sommer, then working in A&R for Atlantic Records, had received permission to sign them and told the band he wanted them. According to Sommer, they accepted his offer in June 1993. Less than four weeks later, Mia was dead.

Seattle Before the Fall

Mia’s death belongs to the history of Seattle music, although the Gits should not be reduced to a chapter in somebody else’s grunge story. The early 1990s were an extraordinary period for the city. An underground community that had spent years developing beyond the attention of the national music industry suddenly became the center of it. The world arrived with money, cameras, contracts, magazine covers, and a need to package a complicated musical culture under one convenient name.

Nirvana became the emblem of that transformation. I was in high school when “Smells Like Teen Spirit” hit the airwaves and I was not initially the band’s biggest fan. The song did not particularly appeal to me. Part of my resistance was probably the ordinary resistance one feels when told that a cultural event is mandatory. I did not know much of Nirvana’s catalog, and I was in no hurry to learn.

A few years later I heard MTV Unplugged in New York and became a fan. This performance was recorded in November 1993 and broadcast that December. The album appeared in November 1994, seven months after Kurt Cobain’s death. It remains by far my favorite Nirvana album. The set contains Nirvana songs such as “About a Girl,” “Come as You Are,” “Pennyroyal Tea,” “Dumb,” and “All Apologies,” alongside extraordinary covers: the Vaselines’ “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam,” David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” three songs by the Meat Puppets, and the dynamite closer “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” performed through Lead Belly’s arrangement. I also like Fecal Matter, Cobain’s pre-Nirvana project, but that is a different matter.

Cobain died on April 5, 1994, apparently from a self-inflicted shotgun wound. His body was found three days later. His death came nine months after Mia’s murder. Their deaths were radically different, and I do not mean to suggest otherwise. One was ruled a suicide; the other was a rape and murder committed by a stranger. Yet the proximity of the two deaths cast a terrible shadow over a scene that had only recently become, at least from the outside, the center of the musical world.

Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were two of the other major bands to emerge from the same period. “Jeremy” was Pearl Jam’s breakthrough signature song, although their cover of “Last Kiss” later became their highest-charting American single. Like “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Jeremy” did not do much for me, and I did not particularly care for Pearl Jam at first. A few years later, however, I heard “Better Man” on Vitalogy and fell in love with it. “Better Man” remains my favorite Pearl Jam song.

Soundgarden belonged to the heavier side of the Seattle sound. I was never really a fan, but Chris Cornell possessed one of the defining rock voices of his generation. Cornell died by suicide in 2017, adding another tragic death to the history surrounding Seattle music. One could extend this list through Andrew Wood, Stefanie Sargent, Layne Staley, and others until the history of the scene begins to look like a memorial wall. That is not the essay I wish to write here. The names establish the context; Mia remains my subject.

The Voice

The danger in writing about a murdered artist is that the murder acquires a terrible gravitational force. It pulls every detail toward itself. Songs become premonitions. Photographs become “last photographs.” Ordinary remarks become clues. A person’s life is rearranged into an approach toward death, as though the ending had always been waiting inside the beginning.

Mia Zapata deserves better than that. She matters because of her life and her music, not because of the notoriety of the crime committed against her. Her murder explains why the Gits stopped. It does not explain why anyone should listen.

Listen first to her voice. Zapata did not sound like the decorative singer attached to a loud band, and she did not sound like someone adopting punk anger as a costume. Her voice carried blues damage, gospel command, punk abrasion, and a strange emotional precision. It could scrape and shout, but it could also bend around a phrase. She sounded older than twenty-seven—experienced, weathered, as though several inherited traditions were moving through her fiercely animated body.

Tim Sommer has described her as a blues shouter placed at the front of a punk band, falling somewhere between figures as different as Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Johnny Rotten, Sam Cooke, and Iggy Pop. The comparisons may sound excessive until one listens. Zapata had Joplin’s rasp without imitating Joplin. She had the directness of punk but not its more narrow emotional range. There is vulnerability alongside aggression as well as something tender beneath it all. Mia rules.

“Another Shot of Whiskey” makes The Gits fusion of sound immediately audible. The title suggests just another drinking song, but Zapata sings with the authority of someone testifying from inside the wreckage rather than celebrating it from a distance. The band moves beneath her with economical force. Nothing hangs around waiting to be admired. The performance arrives, makes its case, and leaves.

“Second Skin” is one of the Gits’ most durable songs because it compresses their qualities so efficiently. The rhythm section drives; the guitar cuts; Zapata sounds simultaneously defiant and exposed. The title itself offers a useful description of what the band gives her. The music is not merely accompaniment. It becomes another skin around the voice—hard enough to protect it, flexible enough to move with it.

Then there is “Here’s to Your Fuck,” a song whose title performs its own critical introduction. It is short, furious, rude, funny, and exact. It does not seek permission to exist. Zapata does not soften the emotion into tasteful disappointment. She gives betrayal the language it deserves. The song is not the whole of the Gits, but it is an excellent doorway into them because it contains their refusal to behave prettily for an audience.

The rest of the band deserves emphasis. Kessler, Dresdner, and Moriarty did not simply stand behind a singular singer. They built the pressure that allowed her singularity to register. The Gits could be ferocious, but their playing was disciplined. The songs possess more structure than their surface violence initially suggests. Zapata’s voice could appear to be tearing free of the band because the band was strong enough to give her something worth tearing free from.

This is where my mild complaint about the recorded sound becomes almost complimentary. The early recordings can be muddy. The parts sometimes collide. Yet that collision catches something important about the Gits: they sound like four people occupying the same dangerous physical space. A more expensive producer might have clarified the instruments, widened the field, and helped the hooks announce themselves. A bad producer might also have destroyed them by polishing away the friction. The artistic problem would have been not how to make them respectable, but how to make their existing power more audible without domesticating it.

Zapata was also a visual artist, and her paintings reinforce the impression made by her performances. The figures are tense, wounded, unstable, and alive. They look caught in the middle of becoming something or escaping something. Her art and music seem to emerge from the same nervous system. Both reject the separation between beauty and damage. Both insist that pain may be shaped without being prettified.

The official biography on the Gits’ website makes an important refusal: it does not want the ending to dwarf the beginning and middle. That is exactly right. Tragedy did not make Mia Zapata a great singer. Tragedy merely prevented more people from discovering that she already was one.

The Twenty-Seven Club

Mia Zapata was twenty-seven when she died. This places her within the famous 27 Club, the cultural category reserved for musicians who died at that age. Its best-known members include Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Robert Johnson. The list feels somewhat uncanny because several immense talents appear on it and because the number is young enough to make every death feel like an interruption.

There is no persuasive evidence of an actual curse. A 2011 study published in The BMJ examined the mortality of famous musicians and found no special spike at twenty-seven; the observed risk was similar at twenty-five and thirty-two. Musicians do face an elevated risk of early death generally, but twenty-seven possessed no unique statistical power. The club is a story created after the fact, a human attempt to impose a visible shape upon unrelated losses.

The story nevertheless affects cultural memory. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, and Winehouse were already major stars before they died. Their catalogs continue to circulate through radio, film, books, reissues, tribute albums, posters, shirts, and the machinery of inherited fame. Death froze them at twenty-seven, but it did not erase their public identities. In some cases it enlarged them.

Mia’s position is different. She reached the same age without receiving the opportunity to establish herself in mass culture. She died at the threshold of greatness. The Gits had made one full-length album and spent years earning local and underground respect, however outside of Seattle they were still little known. She belongs to the 27 Club biologically, but not mythologically. The myth remembers stars who died young. Mia was a star whom most of the world did not yet recognize.

That difference makes her death particularly heartbreaking to me. I admire many artists who died young: Hendrix, Joplin, Winehouse, Tim and Jeff Buckley, Justin Townes Earle, David Berman, Vic Chesnutt, Mark Linkous, and many others. Every early death leaves songs unwritten and unrealized potential behind. Yet we possess enough work from some of these artists to appreciate the shape of their achievement. With Mia, we have the evidence, but not the completed argument. We can hear the beginning of a great career. We cannot hear what it would have become.

A Stolen Future

It is particularly tragic when a young artist of any gender or type loses their life. Talent does not make one life more valuable than another. Fame is not a moral measurement. The death of an unknown twenty-seven-year-old is not less terrible than the death of a singer. Art matters here because it allows us to perceive the stolen future in unusually concrete form. We can hear what Mia had already learned to do. We do not know how much further she could have gone.

I believe Mia Zapata and the Gits would have had a long and illustrious career if Mia had survived. This cannot be proven. Bands break up. Record labels lose interest. Musicians quarrel, burn out, change direction, become parents, take ordinary jobs, or simply decide that life on the road is no longer worth the scratch. The imagined future should not become another sentimental fiction.

Still, the evidence points toward possibility rather than burn out. The Gits had already survived the unglamorous years that destroy many bands: the small shows, shared houses, vans, little money, independent releases, and a long apprenticeship. Their live reputation was strong. A national tour was coming. Atlantic Records had authorized an offer. They had songs, a sound, and a front woman whom people remembered after seeing once. They had done the difficult work required to become lucky.

What might have followed? Perhaps a sharper second or third album. Perhaps a record on which Zapata’s blues and soul inheritance came further forward. Perhaps an acoustic turn, a solo record, a collaboration, or a late-career return after a breakup. Perhaps the Gits would have remained loud and gloriously impolite for thirty years. Zapata might have become a writer, painter, producer, mentor, mother, recluse, public figure, or some combination no speculative list can capture.

These possibilities are not evidence that she would have become famous. They are evidence that she was alive. A human future is not a straight line toward professional success. It is a proliferating field of choices, accidents, relationships, mistakes, recoveries, and second acts. Her killer stole all of them. Fuck him.

I find her death entirely pointless and totally stupid.

The Long Wait for Justice

During the early morning of July 7, 1993, Zapata left the Comet Tavern on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. She visited the basement rehearsal space in a nearby building and briefly saw a friend. Sometime after two in the morning, while moving through the city alone, she encountered a man she did not know. She was raped, beaten, and strangled. Her body was found a little more than an hour after she had left the bar.

The crime was brutal, and detailing every injury does not deepen our understanding. It merely forces Mia’s body to undergo the attack again for an audience. The essential facts are that she was going about her life, a stranger attacked her and killed her for no reason.

The murder initially appeared all but impossible to solve. Investigators naturally examined the people in Zapata’s life, in part because many murders are committed by someone known to the victim. Friends were questioned. Rumors developed. The Seattle music community raised money for a private investigator, Leigh Hearon, while benefit concerts and donations supported the effort. Years passed without an arrest. The case appeared on national crime programs, but publicity did not produce an answer.

The absence of an obvious connection was the central problem. The killer was not a former partner, band associate, fan, or person carrying a visible grievance against Mia. The attack was random. There was no narrative pathway leading from her relationships to the man who killed her. For nearly a decade, the lack of connection protected him.

DNA technology finally supplied the connection that ordinary investigation could not. Biological evidence from the crime scene had been preserved. In 2002, investigators developed a usable profile, and the eventual database match pointed to Jesús Mezquía, who was then living in Florida and whose DNA had entered the system following an unrelated arrest. Seattle detectives arrested him in January 2003.

A jury convicted Mezquía of first-degree felony murder in March 2004. His conviction survived appeal, although litigation over the sentence continued, and he ultimately received approximately thirty-seven years in prison. He died in custody in 2021.

Justice is the word normally placed at the end of such a chronology, but it feels somehow inadequate here. The conviction established legal responsibility and ended the uncertainty surrounding the killer’s identity. It mattered. It mattered to Mia’s family, friends, bandmates, and community. It mattered that justice was done. But a verdict cannot turn back time. It cannot give the Gits a new record. It cannot return a daughter, sister, friend, or the woman who walked out of the Comet Tavern expecting to walk home safely.

It went another way.

What Remains

The people who loved Mia did not wait for the case to be solved before building something from their grief. Women within Seattle’s music and arts community began meeting after the murder to discuss violence, fear, and the inadequacy of conventional self-defense advice. Many available courses were expensive or structured around telling women to restrict their lives: do not walk at night, do not work late, do not go alone, do not inhabit the city freely. For musicians, artists, bartenders, and service workers, such advice was both impractical and somewhat insulting.

From those conversations came Home Alive, a collective that offered free or sliding-scale self-defense education. Its approach extended beyond physical techniques to boundaries, verbal resistance, de-escalation, and the social conditions surrounding violence. The organization sponsored classes and benefit concerts, produced educational materials, and released compilations featuring artists from the Seattle community. Its formal structure changed over time, but its curriculum and influence survived. Home Alive did not compensate for Mia’s death. Nothing could. It represented a refusal to let fear have the final organizational word.

The Gits’ musical afterlife expanded as well. They released Enter: The Conquering Chicken in 1994, followed by archival collections. Joan Jett performed with the surviving members under the name Evil Stig—“Gits Live” reversed—and helped raise money for the investigation. The band 7 Year Bitch released ¡Viva Zapata! in Mia’s memory. Kerri O’Kane’s documentary The Gits eventually carried the band’s story to audiences who had never entered one of those Seattle rooms.

In 2024, Sub Pop announced that it had become the new home of the Gits’ catalog and reissued remastered versions of the band’s albums. This matters because cultural memory depends partly upon access. An artist can disappear without anyone intentionally suppressing them. Records go out of print. Small labels close. Websites rot. Search results fill with accounts of a crime until the music becomes difficult to locate beneath the murder. Making the catalog readily available gives new listeners the chance to meet Mia as a singer before meeting her as a victim.

The Gits remain moderately well known today, especially among listeners of punk and Seattle music. They are not forgotten. Yet time has inevitably eroded much of their cultural presence. Their name does not circulate as automatically as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden. For many people who encounter Mia at all, the first sentence is still about her murder.

That order can be changed. Listen first. Begin with Frenching the Bully. Play “Another Shot of Whiskey,” “Second Skin,” and “Here’s to Your Fuck.” Watch the surviving live footage and see how completely she inhabited the songs. Then learn what happened if you must. The death is part of the history. It is not the source of the talent.

Coda: Just Listen

As mentioned above, the death of a young artist is particularly heartbreaking. It terminates not only a life but a changing relationship between the artist and the work. We lose the possibility of mature records, the failures, the comebacks, the ups and downs, the strange experiments, and the possibility that the artist might someday have rejected everything that first made them famous.

I do believe that Mia Zapata and the Gits would have had a long and illustrious career if Mia had survived. Perhaps I am wrong. There is no way to test the proposition. But uncertainty does not make the loss smaller. It enlarges it. Every version of the future was taken at once.

There is no lesson to be taken from her murder. It did not happen so that a community could create Home Alive. It did not happen so that a murder could eventually be solved through DNA. It did not happen so that later listeners could discover a brilliant singer and experience the pleasurable sadness of imagining what might have been. Those were human responses to an atrocity, not justifications for it.

The Gits are still part of the culture. Their records remain. Their surviving members, friends, listeners, documentary, reissues, and the work created in Mia’s memory continue to carry them forward. But cultural memory is not self-sustaining. Time erodes names unevenly, and the artists who die before the publicity machine has fully claimed them are especially vulnerable. I find this sad, although inevitable.

As for me, I will continue to listen to the Gits and keep the flame alive. Mia Zapata did not live long enough to become the star she might have become. She should not have needed to die in order for us to hear her.

I love Mia Zapata. Listen to the Gits, and you may understand why.

Dedication:

For Mia my baby. I love you and miss you. Rest well, sweetheart.

Selected Sources

The Gits, “About the Gits,” official band website.

Sub Pop, “Sub Pop Is the Proud New Home of the Gits,” November 13, 2024.

State v. Mezquia, Washington Court of Appeals, 2005.

Home Alive, “History.”

Michael Wolkewitz et al., “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? A Retrospective Cohort Study,” The BMJ, 2011.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Mia Zapata’s Killer Again Gets 37 Years,” January 29, 2009.

—    —

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Death of the Second Life

Subtitle: Why Nobody Can Disappear Anymore

There’s a one in a billion chance we’re in base reality.

—Elon Musk

You’re a quick study, aren’t you?

—Freddie Miles, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I fought the law and the law won.

—Sonny Curtis

On Disappearing

It used to be possible to disappear. Not easy, exactly, and rarely clean. You needed nerve, mobility, a little money, a plausible story, perhaps a talent for accents, and the good sense not to return to the same bar every Thursday. You needed to understand that most identity was local. A man was the person his neighbors recognized, his employer paid, his landlord tolerated and the woman across the street remembered seeing come home. If he crossed an ocean, a mountain range or sometimes merely a state line, he passed through an interval in which nobody knew him well enough to contradict him. That interval was the birthplace of the second life.

The interval has nearly closed. A person may still abandon a marriage, occupation, city or circle of friends. He may stop answering the telephone and go silent on social media. The difficulty begins when he wants an apartment, salary, bank account, prescription, airline ticket or hotel room. The machinery that enables ordinary existence is now the machinery that identifies us. Every convenience asks the same question in a different form: are you still the person you were yesterday? The modern fugitive may escape a room, but eventually he needs an ATM.

This is not merely a criminal fantasy for me. Years ago I invented the Thin Man, the central figure in The Thin Man and Andrea, as an alter ego and doppelgänger. He is Niko, although the first book withholds even that. He carries an ambiguous face and an American-seeming education acquired elsewhere. He moves through the world of corporate espionage, which is partly a MacGuffin and partly an excuse to put him aboard a cruise ship, in hotel bars, and within striking distance of Andrea, Jessica, Maya, Desiree and women who sense that his absence of a past is also a kind of invitation. The submarine in the earliest version became a cruise ship because a cruise ship can plausibly contain a temporary world: flags, ports, false intimacies, a cabin to abandon and another country waiting in the morning.

The Thin Man was never fundamentally an alien or a figure composed of negative space, although traces of those early ideas remain. The governing fantasy was simpler. He was me without social, professional or familial responsibility. He could love somebody without joining her calendar. He could enter a city without owing the city an explanation. The plot offered him passports, handlers and invented business, but his real superpower was exemption. He lived without the claims that make an ordinary person locatable.

I now possess fewer of those claims than I once did. My professional responsibilities have diminished. My marriage has ended. My son is grown. In some respects I am living the Thin Man dream, although with less espionage and considerably more concern about hotel credits. The discovery is predictable but still worth making: relief from responsibility does not make a man somebody else. It simply leaves him alone with a clearer version of the same man.

Daniel Defoe understood the mechanical version of the fantasy three centuries ago. When I was fifteen, several friends and I discussed burning or drowning Moll Flanders. We meant the physical book, naturally, not Moll herself. The novel seemed interminable. Moll acquired another name, husband, lover, crime, punishment, jurisdiction and source of money; then the process began again. At fifteen this felt less like structure than clerical error. At fifty-two I can see that the repetition is the structure. “Moll Flanders” announces that the name is not her own. Her identity consists of whatever biography can survive the next room.

Moll is born in Newgate Prison, passes through households and marriages, becomes a thief, evades execution through transportation, returns to Virginia and eventually obtains prosperity and something resembling repentance. She can repeatedly become another woman because identity in her world is portable. It is held in clothing, speech, manners, money and the testimony of the few people nearby. A past can be defeated by distance.

John McAfee tried to perform the same operation in a world that already made it ridiculous. Wanted for questioning in Belize after the 2012 murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull, McAfee hid, fled and simultaneously turned his flight into a media production. He claimed that he buried himself in sand for hours with a cardboard box over his head. He dyed his hair repeatedly and stuffed chewing gum beneath his upper lip as a disguise. The founder of an antivirus company attempted to defeat recognition by making his mouth slightly lumpier.

McAfee possessed money, technical knowledge, mobility, paranoia and an almost supernatural resistance to embarrassment. He nevertheless contacted journalists, issued updates and supplied the public with a running commentary on his disappearance. A photograph posted by the Vice reporters accompanying him contained location metadata pointing toward Guatemala. McAfee wanted to vanish and receive credit for vanishing. That contradiction will return. For now it is enough to say that Moll Flanders could escape because nobody in Virginia had read the London file. McAfee carried the file with him, broadcasting all the way.

The Portable Self

The literature of disappearance flourished before the administrative state completed its map. Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, published in 1904, supplies the cleanest philosophical version. Mattia, trapped in an unhappy life, discovers that a corpse has been mistaken for his own. The world has accidentally released him. He takes another name and attempts to enjoy the freedom of a man officially dead.

But a man without a past possesses no enforceable future. Mattia’s second identity cannot securely marry, own, complain to the police or participate in the institutions through which personality becomes social fact. He has escaped the first life without acquiring the legal substance required for a second. Pirandello arrives at the modern paradox before biometrics: identity is a burden until one needs its protection.

Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantès offer opposing French solutions. Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeleine through moral action. He builds an industry, employs a town, practices generosity and becomes mayor. He changes so completely that the humane judgment is to regard him as a different man. Javert refuses. For Javert, the file is the man, and goodness performed under an alias is merely a fugitive’s more sophisticated disguise. Les Misérables places grace in conflict with administrative continuity.

Dantès, in The Count of Monte Cristo, builds identity through theater and money. Wealth buys clothes, servants, property, introductions, silence and the assumption of prior importance. Nobody asks the Count for a childhood photograph because aristocratic confidence authenticates itself. Dantès does not erase his first life so much as return with a second one powerful enough to prosecute it.

James Gatz performs the American variation. He becomes Jay Gatsby not primarily to evade the law but to escape poverty, embarrassment and the intolerable smallness of his assigned place. Gatsby manufactures manner, history and spectacle. His tragedy is not that the new identity convinces nobody. It convinces almost everybody. Daisy remains dangerous because she knew him before the costume was complete. The person who remembers the original name possesses veto power over the second life.

These stories depend upon a portable self: an identity capable of crossing a boundary and being accepted on the strength of performance. Sometimes the transformation is moral, sometimes theatrical and sometimes criminal. Each assumes that a society contains blank spaces. The traveler enters one and begins supplying information before contradictory information arrives.

You’re a Quick Study, Aren’t You?

Tom Ripley is the great student of the portable self. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, Tom begins as a watcher. He studies wealth before he attempts to inhabit it. He studies jazz, handwriting, clothes, gestures, voices and the particular freedom enjoyed by people whose money causes strangers to complete their stories for them. Dickie Greenleaf possesses everything Tom lacks: beauty, ease, inheritance and the right to become bored with other people.

Tom’s desire is not reducible to robbery. He wants proximity to Dickie, then recognition from Dickie, then the life of Dickie. When those desires become incompatible, murder provides the transition. Tom can imitate Dickie because he has watched with the concentration of the excluded. The peeping is apprenticeship.

Freddie Miles recognizes the dangerous speed of Tom’s education. Visiting Dickie’s Roman apartment, he notices that Tom suddenly understands the geography, furnishings and habits of a life in which he supposedly remains a guest. “You’re a quick study, aren’t you?” Freddie asks. It is a brilliant accusation because it identifies the one part of imitation that cannot be disguised: the curve of improvement. Yesterday Tom did not know where anything was. Today he gives directions.

Seconds later, Tom kills him with the stone head of Hadrian. A Roman emperor becomes the instrument by which the social climber removes a witness. The joke is almost too exact. Freddie does not possess fingerprints or facial-recognition software. He possesses memory, class instinct and contempt. He knows what Tom looked like before Tom learned the role.

Tom’s impersonation is fraudulent, but it is also emotionally sincere. Being Dickie feels more authentic to him than remaining Tom. That is why Ripley endures beyond the machinery of the thriller. He embodies the suspicion that our socially verified identity may be less true than the person we could convincingly perform if nobody interrupted us. He also demonstrates the price. Each new witness becomes a threat because the second life demands the permanent editing of the first.

The criminal achievement eventually becomes less impressive than the psychological imprisonment. Tom escapes particular investigations, but he cannot stop monitoring the room. He must hear every hesitation in his adopted name and see every glance toward the piano, ring or signature. A successful second life is not freedom. It is a part one can never stop playing.

Dick Whitman and Don Draper

Dick Whitman performs the most durable modern transformation in American television. During the Korean War, an explosion kills Lieutenant Donald Draper beside him. Dick exchanges identification tags with the dead officer, survives under Draper’s name and returns to the United States inside a clerical conclusion. War supplies the confusion, body and paperwork. The dead man exits; the living man acquires his place.

Unlike Ripley, Don does not live permanently at the edge of exposure. The new identity accumulates institutional weight. Don works, pays taxes, marries, buys property, fathers children and builds a career. Time itself begins authenticating him. After enough years, the invented man possesses more documentary substance than the abandoned one.

Advertising is the ideal profession because Don’s labor reproduces his own transformation. He takes an ordinary product, suppresses its manufacturing history and gives it a story people prefer. He does the same with himself. The handsome executive, suburban husband and creative genius are not wholly false. They are real accomplishments attached to stolen paperwork.

Yet Mad Men understands that the administrative victory cannot settle the psychological case. Dick is not chiefly afraid that a camera will recognize him. He is afraid that intimacy will. Every person who approaches Don closely eventually reaches the locked room containing Dick Whitman: his poverty, family, desertion, shame and the knowledge that another man’s death financed his ascent.

The Thin Man fantasy and the Don Draper fantasy meet here. Remove the obligations, choose the wardrobe, enter the next room with a name nobody questions. What remains is the person who performed the removal. The Eagles’ old line is unavoidable: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” One may leave a home, spouse, profession and nation. The ghosts keep the original booking.

The Missing and the Dead

Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico in 1913 and disappeared. That is nearly everything we know about this paritcular case. He may have joined Pancho Villa’s forces, reached Chihuahua and died quickly. He may have been executed, killed himself, succumbed to illness or continued traveling. The absence of evidence has generated a century of endings because disappearance makes authors of the people left behind.

Bierce had already written one of literature’s cruelest imaginary escapes. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar falls from a bridge with a rope around his neck, escapes into the water, runs home and approaches his wife—only for the narrative to reveal that the journey occurred inside the final instant before his broken body swings beneath the bridge. The mind creates a second life because the body has no exit. Bierce’s own disappearance feels uncannily like an extension of the story, although we should resist converting formal elegance into evidence. He probably did not begin again. He probably died where the map became uncertain.

John List demonstrates how recently a complete second life remained possible. After murdering his wife, mother and three children in New Jersey in 1971, he traveled west and became Robert Peter Clark. He found accounting work, joined a Lutheran church, remarried and lived within ordinary society for nearly eighteen years. List was not sleeping in a cave. He was commuting, filing returns and participating in carpools. The jurisdictions containing John List and Robert Clark did not effectively speak to one another.

Television finally forced the conversation. America’s Most Wantedaired the case in 1989 using an age-progressed sculpture whose resemblance to List was extraordinary. A former neighbor recognized him. Fingerprints from his military records completed the identification. List stands at the border between eras: he constructed the second life through disconnected paper systems and lost it when mass media connected a face to the buried name.

John Darwin attempted the comic British variation in 2002. He paddled into the North Sea, staged his death and allowed his wife to collect insurance and pension payments while he secretly lived nearby. The plan expanded toward Panama. It collapsed when an online photograph showed the supposedly dead man beside his wife. A basic image search linked John, Anne and Panama. The second life had appeared on the first page of the internet.

Robert Hoagland achieved something quieter. He vanished from Connecticut in 2013 and lived in New York as Richard King until his death in 2022. The new life appears to have been modest rather than operatic. That may be the surviving modern model: abandon grandeur, remain geographically ordinary, ask institutions for as little as possible and hope nobody searches the correct connection. His identity was established after death.

Ryan Borgwardt showed in 2024 how poorly the romantic disappearance now survives contact with the contemporary record. He staged a kayaking death in Wisconsin and left the country. Investigators found evidence of preparation, travel and financial activity, contacted him abroad and persuaded him to return. In 2025 a judge sentenced him to eighty-nine days in jail, matching the period during which he had actively misled authorities, and ordered restitution toward the costly search. The symmetry of the sentence was better than the plan.

These cases are morally different. Bierce may simply have died. Hoagland appears to have abandoned a family without committing the crimes of List or Darwin. List was a murderer. The point is not to place them in one ethical category. It is to watch the available space contract. List could build an ordinary life for eighteen years. Borgwardt’s itinerary began becoming evidence before his family had finished grieving.

You Could Call It the End of the World

Money is the most practical border. A person can sleep outdoors without identification. The moment he wants a hotel, apartment, salary, international ticket or functioning bank account, somebody asks for the name behind the money. A friend of mine treats $9,999 as the largest sum one may carry into the United States. The actual rule is subtler: more than $10,000 may be transported legally, but it must be declared. Japan similarly requires declaration above one million yen. The threshold is not a wall. It is a checkpoint at which money becomes narrative. Where did it come from? Why are you carrying it? Who are you?

The old fugitive relied on fragmentation. A birth certificate sat in one office, fingerprints in another, employment history in a filing cabinet, border entries in ledgers and newspaper photographs in local archives. None of these systems was necessarily weak. They simply did not consult one another quickly. The fugitive’s skill lay in remaining inside the delay.

The decisive modern development is linkage. Passports became machine-readable and biometric. Banking systems identify customers and flag patterns. Phones create location and relationship histories. Cameras no longer merely preserve images; increasingly, software compares faces. Search engines connect photographs with names and places. DNA can identify a person who never submitted a sample because a distant relative did. Public records, commercial databases and social media supply continuity from childhood to the present.

Every system contains errors. Facial recognition misidentifies people. Records conflict. Databases leak. Names are misspelled. The second life does not die because any single machine knows everything. It dies because machines ask one another. The old fugitive needed to prevent one sheriff from telephoning another. The modern fugitive must prevent every machine from recognizing every other machine.

Josef Rusnak’s largely forgotten 1999 science-fiction film The Thirteenth Floor supplies the finest image of this condition. Douglas Hall, a computer scientist in Los Angeles, discovers that the simulated version of 1937 Los Angeles created by his company contains conscious inhabitants. More disturbingly, he learns that his own Los Angeles is another simulation. Following instructions left by his murdered mentor, Hall drives toward Tucson, ignores the road signs and barricades, and eventually reaches the boundary of his universe. The desert stops. The mountains dissolve. Beyond them stands an unfinished green wireframe—the scaffolding of a world nobody expected its inhabitants to inspect. Hall has not merely failed to escape Los Angeles. He has reached the place where Los Angeles runs out.

“You could call it the end of the world,” he says. The line is quiet because terror has already done the shouting. Moll Flanders could leave one town and supply the next with another name. Valjean could cross into another jurisdiction. Dick Whitman could exchange identification tags with a dead officer. Hall cannot accomplish even the preliminary act of departure because the road, desert and destination belong to the same system.

There is no countryside beyond surveillance and no unindexed territory in which to begin again; there is only the end of the program. Our world has not yet become Hall’s wireframe desert, but it increasingly resembles it. Every road leads toward another camera, account, border record or machine asking the traveler to confirm that he remains the person who departed.

The inhabitants of the film’s simulated 1937 discover that their world was created for users elsewhere. Hall then discovers that his apparently real 1999 is also one among thousands of simulations. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” he is told. The sentence might serve as the motto of every identity system. The structure works best when the contained person mistakes its limitations for the natural shape of reality.

Elon Musk’s claim that there is only a one-in-billions chance of our inhabiting “base reality” is not a scientific calculation. It is a swaggering compression of the simulation argument: if advanced civilizations produce enormous numbers of conscious simulated worlds, a randomly situated observer is more likely to occupy one of those than the single original reality beneath them. Whether or not Musk is right, The Thirteenth Floor understands the emotional consequence. The final disappearance is not concealment within the map. It is the impossible search for a place outside it.

The Last Fugitive

John McAfee deserves the title because he possessed nearly every advantage. He had money, international mobility, technical knowledge, familiarity with surveillance, political connections, access to boats and aircraft, and the willingness to behave in ways a normal investigator might not predict. He also possessed a cardboard box.

I have long suspected that McAfee knew more about Gregory Faull’s murder than he admitted, perhaps much more. That is an opinion, not a proven fact. Belizean authorities sought McAfee for questioning, but he was not convicted or charged in connection with the killing. Suspicion does not become evidence merely because its subject is spectacularly strange.

I nevertheless wanted McAfee to remain in circulation. I wanted him alive, ranting online, threatening to parachute into Fukuoka, appearing without warning at a Kyoto bar and ordering a strip steak while explaining that income tax was metaphysically invalid. This is not a defense of anything he may have done. It is an admission that fugitives provide a form of entertainment respectable citizens cannot. McAfee turned the ordinary police question—where is this man?—into theater.

His technical competence makes the comedy sharper. He knew that networks retain traces. He warned endlessly about surveillance. He promoted cryptocurrency and privacy as routes around state control. Yet his own need for audience continually defeated his wish for concealment. He contacted reporters while hiding, traveled with a film crew, cultivated disguises elaborate enough to become stories and generated the publicity through which strangers could follow him.

The Vice metadata incident is almost too perfect. A technology journalist accompanying the antivirus pioneer posted a photograph containing geographical information. The machine did not need to recognize McAfee’s altered face or chewing-gum lip. It merely reported where the photograph had been made. McAfee’s legend and location traveled inside the same file.

This is why he is the last fugitive rather than the greatest one. A true second life requires anonymity. McAfee could tolerate danger, accusation, ridicule and legal jeopardy. He could not tolerate being unknown. He wanted to disappear and narrate the disappearance, to escape the state while retaining the crowd. The modern fugitive may finally be defeated less by the camera than by his inability to live without looking into it.

That appetite is not confined to eccentrics. We announce departures, document privacy, turn reinvention into a new profile and carry our old audiences toward the new life. The desire to become somebody else competes with the desire to have everyone recognize the transformation. Moll Flanders supplies the next town with a story. McAfee supplies the whole planet with updates.

Coda

Is the death of the second life good or bad? Neither. It is a historical development with benefits, cruelties and unforeseen emotional costs. Connected systems catch murderers, fraudsters and people attempting to abandon obligations. They also make escape more difficult for abused spouses, political dissidents, debtors, refugees and ordinary human beings whose worst mistake has become permanently searchable. Accountability and mercy do not rise together automatically.

There remains an important distinction between disappearance and reinvention. An adult can legally change a name, move, choose another occupation, close public accounts and refuse contact. The state does not require everyone to preserve the social life into which he happened to arrive. But legal reinvention preserves continuity. Debts, convictions, parenthood and court orders belong to the person through the change. The first life is not erased. It is amended.

The Thin Man occupies the fantasy beyond amendment. He moves without the drag of continuity. He may enter Andrea’s life, Jessica’s cabin or another city under circumstances that do not require him to explain the previous scene. I invented him because I wanted the freedom of a man nobody could summon. Yet even he carries Niko beneath the working identity. Georgia remains inside him. Education, language, childhood, loss and desire cross every border without documentation.

That is the final limitation, older than passports and more reliable than facial recognition. You cannot outrun your ghosts. A person may defeat the file and still remain the person described by everything the file omitted. Tom Ripley acquires Dickie’s signatures but retains Tom’s hunger. Don Draper obtains Don’s career but brings Dick’s shame into every marriage. McAfee crosses borders with the cardboard box and John McAfee climbs out from beneath it.

At fifteen, I thought Moll Flanders was shapeless because Moll repeatedly acquired another husband, name, occupation, crime, punishment and jurisdiction. Now the repetition looks like the record of a vanished human possibility. Moll continually finds another exit. We inhabit a world of fewer exits, better records and longer memories.

Perhaps this is why stories of disappearance retain their force. They promise that one life need not be final. Somewhere beyond the jurisdiction, ocean, desert or wireframe mountain waits a place where nobody knows what we have done and no machine asks us to confirm it. We know better. The map follows us, and even if it did not, we would arrive carrying ourselves.

Moll Flanders could become another woman. We can only become ourselves somewhere else.

Sources

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and Encyclopedia Virginia’s account of the novel’s transportation plot.

Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904).

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Anthony Minghella’s screenplay for the 1999 film.

AMC, Mad Men: the Dick Whitman/Don Draper identity narrative.

Project Gutenberg and the Ambrose Bierce Project, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and biographical materials.

FBI historical materials on John List and the America’s Most Wanted identification.

Contemporary reporting on John Darwin, Robert Hoagland and Ryan Borgwardt.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Japan Customs guidance on cross-border currency declarations.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, biometric identification materials.

Josef Rusnak, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3.

Code Conference 2016, Elon Musk’s discussion of simulation and “base reality.”

Contemporary Wired, Guardian and Vice reporting on John McAfee’s flight from Belize.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

John Ziegler on Jerry Sandusky: The Price of Being Right

An essay on evidence, obsession, and the price we pay by being right

Epigraphs:

You can’t tell people what they want to hear
If you also want to tell the truth

—Craig Finn

Oh, the price you pay, oh, the price you pay
Now you can’t walk away from the price you pay

—Emmylou Harris

Note: During the long stalled season of COVID, I went through a period of depression. I drank too much. I spent far too much time alone. And, like millions of other people trying to fill hours that had lost their ordinary shape, I listened to podcasts—politics, true crime, history, whatever caught my attention. Somewhere in the middle of this drift I found With the Benefit of Hindsight, John Ziegler and Liz Habib’s lengthy audio investigation of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the fall of Joe Paterno’s.

I expected to hear a crank. This was, after all, a project arguing that the most notorious convicted child molester in American sports history had been railroaded. Sandusky had been convicted in 2012 on forty-five counts after eight young men testified about abuse. Penn State had paid more than $90 million to settle dozens of claims. The public story had hardened years earlier: Sandusky was a monster; Penn State protected him; Paterno looked away; justice, belatedly and imperfectly, had finally arrived. A man insisting that this structure was largely false sounded less like an investigator than a citizen of the internet with a microphone and an inexhaustible supply of grievance.

And then I listened.

===== =====

John Ziegler is not a lawyer. He is an independent journalist, broadcaster, documentary filmmaker and former talk-radio host with a taste for public combat. He is conservative, though “contrarian” may be the more useful category. He likes talking shit to power, talking shit to the people who think they are power, and occasionally talking shit simply because the opportunity presents itself. He is funny, combative, thin-skinned, resourceful, obsessive and totally out of control.

He had also done an extraordinary amount of work on the Sandusky case.

Ziegler began with Paterno. He believed the media and Penn State had transformed a limited failure of institutional judgment into a knowing conspiracy to protect a predator. As he accumulated interviews, records, leaks and contradictions, his theory expanded. He visited Sandusky in prison, corresponded with him, interviewed family members and officials, traveled to Pennsylvania, cultivated sources the national press had abandoned, and spent years reconstructing dates and testimony. By the time he and Habib recorded roughly one hundred studio hours for their original nineteen-part series, Ziegler had crossed from defending Paterno to proclaiming Sandusky innocent.

That final step is where he loses me. It is also where he becomes the most interesting.

I do not believe Jerry Sandusky is innocent. I believe he probably abused boys. The grooming patterns, boundary violations, unusually intense relationships with vulnerable children, physical contact in cars and showers, and multiple accounts of escalating misconduct are too substantial to dismiss. His explanations about horseplay and innocent showering are partially persuasive only in the narrow sense that communal showers and physical joking were more ordinary in the culture in which he coached. I grew up in the 1980s. Boys showered together after sports. Coaches sometimes entered the same open facilities. Towels were snapped; stupid jokes were made; conduct that would now cause alarm was treated as ordinary. That context matters when interpreting an isolated act. It does not explain years of targeted intimacy, secrecy and allegations of sexual contact.

Yet listening to Ziegler made it impossible for me to retain the simpler belief that every important part of the accepted story had been reliably established. His maximal conclusion is unpersuasive. Many of the defects he identifies are real.

That distinction is the narrative spine of this essay. A person can be guilty while the story told about his guilt is partly false. A prosecution can reach a broadly correct result through a contaminated process. Some accusers can tell the truth while others exaggerate, reconstruct or invent. An institution can behave cowardly without having operated a criminal conspiracy. A journalist can discover facts everyone else missed and then damage those facts by demanding that they prove too much.

John Ziegler is right about enough that dismissing him is intellectually lazy. He is wrong about enough that embracing him whole is reckless. The price of being right is what happened between those two propositions.

The Boy in the Shower

The Penn State story begins, in the public imagination, in a shower.

Mike McQueary, then a graduate assistant, said that one evening he entered a football-building locker room and saw Sandusky engaged in sexual conduct with a boy. McQueary did not intervene physically. He left, spoke first with his father and family friend Dr. Jonathan Dranov, then reported the matter to Paterno. Paterno passed it upward to athletic director Tim Curley and university vice president Gary Schultz. President Graham Spanier became involved. The university restricted Sandusky’s access to some facilities and notified the Second Mile, his charity. It did not report the matter directly to police or child-protection authorities.

That chain of events supports a serious criticism of Penn State. Whatever precise act McQueary saw, he believed it was sexual and alarming. Paterno fulfilled the limited bureaucratic act of passing the report to his superiors, but later acknowledged that he wished he had done more. Curley, Schultz and Spanier treated the incident as an internal risk to be managed. Their response was insufficient because the possible victim and other children—not the institution—should have been the center of the decision.

But the version that reached the public was more definite than the underlying record. The grand-jury presentment described McQueary seeing anal intercourse. McQueary later said he had not seen penetration and had not used language that specific. The date migrated from March 2002 to February 9, 2001; Ziegler has argued at length that December 29, 2000, better fits the surrounding records. The length and content of McQueary’s conversation with Paterno have also been disputed. The man believed to have been the boy in the shower reportedly denied that he had been abused and defended Sandusky before ultimately receiving a civil settlement.

None of this proves that the shower encounter was innocent. Sexual acts do not become harmless merely because a witness lacks the ideal viewing angle. Trauma, embarrassment and conflicting loyalties can produce denial. Memory naturally changes. But these are not trivial variations either. The difference between seeing anal rape and hearing or glimpsing conduct that appears sexual is legally, morally and narratively enormous. The public was handed the most explosive version first. Every later ambiguity was forced to compete with an image already burned into the culture.

The result was a form of backward reasoning: Sandusky was eventually convicted of abusing boys; therefore, McQueary must have witnessed the worst possible act; therefore, every Penn State official who heard some version of his report must have understood it exactly as the public later did; therefore, any institutional hesitation must have been a cover-up. Each link may be arguable. The chain is not self-proving.

Paterno occupies surprisingly little of the real legal story. He received a report, passed it to the men responsible for the university and failed to follow through. That is not heroic. It is also not persuasive evidence that he knowingly protected a serial abuser for years. His firing, death and the removal of his statue gave the scandal its Shakespearean public shape, but they do not establish what he knew.

Spanier is more complicated. He approved an institutional response that did too little and prioritized Penn State’s exposure. He was ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor count of child endangerment, served fifty-eight days and remained convinced that he had been scapegoated. Calling him a coward would flatten a murkier failure. He appears to have behaved like an administrator inside a powerful institution: cautious, procedural, self-protective and disastrously willing to accept uncertainty when certainty would have required an ugly confrontation. That may not be a grand conspiracy. It can still be a profound moral failure.

The Settlements

Sandusky’s criminal trial and Penn State’s civil settlements are frequently blended into one body of proof. They are not the same thing.

The trial placed witnesses under oath and allowed cross-examination, however rushed or ineffective the defense may have been. The settlements were private risk resolutions. In 2013 Penn State announced twenty-six settlements totaling $59.7 million. By 2015 its audited total had reached approximately $92.8 million for thirty-two claims, and later accounting pushed the broader cost beyond $100 million. The agreements explicitly did not require Penn State to admit the validity of each allegation.[1]

The university’s incentives were overwhelming. It faced catastrophic publicity, potentially enormous jury awards, discovery that could expose embarrassing documents, and a governing board desperate to end a crisis. A settlement did not mean, “We have established that this exact history occurred.” It meant, “The expected cost of fighting this claim exceeds the price of buying certainty and a release.” That is common civil-law logic, particularly in institutional-abuse cases. It is neither an admission of guilt nor evidence of fraud.

Still, the process deserves scrutiny. Penn State’s insurance carrier did scrutinize it, because the carrier might ultimately have to pay. In litigation between the university and its insurer, an expert for the insurer wrote that Penn State appeared to have made little effort to verify claimants’ credibility and noted missing affidavits or other personal verification in some files. University personnel acknowledged that the consulting psychiatrist did not personally interview the first group of claimants. Penn State later introduced direct psychiatric examinations, but confidentiality prevents the public from reconstructing the complete evaluation of most claims.[2]

Penn State did not establish thirty-two separate histories of abuse. It purchased thirty-two resolutions under conditions in which contesting an allegation had become almost as dangerous as losing one.

Ziegler is strongest when he keeps his attention on that distinction. He is weakest when he assumes that a financially interested claimant is therefore lying. Money is a motive to fabricate; it is also compensation sought by people who were genuinely harmed. A changed account can signal contamination; it can also reflect shame, delayed disclosure or a witness finding language for an experience he previously could not describe. In a serious examination, suspicion is the beginning of inquiry, not its conclusion.

The Lock Haven cluster demonstrates both the value and danger of Ziegler’s method.

Lock Haven is a small city in central Pennsylvania, roughly thirty-eight road miles and about fifty minutes northeast of State College. Penn State’s main University Park campus sits in State College, not in western Pennsylvania. Geography does not make the allegations impossible. The Second Mile existed precisely to connect disadvantaged children from communities such as Lock Haven with Sandusky, Penn State facilities, camps, games and other outings. Transportation came through the charity, Sandusky and the adults running its programs.[3]

Five claimants from the Lock Haven area—Aaron Fisher, Frankie Probst, Skyler Coover, Glenn Neff and Joshua Culver—reportedly received settlements totaling $35.5 million. They attended the same school district; three shared a lawyer; only Fisher testified at Sandusky’s criminal trial. That clustering does not establish coordination. It is also not meaningless. Members of the same social and institutional network could share truthful experiences, influence one another’s recollections, learn the settlement system from one another, or do all three.

The claims were not geographically uniform. Fisher met Sandusky through a Second Mile camp at Penn State and alleged a relationship that moved among the charity’s activities, Sandusky’s car, Central Mountain High School and Sandusky’s home, including its basement. His was not a sudden post-conviction claim: he reported abuse in 2008, helped initiate the investigation and testified at trial. Whatever one thinks of changes and therapeutic influence in his account, Fisher does not fit the description of a man who merely appeared after checks began flowing.

Probst also met Sandusky through the Second Mile. In a nationally televised 2011 interview, he called Sandusky a father figure and denied being touched inappropriately below the belt, although he described showering with him, overnight trips, discomfort with Sandusky becoming clingy, and touching on his leg in a car. More than four years later, Probst filed a civil claim alleging years of far more serious oral and anal abuse beginning around age ten. Penn State reportedly settled for $9 million. That does not prove the later account false. It is an enormous transformation that demands an explanation more rigorous than either “victims always disclose gradually” or “he saw the money and lied.”[4]

Public details surrounding Coover, Neff and Culver are thinner because their civil claims remained confidential and none testified in Sandusky’s trial. Neff reportedly alleged oral and anal assaults on multiple dates in 2004 and 2005 but did not report them until 2016. A later judge questioned Neff’s reliability in an unrelated proceeding over attempts to convert part of his structured settlement into immediate cash; that ruling concerned his financial representations, not whether Sandusky abused him. Coover underwent one of Penn State’s later psychiatric evaluations before receiving a reported $7 million. The accessible record does not permit a responsible reconstruction of the exact sites, trips or transportation asserted in every confidential claim.

Culver supplies Ziegler’s most combustible Lock Haven anecdote. Tennielle Jones, Culver’s former fiancée and the mother of his child, gave a tape-recorded interview in 2017 for a proposed Newsweek investigation by Ziegler and journalist Ralph Cipriano. According to their unpublished draft, Jones said Culver bragged that he had received $5 million from Penn State and told her he stayed awake for three days before meeting a therapist so that he would appear emotional and convincing. It was reportedly the first time he had mentioned Sandusky to her. The claimed amount matched a settlement figure that had not then been publicly disclosed.[5]

That is a real lead: a named source, a recorded interview and a specific allegation containing potentially checkable knowledge. It is not an adjudicated fact. Newsweek never published the investigation, Culver was not cross-examined about Jones’s account, and I have found no independent confirmation that he admitted fabricating abuse. Ziegler and Cipriano may have found evidence of fraud. They may have found a furious ex-partner recounting a boast accurately, inaccurately or without its full context. The correct journalistic verb is alleged.

The ostentatious money photographs belong to Fisher, not Culver. Ziegler published an image of Fisher lying amid large-denomination cash and giving the camera the finger. Elsewhere he displayed photographs of another claimant’s new Audi and other post-settlement consumption. Who poses in a pile of money after receiving millions in an abuse settlement? It is grotesque optics—juvenile, provocative and almost purpose-built for Ziegler’s argument. It proves nothing about whether the abuse occurred. People with legitimate settlements can behave like fools. Yet evidence does not have to prove the ultimate charge to possess evidentiary value. The photograph helps explain why Ziegler suspected the public morality play concealed uglier and more opportunistic human motives.

The Lock Haven five therefore tell us something more limited and more useful than either camp wants. They show that allegation networks can form inside existing social networks; that the Second Mile explains opportunity and transportation; that some stories preceded the financial panic while others came years later; that accounts could expand dramatically; and that Penn State paid confidential claims the public still cannot fully evaluate. The cluster justifies investigation. It does not justify collective acquittal or collective condemnation.

What Ziegler Gets Right

Ziegler’s first great service is resisting narrative compression. The national press took a sprawling set of incidents, reports, institutional decisions, therapeutic encounters, criminal charges and civil claims and compressed them into one clean sentence: Penn State protected a monster. Ziegler reopened the components and asked which proposition was supported by which evidence. That is exactly what journalism should do after the first moral emergency has passed.

Second, he recognized the importance of changing accounts. Variation is not automatically deception, but neither should every escalation be insulated from scrutiny by the vocabulary of trauma. Several witnesses initially denied abuse or described limited conduct, then alleged far more serious acts after repeated interviews, therapy, publicity or legal representation. In at least two instances, the sexual history asserted in a civil claim was substantially broader than the account given under oath at the criminal trial. If both versions cannot comfortably coexist, the discrepancy belongs at the center of the analysis.

Third, Ziegler exposed how investigators could communicate certainty to uncertain witnesses. Suggestive interviewing is not a fringe concern. Telling a person that other boys have described the same acts, assuring him that blocked memories are normal, or repeatedly revisiting a desired hypothesis can affect recall without anybody consciously conspiring to create false testimony. A witness may become more sincere as his memory becomes less reliable. The opposition between “truthful victim” and “lying opportunist” is too crude to capture memory contamination.

Fourth, he distinguished Paterno’s actual conduct from the symbolic role assigned to him. Paterno should have followed up. That failure does not prove he possessed decades of secret knowledge or directed a cover-up. The most famous person in a scandal is not necessarily its causal center.

Fifth, Ziegler kept reporting after institutional and media interest had moved on. He obtained interviews, settlement material, medical records and internal statements that complicate the official history. A proposed 16,000-word Newsweek investigation he developed with Cipriano was killed before publication. Ziegler’s telling of that collapse is predictably apocalyptic, but the underlying draft contains material that deserved a wider and more careful public examination.

Finally, the latest legal development means his central procedural concern cannot simply be laughed away. On August 28, 2026, the Associated Press reported that a judge had scheduled a September 8 evidentiary hearing concerning an affidavit from a trial witness identified as R.R. The witness says he was extensively coached, told that trauma might fragment memory and encouraged to affirm details he did not fully remember. The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office considers the recantation highly suspect. Even a credible recantation would not automatically produce a new trial, much less prove Sandusky innocent. But a court is now preparing to hear, under legal procedures, a claim resembling the contamination theory Ziegler has argued for years.[6]

That does not make him right about everything. It makes the respectable world’s refusal to engage him look worse.

Where Ziegler Goes Off the Rails

Ziegler treats almost every ambiguity as a one-way ratchet toward innocence. A denial favors Sandusky; a later allegation proves contamination. Continued affection favors Sandusky; anger proves financial motivation. An accuser who behaves badly is untrustworthy; an accuser who behaves well is performing. A media outlet that rejects Ziegler is afraid of the truth; one that interviews him confirms his legitimacy. The theory becomes difficult to falsify because opposition itself becomes evidence of the cover-up.

He also overreads medical evidence. Records suggesting low testosterone, sexual dysfunction or distinctive anatomy can be relevant to specific allegations. Impotence is not a defense to all sexual abuse. Abuse can involve touching, coercion, oral contact and acts not requiring a sustained erection. Physical limitation may make one described act less plausible without erasing an entire course of misconduct.

His rhetoric corrodes his best reporting. He calls people frauds, morons and liars before the evidence has completed the journey. It is entertaining—often extremely entertaining—but it gives skeptical readers permission to dismiss the documents with the man. The investigator discovers a discrepancy; the polemicist declares the whole case dead; the discovery dies with the overstatement.

Most importantly, he does not adequately account for the cumulative pattern surrounding Sandusky. Individual allegations may wobble. Some may be false. Yet a powerful adult repeatedly created private, physically intimate relationships with vulnerable boys, brought them into showers and his home, touched them in cars, cultivated dependence and crossed boundaries that require explanation. Ziegler frequently treats the absence of conventional pornography, a confession or DNA as affirmative evidence of innocence. Many child-abuse cases produce none of those things. The relevant conduct often occurs privately and leaves no recoverable physical trace.

I therefore cannot follow him to total exoneration. I can follow him to a narrower, unsettling place: I am no longer confident that Sandusky committed every major act attributed to him, that every witness’s final account was independently reliable, or that the trial process adequately separated original memory from subsequent influence. Those doubts matter even if Sandusky is guilty.

Guilty Man, False Stories?

History offers imperfect but useful comparisons to the Sandusky case. Julius Rosenberg was genuinely involved in Soviet espionage. Ethel Rosenberg’s role was less clear, and the prosecution used the threat of her execution in an effort to force cooperation. Their case demonstrates that underlying wrongdoing does not validate every prosecutorial claim or every punishment imposed around it.

Wayne Williams was convicted of murdering two adults and was publicly associated with a much larger group of Atlanta child murders. Closing numerous cases through administrative attribution created a broader story than the two convictions established. Williams may be guilty of more than the adjudicated murders; the point is that “guilty of something” cannot do the evidentiary work for “guilty of everything.”

The Wenatchee child-abuse prosecutions of the 1990s offer the darker warning about investigative generation. Repeated and suggestive questioning produced expanding networks of allegations, prosecutions and ruined lives before many convictions collapsed. That does not mean every mass-abuse case is hysteria. It means an investigation can become a machine that manufactures confirmation faster than it tests alternatives.

Sandusky is not Richard Jewell, an innocent man wrongly suspected in the Atlanta bombing. Nor is his case the Duke lacrosse prosecution, where the central allegation collapsed before trial. The more demanding proposition is that a guilty man can receive an unreliable trial or become the center of a partly false social narrative. Defending his procedural rights does not require liking him, trusting him or announcing his innocence.

Like most people, I have problems with aspects of the American legal system. I nonetheless accept its foundational aspirations. The state should prove criminal guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. An accused person should receive competent counsel and a meaningful chance to confront the evidence. A convicted person retains the right to challenge unlawful confinement through appeals, post-conviction proceedings and, where available, habeas corpus. Habeas is not a magical declaration of innocence, and the post-conviction presumption is not identical to the presumption at trial. It is the mechanism by which the state is required, in limited circumstances, to justify continuing to hold a human being.

That principle is easiest to praise when the prisoner is sympathetic. It matters most when he is Jerry Sandusky.

Liz Habib and the Discipline of Company

Ziegler did not make With the Benefit of Hindsight alone. Liz Habib, an experienced television journalist and sports anchor, spent approximately one hundred hours with him in a California studio assembling the original series. Raised in the Pittsburgh area in an athletic family, she worked in Steubenville, Cleveland, Phoenix and Los Angeles, became Fox 11 Los Angeles’s first female weekday sports anchor, won Emmys and later taught journalism. She now works in the federal Small Business Administration.[7]

Her role matters because she gives the project a second intelligence and a different rhythm. Ziegler is the crusader; Habib is the person in the room who can hear how the crusade sounds to somebody not already living inside it. She does not neutralize his excesses, and the series ultimately shares too many of his premises. But her questions, summaries and professional presence help turn an archive of obsession into a narrative that an outsider can enter.

There is a larger lesson there. Contrarians need company—not cheerleaders, but people capable of preserving the distinction between a discovery and a verdict. Ziegler’s work is most persuasive when another mind forces him to slow down. It loses force whenever certainty outruns the record.

The Price of Being Right

What price did John Ziegler actually pay?

We should not romanticize it. The Sandusky project gave him a signature subject, a devoted audience and hundreds of hours of content. It produced interviews, appearances and a reputation as the man willing to argue the case nobody else would touch. I cannot establish that it impoverished him or single-handedly destroyed a conventional career he otherwise would have possessed.

The reputational price is easier to see. To question one Sandusky accuser was to invite suspicion; to declare Sandusky innocent was to become professionally radioactive. Editors, broadcasters and ordinary readers could treat association with Ziegler as evidence of moral defect. The failure of the proposed Newsweek article—whatever mix of legal caution, editorial judgment and institutional fear killed it—left his strongest material trapped on his own advocacy site, where people inclined to distrust him would never encounter it.

There was an opportunity cost too. A decade devoted to one nearly impossible cause is a decade unavailable for other reporting, relationships and work. Obsession builds expertise by narrowing life. Ziegler knows the evidentiary history of this case at a level few journalists can match. The achievement and the damage may be the same fact viewed from opposite ends.

His greatest price, however, is persuasive. By insisting that Sandusky abused nobody, Ziegler makes it harder for the public to hear his demonstrably stronger claims: that the McQueary narrative was overstated; that Paterno was assigned knowledge not proven by the record; that some accounts changed radically; that investigators and therapists may have shaped memory; that Penn State’s settlement process sometimes substituted payment for robust adversarial testing; and that at least one trial witness now says the process influenced him.

Ziegler found holes in a wall and announced that there was no wall. People looked at the wall, saw that it remained standing and ignored the holes.

That may be the final meaning of The Price of Being Right. It is not simply that society punished Ziegler for challenging a sacred narrative. Sometimes it did. It is that his need to be right about the whole case reduced the force of what he was right about. He paid for certainty with credibility. The public paid too, because valuable evidence became easier to discard. The truth paid most of all.

I came to the podcast expecting a crank. I found a crank, certainly, but also a genuine journalist: brave, funny, obsessive, infuriating and capable of discovering things more respectable people had missed. I began believing the Sandusky case was essentially closed. I finished believing Sandusky was probably guilty and the story of his guilt was substantially less reliable than I had assumed.

That is not the conversion Ziegler wanted. It is still a conversion.

The September hearing may amount to nothing. Recantations are treated skeptically for good reason. Memories change; loyalties change; pressure can operate in several directions. The court may find R.R. incredible, immaterial or insufficient to disturb the other convictions. Sandusky may die in prison, and history may retain him exactly as it has known him since 2011.

But he gets the hearing. The state must listen, answer and make a record. That is not an exoneration. It is the law doing the difficult thing the law exists to do: looking again when nearly everyone would prefer never to look at all.

John Ziegler has been asking people to look again for more than a decade. He has often asked badly. He has sometimes demanded conclusions the evidence cannot carry. He has insulted the audience, the witnesses, the press and occasionally his own best work. He has also refused the comfort of a finished story.

On that essential point, I agree with him.

Dedication:

For John. You are totally outta control but you still rule baby.

Sources

1. Penn State, “Settlements Announced for Sandusky Victims,” October 28, 2013; WHYY, “Penn State, Insurer Scuffle Over Paying Sandusky Victims,” November 30, 2015.

2. Ralph Cipriano, “Easy Money at Penn State,” Big Trial, August 14, 2018; Cipriano and John Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” unpublished proposed Newsweek investigation posted by Ziegler, March 29, 2018.

3. Penn State, University Park campus information; contemporary route information between Lock Haven and State College.

4. NBC interview with Frankie Probst, November 21, 2011; Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley.”

5. Cipriano and Ziegler, “The Sad Story of Happy Valley,” section titled “The Lock Haven Quintet.”

6. Mark Scolforo, Associated Press, “Judge Will Hear Recantation of Sexual Abuse Claim Against Ex-Penn State Coach Jerry Sandusky,” August 28, 2026.

7. With the Benefit of Hindsight project page; U.S. Small Business Administration biography of Elizabeth Habib.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Three Musicians Who Walked Away from Great Bands

Epigraphs:

What’s the matter with the boy?
He don’t come around no more.

—The Rolling Stones

Maybe I should just change my style.

—Dean Wareham

Just another cigarette, staring at my shoes.

—Izzy Stradlin

Note: This is an essay about three musicians who walked away: Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones, Dean Wareham from Galaxie 500, and Izzy Stradlin from Guns N’ Roses. Their circumstances were wildly different, as were their reasons for leaving. But all three walked away from something that was working, something valuable, and in two cases something potentially worth an almost unimaginable amount of money. I’m interested in why they did it, what it cost them, what they gained, and the strange calculation involved in deciding that success itself is no longer sufficient reason to stay put.

Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones in December 1974. Dean Wareham left Galaxie 500 in the spring of 1991. Izzy Stradlin left Guns N’ Roses in November of the same year.

In the first and third cases, the bands were among the biggest in the world. In the second, Galaxie 500 was an up-and-coming indie band, critically acclaimed and preparing for a tour of Japan, with reason to believe that bigger things lay ahead.

All three men left for different reasons. Taylor was tired of the Rolling Stones and wanted to broaden his musical horizons. Wareham had become increasingly miserable inside Galaxie 500 and wanted to start his own band and chill. Stradlin had recently become sober and suddenly found the chaos surrounding Guns N’ Roses considerably less charming when he was looking at it with clear eyes.

There are differences between the three cases of course. But I see some essential similarities.

All three men walked away from something valuable. And I mean valuable in the most vulgar sense of the word too: money.

I am fascinated by the economics of the music business. Who owns what piece? Who gets paid when an old song is streamed? Who has the publishing rights? Who has songwriting credit? If a band breaks up, who continues receiving royalties? When a guitarist leaves a group in 1974, what exactly has he surrendered by 2026? When another leaves one of the biggest bands on earth in 1991, how many millions of dollars has he effectively decided he does not need?

These aren’t incidental questions. Money is one of the invisible forces inside bands, just as important sometimes as friendship, ego, drugs, sex, musical differences, or the question of who gets the spotlight.

And so I am interested in the leaver.

More particularly, I am interested in the person who looks at a successful institution from the inside and decides that its value is no longer sufficient reason to remain there.

There is something reckless about this.

There can be something rational about it as well.

I. Mick Taylor: Leaving the Biggest Band in the World

Mick Taylor was just twenty years old when he joined the Rolling Stones.

Think about that for a minute.

He had already played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, replacing Peter Green, and was a staggeringly accomplished guitarist before most people his age had figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. When Brian Jones died in 1969, Taylor became the new Rolling Stone.

He then participated in what many people consider the greatest period in the band’s history.

Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. from this period are, for me, the two greatest Stones records. Nothing before or afterward really comes close. Others can have “Paint It Black” or whatever else they want. I’ll take the Mick Taylor Stones.

Charlie Watts himself later called Taylor’s period a creative peak for the band, while Mick Jagger acknowledged that Taylor brought a fluent, melodic style of guitar playing that the Stones had not possessed before and did not possess afterward.

Taylor also complemented Keith Richards perfectly. This isn’t an argument against Keith, whom I also love. It is in fact the opposite. Richards and Taylor were sufficiently different guitarists that each gave the other room to be himself.

The result is all over those records. And then Taylor left.

He was twenty-five.

There are several explanations for the decision, and Taylor himself has told different parts of the story at different times. He had developed a serious drug problem. He had been touring and recording almost continuously since his days with John Mayall. He felt creatively constrained. And he believed he had contributed to the writing of songs for which Jagger and Richards received the official songwriting credit.

That last part particularly interests me.

Taylor has specifically mentioned “Sway” and “Moonlight Mile,” among other songs, and said that Jagger had promised him credits that never materialized. This wasn’t simply a matter of whether Mick Taylor’s name appeared nicely on an album sleeve. Songwriting credit means publishing. Publishing means money. And when the song in question remains part of the catalogue of the Rolling Stones for another fifty years, publishing potentially means an awful lot of money.

So Taylor quit.

This is where hindsight becomes dangerous.

It is easy now to look at the Rolling Stones as an eternal financial machine and calculate all the stadium tours Taylor did not play, all the merchandise he did not participate in, all the enormous guarantees he did not receive. But Taylor wasn’t sitting in 1974 with a spreadsheet showing the Stones’ revenues through 2026.

In fact, he has said that he wasn’t convinced the band would remain together. From inside, the Stones looked chaotic. Keith Richards’ heroin use was becoming catastrophic. Taylor had his own drug problems. The machinery was wobbling.

And Taylor was a musician. He wanted to play.

Later he put the question beautifully: some people are content to ride along on somebody else’s success. For him, that wasn’t enough.

This is the point.

Financially, leaving the Rolling Stones looks insane. Artistically and psychologically, remaining makes more sense.

Taylor has gone considerably further. Asked later whether he regretted leaving, he said that had he stayed he might well be dead.

What price do we put on that?

Taylor didn’t disappear. He worked with Jack Bruce, Bob Dylan and many others, recorded under his own name, returned occasionally to play with the Stones, and continued being exactly what he had always fundamentally been: an extraordinary blues guitarist. He just stopped being a Rolling Stone.

There is something almost shocking about the simplicity of that.

The institution had become bigger than the man. So the man left the institution.

II. Dean Wareham: Maybe I Should Just Change My Style

The Dean Wareham case is the one I know best.

I have written about Galaxie 500 elsewhere. I have written about Luna here and here. I have written about seeing Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang in Kyoto and having Damon come across the room to shush me while I was talking to a friend before, in my opinion, the fucking show had even started.

I have litigated that case sufficiently elsewhere. I remain innocent.

More importantly, I have read Wareham’s excellent memoir Black Postcards a number of times, and the Galaxie breakup has fascinated me for years.

Galaxie 500 consisted of Wareham, Krukowski and Yang. Damon and Naomi were a couple; Dean was the third person. All three were intelligent, arty people who attended Harvard. They began making music together without, by Wareham’s telling, having any particularly clear idea what they were doing.

Somehow they developed an extraordinary sound.

Galaxie 500 was spacious and slow, droning and melodic, fragile without being weak. Wareham’s guitar floated around inside songs while his thin, peculiar voice made the whole enterprise sound simultaneously sincere and slightly detached from itself.

They became successful enough to tour internationally and open for the Cocteau Twins. Rough Trade released their records. By 1991 they were supposed to go to Japan.

Instead, Dean Wareham quit. The immediate mechanics are almost comically mundane.

Their final show was at Bowdoin College on April 5, 1991. There were reportedly only forty or fifty people there. The opening band played too long. Everyone was irritated. Afterward, according to someone who attended the show, Wareham packed his things, walked out the door and drove away without much ceremony.

Then Damon called him about the tickets to Japan. Dean told him not to buy one. He was leaving.

The phone exploded for three days.

Naomi later recalled yelling at Dean, something apparently very unlike her, because she couldn’t understand how he could throw away what they had built without even bothering to discuss it.

From her perspective, this makes perfect sense. From Dean’s, I suspect the discussion had been going on internally for months.

That is one of the strange things about leaving. The person being left often experiences a sudden event. The person leaving may experience the final announcement as merely the last sentence of an argument he has been having silently with himself for years.

Wareham had been documenting his frustrations.

The most famous passage concerns touring. Damon was effectively tour manager, and to Dean it seemed that every hotel, rental car and airline seat became another source of stress. Wareham concludes simply that traveling together highlights your differences.

That’s just true.

Travel is an extraordinary accelerant. Two people can get along beautifully when they meet twice a week for dinner and discover within four days of sharing hotels, airports, taxis, bathrooms and luggage that they should never be permitted within fifty miles of each other again.

The members of Galaxie 500 had spent years in vans together. Now there was nowhere for their differences to hide.

Then there was the spotlight.

At a show in Los Angeles in 1991, Wareham moved forward to take a guitar solo and a lighting technician put a spotlight on him.

Damon apparently interpreted this as a calculated move. Los Angeles meant record-company people. Why, he wondered, had Dean suddenly acquired a spotlight there when there hadn’t been any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas?

Dean’s tour diary records Damon complaining that Wareham stepping in front of his drum kit threw him off. Wareham writes that he resisted telling Damon to go fuck himself.

Dean’s restraint did not save Galaxie 500.

I love this story because it is simultaneously trivial and enormous.

Bands are full of these things. Who stands where. Whose song goes on the record. Who talks to the journalist. Who gets the hotel room with the view. Who gets songwriting credit. Who decides the setlist. Who is allowed to play twenty guitar solos while everyone else goes for lunch.

Every argument is ostensibly about the thing being argued about. Very few arguments are actually about the thing being argued about.

And underneath all of this, I think Wareham simply wanted something different. You can hear it happening in real time.

“Fourth of July,” from Galaxie’s final album This Is Our Music, contains the line I have used as his epigraph here:

Maybe I should just change my style.

Well yes Dean. Maybe you should dude.

Wareham left Galaxie and almost immediately began assembling what would later became Luna.

The first Luna record, Lunapark, still has one foot in Galaxie territory. “Anesthesia” has the wooziness, the Velvet Underground haze, the fuzz, the slightly narcotized pace. “Slash Your Tires” points further forward.

Then Sean Eden arrived and Luna became Luna.

Eden is a brilliant guitarist and the ideal foil for Wareham, although apparently he makes music with roughly the degree of agony other people associate with emergency dental surgery.

There is a wonderful passage in Black Postcards about the Rendezvous sessions in which producer Bryce Goggin essentially tells Sean to come into the studio the following morning, record twenty guitar solos, choose whichever one he likes, and let someone else record him because Bryce does not need to be physically present for the ordeal.

That arrangement also strikes me as very Dean Wareham. Let Sean suffer over his twenty solos. Dean will come back later.

The interesting point is that Wareham could coexist with this sort of difference inside Luna in a way he could no longer coexist with the differences inside Galaxie.

Why?

Partly age. Partly experience. Partly the structure of the band. But I think something more fundamental had changed.

Luna Was Dean’s Band

Not in the sense that the other musicians didn’t matter. Sean Eden transformed Luna. Justin Harwood and later Britta Phillips mattered as well. Stanley Demeski and Lee Wall contributed. Luna’s chemistry is real.

But with Luna Wareham no longer had to negotiate the basic identity of the project every day.

He took a risk. And it worked out.

This is where I disagree from any interpretation of the story that treats Galaxie 500 as the glorious future Dean foolishly threw away.

Galaxie 500 later became quite influential. Their records have aged well. Maybe they would have become substantially bigger had they remained together.

Nobody knows.

What we do know is that Luna became a larger, longer-lived project with a substantial catalogue of its own, a major-label career, an international audience and, after reforming in 2014, an existence that continues today.

More importantly for me, Luna is simply the better band.

By Bewitched, they had become smoother, sharper and more assured. “Friendly Advice,” “Tiger Lily,” “California,” “Great Jones Street”: this is music I can live inside.

And eventually you get Penthouse, Pup Tent, The Days of Our Nights, Romantica, Rendezvous. You get “23 Minutes in Brussels.” You get “Chinatown.” You get Luna playing “Fourth of July” and Dean reclaiming his own Galaxie song inside the band he chose to create. That matters.

Wareham didn’t merely leave something. He left for something else. The distinction is critical.

III. Izzy Stradlin: Just Another Cigarette

And then we get to Izzy.

I have been rediscovering Izzy Stradlin lately, although “rediscovering” is slightly misleading because I knew the Ju Ju Hounds when the record came out in 1992.

I loved “Shuffle It All.”

Then life happened, decades passed, music piled on top of music, and recently I came back around to the song and immediately thought:

Jesus fucking christ, Izzy Stradlin fucking rocks.

Then I put on “Come On Now Inside.” Same reaction.

And suddenly I found myself wondering something I had never adequately wondered before.

Who exactly is this guy?

Stradlin grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, as did Axl Rose. They eventually migrated separately to Los Angeles, where the band that became Guns N’ Roses assembled out of several collapsing and recombining groups.

Izzy never looked entirely comfortable with the circus.

This is perhaps easier to see retrospectively because Guns N’ Roses became one of the most circus-like bands in rock history.

Appetite for Destruction was gigantic. By the time Use Your Illusion I and II arrived in September 1991, Guns were operating at a scale almost impossible to imagine for a group that had been playing clubs only a few years earlier.

And Izzy was not some replaceable rhythm guitarist standing behind Slash. He was fundamental to the songwriting.

He co-wrote “Don’t Cry” and “You Could Be Mine,” among others, and the Illusion records finally made his importance unusually visible: he sang lead on several tracks and had sole writing credit on songs including “Pretty Tied Up,” “Double Talkin’ Jive” and “You Ain’t the First.”

Then he up and quit in November 1991 at almost precisely the moment when an ordinary person might think: Now dude? You’re leaving NOW?

Yes my friend. Right now.

Izzy had recently gotten sober and sobriety changed the view about the band.

He later described looking around after quitting drugs and essentially wondering whether this was all there was. The delays, the chaos, Axl’s lateness, shows going off the rails, the Riverport riot, the endless machinery required to move Guns N’ Roses around the planet.

Slash later framed Izzy’s departure partly in terms of his unwillingness to endure the amount of work and stress required to keep the operation functioning.

Izzy rejected the idea that he simply hated touring. His version was funnier.

He had a bus. The others had a plane. He still beat them to the gig. That tells you a lot about Izzy Stradlin.

It also tells you something about institutions after they reach a certain size. More resources do not necessarily produce more freedom. Sometimes they produce more machinery.

The plane becomes slower than the bus. The rock star becomes less free than the guy driving down the highway staring at his shoes and smoking a cigarette.

And financially? This is where Izzy’s decision becomes astonishing.

Mick Taylor left a huge band in 1974. Izzy left an enormous band in 1991 just as its commercial machine was reaching maximum velocity.

The two Use Your Illusion albums debuted at numbers one and two in the United States. Guns N’ Roses had years of stadium touring ahead of them. The catalogue would continue selling forever.

Izzy had songwriting royalties, certainly. Leaving the touring band did not magically erase his authorship of the songs he had already written.

But he was nevertheless walking away from a gigantic stream of future income associated with actually remaining a member of Guns N’ Roses.

And apparently he could live with that.

Within a year, he released Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds. There is no mystery about the aesthetic.

It’s loose. It’s Stonesy. It’s unpretentious. It sounds like somebody who has escaped a meeting. Thank god. Meetings suck. Hard.

“Shuffle It All” is a masterpiece.

The song doesn’t sound like a man mourning the loss of Guns N’ Roses. It sounds like a man who has discovered that there are roads in the world and that he is permitted to drive on them.

That cigarette line compresses the whole Izzy Stradlin philosophy into a few words. No pyro. No grand piano. No two-hour delay. No riot. No fucking plane.

A bus. Another cigarette. Staring at his shoes.

And one great song.

IV. Three Gambles

So who took the biggest risk?

In purely financial terms, probably Izzy.

He walked away from the hottest band on earth at almost exactly the point at which the money hose was being turned all the way on.

Taylor’s decision may look even more expensive with fifty years of hindsight, because the Rolling Stones turned out to possess something approaching economic immortality. But Taylor couldn’t know that in 1974. He thought the band might collapse. In his twenties, with the Stones themselves in chaos, this was hardly an absurd prediction.

Wareham’s gamble was different.

Galaxie 500 had prestige and momentum, but not Stones or Guns money. His risk was therefore less about surrendering millions already within reach and more about destroying something difficult to reconstruct: a critically acclaimed band with a distinctive sound, a label, an audience and an international future.

And Wareham’s gamble paid off most clearly. He made Luna and they were, at least a moderated success.

That doesn’t mean Luna proves leaving Galaxie was objectively correct. Life doesn’t supply control groups. There is no parallel universe in which Dean stays and we get to compare the fourth, fifth and sixth Galaxie records with Bewitched and Penthouse.

There is only what happened. But that is enough. Three musicians looked at successful situations and independently arrived at versions of the same conclusion:

This is valuable. I am leaving anyway.

That’s what fascinates me.

Because a calculated risk isn’t the same thing as recklessness. Sometimes the calculation includes things that cannot be entered neatly into the financial column.

Creative control. Sobriety. Friendship. Mental health. Time. The simples pleasures of making music.

The ability to get on your own bus and arrive at the fucking concert before everybody else.

V. The Price of Staying

There is another reason I am interested in these stories. I am contemplating my own calculated exit.

After nearly thirty long career in teaching, I’m increasingly looking toward walking away and pursuing writing, along with whatever else I need to do to make the economics work.

My situation is obviously not remotely comparable in scale to Mick Taylor leaving the Rolling Stones or Izzy Stradlin leaving Guns N’ Roses.

Nobody is presently offering me a stadium tour.

Damn.

But the underlying calculation interests me because it is recognizable.

When you’ve invested years in something, the investment itself begins to make the decision for you. You’ve already spent twenty years here. You have seniority. You have security. You know how the machine works. Why would you leave?

This is the logic of staying. And sometimes it is excellent logic. But there is an opposing question that gets asked less often:

What does staying cost?

Mick Taylor could calculate the money he might lose by leaving the Stones. He couldn’t calculate precisely what staying would do to him.

Dean Wareham knew exactly what he was throwing away when he told Damon not to buy the ticket to Japan. He couldn’t know Luna would work.

Izzy Stradlin could see Guns N’ Roses becoming impossibly enormous. He got on the bus anyway.

I don’t think any of these men should be romanticized merely because they left. People quit good situations for stupid reasons every day. People also remain in difficult situations for excellent reasons. There is no universal moral law of walking away.

But there is a lesson here about sunk costs. Success answers only one question:

Is this working to not?

It does not answer the more important question: Do I still want it?

Taylor didn’t. Wareham didn’t. Izzy didn’t. And so they walked.

The Rolling Stones survived Mick Taylor and became the most durable touring institution in rock history.

Galaxie 500 did not survive Dean Wareham, but Luna emerged from the wreckage and became, for my money, one of the greatest bands ever.

Guns N’ Roses survived Izzy Stradlin, although I would argue they lost something fundamental when he left: the loose, Stonesy rhythmic center underneath all the Slash and Axl spectacularity.

And all three men survived too. That’s worth remembering.

A band can be bigger than you. A company can be bigger than you. A career can be bigger than you. The machine can keep going when you leave.

Fine. Fuck em.

There is a particular kind of freedom in discovering that you don’t actually need to remain inside the machine simply because the machine is successful.

Sometimes you change your style.

Sometimes you go play the blues.

And sometimes you light another cigarette, stare at your shoes, and shuffle it all.

Motherfucker.

Dedication:

For Mick, Dean and Izzy. You guys are awesome and you totally rule. You’ve made my world a better place. Thank you fellas.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY: A POEM

Epigraph:

Fuck the man.

Everybody

Note: This is a poem called Terms and Conditions Apply.

It started, as these things sometimes do, with a phrase that had annoyed me one too many times.

Terms and conditions apply.

Of course they do.

They apply at the bank. They apply at the pub. They apply on the train. They apply at the airport. They apply when the coffee machine steals your money. Apparently they apply to fathers, daughters, sperm banks, Houston, love, abandonment, driving home and every other human activity.

Eventually the phrase stopped sounding like corporate boilerplate and started sounding like a philosophy.

So I wrote it a song. Or a poem. Or whatever the hell this is.

The epigraph is by everybody. Fuck the man. Oh and also dude, fuck terms and conditions. Big time.

===== =====

I went down to the sperm bank

To make a little I

They said, “Terms and conditions apply.”

I gave up on my baby daughter because terms and conditions apply

I left my baby daughter in a pub I did spy

It just said, “Terms and conditions apply.”

I went in anyway and asked Mac behind the bar

Mac said, “Baby, what’s with the polo? Why oh why?”

As I chugged my second brewski

I knew I wouldn’t get that far

And Mac said, “Terms and conditions apply.”

I left the pub with my baby o’ mine

Caught the last slow train at a quarter to nine

The conductor punched my ticket and looked me dead in the eye

“Ride anywhere you want, baby

Still terms and conditions apply.”

I left my baby daughter down by the riverside.

I said, “Hon, honey bun—terms and conditions apply.”

She looked at me once and she looked at the sky.

Then she said, “Daddy, everybody leaves. They just tell you different reasons why.”

I went down to the airport. To Houston I would fly.

The stewardess was out of sorts. I never did learn why.

I said, “Baby, I’ve heard that all day. If I hear it again, I’m gonna cry.”

She said, “Well, there’s really nothing I can say except

terms and conditions apply.”

I landed down in Houston underneath a Texas sky.

Bought a coffee from a machine that took my money twice.

I kicked it once. It kicked me back. A little red light blinked nearby:

Terms and conditions apply

So I walked out toward the highway with no particular place in mind

My baby called from somewhere. I said, “Baby, are you all right?”

She said, “I’m fine. But if you’re coming home, you better come tonight.”

I said, “Baby, I’m coming.”

She said, “All right any yet”

Terms and conditions apply.

Of course they do dude. Always.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Habbibi Habbibi, You’re No Habbibi of Mine

“20th Century Habbibi.”
— Me, by way of T. Rex

“I’d go the whole wide world just to Habbibi.”
— Me, by way of Wreckless Eric

HABBIBI I:

There are Habbibis everywhere. This is one of the things I have learned.

There are Habbibis on trains. Habbibis behind counters.

Habibis smoking cigarettes outside convenience stores. Habbibis who give directions and Habbibis who give you cigarettes and Habbibis who cannot help you but seem genuinely sorry about it.

There are bank Habbibis, hotel Habbibis, street Habbibis, temporary Habbibis, provisional Habbibis and men who look extremely promising from fifty meters away but turn out, upon closer inspection, to be no Habbibi of mine.

Oh Habbibi Habbibi Habbibi you’re fine, but Habbibi you’re no Habbibi of mine.

Habibi is not a word anymore. I understand that it was a word before I got hold of it. It is now an all-purpose descriptor for people and things of all kind. I apologize in advance to Arabic.

It is now a lexical system.

A Habbibi is somebody who makes the world briefly less difficult.

That’s it.

You’re broke. You’re sweating. Your bankbook has betrayed you. Your hanko has vanished. You have dragged your suitcase halfway across Kyoto for reasons that seemed compelling three hours ago. You are beat.

You are hungry. You are thirsty. You need a cigarette. Bad.

You have reached that peculiar point in the day when every automatic door, ticket gate and escalator appears to have developed a personal grievance against you.

And then somebody does one decent thing.

Nothing enormous. He holds the door. She tells you where the elevator actually is.

The guy behind the counter understands your terrible Japanese and does not make a production of it.

Some glorious bastard gives you an entire pack of Marlboro Reds when you have almost no money.

Habibi

My Habbibi. You motherfucking Habbibi of mine. Be my Habbibi for all time.

You don’t earn Habbibi through greatness. Greatness might actually work against you. Nobody needs another great man. History is crawling with great men, and look what they’ve done to the place.

A Habbibi is smaller.

My Habibi is local.

A Habbibi is the guy who sees that you are having a bad day and, without knowing anything about you, makes it three percent better.

Three percent is enormous.

I know because some days I have been living on three percent.

Of course Habbibi status can be revoked just as quickly as it was granted. There is no tenure. No due process. No appeals court. One minute you are Habbibi, my Habbibi. The next you are not.

Habbibi Habbibi Habbibi this time…

You’re still no Habbibi of mine. Habbibi.

HABBIBI II:

There are other Habbibis.

Paul Westerberg, a.k.a. Pauly Paul the lead singer of the Replacements is a serious Habbibi. He’s is one glorious motherfucking Habbibi that’s for sure.

He had his moments of depression. He talked about suicide. Oh Habbibi. Before all shakedown, Habbibi stop it. Nevertheless, he carried on. Thank god Habbibi. Oh my Habbibi.

Give him his props, Habbibi. Habbibi.

Habbibis III-IV:

Lemmy Habbibi.

Mr. Motörhead himself. Oh Habbibi.

Now, I don’t know enough about Lemmy it’s true. That’s all right. You don’t have to know everything about a Habbibi to recognize one in the wild.

Lemmy looked like a Lemmy. And a Habbibi. RIP Habbibi my Habbibi. There was no second Lemmy. Nobody at the factory said, Yeah, give me another one of those. 

They made Lemmy, broke the mold, smoked whatever was left of the mold, plugged a Rickenbacker into an amplifier approximately the size of Luxembourg and got the fuck out of the way. Habbibi, play the ax my man.

Habbibi rip it up.

Habbibi had the mutton chops. The mole. The boots. The hat. The cigs. The bass slung over his shoulder like it was not a bass at all but some kind of industrial equipment he had been licensed to operate under an obscure British law. Habbibi. Chill.

And that voice.

Not a beautiful voice. A Lemmy voice.

That’s better. Habbibi you’re bizarre. Habbibi.

He was in Hawkwind. He got thrown out of Hawkwind. Fine. Habbibi. He went and made Motörhead. Better Habbibi. He spent decades making the music he wanted to make, at the volume he wanted to make it, which was fucking loud. Naturally. Habbibi crank that motherfucker up to 110. Good god Habbibi. Settle down.

And he kept going.

That’s the Habibi part.

Not because everything was good. Not because everything he did was admirable. Not because surviving automatically makes anybody wise.

Because the motherfucker remained unmistakably himself. Habbibi.

Paul Westerberg did too.

Different Habbibis, same genre.

Pauly could disappear into the basement, get sad, get strange, write something devastating, come back upstairs, fuck around with the Replacements and occasionally set the whole fucking building on fire.

Lemmy just seemed to be there.

Same Habbibi. Year after year. Decade after decade. The world changed. Lemmy kicked it. RIP.

Habbibi

HABBIBI IV:

Krispy Kreme Habbibi

Habbibi, Habbibi, Habbibi it’s fine

Habbibi you’re no Habbibi of mine

Shut the fuck up, Krispy Kreme.

Fuck you.

Fuck off, Krispy Kreme.

You’re too delicious. You’re too damn nice. You’re too damn tasty, baby.

There’s no reason for a doughnut to behave like this.

A doughnut should have some structural integrity. It should put up a fight. I should bite the doughnut and the doughnut should, at a minimum, acknowledge that an exchange has taken place.

Not you you punk.

You melt on my motherfucking tongue, Habbibi.

You’re barely food. You’re an event. A glazed little hallucination. Somebody took flour and sugar and oil and bad judgment and engineered a small edible pillow that disappears six seconds after entering the my mouth.

Habbibi

And the Original Glazed? That’s the one.

Fuck off.

Don’t put cereal on it. Don’t put a fucking candy bar on it. Don’t make it purple. Don’t make it Pokémon. Don’t put twelve additional Habbibis on top of the original Habbibi.

Give me a hot one.

Give me the glaze.

Give me that sweet, sweet cream. Powder cream, baby. Of course.. Nice one Habbibi.

And then you put twelve of the motherfuckers in a box.

Why twelve?

That is irresponsible.

Nobody needs twelve Krispy Kremes. Nobody has ever needed twelve Krispy Kremes. Twelve Krispy Kremes is not a food purchase. It is in fact an Habbibish situation. Whatever that means. Habbibi oh Habbibi you are a Habbbibi of mine. I guess.

Habbibi.

Dedication:

To each and every Habbibi around these days. You rule my Habbibi. And yes Habbibi, you are, after all, still my Habbibi. Habbibi.

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My Favorite Songs of All Time: 1-20 With Commentary

Music motherfucking rules

Me

I hear the aged footsteps
Like a motion on the sea
Sometimes I turn there’s someone there
Other times it’s only me

Bob Dylan

They say that victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

Conor Obrest

Note: This list speaks for itself, it is simply my 20 favorite songs of all time that include lyrics. For this list I have included extended commentary on each song. When I first published this list it was 110 songs long, and I will publish a full 250 this time in several installments. With the first publication, several people let me know that they had discovered new songs from it, and honestly that is the best outcomes I could have hoped for. This list does not include ambient music or jazz, two genres I also love. The list is a product of nearly 40 years of intensive music listening, so it is, at a minimum, highly curated. Thank you for reading, and may you find a new favorite somewhere here.

1. Cape Canaveral — Conor Oberst

For the first time since I began making versions of this list, I have a new number one. Conor Obrest’s Cape Canaveral has slowly, almost imperceptibly, worked its way past every other song I love. I didn’t exactly wake up one morning and decide that it was the greatest song ever. I simply noticed that I had already begun treating it that way. I return to it constantly, and it still gives me full-body chills and moves me to tears almost every time I hear it. After nearly forty years of obsessive music listening, Cape is as good of a number that I can come up with.

Conor is my number five artist of all time, and the fact that Cape Canaveral has become the song above all others that explains why. Number one. There it is. Man oh man. I didn’t see this one coming.

I have loved Cope for about eight years since I first heard it shorty after the release of the record it is on, Conor’s solo self titled debut from 2008. It is in my opinion his most beautiful and moving song. Conor also wrote my number 13 favorite song, Easy/Lucky/Free, which I write about below. Cape Canaveral uses the space program—those televised launches from decades ago, the spectacle of rockets lifting off into the unknown—as a proxy for growing up in America in the latter part of the 20th century. It’s about distance, aspiration, and the strange way in which memory reshapes people and moments over time.

It is one of the most gorgeous American songs ever written. “I watched your face age backwards / changing shape in my memory / you told me victory’s sweet / even deep in the cheap seats.” This is one of the loveliest passages ever set to music. Oberst is doing something subtle and devastating here—he’s taking the language of triumph and reframing it from the margins. Victory’s sweet even deep in the cheap seats is not a grand statement, however it is oddly triumphant. It’s about making meaning over time, with partial access, and moving from watching to participating.

That’s what the whole song feels like: an attempt to construct something lasting out of fragments—TV images, half-remembered conversations, the emotional residue of growing up. The rockets go up, but the song stays grounded in what it felt like to watch them, to want something more without knowing exactly what that “more” was. Full body chills every time. Conor is my number three artist of all time, and Cape Canaveral is exactly why.

2. Leaving LA — Father John Misty 

As of recently, “Leaving L.A.” is my second favorite song of all time. I first heard it when Father John Misty released Pure Comedy in 2017, and I can remember almost exactly where I was. I was walking after work, headphones on, going down the stairs at a train station on my way to a Starbucks. I have had exactly two genuine musical epiphanies in my life. The first came in the summer of 1991, when I heard Bob Dylan’s acoustic “Every Grain of Sand”—the famous barking-dog version—on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3. The second came walking down those stairs listening to “Leaving L.A.” The song absolutely fucking flooded me.

And it is a motherfucker of a song. Thirteen minutes long, mostly acoustic, essentially one enormous unfolding narrative, and utterly unconcerned with whether you have the patience to follow it. Misty moves through his accelerating fame and his profound ambivalence about the same; Los Angeles and the absurdity of being a successful singer-songwriter there; marriage; self-mythology; artistic pretension; mortality; and his own suspicion that perhaps writing a thirteen-minute acoustic song about all of this is itself ridiculous. He even takes a drive-by at Amy Grant and contemporary Christian music along the way. Nobody is safe, least of all Father John Misty.

One of the song’s funniest passages is his description of music that sounds like “dollar signs and Amy Grant,” part of a larger assault on commercially manufactured profundity. But the jokes never exist merely as jokes. Misty keeps using comedy to approach things he cannot quite approach straight on. The strangest and best example is his childhood story about nearly choking to death on watermelon candy while shopping with his mother. An apparently ridiculous memory suddenly opens onto mortality: the adult artist looking backward at the child who could simply have ceased to exist right there, before any of the fame, records, marriage, drinking, jokes, or bullshit ever happened.

That movement—from comic digression into something unexpectedly frightening or tender—is the song’s great trick. “Leaving L.A.” keeps wandering away from its subject only to reveal that the wandering is its subject. This is a song about the stories we construct around ourselves, and about the increasingly absurd position of a man becoming famous for constructing stories about himself while simultaneously distrusting the entire enterprise.

And then the song closes movingly by bringing all that sprawl back down to two people and the possibility of another life: he could quit drinking; she could write her script. Yeah, right. As of this writing, I have no real clue whether Father John Misty has quit drinking, and no idea whether his best girl ever wrote that script. I hope so. What matters inside the song is that for a moment another version of their lives becomes imaginable—less spectacular, perhaps, but also less ridiculous. After thirteen minutes spent exploding his own mythology, Misty ends with something remarkably small and human.

I keep this one beside me at all times. It is one of the handful of songs I love falling asleep to, partly because its length and pace allow me simply to disappear inside it. Sometimes I make it to the end and sometimes I don’t. It hardly matters. I love this song and every line in it.

“Leaving L.A.” is the towering centerpiece of Pure Comedy, and it is by some distance my favorite Father John Misty song. There are plenty of others I greatly enjoy—“I’m Writing a Novel,” “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.,” “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins),” “Mr. Tillman,” and “Nancy From Now On” among them—but none has ever hit me remotely like this one.

Thirteen-minute acoustic songs are not generally how one goes about acquiring casual listeners. Fine. If you are a literate music fan with any tolerance at all for the long, digressive, dirge-like form, give it thirteen minutes and let the bastard work on you. It has been working on me since the first time I heard it walking down those train-station stairs.

Number two. Father John Misty fucking rules.

3. Cruiser — Red House Painters

“Cruiser” is my third favorite song of all time. It narrowly nudges out Whiskeytown’s glorious “Houses on the Hill” and Craig Finn’s absolutely amazing “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.” Right now I have it placed just behind “Leaving L.A.,” but damn, is it close. Full-body goosebumps. Tears. The whole fucking thing.

Like “Leaving L.A.,” “Cruiser” is a long song, and it has absolutely no interest in hurrying. It seems to be about the singer’s love for, or fascination with, a Japanese woman living in Los Angeles. According to the song, she possesses the “biggest smile from Tokyo,” and she came out to Los Angeles five years earlier. So there we are: Kozelek, a recent Japanese transplant, Los Angeles, and a car. That is more than enough to build a world.

The song meanders and takes its time. Along the way we get a tour of Los Angeles as it existed when Kozelek wrote it: driving around, streets and neighborhoods passing by, the city experienced not as a collection of landmarks but from inside a moving car. That matters. “Cruiser” really does cruise. It has the strange floating quality of driving around a city with nowhere particularly urgent to be, when the person beside you and whatever is coming through the speakers become more important than the destination.

And naturally, music is part of the landscape. One of the things I have always loved about artists like Kozelek is that beneath all the songwriting, mythology, and accumulated weirdness, they remain genuine music fans. Kozelek has spent his entire career listening, absorbing, interpreting, and arguing with other people’s songs. He has covered AC/DC, Modest Mouse, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Paul McCartney, and many others, often transforming the source material so completely that the cover becomes a Kozelek song.

I especially love his version of AC/DC’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer.” The original is a little too goofy for me; Kozelek strips away the attempted humor and plays the thing completely straight. Under the Red House Painters name, he recorded an acoustic version, and later, under his Sun Kil Moon moniker, he returned to it electrically. Suddenly what had been a cocky young rock song becomes something closer to a statement of purpose: this is what I wanted to become, and this is what I became. His cover of Modest Mouse’s “Never Ending Math Equation” is similarly amazing. Kozelek is an incredible singer, but he is also an extraordinary interpreter of the rock-and-roll canon.

And that musical consciousness matters in “Cruiser,” because the song feels partly like Kozelek constructing his own little canon in real time: the woman, the car, Los Angeles, whatever is playing, memory already forming while the experience itself is still happening. The city becomes inseparable from the music, and the music becomes inseparable from the person sitting beside him.

There are many Kozelek songs I love, and several more will appear below. “Have You Forgotten,” “Michigan,” “Japanese to English,” “Rock ’n’ Roll Singer,” and others all have legitimate claims on me. But “Cruiser,” for my money, stands head and shoulders above the rest.

It is romantic without being sentimental, sprawling without becoming shapeless, and beautiful without seeming to work particularly hard at being beautiful. It just rolls along until somehow you realize it has completely fucking destroyed you.

Number three. My man.

4 (t). Houses on the Hill

“Houses on the Hill” appears on Whiskeytown’s 1997 masterpiece Strangers Almanac. Until about a month ago, I was convinced that Strangers Almanac was by far Whiskeytown’s best record. Their final album, Pneumonia, is great too, of course, and contains “Jacksonville Skyline” as well as the absolutely glorious and unbelievably beautiful ballad “My Hometown.” But recently I’ve been getting deep into their 1995 debut, Faithless Street, and today I consider it every bit as good as Strangers Almanac. Songs such as the title track, “Lo-Fi Tennessee Mountain Angel,” and “Mining Town” stand out, along with many others.

However, it is “Houses on the Hill” that remains my very favorite Whiskeytown song.

The lyric is simply wonderful. The song reaches backward into another generation and constructs an entire vanished life out of photographs, letters, houses, war, and memory. My favorite moment comes when the narrator describes a young man being sent off to World War II. He leaves behind the woman he loves and carries her picture with him when he goes ashore. That tiny sequence absolutely destroys me. Ryan Adams can toss off an image like that almost casually and suddenly an entire life—love, separation, war, mortality—is sitting there inside a couple of lines.

Motherfucking full-body goosebumps. Full-body tears.

A lot of songs make me cry, and “Houses on the Hill” is right near the top of the list. Part of its power is how little it insists upon itself. There is no giant emotional announcement. Adams and Caitlin Cary, who co-wrote the song, simply let these remnants of somebody else’s life accumulate until the emotional weight becomes almost unbearable. It is a song about what survives people: houses, photographs, letters, stories—and the people who come afterward trying to reconstruct what those objects once meant.

I especially love the live-in-the-studio version included with the deluxe Strangers Almanac. The studio version is great. I love the studio versions of virtually all my favorite songs, obviously. But for whatever reason, I tend to love live versions even more, and this one is no exception. The performance was recorded for KCRW in September 1997, and it opens the song up beautifully; even the instrumental ending seems to let some additional air into the story. 

Ryan Adams has gone on to have an almost absurdly prolific career. His official discography already runs to dozens of releases, beginning with his solo debut Heartbreaker in 2000 and continuing right through new music in 2026. Heartbreaker contains “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” another of my favorite Adams songs and one that appears later in this list. There are many, many others.

But for now, “Houses on the Hill” remains my favorite Whiskeytown/Ryan Adams song by a little ways.

It simply fucking rules. Stay tuned.

4 (t). It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

5. Tulsa Queen — Emmylou Harris.

For years, “Tulsa Queen” was my answer to the question “what is the greatest song ever.” It was number one I thought. Don’t bother asking me again. And then, eventually, Cape Canaveral by Conor Obrest slipped past it. Barely. This isn’t really a demotion so much as the smallest possible movement inside the topmost tier: Tulsa Queen remains one of the most overwhelming pieces of music I have ever heard, and Emmylou Harris remains, for my money, the greatest vocalist who ever lived.

Then straight into:

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear it…

The existing conclusion needs the corresponding tiny adjustment. Instead of “The GOAT. Pure legend. Full stop,” which contradicts #2, I’d go:

For a very long time, Tulsa Queen was the GOAT. Now it is number five. Nothing about the song has changed. I did. It is still absolutely legendary. Always will be.

I get full body chills and my eyes well up with tears every time I hear Tulsa Queen. Emmylou is the greatest vocalist of all time by far, and Tulsa presents the clearest evidence—not because it’s flashy or showy, but because it is so perfectly, devastatingly controlled. She doesn’t overpower the song; she becomes it. The song starts—“I saw the train/ in the Tulsa night/ calling out my name/ looking for a fight”—and it’s just pure magic. Just unbelievable. The phrasing, the restraint, the sense that the story is already in motion before you’ve even arrived—there is nothing like it. You’re not being introduced to a narrative; you’re being dropped into the middle of one that already feels lived-in and already carries weight.

What makes Tulsa Queen so overwhelming is that it distills everything that makes Emmylou Harris who she is as an artist across her entire career: the fusion of country, folk, and rock sensibilities; the emotional clarity; the ability to inhabit a character without ever losing the self; the sense that every line has been earned. From her earliest work through her later records, she has always been able to locate the emotional center of a song with uncanny precision, but here she doesn’t just locate it—she holds it, perfectly, for the entire duration. It exists in the same emotional universe as something like “Boulder to Birmingham”—another wonderful, better-known masterpiece—but Tulsa Queen goes deeper.

Where “Boulder” is open grief, expansive and communal, Tulsa Queen is interior, private, almost dangerous in how close it lets you get to the narrator’s unrest. It feels less like a performance and more like a confession you were never meant to overhear. There are no words in any language to fully describe the feeling of listening to Tulsa Queen. That’s not hyperbole; it’s recognition. The song operates at a level that bypasses explanation and goes straight to the nervous system. It doesn’t ask to be analyzed—it insists on being felt. Emmylou baby you remain the GOAT.

6. Faded — Afghan Whigs.

The Afghan Whigs’ lead singer Greg Dulli does something remarkable of Faded, which is blend swagger, menace, mystery, bravado, and also deep insecurity in one package. Seeing the Whigs play this as the encore at the Paradiso in Amsterdam in 2017 was one of the highlights of my life. It lands as an encore because it has to—it’s the only place a song like this can go. It doesn’t just end a set; it empties it out. Faded closes Black Love, which is not just an album but a fully realized world—cinematic, shadowy, saturated with urban crime, bad decisions, and the kind of late-night moral drift that never quite resolves.

Across the record, songs like Going to Town and Honky’s Ladder are all forward motion and attitude, pure swagger on the surface. But that swagger always feels a little overextended, like it’s covering something fragile underneath. By the time you get to Faded, the cover is gone. What’s been hinted at all along—doubt, damage, a kind of spiritual exhaustion—comes fully into view. There is no mystery as to why this has been the encore for every Whigs show for 30 years.

When Dulli asks to be lifted out of the night, to have someone look down and see the mess he’s in, it doesn’t feel performative. It feels exposed. The bravado is still there, but it’s cracked open, and what comes through is something far more human and far more dangerous. Not only is this the best Afghan Whigs song, Black Love is their best album by a mile. Everything they do well converges there—the mood, the storytelling, the tension between control and collapse—and Faded is the final, perfect release of that tension. He is a genius and the motherfucking man, and Faded is the best of many great Whigs songs. A worthy inclusion at number seven.

7. My Life Is Sweet — Simon Joyner.

“Met the drinker for a drink/ back when I was drinking everything but the kitchen sink”—and sure enough this song is about drinking, and drunks. Joyner’s friend is an alcoholic, and at the time of writing so is Joyner. They go to a bar and sit together, talking a little, mostly not, letting the night pass in that particular way that only two people who know each other well can manage.

Ultimately, this song is about male companionship, and how a quiet drink with a quiet friend can be life-saving when you really need it. Joyner takes a taxi home—drunk, or hungover, or somewhere in between—and collapses on the floor. And then the song ends with that extraordinary sequence where the city drops away, becomes something almost beautiful from a distance, and he arrives at that fragile, hard-won conclusion: my life is sweet. Anyone who is, or has been, a drinker will immediately recognize what Joyner is doing here—he is rationalizing the unrationalizable, but at the same time he’s not lying about it.

Is drinking so, so sweet? Yes and no, of course—and that tension is the point of this truly magnificent song. Part of what makes Joyner so compelling is how deeply rooted he is in the Omaha scene that would later produce Conor Oberst. Joyner is the elder figure there—born in 1971, a few years ahead of Oberst, who came up in the early ’80s generation—and his influence on Conor is both documented and unmistakable. Oberst has cited Joyner as a major influence, and you can hear it: the diaristic honesty, the willingness to let a song feel unfinished, the comfort with contradiction.

Joyner was mapping that terrain before it had a name, and before it had an audience beyond the local. He’s also massively underrated. He has other great songs—Fearful Man, One for the Catholic Girls—but My Life Is Sweet feels like the purest distillation of what he does best. There’s no artifice, no attempt to resolve the contradictions he’s living inside. Just a voice, a night, a friend, and the uneasy grace of getting through it. Anyone who’s been there knows: that’s more than enough.

8 (T). Never Aim to Please —

8 (T). Never Aim to Please — Bash and Pop

Tommy Stinson, the bassist from The Replacements—went on to have, in my opinion, an even better solo career than the band’s lead singer Paul Westerberg. And considering that Westerberg is a genius and an absolute legend, this is saying something.

Stinson was barely out of childhood when the Replacements were at their peak—a teenager holding down the low end in one of the most chaotic, brilliant bands of their era. That early immersion shows up everywhere in his later work: the instinct for melody, the looseness, the sense that a song should feel lived-in rather than perfected. But what’s striking about his post-Replacements career—through Bash & Pop and his solo records—is how much he refines that instinct. The pure thrash and glorious sloppiness of early Replacements material gives way to something sweeter, more polished, but never sanitized. The edges are still there; they’re just better framed.

Never Aim to Please comes from Bash & Pop’s first record, Friday Night Is Killing Me, and Stinson has alternated between Bash & Pop releases and solo records over the 35 years since the Replacements broke up. In the first verse, Stinson sings about the absence of a point of view, and that marvelous line always reminds me of Westerberg’s writing on “Someone Take the Wheel”—that same sense of dislocation, of trying to find footing in a world that keeps shifting under you. There’s a great anecdote from Westerberg that early on, the Replacements pretended to hate The Rolling Stones—it was part of the pose, the punk posture. But it was just that: a pose. They actually loved the Stones.

And you can hear that lineage clearly in Stinson’s work. For all of his originality, he’s very much working in that classic rock tradition—songcraft, groove, emotional directness—but he does it in the best possible way, without nostalgia or mimicry. It feels inherited, not borrowed. Stinson may not claim to have a point of view in this song, but he’s been a remarkable curator and keeper of the Replacements’ legacy, especially as Westerberg has retreated from the music scene over the last decade. There’s a quiet authority in that, a sense of continuity that runs through his work. And the song itself? It just fucking kicks. It hits me in all the feels every time, and it is a worthy number nine.

9. A Bathtub in the Kitchen — Craig Finn.

My favorite of many possible Finn contenders. Bathtub is about friendship, guilt, redemption, betrayal, and mostly about thankfulness. It’s the greatest song ever written about New York City and also about moving to a big city in general. Finn compresses an entire early chapter of a life into a few lines—the arrival, the uncertainty, the desperation to be claimed by the city, and the friend who makes that possible by opening his door. That friend—Francis—is the emotional center of the song. Twenty years earlier, he’s the one who shows the narrator the ropes, lets him crash on the couch, gives him a foothold when he doesn’t have one. He is, in a very real sense, the reason the narrator makes it at all. And now, in the present of the song, Francis is down and out, struggling, a diminished version of the figure who once seemed stable and generous.

What makes the song hit so hard is the narrator’s response to that reversal. There’s hesitation, even avoidance. He tries, briefly, to pass the responsibility off—to suggest that someone else, someone more put-together, might be in a better position to help. It’s a small moment, almost throwaway, but it reveals everything: the discomfort, the guilt, the instinct to deflect when confronted with a debt that can’t really be repaid. Because that’s the truth the song circles around—some debts can’t be repaid. Not cleanly, not proportionally.

In the end, the narrator does give Francis money—two hundred bucks—but it lands with a kind of quiet insufficiency. It’s something, but it’s not enough, and it never could be. You can’t square that kind of ledger. You can only acknowledge it. And that’s where the thankfulness comes in. Not as a resolution, not as a way of tying things up neatly, but as a recognition that what was given mattered, even if what is returned will always fall short. Finn doesn’t offer redemption in the traditional sense. He offers something more honest: awareness, discomfort, and the attempt—however partial—to do right by someone who once did right by you. It’s a stunning, stunning song and an absolutely worthy number nine.

10. Dreadful — The Violet Burning

“Dreadful” by The Violet Burning fucking slaps. That’s really all there is to it. It just slaps. So damn hard.

The song is only two minutes and twenty-eight seconds long, and it is just totally dialed in. There’s no wasted motion, no long setup, no attempt to turn itself into something grander than it needs to be. It comes in, kicks ass, and gets out. I spend a lot of time in hotels and if “Dreadful” is playing when I leave the room, I usually leave it playing as loud as I can for, as I like to say, my good angels. Angels rule. Why not?

The Violet Burning are a criminally underrated band. Basically nobody today knows who they are, but I do, and I have loved them for years. The band began around 1990 in Orange County, California, and from the beginning the central figure has been singer, guitarist, and songwriter Michael Pritzl. The musicians around him have changed repeatedly over the decades, but Pritzl has remained the constant—the voice, songwriter, guitarist, and creative mainspring of the whole enterprise. 

And what an enterprise it has been. Pritzl has made more than twenty albums, EPs, and live recordings under The Violet Burning and related names, toured relentlessly through the United States and Europe, and somehow maintained a fiercely loyal audience while remaining almost completely outside the mainstream. Their early sound drew from post-punk and alternative rock—The Cure, U2, Echo & the Bunnymen—and over time expanded into the huge, atmospheric guitar music that has over time became unmistakably theirs. 

The Violet Burning came out of the Christian alternative-rock world, although Pritzl has never exactly fit comfortably inside that box. That puts him in the same broad lineage as people like Larry Norman, Gene Eugene, and Michael Knott: artists for whom faith was part of the work but never sufficient to explain the work. The music is too strange, too wounded, too beautiful, and often simply too fucking loud for that. Pritzl himself has always seemed interested in the collision between devotion and doubt, beauty and damage, transcendence and straight-up rock and roll.

R.I.P. Gene Eugene, the man. And R.I.P. Michael Knott, the motherfucking badass of all badasses.

In addition to being hugely underrated, parts of The Violet Burning catalog remain frustratingly difficult to find on the major streaming services. That is a real shame, because this is precisely the sort of band that should be continually rediscovered. They built an enormous body of work without ever becoming remotely as famous as the quality of that work deserved. Even at their commercial peak they were essentially an independent proposition, building their audience through touring and word of mouth rather than anything resembling mainstream success. 

I wish more people knew The Violet Burning. I wish more people heard these songs.

My number two Violet Burning song is “Gorgeous,” which we’ll get to a little later. That song is enormous, emotional, and glorious in an entirely different way. But for now, “Dreadful” is the one.

Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Nothing wasted.

Number nine.

This bad boy fucking slaps.

11. The Traitor — Leonard Cohen

Cohen’s early career began not as a songwriter but as a poet and novelist—already established in literary circles before he ever stepped into popular music. When he moved into song, it wasn’t a reinvention so much as a translation. Early breakthroughs like Suzanne and later Bird on the Wire introduced a voice that felt unlike anything in contemporary pop: formally literary, emotionally restrained, but spiritually enormous.

Across a career that stretches from that early poetic minimalism to late-period gravity, Cohen repeatedly returned to the same emotional territory in different registers. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy carries quiet tragedy without spectacle. Death of a Ladies’ Man leans into chaos and contradiction. Alexandra Leaving and That Don’t Make It Junk show a late-career clarity—less ornament, more acceptance. And then, right at the end, The Night of Santiago from Thank You for the Dance—completed after his death by his son Adam—feels like a final echo rather than a conclusion, as if the voice is still resolving even after it has stopped.

But it is this passage that sits at the center of everything: “I told my mother, mother I must leave you / preserve my room and do not shed a tear / should rumor of a shabby ending reach you / it was half my fault and half the atmosphere.” Quite possibly the greatest verse ever set to paper.

There is something almost unbearable in its tenderness—the attempt to leave without destroying what you came from, to depart without turning departure into permanent damage. “Preserve my room” is not a realistic request; it is a desire for time to stop, for memory to remain untouched while the self moves forward into uncertainty, drift, and likely failure.

Cohen does something very few writers ever manage: he distributes responsibility without dissolving it. “Half my fault and half the atmosphere” is not an excuse—it is an ethics of existence. The self is accountable, but so is the world that formed it. There is guilt here, but no self-pity. There is clarity, but no absolution. He is naming the condition of being human with a precision that feels almost too large to hold. And what makes the song extraordinary is that it refuses resolution. Cohen never tries to solve the tension he has introduced. Instead, he inhabits it fully.

Across his work—from the early poetic breakthrough to the late songs of acceptance and erosion—he speaks to the quester, the striver, the poet, and the mystic in each of us. Not by offering answers, but by dignifying the act of searching itself. Leaving, longing, failing, seeking—these are not problems to resolve, but conditions to endure with awareness. His voice carries all of it: resignation, yearning, and a kind of quiet, unbreakable grace.

His best by a mile. Simply marvelous.

12. Gorgeous (live)— The Violet Burning

“Gorgeous” is gorgeous. It is gorgeous, as indicated by the title, and probably one of the most gorgeous songs ever recorded. This is my number two favorite Violet Burning song, as indicated in my discussion of “Dreadful” above. The Violet Burning is a criminally underrated band. I will never understand how they don’t have a bigger footprint. They deserve to be widely recognized and appreciated.

While Dreadful is almost certainly the slappiest song of all time, if that is a thing, Gorgeous is absolutely one of the sweetest. It starts with Michael Pritzl, the band’s lead singer and creative center, singing, “I swear it was the Fourth of July.” Oh yeah, Michael? Are you sure? Okay, baby, whatever you say. So yeah, it’s the Fourth of July: patriotism, mom and pop, apple pie, fireworks—the whole nine. But Pritzl immediately turns all of that American iconography into the language of romantic awe. The fireworks aren’t really the point. The person he is looking at is.

And then the song eventually delivers its payoff: baby, you’re so gorgeous.

Motherfucker.

Of course.

Gorgeous originally appeared on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic, released in 2001, one of the strangest and more adventurous records in The Violet Burning catalog. The album moves between glam, alternative rock, electronics, enormous guitars, and quieter atmospheric material, with Gorgeous arriving towards the end. It is a perfect example of what makes Michael Pritzl such an unusual songwriter: underneath all the sonic experimentation is a deeply sincere romantic. He can build a wall of noise around a feeling, but he never seems embarrassed by the feeling itself.

Pritzl has described honesty and vulnerability—including honest conversations about God and ordinary human life—as central to what the band does. He specifically included Gorgeous among the songs on Demonstrates Plastic and Elastic that embody that impulse. That combination—spiritual yearning, romantic yearning, distortion, beauty—is basically the Violet Burning universe in miniature.

And Gorgeous has endured. It remained important enough to the band to appear late in sets and sometimes close them many years after its release. I particularly love the live versions because Pritzl can stretch the song outward until what begins as a simple declaration of attraction becomes something much larger. The sweetness survives the volume. If anything, the volume makes it sweeter.

That is also why I can put Dreadful and Gorgeous this high on the same list without feeling remotely repetitive. They represent opposite poles of what I love about this band. Dreadful fucking slaps. Gorgeous fucking glows. One makes me want to turn the stereo up until the walls shake; the other reminds me that sometimes the most effective thing a songwriter can do is look at another human being and say the simplest possible thing: you are gorgeous.

And Michael Pritzl makes me believe him every goddamn time.

13. Albuquerque — Mark Kozelek (Neil Young Cover)

Well, they say that Santa Fe
Is less than ninety miles away
And I got time to roll another number and rent a car
Oh, Albuquerque.

Oh my God, Neil. What are you doing to me? Neil, baby, you’re breaking my heart. Neil, shut the fuck up.

“Albuquerque” appears on the back end of Neil Young’s 1975 record Tonight’s the Night, immediately before “New Mama.” “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” with which I constantly confuse it for reasons that will shortly become obvious, appears a few songs earlier. Tonight’s the Night, as many readers will remember, is Neil’s record most haunted by death. It was largely recorded in 1973 but held back until 1975, and the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist, singer, and songwriter Danny Whitten and Young’s roadie Bruce Berry hang over the entire thing.

Berry is famously eulogized in the two versions of “Tonight’s the Night” that bookend the record: “Bruce Berry was a working man / He used to load that Econoline van.” Neil, my man.

Obviously Neil Young loved Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten. He basically wrote an entire record out of the grief that followed their deaths. Tonight’s the Night is consequently a strange, ragged, drunken, grief-stricken motherfucker of a record. It sounds at times as though everybody involved is barely holding the thing together, which is exactly why it works.

Tonight’s the Night also includes one of the first Neil Young songs I ever heard, “Tired Eyes,” with the stone-cold classic opening: “Well, he shot four men in a cocaine deal / And he left them lying in an open field / Full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors.”

Neil. Bullet holes in the mirrors? Really, baby? Again: oh my.

In any case, I often get “Albuquerque” and “Roll Another Number” confused, simply because “Albuquerque” itself contains the line, “So I’ll roll another number for the road / I feel able to get under any load.” Obviously Mr. Young was rolling his own during this period.

Probably other periods too.

But my favorite lines from “Albuquerque” are these: “So I’ll stop when I can / Find some fried eggs and country ham / I’ll find somewhere where they don’t care who I am.”

Motherfucker.

By 1975, Neil Young was already a global superstar. He was massive in his native Canada, massive in the United States, and increasingly massive around the world. In his wonderful song “Don’t Be Denied,” Young writes about reaching that point—record executives suddenly all over him and the band when all he really wanted to do was play rock and roll. Neil, fucking do it.

And that context is part of what makes “Albuquerque” so moving. This is a famous man singing about wanting to disappear. He doesn’t want the record company, the expectations, the mythology, or apparently anybody asking where the hell Neil Young is. He wants to get into a car, roll another number, eat some fried eggs and country ham, and go somewhere where nobody cares who he is. It is an almost comically modest fantasy of escape, which is precisely why it works.

And then there is Mark Kozelek. I love Neil Young’s original, obviously, but it is Kozelek’s cover that gets the spot on this list. Kozelek has always been a magnificent interpreter of other people’s songs—AC/DC, John Denver, Modest Mouse, Paul McCartney, Kris Kristofferson, and many others—and he understands exactly what makes “Albuquerque” work. He doesn’t try to improve Neil Young. He slows everything down, opens up the spaces between the words, and lets the loneliness that was already buried in the song come completely to the surface.

That is what the best covers do. They don’t replace the original; they reveal something that was already there. Neil Young wrote a great song about escape. Mark Kozelek heard the loneliness inside the escape and made it almost unbearably beautiful.

Fried eggs. Country ham. Nobody caring who you are. Sometimes that is the whole fucking dream.

Neil, my man. My god what an amazing song.

14. Oh My Sweet Carolina — Ryan Adams

One of the most beautiful and sad songs in modern American songwriting. The record Heartbreaker—Adams’ solo debut after his run fronting Whiskeytown—remains his peak for many listeners. It’s also the album where everything still feels unforced: the writing, the pacing, the emotional exposure. Later records like Gold brought wider recognition, and something like Chris gets close in flashes, but Heartbreaker has a coherence of mood that he never quite replicated.

What defines Oh My Sweet Carolina is its dual perspective. On the surface, it’s a travel song—young man on the road, drifting through cities like Cleveland, accumulating damage, spending energy and money with a kind of reckless momentum that feels both chosen and inevitable. But underneath that motion is something much older: a pull backward, toward origin, toward a place that isn’t just geographic but emotional. North Carolina isn’t just home—it’s coherence.

The Cleveland passages (“So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane/ I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance/ And I was spending money like the way it likes to rain/ Man, I ended up with pockets full of cane”) carry that classic Ryan Adams contradiction: charm and collapse in the same breath. The narrator moves through instability with the confidence of someone still convinced that motion equals meaning, even as that belief is starting to fail him. It’s the sound of someone learning, mid-stream, that movement alone doesn’t resolve anything. And then the emotional center of the song reveals itself: (Oh mw sweet Carolina/ what compels me to go/ oh, my sweet disposition/ may you one day carry me home), the longing not just to return, but to be returned in one piece. Not improved, not transformed—just intact.

This is where the collaboration with Emmylou Harris matters. Her voice doesn’t decorate the song; it stabilizes it. It sounds like witness. Adams has written other songs that brush this same emotional territory—English Girls Approximately, Oh My God, Whatever, Etc., Still a Cage, Birmingham—but none of them quite hold the same balance of youth and exhaustion, romance and reckoning. Oh My Sweet Carolina feels like a hinge between those states: a young man already speaking like he understands what the older version of himself will miss. It’s a debut record moment that feels strangely final. A song about going forward that only makes sense when you understand what it costs to leave things behind. A truly majestic entry—and a worthy entry here at fifteen.

15. (T) Montreal Rock Band Somewhere — Happyness

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” is totally out of control. Of course it is. What else can you say about a song that contains the lyric, “I’m wearing Win Butler’s hair / There’s a scalpless singer of a Montreal rock band somewhere”? Win Butler is, of course, the lead singer of Arcade Fire, who suck.

They suck.

Arcade Fire hit the big time with Funeral, released in 2004. I like Funeral okay, but I haven’t listened to it in more than a decade, and I probably never will again. It just isn’t my speed. It sounds to me like a concept record: operatic, overblown, and the production lets it down at every turn.

So yeah, I don’t like Arcade Fire.

However, Happyness is massively underrated. Other than The Violet Burning and maybe Daddy Issues, Happyness is, to my mind, the most underrated band of all time. And that is saying something.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” runs 5:04, and it is a sprawling guitar workout that somehow feels much bigger than its running time. The Happyness boys can really fucking play. That sometimes gets obscured by how funny they are, and by the deliberately tossed-off quality of the whole operation. The songs can sound as though three guys wandered into a room, made each other laugh, picked up their instruments, and accidentally recorded something brilliant. But listen underneath the jokes: these guys know exactly what they are doing.

There is also some weird history surrounding the song’s placement. Weird Little Birthday was originally released in the UK in 2014 as a 13-song record without “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere.” The expanded 2015 release added four bonus songs, with “Montreal” coming immediately after what had originally been the album closer, “Monkey in the City.” That expanded record also contains “Orange Luz” and the wonderfully titled “Refrigerate Her,” but those were already part of the original album. 

I am fascinated by song order on records, and I spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking and writing about it. “Janie Jones” goes first. “Rocks Off” goes first. Some songs simply announce themselves as openers or closers. “Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” feels to me like a closer: sprawling, funny, strange, guitar-heavy, and just unresolved enough to leave the record hanging in the air after it ends.

There are plenty of other great songs on Weird Little Birthday, including the title track and “Leave the Party.” In “Leave the Party,” for example, the narrator proposes killing everyone at the party and then heading home.

Really, baby? You’re going to murder the whole party and just jet like that? Settle down. Take a shower. Think things through. Not the best move perhaps.

They followed the debut with Write In in 2017 and eventually Floatr in 2020, a much slower, denser, stranger record. I like Floatr, but it is not an easy record to get into. The immediacy and wiseass humor of Weird Little Birthday are still there in places, but everything feels more submerged. It is the sort of record that asks you to come toward it rather than coming toward you.

And maybe that helps explain why Happyness never really broke through. They were always slightly sideways to whatever might have made them commercially successful. They can write hooks, they can make enormous guitar noise, the songs are genuinely beautiful, and they are extremely funny. However for some reason they never seemed particularly interested in making things easy for their audience. Even their best songs tend to wander around, stop somewhere unexpected, make a joke, get sad, and then suddenly fucking explode.

“Montreal Rock Band Somewhere” contains almost the entire Happyness proposition in five minutes. It is funny without being a novelty song, melancholy without announcing itself as melancholy, and loose without actually being sloppy. Beneath the Win Butler joke is a genuinely beautiful piece of guitar music made by a band that understood exactly how much room a song sometimes needs.

They never became Arcade Fire. Good. I’ll take Happyness every day of the week.

15. (T) Crushed Out — Bad Moves

17. Caribbean Wind — Bob Dylan

18. (T) Center of Asia — Paul Pena 

19. (T) Rocket and a Bomb — Michael Knott

This is Knott’s best-known—and, for many people, only known—song. It’s the one that traveled beyond the small, fractured world he spent his career navigating, the one that people who don’t know the rest of his catalog can still recognize. And that’s fitting, because it captures almost everything that made him singular. Knott never fit comfortably inside the Christian rock community that was supposed to be his home. He clashed with labels, bounced from one situation to another, tried repeatedly to start his own imprints just to maintain control of his work, and spent much of his career existing in the margins of an already marginal scene. There were too many expectations, too many rules about what a “Christian artist” was supposed to sound like, what he was supposed to say, how cleanly he was supposed to resolve things. Knott refused all of it.

You can hear the lineage—artists like Larry Norman laid some of the groundwork—but Knott is no inheritor in the traditional sense. He’s a total original. Where Norman and others often leaned toward proclamation, Knott leaned into contradiction, mess, unresolved tension. He wasn’t interested in presenting faith as an answer; he was interested in showing what it felt like to live inside it when the answers didn’t come.

His career reflects that restlessness. From the early chaos of Popsicle and Popsavers, through the darker, more aggressive phases of L.S. Underground and LSU, into his solo work and projects like Aunt Betty’s, Knott kept shifting forms, refusing to settle into anything that could be easily categorized. The sound changed, the bands changed, the labels changed—but the core impulse didn’t: tell the truth as he experienced it, even if it didn’t line up with what anyone wanted to hear. Rocket and a Bomb distills all of that into something deceptively simple. There’s humor in it, almost absurdity—“Mr. God, is there a Ms. God? Can she help me find a job?”—but it lands because it’s so nakedly real. This is a man of Christ who is also a man of the world, standing in the gap between those identities, not reconciling them but living them both at once. He’s not asking for salvation in the abstract; he’s asking for something immediate, practical, human. He just needs a goddam job.

That tension runs through everything he ever said and did. His line—“I know Christ. It doesn’t make me good; it doesn’t make me bad; it doesn’t make me anything. It just means I know Christ.”—might be the clearest articulation of his entire ethos. Faith is not a moral upgrade, not a solution, not a transformation you can point to and quantify. It’s a relationship, and relationships are messy. So what is a rocket and a bomb? They’re things most people don’t get to touch. Power, transcendence, impact—forces that exist beyond the everyday. The narrator wants a job, something stable, something achievable. But he also wants more. He wants access to something larger, something explosive, something that breaks the limits of an ordinary life. Knott lived that contradiction. He lived fast, pushed hard, refused to smooth out the edges that made him difficult to categorize or contain. He burned through systems that couldn’t hold him, left behind a body of work that feels both deeply personal and strangely universal. He had to.

20. There Must Be More Than Blood — Car Seat Headrest.

This is a tricky one, because it forces us to deal with a shift—not just in a song, but in an artist. My thesis is that this is Will Toledo going into a kind of relative hiding, and the song reads like a document of that transition in real time. His early work—from Beach Life-in-Death through Nervous Young Man to Sleeping with Strangers—was as direct, as exposed, as heart-on-the-sleeve as anything in the last decade of rock music. He wasn’t just confessional; he was incapable of not being confessional. He was the heart on his sleeve songwriter of his generation. You didn’t have to work to understand him—you just had to be willing to feel what he was feeling.

And then you put that next to someone like John Darnielle—super prolific, deeply lofi in his early approach, but always a little more mediated, a little more constructed. Darnielle throws his material against the wall and lets it accumulate into narrative. Toledo, at his best, just bleeds. So when Making a Door Less Open arrives, even the title signals a shift. Something is closing. Something is being sealed off. The masks—first the normal face coverings, then the Trait mask, then the gas mask—aren’t just stagecraft. They’re statements. The question isn’t “what is he hiding?” but “why does he suddenly feel the need to hide at all?” There Must Be More Than Blood sits right in the middle of that tension. You get these images of dislocation—of a life that used to feel rooted and now doesn’t. The delta, the shoreline, the houses stripped away—it doesn’t read like a literal disaster so much as an internal one. The sense of ground disappearing. Of structures—family, identity, whatever “home” used to mean—losing their coherence. He talks about wasting time, but you know that’s not true. He’s one of the most prolific songwriters around. What he’s really describing is a shift in how that time feels from the inside.

And then there’s the second movement—the red-eye flight, the self-recognition that barely qualifies as recognition at all. He sees himself, but only as an outline, a set of lines without substance. That’s the real break from the early work. The old Toledo was hyper-present, almost overwhelmingly so. This Toledo is thinning out, becoming harder even for himself to locate. So what do you do when you can’t see yourself clearly anymore? You disappear further. You become, in a sense, the Invisible Man. That’s what the masks start to feel like—not affectation, but adaptation. A way of dealing with a self that no longer feels stable enough to present directly. And if you follow that thread forward, you get to The Scholars—The Scholars—his most recent record. It’s even more oblique than Door. There are great songs there—Stay With Me (I Don’t Want to Be Alone), Equals—but they’re harder to parse, less immediately accessible. The emotional core is still there, but it’s buried deeper, refracted through more layers.

Part of that may simply be life catching up with him. Toledo dealt with serious health issues in the lead-up to that record—long COVID, histamine intolerance—and the process became more collaborative, less singularly driven. That alone changes the texture of the work. The lone voice becomes one voice among several. The signal diffuses.So There Must Be More Than Blood starts to feel like a hinge point. The moment where the old mode—pure exposure, pure immediacy—begins to give way to something more guarded, more fragmented, more difficult to access. But the core hasn’t disappeared. It’s just harder to reach. And that’s why the song matters. It captures an artist in the act of losing something essential—or at least transforming it into something less direct, less available, maybe even less comforting. Will Toledo is a mysterious guy. Deep, fragile, a little haunted, clearly carrying more than he lets on. He’s dealt with some tough stuff, and you can feel it in the way the work shifts over time. And for anyone still saying “rock is dead”—they can fuck off. There is still The Hold Steady and Car Seat Headrest making records that matter, records that wrestle with something real. You just have to be willing to meet them where they are now, not where they used to be.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Bill Simmons’ Half-Baked Ideas

Note: Free vasectomies. Sicario Fantasy Camp. Bring back dumbwaiters. These ideas are not fully baked. That is the point.

This piece represents my first attempt to come up with some of what Bill Simmons and Kevin Wildes call “Half-Baked Ideas.” Simmons is, of course, the longtime sportswriter and podcaster whom I have discussed elsewhere on The Kyoto Kibbitzer. I roasted him pretty good in that piece, but that’s okay. He can take it.

“Half-Baked Ideas” is not my very favorite of Simmons’ recurring bits, but Simmons and Wildes are always funny, and I enjoy the bit. So, of course, I decided to try to come up with some of my own.

This proved to be a little difficult. For Half-Baked Ideas, you really have to thread the needle between complete absurdity and partial plausibility. A Half-Baked Idea can’t simply be a terrible idea. It needs to sound just reasonable enough that somebody might listen to it and think, You know, that actually might work. Then, usually about ten seconds later, the whole thing should begin to fall apart.

For my version, Simmons will be joined by his old friend Cousin Sal. Why? Because I know Cousin Sal better, and this is my website.

Half-Baked Idea #1: Free Vasectomies

SAL: Dude, I think I got one. I think this is the definition of a Half-Baked Idea.

BILL: What’s that, Sal?

SAL: Free vasectomies. Every city in America. Several locations. But here’s the thing: they have to be immediately reversible.

BILL: Okay…

SAL: Because think about it, Billy. You got a hot date with Tracy. You think you’re gonna score. You don’t want to use a condom, obviously.

BILL: Obviously?

SAL: Come on, Billy. You’ve been known to pull the goalie from time to time.

BILL: Maybe.

SAL: So you stop in on the way to dinner. Get the snip. Boom. You and Tracy get down to business. Next morning, you go back and get it reversed. No problem.

Pause.

BILL: I kind of like it.

SAL: Right?

BILL: Except then you’re getting surgery before every date.

SAL: It’s not surgery, Billy. It’s the snip.

BILL: I think the snip is still surgery.

SAL: All right, whatever. That’s why they have several locations.

END SCENE.

Half-Baked Idea #2: Sicario Fantasy Camp

BILL: Okay, Sal, I think I got a good one too.

SAL: Okay. Hit me with it.

BILL: Dude. Picture this. It’s just called Sicario Fantasy Camp.

Pause.

SAL: Hmm. I guess it could work. But how?

BILL: Well, just think about it. You get to choose from five characters. You can be Matt Graver. You can be Benicio. You can be Kate. You can be Kate’s partner. Or you can be Ted, the cowboy guy who tries to kill Kate and pays the price.

SAL: Why would anybody pick Ted?

BILL: I don’t know. Somebody’s gotta be Ted.

SAL: Okay.

BILL: Then you spend the weekend doing Sicario things. You get the sunglasses. The tactical gear. You ride around in a convoy—

SAL: Where?

BILL: Arizona. Somewhere. And, Sal, get this.

SAL: What?

BILL: You get to fly a drone.

SAL: A real drone?

BILL: Yeah.

SAL: With missiles?

BILL: No, Sal. They’re not gonna give you missiles.

SAL: Well, then what am I doing with the drone?

BILL: Sicario things.

Pause.

SAL: I don’t know, Bill. Sounds a little complex. And the movie’s kinda old.

BILL: Come on, Sally. Everybody loves Sicario, right?

SAL: Yeah, Bill. You do, anyway.

Later, at the pitch meeting

Several executives sit across the table from Simmons.

EXECUTIVE: Okay, Bill. And what exactly do people do in Arizona for the whole weekend?

Pause.

BILL: Sicario things.

END SCENE.

Half-Baked Idea #3: Bring Back Dumbwaiters

BILL: Okay, Sal, we gotta wrap soon. What’s your last one?

SAL: Okay, Bill. I’ve been thinking about this one for a little while.

BILL: Okay.

SAL: I don’t have it fully worked out yet.

BILL: Great start.

SAL: But basically, it’s: bring dumbwaiters back.

BILL: Dumbwaiters?

SAL: Yeah.

BILL: Were they gone?

SAL: Exactly, Billy. That’s the problem. Nobody knows.

BILL: Okay, but that’s not quite what I meant.

SAL: Think about how much shit you carry around your house every day. Food. Drinks. Laundry. Amazon boxes. Whatever. Why am I carrying this stuff upstairs myself? It’s 2026.

BILL: So you want an elevator for your sandwich.

SAL: Not just the sandwich, Billy. Anything.

BILL: How big is this dumbwaiter?

SAL: I don’t know. Pretty big.

BILL: Can a person fit in it?

SAL: No.

Pause.

SAL: Maybe a kid.

BILL: Sal.

SAL: I’m not saying you put the kid in there. I’m saying technically the kid fits.

BILL: Okay, so now every house in America has this child-sized elevator going between floors.

SAL: Exactly.

BILL: That seems incredibly dangerous.

SAL: Well, we’ll put a sticker on it or something.

BILL: Okay, sure, Sal.

END SCENE.

And the drone is the next beat:

BILL: Then you spend the weekend doing Sicario things. You get the sunglasses, the tactical gear. You ride around in a convoy—

SAL: Where?

BILL: Arizona. Somewhere. And, Sal, get this.

SAL: What?

BILL: You get to fly a drone.

Pause.

SAL: A real drone?

BILL: Yeah.

SAL: With missiles?

BILL: No, Sal. They’re not gonna give you missiles.

SAL: Well, then what am I doing with the drone?

BILL: Sicario things

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Most Insane People of All Time (aka You’re Outta Control!): #4 Azalia Banks

I just wanna sip the punch with your peeps and
Sit in that lunch if you’re treatin’

— Azealia Banks, “212”

I. Introduction

In my opinion, Azealia Banks is the greatest rapper of all time.

I do not say this lightly.

These days, I don’t listen to much rap and hip-hop. I regret this a bit. However, life is short, there is a lot to do, and there is simply too much music to listen to. I am familiar with and enjoy a number of hip-hop artists, mostly from the late 1980s and 1990s: LL Cool J, Sir Mix-a-Lot, Wu-Tang Clan, KRS-One and A Tribe Called Quest, among others. I especially like A Tribe Called Quest’s “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.”

Of course you did, dude. You went to El Segundo. You lost your fucking wallet. Naturally.

I also enjoy the more jazz-inflected end of the genre: De La Soul, Digable Planets and Basehead. Among later artists, I know Nas, Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West to varying degrees. Kanye is, of course, completely outta control. I do not believe I am alone at this point in saying that I do not care for Kanye West as a person. His flirtation with Nazi imagery and rhetoric is indefensible. Nevertheless, Kanye is certainly a talented artist, and I do like—or at least once liked—My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Its lyrical density and imagination are something to behold.

However other than Azealia, my favorite rap group remains Public Enemy.

Public Enemy arrived when hip-hop was still a relatively young genre, and pushed it into territory that was denser, louder, angrier, more political and, to my ears anyway, considerably more interesting. I respect N.W.A. and their place in the tradition. I like “Fuck tha Police” well enough. Ice Cube obviously went on to enormous fame and fortune, and Eazy-E had a tough life. RIP. Nonetheless, for my money, Public Enemy is the more important and enjoyable group. “911 Is a Joke” is great. “Welcome to the Terrordome” is my favorite Public Enemy song. Terradome rules.

So I guess at the end of the day I do regard Chuck D as the greatest rap/hip-hop lyricist of all time. However, these days I don’t find myself listening to Public Enemy all that often. “212,” on the other hand, I listen to regularly.

And baby, here we go.

212

It only makes sense to start with “212.”

Azealia Banks released “212” in 2011, when she was twenty years old. It subsequently appeared on her four-song 1991 EP in 2012 and, eventually, on her debut album Broke with Expensive Taste in 2014. 

“212” is stuffed with the most amazing collection of rhymes, near-rhymes, internal rhymes and alliteration I have ever heard. I understand that hip-hop and rap lyrics depend on these techniques and that plenty of rappers have demonstrated extraordinary mastery of them.

Azealia, in my opinion, takes the whole thing to another level.

My favorite line in the song, by far, is not even one of the blue lines:

I just wanna sip that punch with your peeps and / Sit in that lunch if you’re treatin’

I love this line so very much, primarily because it establishes Azealia’s modus operandi when it comes to her business and career.

Azealia is on the come-up. She’s going places. She has designs on the crown. The girl has talent for days, and the industry is listening. But the second half is arguably even more essential to understanding how Azealia works.

She wants to sit in that lunch if you’re treatin’. Then or now, Azealia Banks is the last person who is ever going to pay for lunch.

This, incidentally, makes the eventual title Broke with Expensive Taste almost impossibly perfect.

And then we get this:

I’m the one today / I’m the new shit, boo / Young Rapunzel / Who are you, bitch? New lunch?

Followed, repeatedly, by this immortal threat:

I’ma ruin you, cunt.

Of course you are, Azealia. Of course you are.

The funny thing is that these lines would prove somewhat prophetic.

Azealia clearly thought she was the shit.

I agree.

“212” was an extraordinary announcement of a young artist who seemed capable of doing almost anything. Contemporary critics heard it too. When Pitchfork reviewed 1991 the following year, the publication was already emphasizing the slyness beneath Banks’s aggression and the enormous expectations surrounding her. 

And then Azealia started ruining people. For real.

I’ma Ruin You Cunt

Azealia Banks has been involved in so many public feuds that trying to compile a complete list would require an entirely separate essay.

This is not that essay. Instead we will take a few representative samples.

There was Zayn Malik. In 2016 Banks accused the former One Direction singer of copying her aesthetic. That dispute escalated into an extraordinarily ugly series of racist and homophobic attacks from Banks. Then the fourteen-year-old Disney actress Skai Jackson made the apparently catastrophic decision to tell Azealia to simmer down.

Baby no.

You do not tell Azealia Banks to simmer down. No one does. Azaalia does not settle. Period.

Banks promptly opened another front, this time against a fourteen-year-old girl. Sure babes, why not. Ruis her too. Just because. Twitter suspended her account, and a UK festival subsequently dropped her from its lineup. This is one of the places where we can move beyond speculation about whether Azealia’s behavior damaged her career. Here it plainly did. 

And then there was Grimes.

Oh my God. Baby take an aspirin. Now.

In 2018 Banks went to Los Angeles expecting to collaborate with Grimes and ended up at the house Grimes shared with Elon Musk. The proposed musical collaboration went nowhere. Obviously. Banks hung around for a bit and then things got weird. Real weird.

Banks began posting about the experience publicly, describing her time with Grimes and Elon as bizarre and increasingly hostile terms and making allegations about Musk and drug use. Musk denied the drug allegation. But somehow an aborted Azealia Banks/ Grimes recording session had become entangled with Musk’s already notorious “funding secured” Tesla tweet and the securities controversy surrounding it.

That’s the thing about Azealia.

She can start out trying to make a song with another musician and somehow end up adjacent to a federal securities investigation involving one of the richest men on Earth.

How?

Because she is Azealia Banks baby. And you are not. No other explanation required.

And these were hardly isolated incidents. She feuded with T.I. and Iggy Azalea. She attacked Perez Hilton. Of course. She criticized Pharrell, Baauer and Disclosure. Pitchfork noted as early as 2014 that some of these fights were no longer merely entertaining sideshows: they were costing her potentially valuable collaborators. She was hurting career for no apparent reasons. At all.

Azealia would gun down anybody. She does not give a single shit.

Men. Women. Musicians. Producers. Celebrities. Minor celebrities. People who were minding their own business. People who were very much not minding their own business. Teenagers. Whoever. Whatever. Funk em all Azealia. Fuck em all.

It didn’t matter.

I’ma ruin you, cunt.

And she did.

Broke with Expensive Taste

The tragedy—or comedy, depending on how you look at it—is that through all of this Azealia Banks remained enormously talented.

Her debut album, Broke with Expensive Taste, finally appeared in November 2014 after years of delays and a disastrous relationship with Interscope Records. Banks had gotten herself released from her deal and retained the rights to the recordings. The record finally came out on her terms. More or less. 

And the critics liked it. Quite a lot, actually.

The Guardian described a record luxuriating in sound and language, bouncing around among underground club music, house, garage and stranger territory. Pitchfork heard essentially the same thing: an artist jumping almost recklessly among genres, held together by Banks’s own voice and formidable technical ability. 

I recently listened to Broke with Expensive Taste again and really enjoyed it. Some of it runs a little long for me, but there is great stuff all over the record.

All this complicates the easy story.

It would be simple to say Azealia Banks destroyed her career because she couldn’t stop fighting with people. It would also be wrong.

The record industry contributed plenty to the mess. Her relationship with Interscope was dysfunctional. Banks believed the label simply did not understand the record she wanted to make. There is some evidence that she was right. Broke with Expensive Taste is a strange record. It is difficult to classify. It does not sound particularly interested in behaving like a conventional major-label rap debut.

Indeed, after Banks finally got out of the Interscope arrangement, she told Pitchfork that other labels liked the album but remained wary of her. Banks laughed about her reputation. 

So the record-company story and the Azealia story meet somewhere in the middle.

The industry didn’t know what to do with her. Azealia frequently didn’t know what to do with Azealia. She is, of course, totally outta control at all times.

And nobody knew what the fuck was going on.

The Prophecy

There is one more remarkable thing about “212.”

Amid all the obscenity, comedy, sexual swagger, threats and spectacular displays of technical skill, Banks suddenly turns the camera around.

She warns herself:

Why are you procrastinating? You have all this talent. Baby you’re wasting it. People are going to forget you, and when they do, ultimately you’ll have yourself to blame.

TIME noticed the eerie quality of this almost immediately when Broke with Expensive Taste finally appeared in 2014. What had sounded in 2011 like the self-motivation of an extraordinarily ambitious young artist three years later sounded like prophecy. 

That strikes me as much more interesting than another catalogue of Azealia Banks saying outrageous shit on the internet.

Because the talent is real. The promise is real. The record is real.

And this is why Azealia Banks drives me so nuts.

I don’t particularly care that she’s badly behaved. Plenty of great artists are badly behaved.

I care because she’s so fucking talented.

“212” remains an astonishing piece of writing. To me, the song feels as fresh today as it did when it was released. The rhymes and internal rhymes are off the hook. The alliteration is just nuts. The profanity is dialed to 11. And the song makes me crack up every single time I hear it.

Brother just listen to what this woman could do.

Baby told us in 2011.

I’ma ruin you, cunt.

Shut the fuck up Azealia. But I will say this: you certainly ruined a lot of people along the way.

But nobody ever did more damage to Azealia Banks than Azealia Banks.

Dedication:

For Azealia Banks. Baby, you’re completely out of all reasonable and rational control. And that’s why I love you so very, very much. Baby.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Beavis and Butthead Play Two

Note: A couple of months ago, I wrote my first play about the love of my life, Elodie. It is called Wayfarer. Today, I’m pleased to publish my first TV script.

The script is, of course, a Beavis and Butt-Head episode.

I’ve wanted to do one of these for the longest time, simply because Beavis and Butt-Head are completely fucking hysterical. I know the show is a bit old at this point, and one could argue that the humor is sophomoric. Probably so. But that’s the point.

For anyone who somehow missed them, Beavis and Butt-Head are Mike Judge’s two magnificently stupid teenage metal heads, unleashed on MTV in the early 1990s to watch music videos, insult everything and everything they encountered, misunderstand nearly everything happening around them, and occasionally stumble into something resembling wisdom. They are idiots, but they are very particular idiots. There is a strange precision to their stupidity, and after all these years their friendship remains weirdly endearing.

I love the Beavis and Butt-Head universe, and I plan to write several more of these. Stay tuned.

This first one sends the boys to Chicago for a Cubs doubleheader. There is a girl. There is a box of love letters. There is a Chevy Suburban outfitted for bass fishing. There is George Brett.

Naturally.

Epigraphs:

It’s a great day for a ball game; let’s play two!
— Ernie Banks

Change it Butthead.
— Beavis

Shut the fuck Beavis.
— Butthead

I: Beavis’ Birthday

PING-PONG.

Butt-Head looks toward the front door.

“No.”

“Beavis.”

“Beavis. Someone’s at the door. Go get it.”

“You get it, Butt-Head.”

“Okay, Beavis. Let’s go together.”

The boys get off the couch and approach the door.

Stuart is standing outside in his Winger T-shirt.

“Hey, guys. I heard it was Beavis’s birthday. You guys wanna hang out?”

“No,” Butt-Head says.

He begins to close the door.

“Wait a minute,” Beavis says.

Butt-Head stops.

“What?”

“He does have a point.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It is my birthday, Butt-Head.”

“Yeah, dumbass. I know.”

Butt-Head pauses.

“But yeah. Happy birthday, Beavis.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Now shut up Beavis.”

Stuart is still standing outside.

“So you guys wanna hang out or what?”

“No,” Butt-Head says. “We have important stuff to do.”

“Yeah,” Beavis says. “Important birthday stuff.”

“We’re going to Chicago, Stuart.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We’re going to see the Cubs tomorrow.”

“It’s a doubleheader,” Beavis says.

Stuart smiles.

“That sounds pretty cool.”

“Shut up, Stuart,” Butt-Head says.

He begins to close the door again.

“Wait,” Beavis says.

“What?”

“You forgot to tell him.”

“Tell him what?”

Beavis lowers his voice.

“Amanda.”

“Oh yeah.”

Stuart looks from Beavis to Butt-Head.

“Who’s Amanda?”

Beavis’s face changes.

“Amanda,” he says reverently.

“She’s a ball girl for the Cubs,” Butt-Head says.

“She’s hot,” Beavis says. “She wants me.”

“Shut the fuck up, Beavis. She doesn’t want you. She wants me.”

“No dude. She wants me. But whatever. Why do you think Butt-head that she wants you.”

“I saw her on TV.”

“You were on TV Butthead?”

“She was on TV, dumbass.”

“Oh yeah. I forget”

Stuart looks confused.

“What”s going on?” said Stewart “What’s a ball girl?”

The boys stare at him.

Butt-Head closes the door.

“Stuart, you need to leave.”

II: Uncle Ken

A Chevy Suburban rolls up outside the house.

It belongs to Beavis’ Uncle Ken, a Chevy dealer from greater Kansas City. The Suburban is outfitted for bass fishing and elk hunting. One of Ken’s major clients is George Brett, the former star of the Kansas City Royals.

Ken parks and gets out.

Beavis and Butt-Head are sitting shirtless in lawn chairs, drinking forties.

Improbably, the boys have found an extension cord and snaked it outside. A small black-and-white television sits between them, playing music videos.

Ken lights a Camel.

“You boys ready for your first ball game?”

“Yeah, Ken,” Butt-Head says. “I guess.”

“Thanks, Uncle Ken,” Beavis says. “You rule.”

“Ok. Let’s go.”

A few drops of rain begin to fall. Beavis picks up the television and puts it under the awning to protect it.

The boys leave the lawn chairs where they are. They climb into the Suburban, still shirtless.

They both sit in the back.

Ken passes them a bag containing sandwiches, chips, oranges and iced tea. Beavis looks inside.

“Thanks, Uncle Ken. You rule.”

Butt-Head lowers his voice.

“Beavis, your uncle may rule, but he also needs to shut the fuck up.”

“Why?”

“There’s not enough food to get us to Chicago.”

“Dumbass. We can stop on the way.”

“Oh yeah.”

Ken butts his cigarette in the front ashtray. The boys throw theirs out the window.

A few minutes later, Butt-Head leans forward.

“Hey, Ken.”

“Yeah?”

“Was this really George Brett’s Suburban?”

“Yeah, Butt-Head. It sure was.”

“Whoa.”

Beavis looks around the interior.

“George Brett played baseball.”

“Yeah, Beavis. Everybody knows that.”

“Oh yeah.”

Butt-Head leans farther toward the front seat.

“Hey, Ken.”

“What?”

His voice drops.

“But did George Brett score in here?”

Ken looks at him in the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know. Probably.”

The boys look at each other.

“Whoa dude”

III: The Motel 6

The rest of the drive passes without incident.

Around seven, Ken pulls into a roadside Motel 6. Beavis looks through the window at the motel.

“Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“It’s a motel.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna score.”

“Oh yeah, Beavis. We’re gonna score all right.”

Ken overhears them from the front seat.

“Boys, if you’re really serious about scoring tonight, there’s a truck stop right over there.”

The boys look over.

“I don’t know for sure,” Ken continues, “but I’ve heard there are a lot of lot lizards around there at night.”

Beavis looks at Butt-Head.

“What the fuck is a lot lizard?”

“Shut up, Beavis. A lot lizard is just another word for a lady of the night.”

“Oh yeah.”

They eat chicken-fried steak at a diner beside the motel. By ten-thirty, Uncle Ken is asleep.

Beavis and Butt-Head are not.

They stand outside their motel room drinking two of Uncle Ken’s beers.

“Beavis.”

“Yeah?”

“You wanna go find those lizards?”

“Yeah. Heh heh.”

They walk across the parking lot toward the truck stop.

There are no lot lizards. There are, however, approximately forty trucks.

Beavis stops beside one.

“Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“Do you think George Brett ever drove a truck?”

“No, dumbass. George Brett played baseball.”

“Oh yeah.”

They continue walking.

After a moment Butt-Head stops.

“Although he did have a Suburban.”

“Yeah.”

They both consider this.

“Maybe he drove a truck.”

“Yeah, dude. Maybe.”

The boys return to the motel around eleven. Ken has his own room. Beavis and Butt-Head share a twin room.

Beavis sits on his bed.

“Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“We got the big game tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

“Is tonight the night we finally cuddle?”

“Shut up, Beavis. I’m not gonna cuddle with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you smell, Beavis.”

“Oh yeah.”

Butt-Head points to the bed by the wall.

“I’m sleeping on this one.”

“Fine, Butt-Head.”

“Good night, Beavis.”

“Good night, Butt-Head.”

Beavis turns out his light and prepares to go to sleep. Butt-Head leaves his light on.

He takes out a small box. Inside are twenty Xeroxed letters.

Beavis raises his head.

“What are you doing, Butt-Head?”

“I’m reading my letters to Amanda, dumbass.”

“Oh yeah. I guess you do that every night, huh, Butt-Head?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you do that, Butt-Head?”

“Come off it, dude. I’m in love with her. What do you think?”

“Oh yeah.”

IV: The Cubs Game

The next morning, the three eat breakfast and continue to Chicago. By noon they are outside Wrigley Field. The boys are wearing their shirts again.

A man is standing over a barbecue grill surrounded by about a dozen people. This is George Brett.

“Ken.”

“George.”

They shake hands.

George looks at Beavis and Butt-Head.

“These the boys?”

“Yep.”

Butt-Head looks at George.

“Hey, George.”

“Hey.”

Beavis looks at the grill.

“Are those hamburgers?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, George. You rule.”

George hands him a hamburger.

Butt-head says “Hey, George.”

“Yeah?”

“Was that really your Suburban?”

“Yeah.”

“Sweet.”

Pause.

“I mean, did you ever score in it?”

George looks at him.

“Probably.”

The boys look at each other.

“Whoa.”

They have box seats on the first base line. Before entering the park, the boys put four beers from the Suburban into their pants. Improbably, this works.

The game starts, and Butt-Head immediately begins looking for Amanda.

“Beavis.”

“What?”

“There she is.”

“Where?”

“Down there, dumbass.”

Butt-Head points toward the field. Amanda is working along the first-base line.

Beavis stares at her.

“Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s hot.”

“Shut up, Beavis.”

“But she is.”

“I know. That’s why I’m in love with her.”

“Oh yeah.”

The game begins.

For most of the first three innings, neither boy watches it.

Every time Amanda moves, Butt-Head points her out.

“There she is.”

“I know, Butt-Head.”

“There she is again.”

“I know.”

“Dude. She just picked up a ball.”

“Whoa.”

“She rules.”

“Yeah.”

A foul ball comes toward their section.

Both boys stand.

“Whoa!”

The ball lands approximately twenty rows away.

They sit down.

“Baseball sucks,” Butt-Head says.

“Yeah, it does.”

During the seventh-inning stretch, George Brett leans toward Butt-Head.

“Hey, Butt-Head.”

“Yeah, George?”

“If you’re really serious about this Amanda chick, I can get you down there after the game.”

Butt-Head stares at him.

“No way.”

“Sure. I know some people. I can get you into the clubhouse.”

Beavis leans across Butt-Head.

“That would be awesome, George. You rule.”

“I know.”

Butt-Head looks back toward Amanda.

Just before the ninth inning, Beavis leans over and whispers in Butt-Head’s ear.

“Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“I gotta tell you something.”

“What?”

“Well, the thing is, I’ve been watching Amanda all game.”

“Yeah.”

“And I think I’m in love with her too.”

Butt-Head slowly turns toward him.

“Shut the fuck up, Beavis.”

“I’m serious.”

“You can’t be in love with Amanda. I’m in love with Amanda.”

“Yeah, but I’m in love with her too.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No, Beavis. You just think she’s hot.”

Beavis considers this.

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“But I also love her.”

“Dumbass. She’s mine.”

A few minutes later, Amanda looks toward their section.

“Dude,” Beavis says. “She looked up here.”

“She looked at me, Beavis.”

“She looked kind of to the left.”

“I’m to the left, dumbass.”

“No, I’m to your left.”

Butt-Head looks around.

“Oh yeah.”

V: Meeting Amanda

After the game, George takes Ken and the boys into a small lounge adjoining the clubhouse. Butt-Head is clutching his box of letters.

Beavis, improbably, has gone to the bathroom and washed his face. He is trying to look his best for Amanda.

Amanda enters the lounge. A couple of tables have been set up with drinks and snacks.

“Amanda,” George says. “This is Beavis and Butt-Head.”

“Hi, guys. Thanks for coming to the game today. Did you have a good time?”

Beavis speaks up.

“We had a great time, Amanda. And the best part was seeing you.”

“Shut up, Beavis.”

Butt-Head looks at Amanda.

“But yeah. He’s right. You’re super hot.”

Amanda blushes slightly.

“Why, thank you, guys.”

“Anytime,” Butt-Head says.

They sit down.

George, Ken and the boys crack beers. Amanda has a lime spritzer.

Beavis takes out his cigarettes.

“Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“Can we smoke in here?”

“No, dumbass.”

“Why not?”

Butt-Head looks around.

“I have no idea.”

“Oh yeah.”

Beavis puts his cigarettes away. After a while, George stands.

“Well, I guess it’s time for me to say goodbye.”

“George, do you really have to go?” Ken asks.

“Yeah, Ken. Busy day tomorrow.”

“Well, George, it was great seeing you.”

“Good seeing you too.”

Beavis looks at him.

“Yeah, George. It was great to meet you. You rule.”

Butt-Head nods.

“Yeah, George. You rule.”

“Thanks, guys.”

George Brett leaves. Ken and the boys crack another beer. Amanda is still working on her lime spritzer.

Butt-Head looks at her.

“Hey, Amanda.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever get my letters?”

“Yeah, Butt-Head. I saw one or two.”

Beavis leans forward.

“Well, he only wrote like a thousand.”

“Shut up, Beavis. I wrote twenty. I counted.”

Beavis looks at him.

“Butt-Head, you can count?”

“Shut up, Beavis. Yes, I can.”

“I’m just saying.”

Amanda smiles.

“I thought the letters were sweet.”

Butt-Head looks at Beavis.

“See, dumbass.”

He opens the box.

“I brought them.”

Amanda looks inside.

“All twenty?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Butt-Head pauses.

“In case you forgot.”

“Oh.”

Beavis is getting impatient to speak to Amanda.

“Hey, Amanda.”

“Yeah?”

“I washed my face.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

A beat.

“I did that for you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Butt-Head looks at him.

“Dumbass.”

Amanda finishes her lime spritzer. She stands and stretches.

“Well, guys, I should probably get going.”

Butt-Head stands immediately.

“Yeah. Me too.”

Beavis stands.

“Yeah. Me too.”

“You guys have a good trip home.”

“Thanks, Amanda,” Beavis says.

“Yeah,” Butt-Head says. “Thanks.”

Amanda waves.

“Bye, guys.”

“Bye, Amanda.”

She leaves.

The boys remain standing. Beavis looks at Butt-Head.

“Did you score?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

Another beat.

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Ken finishes his beer.

“You boys ready?”

“Yeah.”

VI

The cab pulls up outside the Hyatt.

Ken pays the driver. Beavis and Butt-Head climb out.

They walk toward the entrance.

“Hey, Butt-Head.”

“What?”

“I think we came pretty close.”

“No, we didn’t, Beavis.”

“Oh yeah.”

They enter the hotel.

Later, Ken says good night and retires to his room.

Beavis and Butt-Head return to theirs.

Butt-Head points to the bed by the wall.

“Beavis. That’s mine.”

“Yeah, Butt-Head. I know.”

The boys are tired from their long day. They crawl into bed and turn out the lights.

The television remains on.

“Hey, Butt-Head.”

“Yeah, Beavis?”

“We tried our best.”

“Shut up, Beavis.”

A beat.

“But yeah. I guess we did.”

They watch television.

“1979” by the Smashing Pumpkins is playing.

“Beavis.”

“Yeah?”

“Turn it down a little.”

Beavis turns it down a little.

“This song sucks.”

“Yeah.”

Beavis changes the channel.

Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain” is playing.

Butt-Head looks at the television.

“Beavis.”

“Yeah?”

“Isn’t this that song from the movie?”

“What movie?”

“Say Anything, dumbass. With John Cusack.”

“Oh yeah. He sucks.”

“Of course he sucks, Beavis. But he also rules a little bit.”

Beavis considers this.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

They watch a little longer.

“This song is lame,” Butt-Head says.

“I don’t know. I think it’s kinda sweet.”

Butt-Head turns toward him.

“Shut up, Beavis. This song sucks.”

FIN