Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of the Mendoza Line Universe: The Most Underrated Emotional World in Indie Rock

Note: This essay reflects on the body of work created by The Mendoza Line across their full run of albums from the late 1990s through the 2000s. Rather than focusing on any single record, the piece treats the band’s catalog as a continuous emotional landscape shaped by the songwriting partnership of Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle.

Listeners often encounter Mendoza Line songs individually, but much of the band’s power emerges through the cumulative experience of their discography. Themes of adult friendship, romantic complication, and the passage of time echo across multiple records, giving the catalog a novelistic quality that rewards long listening.

The essay also briefly notes the continuing literary sensibility present in the later work of Elizabeth Nelson and her band The Paranoid Style, whose writing carries forward some of the same attention to language and emotional nuance that defined the Mendoza Line’s universe.

There are bands that produce great songs, and there are bands that create something more elusive: a world. A place listeners gradually learn to inhabit. The details accumulate across albums — the same emotional terrain, the same types of characters, the same quiet dramas unfolding in apartments, bars, late-night conversations, and long walks home after things didn’t quite work out the way anyone hoped.

The Mendoza Line built one of the most coherent emotional worlds in indie rock. Yet somehow that universe has remained strangely under-discussed. Their records are beloved by those who found them, but the band rarely appears in the simplified historical narratives that dominate discussions of the early-2000s indie era.

Which is a shame, because the Mendoza Line did something unusually difficult. They built not just songs, but an emotional ecosystem — a body of work in which relationships evolve, perspectives shift, and the same themes reappear across albums like chapters in an ongoing novel.

At the center of that universe were the complementary voices of Tim Bracy and Shannon McArdle. Their interplay gave the songs an unusual depth. Bracy’s delivery often carried a mixture of irony and quiet vulnerability, while McArdle brought a steadier, observational clarity to the band’s emotional landscapes. The result was a kind of dialogue — two perspectives navigating the complicated terrain of adulthood together.

Before we even reach the peak records, the early Mendoza Line albums already reveal the shape of the world they were building.

The band’s debut, Poems to a Pawnshop (1998), arrived like a sketchbook. The songwriting was still forming its voice, but the themes were already present: urban melancholy, friendships under strain, characters trying to maintain dignity in the face of disappointment. The album hinted at something larger than a conventional indie record. Even then, the songs seemed less concerned with spectacle than with capturing moments of emotional recognition.

That sensibility expanded on Like Someone in Love (2000). Here the band began refining the tone that would define their work: literate, quietly devastating, and grounded in adult emotional experience. The arrangements grew more confident, and the songwriting displayed the narrative patience that would become their hallmark. Rather than rushing toward climaxes, the songs unfolded gradually, allowing the emotional implications of each line to settle.

Then came the record that truly opened the Mendoza Line universe: We’re All in This Alone (2002).

This album remains one of the great underappreciated statements of its era. The title itself captures the paradox the band explored repeatedly: the tension between isolation and community, between private disappointment and collective endurance. The songs feel like dispatches from adult life — not the romanticized version pop music often celebrates, but the real thing, where people struggle to remain generous and decent even when circumstances grow complicated.

It is here that the Mendoza Line’s narrative sensibility becomes unmistakable. The songs begin to feel interconnected, as though the same characters might wander through multiple tracks. The emotional terrain — bars, apartments, quiet reflections after midnight — becomes familiar to the listener.

By the time the band reached Lost in Revelry (2005), that universe had become fully inhabited.

This is perhaps the Mendoza Line’s masterpiece. The record captures the band at the height of its emotional and musical powers. The songwriting is confident without becoming grandiose. The arrangements remain understated, allowing the lyrics and vocal interplay to carry the emotional weight.

But the Mendoza Line story reaches one of its most powerful emotional statements with the next record, Full of Light and Full of Fire (2006). If Lost in Revelry feels like a moment of clarity, Full of Light and Full of Fire feels like the long reflective walk that follows. The songs explore what happens after the drama fades — how people continue living with the decisions and disappointments that accumulate over time.

Then, in 2008, came the band’s final studio album, Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent. By this point the Mendoza Line universe had reached its fullest expression: reflective, humane, and quietly philosophical about the passage of time.

It is here that we find “31 Candles.”

And “31 Candles” stands as one of the greatest breakup songs ever written.

What makes the song extraordinary is its restraint. It does not rely on grand declarations or bitterness. Instead it captures the emotional reality of a relationship reaching its natural end — two people recognizing, with sadness but also clarity, that their story has run its course. The lyrics move through small observations and gestures, allowing the emotional truth to emerge gradually.

Breakup songs often dramatize conflict. “31 Candles” does something harder. It captures the dignity of acceptance.

The band’s understanding of time also finds beautiful expression in another Mendoza Line classic: “It’s a Long Line (But It Moves Quickly).” For me this song sits comfortably in my personal top fifty songs of all time. Its brilliance lies in its metaphor. Life becomes a slowly advancing line — one we all stand in as friendships evolve, ambitions change, and years pass almost without our noticing. The song holds humor and melancholy in perfect balance, acknowledging both the absurdity and quiet beauty of the situation.

Few bands have written about adulthood with this level of honesty.

What makes the Mendoza Line universe so compelling is that the songs resist simplification. Relationships in these stories are not tidy narratives with heroes and villains. People make mistakes. They try to remain kind despite disappointment. They fail and try again. The songs treat these struggles with empathy rather than judgment.

The influence of that sensibility extends beyond the band’s own records. One of the pleasures of revisiting the Mendoza Line today is noticing how its literary intelligence echoes through later projects connected to its members. In particular, the work of Elizabeth Nelson — especially through The Paranoid Style — carries forward some of the same fascination with language, irony, and the strange comedy of modern life. The lineage is not identical, but the spirit feels unmistakably related.

Looking back now, it seems clear that the Mendoza Line were never chasing the kind of breakthrough moment that defines rock mythology. They were doing something quieter and arguably more enduring. Instead of building a career around spectacle, they built a body of work that rewards listeners who return to it slowly over time.

Their songs feel less like artifacts of a musical era and more like rooms in a house one can revisit years later. The characters still live there. The conversations continue. The emotional truths remain recognizable.

In an age when so much music competes for instant attention, the Mendoza Line trusted patience. They believed that listeners would eventually discover the world they had created.

For those who have spent time there, the conclusion is obvious.

The Mendoza Line did not merely write songs.

They built a place.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of Mayo Thompson

Note: This essay reflects on the artistic approach of Mayo Thompson and the work of Red Krayola, particularly the band’s deliberate challenge to conventional ideas of musical skill. The famous observation that Thompson plays the guitar “badly, on purpose,” often cited in critical discussions of the group’s work — including later reassessments of records such as Malefactor, Ade — captures something essential about that approach.

The phrase can sound dismissive at first, but it also points toward a deeper artistic intention. From the late-1960s underground scene through later recordings, Red Krayola consistently treated rock music less as a polished craft than as an open field for experimentation. Imperfection, disruption, and instability were not accidents but part of the aesthetic design.

Whatever one ultimately makes of the results, Thompson’s work continues to raise an interesting question: how much of what we call musical “skill” is simply a set of habits that artists occasionally need to break.

There are certain musicians whose reputations survive largely through footnotes. They appear in the histories. Critics cite them as influences. Other artists speak their names with reverence. Yet relatively few listeners spend their evenings actually playing the records.

Mayo Thompson, the guiding figure behind Red Krayola, occupies precisely that strange territory. His band is frequently described as “important,” “experimental,” or “avant-garde,” words that often function as polite signals that the music itself may not be especially enjoyable. Red Krayola records circulate through the culture like curious artifacts — admired, studied, but approached cautiously.

And the most famous criticism of Thompson’s musicianship captures the problem perfectly.

A critic once observed that Thompson plays the guitar “badly, on purpose.”

The line, often repeated in retrospective discussions of Red Krayola’s music, originally surfaced in commentary surrounding the band’s 1989 record Malefactor, Ade. Whether in a Pitchfork reassessment or earlier critical recollection, the phrase stuck because it seemed to summarize the entire aesthetic in five devastating words.

Badly. On purpose.

For many listeners the sentence reads like a dismissal. But read another way, it becomes the most accurate description of Thompson’s artistic method ever written.

Because the key word in that sentence is not badly.

It is purpose.

From the beginning, Red Krayola treated rock music not as a set of rules to master but as a field of possibilities to disrupt. When the band first appeared in the late 1960s, rock was rapidly developing its own conventions — tighter songwriting, increasingly polished production, guitar virtuosity becoming a badge of seriousness. Thompson responded by moving in the opposite direction.

Instead of improving technique, he destabilized it.

Instead of polishing songs, he dismantled them.

Instead of reassuring the audience, he occasionally seemed to provoke it.

To understand this impulse, it helps to remember the strange cultural environment out of which Red Krayola emerged. The late-1960s underground was full of what might loosely be called the freak scene — a loose constellation of psychedelic bands, communal happenings, and avant-leaning musicians who were less interested in building careers than in testing the boundaries of sound itself. In Texas, where Red Krayola formed, that scene intersected with the surreal humor and anarchic spirit of the local counterculture. Musicians were experimenting with noise, collective improvisation, and absurd theatrical gestures long before those practices acquired respectable academic labels.

Red Krayola fit naturally into that environment. Early performances sometimes resembled happenings more than concerts. Songs dissolved into noise. Improvised ensembles wandered across the stage. Audience expectations were occasionally disrupted on purpose. It was not chaos exactly — more like a deliberate challenge to the idea that a rock performance had to behave in a predictable way.

Thompson understood something fundamental about rock music that many technically superior players missed. The genre had always contained a certain productive roughness — a willingness to accept imperfection as part of its expressive vocabulary. Chuck Berry’s guitar was not elegant in the classical sense. Early garage bands could barely tune their instruments. Punk would later turn this roughness into a formal principle.

Red Krayola pushed that principle further than almost anyone else.

By “playing badly on purpose,” Thompson exposed the hidden assumptions behind musical skill. What does it actually mean to play well? To hit the expected notes? To follow the established structure of a genre? To demonstrate control over the instrument?

Or might it mean something else entirely: the ability to reshape the instrument so that it produces new kinds of thought?

Listen carefully to Red Krayola’s recordings and the supposed incompetence begins to look suspiciously intentional. The guitar lines wobble, fragment, and reassemble themselves in unexpected patterns. Rhythms appear and disappear. Melodies emerge briefly before dissolving into something stranger. The music behaves less like a traditional composition and more like an argument unfolding in real time.

The phrase “avant-rock” is often used to describe this territory, but the label can make the music sound colder than it actually is. Beneath the disruption lies a restless curiosity about what rock music could become if freed from its habits. Thompson’s playing does not reject the guitar so much as treat it like a tool for questioning the very idea of guitar playing.

Which brings us back to that famous line of criticism.

“Playing the guitar badly, on purpose.”

For some listeners the sentence still reads as an indictment. But for others it begins to sound like a manifesto. What if the deliberate abandonment of technical mastery allows a musician to explore new expressive territory? What if awkwardness becomes a form of freedom?

The history of experimental music is filled with similar gestures. Artists deliberately violate the rules of their medium in order to discover what lies beyond them. Painters distort perspective. Writers abandon traditional narrative structure. Filmmakers fracture chronology. Thompson simply applied the same logic to the electric guitar.

And the results, while sometimes difficult, have proven surprisingly durable. Decades after Red Krayola’s earliest recordings, the band’s influence can be heard echoing through the strange corners of indie rock, post-punk, and experimental pop. Musicians who grew up absorbing Thompson’s restless attitude toward form learned an important lesson: rock music does not have to choose between intellect and instinct. It can contain both.

Thompson himself has often downplayed his role in the process, describing music as merely a “means to an end.” That humility is part of the puzzle. The work was never about demonstrating personal virtuosity. It was about using the medium of rock music as a way of thinking — testing ideas about sound, structure, and audience expectation.

Which explains why Red Krayola’s catalog continues to feel oddly alive. The records are not polished monuments to technical achievement. They are documents of exploration, full of wrong turns, strange detours, and flashes of accidental beauty.

In a culture that often equates artistic success with increasing refinement, Mayo Thompson chose the opposite path. He embraced awkwardness, instability, and deliberate imperfection as creative tools.

And if that occasionally meant playing the guitar badly — well, that too was part of the design.

Badly, perhaps.

But never accidentally.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of Bob Dylan’s Voice

Note: This essay addresses the vocal style of Bob Dylan rather than attempting to summarize or evaluate his entire career. Few artists have produced a catalog as vast and stylistically varied as Dylan’s, and any short reflection necessarily highlights only a handful of examples.

The focus here is narrower: the persistent criticism of Dylan’s voice itself. What is often described as a flaw — the nasal phrasing of the early years, the shifting timbre across decades, the later gravel and wear — may actually be central to the expressive power of the songs. From the relaxed baritone of “Lay Lady Lay” to the weathered storytelling of later pieces like “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Dylan has treated the voice less as a fixed instrument than as something that evolves alongside the writing.

Whatever one ultimately thinks of Dylan as a singer, it is difficult to separate the sound of that voice from the way the songs themselves think and move.

For more than half a century now, the most common criticism of Bob Dylan has been delivered with a kind of amused certainty. The songs are brilliant, people say. The lyrics changed popular music. The cultural influence is beyond dispute. But then comes the familiar caveat: that voice.

It has been called nasal, abrasive, cracked, tuneless, irritating. Entire generations of listeners have learned to preface their admiration for Dylan with the same apologetic formula: I like the songs, but I can’t stand the voice.

The curious thing about this complaint is that it misunderstands what Dylan has been doing from the very beginning. The voice was never designed to function like a conventional pop instrument. Dylan did not arrive in the early 1960s trying to compete with the smooth professionalism of singers trained to project warmth and polish. His voice was something else entirely — a narrative instrument, flexible and expressive, capable of bending itself around the demands of language.

Dylan sings the way a storyteller speaks. He stretches syllables, clips phrases, pushes words slightly ahead of the beat when the meaning requires urgency. The phrasing follows the thought rather than the melody. In that sense the voice is inseparable from the writing. It carries the emotional intelligence of the lyrics themselves.

Listen to the early recordings and the intention becomes clearer. Dylan’s adoption of a Woody Guthrie–inflected nasal tone was not an accident or a limitation. It was a conscious refusal of the polished vocal style that dominated American pop music at the time. That sharp, cutting tone allowed the lyrics to arrive with unusual clarity. When Dylan sang a line, it sounded less like a performance than like a declaration.

The voice was never meant to be pretty. It was meant to be distinct.

What makes Dylan’s vocal history especially interesting, however, is that he never treated the voice as a fixed identity. Most singers spend their careers protecting the sound that first made them famous. Dylan has spent his career reinventing his instrument.

Consider “Lay Lady Lay.” When the song appeared in 1969 it startled listeners precisely because Dylan suddenly sounded like a different singer. The voice drops into a relaxed, warm baritone that almost resembles a country croon. The performance feels intimate and unhurried, floating gently across the melody. For listeners who had grown accustomed to the sharp nasal delivery of the mid-sixties records, the shift was almost surreal. Yet the moment reveals something essential about Dylan’s approach: the voice was always a tool, something he could reshape to serve the emotional temperature of a song.

That willingness to reshape the instrument continued across the decades. By the time Dylan reached the late 1980s and recorded Oh Mercy, the voice had grown darker and more weathered. The nasal sharpness softened into something more reflective, almost conversational. Songs like those on that record carry the sound of someone who has traveled long enough to lose interest in youthful urgency. The phrasing slows. The lines drift into place with the patience of a writer thinking aloud.

Then came one of the most revealing turns in Dylan’s career: the acoustic folk return of Good as I Been to You. Here the voice is noticeably rougher — craggy, even fragile in places — but the effect is strangely beautiful. Stripped of studio polish, the performances feel intimate and direct. Dylan leans into the imperfections rather than hiding them, allowing the cracks and worn edges to become part of the storytelling. The voice sounds like the voice of someone who has lived inside these songs long enough for them to feel personal.

By the time we reach “Red River Shore,” one of the most quietly devastating pieces in Dylan’s later catalog, the vocal approach has evolved again. The singing drifts between speech and melody, sometimes barely holding the line of the tune. Yet the emotional clarity of the performance is unmistakable. The voice carries longing, regret, and memory in equal measure. A smoother instrument might have delivered the melody more elegantly, but it would not have carried the same weight of experience.

This is where the criticism of Dylan’s voice begins to collapse under its own logic. What many listeners describe as a flaw is actually the source of the music’s emotional credibility. Dylan does not sing as if he is demonstrating technique. He sings as if he is living inside the narrative of the song.

The culmination of this approach arrives late in his career with songs like “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” The voice now sounds almost spectral — gravelly, patient, slightly detached from ordinary time. Dylan sings like someone wandering slowly through the ruins of American memory, pausing occasionally to remark on the strange persistence of its myths and melodies. The performance feels less like a conventional vocal interpretation than like an old storyteller recounting fragments of history.

What becomes clear across these transformations is that Dylan has allowed his voice to age openly. Instead of fighting the passage of time, he has incorporated it into the music itself. Each decade introduces a new vocal texture: the sharp folk nasal of the early years, the relaxed croon of Nashville Skyline, the reflective tone of Oh Mercy, the craggy intimacy of Good as I Been to You, the haunted narrative voice of his later work.

The result is something unusual in popular music. Dylan’s catalog does not simply document the evolution of a songwriter. It documents the evolution of an instrument — an instrument that carries the marks of time just as visibly as the songs carry the marks of history.

In a culture that often treats youth as the standard for artistic vitality, Dylan has done something quietly radical. He has allowed his voice to become older, stranger, and more idiosyncratic with each passing decade. The roughness critics once mocked has turned into a kind of authority. When Dylan sings now, the voice carries the sound of someone who has traveled a long road and has no interest in pretending otherwise.

Which brings us back to the original complaint. Yes, Dylan’s voice can sound abrasive. It can wander away from conventional melody. It can refuse the kind of polished beauty audiences expect from great singers.

But that resistance is precisely what gives the music its power. Dylan’s voice does not float above the songs like an ornament. It digs into them, pulling the meaning up from somewhere deeper than technique.

For listeners willing to follow it, the reward is a rare experience in modern music: a voice that has never stopped evolving, never stopped experimenting, never stopped chasing the emotional truth of the song.

Not perfection.

Truth.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you may enjoy the there pieces in this series. This is the fourth piece in our “In Defense” of series. The first piece is on Ryan Adams. It can be found below.

In Defense of Ryan Adams
Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of Conor Oberst

Note: This essay focuses on the songwriting of Conor Oberst and the broader arc of his work as a writer and performer. It does not attempt to settle every critical debate about his career or evaluate the many shifting narratives that have surrounded him over the years.

Instead, the argument here is simpler: when listeners return to the songs themselves — especially pieces like “Cape Canaveral,” “Easy/Lucky/Free,” and “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For” — the caricature of Oberst as merely an overwrought diarist becomes difficult to sustain. Whatever one thinks of the mythology around him, the writing continues to reward careful listening.

For more than twenty years now it has been fashionable to treat Conor Oberst as a kind of permanent adolescent: the patron saint of overwrought confession, the boy genius who mistook emotional intensity for wisdom and simply never grew out of it. Even listeners who admired the early records sometimes adopt a gentle condescension when talking about him now. Those songs were powerful, they say, but they belonged to a particular moment — a moment of youthful melodrama that serious listeners eventually leave behind.

The outline is familiar. Too many feelings. Too many words. Too much trembling urgency in the voice. Somewhere along the way Oberst became shorthand for the idea that emotional sincerity, taken too far, turns embarrassing.

But like many tidy cultural narratives, this one collapses as soon as you start listening carefully again.

The first thing worth remembering is that Oberst began writing and recording music at an age when most people are still learning how to articulate their own thoughts. The early Bright Eyes records captured something very specific: the internal weather of late adolescence and early adulthood. The confusion, the moral absolutism, the sudden swings between despair and hope. Critics often call this melodrama, but melodrama is sometimes just another word for emotional honesty before the world teaches you to disguise it.

What Oberst did during those years was document the process of becoming a person. The songs are full of doubt, self-contradiction, and grand declarations that may not survive contact with reality. But that is exactly how young consciousness works. It moves through extremes. It searches for certainty and then dismantles it. Listening to those records now is less like hearing a performance than like reading a diary written in real time while the author tries to understand himself.

The voice, which so many critics found grating, was central to that effect. Oberst sang as if the words were arriving at the exact moment he needed them. The wavering pitch, the occasional cracks, the sense of someone pushing language slightly faster than it could comfortably travel — all of that created the feeling of urgency. It sounded like a mind thinking out loud.

The strange thing about Oberst’s career is that this intensity became the very thing people later held against him. Emotional transparency, once celebrated as authenticity, gradually hardened into caricature. Listeners who had grown older began to treat the songs as artifacts from a younger self they preferred not to revisit. Oberst did not change enough for some critics, while for others he changed too much.

But the best way to understand his writing is to look closely at several songs that capture the full range of what he does. “Cape Canaveral,” from his 2008 solo record, is often cited by fans as one of his finest achievements, and for good reason. The song moves with a calm, reflective confidence, drifting through memory, regret, and travel before arriving at a quietly devastating insight: “Every time I try to pick up the pieces / Something shatters.” The writing has none of the frantic urgency critics associate with Oberst. Instead it feels mature, patient, almost philosophical — proof that his gift for emotional clarity did not disappear when he left his early twenties.

Another example arrives with “Easy/Lucky/Free,” one of the defining songs from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The track looks outward rather than inward, sketching a world where technology and surveillance gradually erode the illusion of personal freedom. The chorus lands with a mixture of dread and irony that feels more prophetic with every passing year. What might once have sounded like youthful paranoia now reads as a remarkably prescient meditation on the digital age.

And then there is “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For,” perhaps the most quietly devastating song of Oberst’s middle period. The track unfolds with almost conversational simplicity, recounting memories of youth, friendship, and the slow arrival of adult responsibility. By the time the final lines arrive — “You said that you hate my suffering / And you understood / And I said that I love you too” — the song has achieved something rare: a portrait of adulthood that feels honest without becoming cynical.

Taken together, these songs reveal the real architecture of Oberst’s songwriting. Beneath the reputation for emotional excess lies a writer deeply concerned with memory, time, and the fragile ways people try to make sense of their lives. His best work captures the moment when experience shifts from confusion into recognition — when a half-formed feeling finally finds the right words.

Another reason Oberst’s work continues to resonate is that he writes from inside experience rather than from a critical distance. Many songwriters polish their observations until the emotional edges disappear. Oberst tends to leave the edges intact. His songs preserve the awkwardness, the uncertainty, the half-formed thoughts that accompany real moments of reflection. The result is sometimes messy, occasionally excessive, but often uncannily recognizable.

This quality also explains why Oberst has remained so influential among younger songwriters. He helped create a space in indie music where vulnerability could coexist with literary ambition. The songs suggested that personal confession and careful craft were not mutually exclusive. For a generation of listeners trying to articulate their own emotional lives, that permission mattered.

None of this means that every Oberst record works equally well, or that every lyric survives scrutiny. A career built on openness will inevitably produce uneven moments. But the larger body of work tells a more interesting story than the caricature of a permanently anguished songwriter. It shows an artist who has spent decades documenting the slow evolution of a restless mind.

And perhaps that is the real reason Oberst continues to provoke such divided reactions. His songs refuse to adopt the protective distance that many listeners eventually develop toward their own past selves. Instead they remain exposed — still searching, still uncertain, still willing to ask questions that adulthood often teaches us to bury under routine.

In that sense the emotional intensity people once dismissed as youthful melodrama begins to look different. It becomes a record of someone refusing to abandon the difficult work of feeling deeply about the world. For listeners willing to meet him there, the songs offer something rare in modern music: the sound of a consciousness continuing to unfold, one uneasy thought at a time.

Note: This is the third piece in our series “In Defense Of.” Iy you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the one on Mark Kozelek. You can access it below.

In Defense of Mark Kozelek
Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of Mark Kozelek

Note: This essay addresses the artistic approach of Mark Kozelek as a songwriter. It does not attempt to evaluate or adjudicate the various personal controversies that have circulated around him in recent years, many of which remain publicly disputed and complex.

The focus here is narrower: how Kozelek’s long-form, diaristic songwriting works as a musical method — particularly in songs like “Ali/Spinks II,” where ordinary details accumulate into something emotionally larger. Whatever one thinks of the artist as a person, the question of how the music itself functions remains worth examining on its own terms.

For several years now it has been fashionable to treat Mark Kozelek as something like an exhausted case: a brilliant songwriter who wandered too far into self-absorption, whose songs became too long, too diaristic, too willing to linger on the small debris of daily life. Even some longtime listeners have adopted the shorthand. Early records were masterpieces; later ones were indulgent. The verdict sounds tidy. But like most tidy verdicts in music, it collapses as soon as you start listening again.

The basic complaint about Kozelek’s later work is well known. The songs stretch past ten minutes. The lyrics catalog ordinary events: hotel rooms, meals, airports, old friends, television shows, half-remembered conversations. The narrator seems to be narrating his own day in real time, occasionally pausing to note a basketball score or a passing cloud of melancholy. To critics raised on the discipline of verse-chorus songwriting, this can sound like navel-gazing elevated to an art form.

But the strange thing about Kozelek’s music is that the minutiae are not actually the point. They are the atmosphere. His songs work less like traditional compositions and more like extended walks through consciousness. The grocery lists, the memories of old bands, the stray anecdotes about touring musicians — all of it forms the texture through which something else slowly emerges. A mood. A sense of time passing. The feeling of being a person moving through an ordinary day while carrying decades of memory.

The best way to understand this approach is to listen carefully to “Ali/Spinks II,” one of the central tracks from Benji. The song begins almost casually, recounting the death of Kozelek’s cousin and drifting through fragments of memory connected to that loss. There is no obvious structure, no chorus that arrives to organize the material. Instead the narrative moves the way memory moves: sideways, unpredictably, circling back on itself. The details accumulate slowly until the emotional core of the story becomes unavoidable. What begins as a series of seemingly unrelated observations eventually reveals itself as a meditation on grief, family history, and the strange ways tragedy ripples through ordinary life. The song is long, messy, and digressive — and it works precisely because of those qualities. “Ali/Spinks II” is not merely an example of Kozelek’s method; it is the test case. If the listener accepts the logic of that song, the entire later catalog suddenly makes sense.

This approach did not come out of nowhere. Kozelek has always been a writer drawn to the long arc of a song. Even in the early days of Red House Painters, the music moved at a patient pace, letting chords hang in the air while the lyrics circled around regret, nostalgia, and quiet observation. What changed later was not the impulse but the level of exposure. The lens moved closer. The songs stopped pretending to be about characters and admitted they were about the singer himself.

For some listeners that shift felt like a loss of mystery. But there is another way to hear it. Kozelek’s later records are essentially field recordings of a mind at work. They capture the strange mixture of memory, boredom, humor, irritation, and melancholy that makes up ordinary consciousness. Most songwriters edit this material down to the highlights. Kozelek leaves it mostly intact. The result is less like reading a poem and more like sitting beside someone during a long drive while they talk about whatever crosses their mind.

The famous outbursts that circulate online tend to obscure this. Kozelek has never been particularly careful about public performance of personality, and that roughness often dominates the narrative around him. When he released the song “War on Drugs: Suck My Dick,” a public feud with The War on Drugs instantly became the headline. The track was petty, funny, abrasive, and entirely unnecessary — which is to say it was perfectly consistent with the same impulsive candor that fuels his songwriting. Kozelek has never seemed particularly interested in polishing the public version of himself.

But the deeper argument about his music usually centers on the accusation of self-indulgence. Why should listeners care about the details of a songwriter’s daily routine? Why should a song wander through anecdotes about hotels, meals, or aging friends? Why should anyone sit through ten or twelve minutes of conversational narrative when a tight three-minute composition could deliver the emotional payload more efficiently?

Kozelek himself once answered that question in a line that perfectly captures his stubborn philosophy: he said he liked playing shows for “dudes in tennis shoes.” The phrase sounds casual, almost dismissive, but it carries a small manifesto inside it. He is not writing for critics parsing lyrical elegance or for industry tastemakers deciding what counts as proper songcraft. He is writing for ordinary listeners who recognize the shape of everyday life — the boredom, the odd digressions, the strange humor that creeps into conversation when people talk long enough.

In that sense Kozelek’s songs resemble a certain kind of late-night storytelling more than traditional music. Imagine someone sitting across the table recounting a memory that begins in one place, wanders through several unrelated details, circles back to a childhood story, and eventually lands somewhere unexpectedly moving. The emotional impact arrives not through compression but through accumulation. You spend time inside the story until its meaning quietly surfaces.

The length of the songs, which so many critics treat as evidence of indulgence, is actually central to the effect. Time itself becomes part of the composition. The listener settles into the rhythm of the narration. Small details begin to gather weight simply because they have been allowed to exist long enough. By the time the song ends, the ordinary events that seemed trivial at the beginning have become part of a larger emotional landscape.

This is not the only way to write songs, and it is certainly not the most efficient one. But efficiency has never been Kozelek’s artistic goal. His music belongs to a tradition of artists who treat the everyday as worthy of sustained attention. The diary becomes the canvas. The passing moment becomes the subject. Instead of distilling experience into a polished metaphor, the songwriter simply records the experience itself and trusts that meaning will accumulate over time.

If that approach sometimes borders on excess, it also produces moments that feel uncannily real. A stray observation about a friend can suddenly open into a meditation on aging. A casual mention of a hotel room can turn into a reflection on the strange loneliness of touring musicians. The emotional truth arrives sideways, hidden among the details of ordinary life.

Which brings us back to the central criticism: that the songs are too long, too detailed, too inward. All of that is true. But it may also be precisely why they matter. Kozelek’s music asks listeners to do something that modern culture rarely encourages anymore — to slow down, to sit with the flow of another person’s thoughts, to accept that meaning often appears gradually rather than in a neatly packaged chorus.

Not every listener will have patience for that. But for those willing to spend time inside the songs, the reward is a strangely intimate experience: the feeling of inhabiting someone else’s memory stream for a while. The tennis shoes crowd, in other words, may understand something that critics occasionally miss. Sometimes the most honest art does not arrive in the form of a perfectly shaped statement. Sometimes it arrives as a long conversation that refuses to end too quickly.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

In Defense of Ryan Adams

“When the stars go blue.”
— Ryan Adams, “When the Stars Go Blue”

Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t.

For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, serious personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?

Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From Heartbreaker forward, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.

When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams was removed from tours, dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.

That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.

But the songs remain.

Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.

None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.

What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about that condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as the problem.

That distinction matters.

One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.

If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.

The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.

In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.

The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.

There is something oddly honest about that.

The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.

That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.

The songs were never about innocence.

They were about self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.

Dedication

For those who know the difference between a song and a headline.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Projection

This piece grows out of a pattern I kept noticing across very different areas of life — music, institutions, relationships, even small domestic moments. The common thread was projection: the quiet human habit of deciding who someone is before we actually know them.

Most of the trouble people cause each other doesn’t begin with malice. It begins with projection. A quick glance, a flash of confidence, a moment of competence, and the mind rushes in to fill the rest of the story. We decide who someone is long before we know them, then spend the next several interactions quietly forcing reality to match the role we’ve already written. The strange part is how automatic it feels. Projection moves faster than curiosity. By the time the real person arrives, the character has already been cast.

Artists have always understood this better than psychologists. Warren Zevon could compress the entire phenomenon into a sideways moment — a smirk from a hotel bellboy, a glance that tells you someone has already decided what kind of person you must be. That small misreading carries a particular sting. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s casual. A stranger assigning you a part in a play you never auditioned for.

The same mechanism runs everywhere. Romantic life is the most obvious theater. People meet someone who carries a certain kind of presence — confidence, magnetism, calm — and projection fills in the rest. One person sees mystery, another sees danger, another sees salvation. Rarely does anyone pause long enough to discover the ordinary human being standing behind the projection screen.

But romance is only the loudest version of the phenomenon. The quieter version appears in institutions. Walk into any functioning organization and you will see it immediately. Certain people get labeled early: the fixer, the visionary, the difficult one, the safe pair of hands. Once the role has been assigned, the institution stops looking carefully. Evidence that confirms the role is absorbed instantly; evidence that contradicts it tends to drift past unnoticed.

Competence is particularly vulnerable to this kind of projection. Once people notice that you can solve problems, the problems begin moving toward you almost by gravity. It rarely happens maliciously. More often it unfolds through a thousand small assumptions: they’ll handle it, they’re good at this, they don’t seem bothered. Over time the projection becomes structural. You wake up one day and realize the role people see when they look at you has quietly become the architecture of your work.

The same thing happens in subtler ways in personal life. A confident woman becomes a symbol of availability. A calm man becomes the emotional ballast of every room he enters. Someone who listens well becomes the designated interpreter of other people’s feelings. None of these roles are entirely false, but they are rarely complete. The projection flattens the person into a function.

And yet every now and then something rare happens. The projection stops.

Sometimes it happens in a team that has matured enough to recognize its own weight. Work begins moving horizontally instead of downhill. Problems get solved in real time without automatically searching for the usual backstop. The structure starts holding itself.

Sometimes it happens in friendship, where someone listens closely enough to hear the difference between energy and intention.

Sometimes it happens at home, in the quiet choreography of daily life — laundry hung, dinner made, small responsibilities passed back and forth without ceremony. No one performing a role. Just two people moving through the same system with mutual awareness.

Recognition, when it appears, is strangely quiet. It doesn’t arrive with speeches or dramatic declarations. More often it shows up as the absence of pressure — the sudden realization that you no longer have to play the character someone else wrote for you.

That absence can feel almost physical. A lightness in the room. A small shift in gravity.

Most of life still runs on projection. It’s simply too efficient a mental shortcut to disappear entirely. Human beings read surfaces quickly and fill in the rest. We build stories because the world moves too fast to wait for full understanding.

But every once in a while the projection drops and something more accurate takes its place. Someone sees you clearly. Or a system finally distributes its weight the way it should have all along.

Those moments are easy to miss because they are not dramatic. They feel almost ordinary.

But if you pay attention, they carry a quiet form of relief: the sense that for a brief stretch of time, at least, you are no longer acting in someone else’s script.

Dedication

For those rare moments when the projection dissolves and the real person gets to stand in the room.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song The Hula Hula Boys

Author’s Note

This piece started with a Zevon lyric and ended somewhere closer to everyday life — school, work, home. The theme that connected them was simple: the difference between being projected onto and being recognized accurately.

Warren Zevon had a way of telling the truth sideways. He’d take a tiny humiliation — a smirk from someone who shouldn’t matter — and turn it into a whole portrait of misread identity. That moment where the bellboys smirk in Hula Hula Boys isn’t really about Maui. It’s about the particular sting of being assigned a character you never auditioned for — a whole world deciding who you are based on five seconds of surface reading.

Zevon never explained it.
He just let you feel the bruise.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how often this happens in real life — not the dramatic betrayals, but the smaller misalignments, the places where people look at you and somehow see the wrong outline.

There’s a certain kind of woman the world keeps getting wrong in exactly the same way. She walks in with confidence — not bravado, just a grounded sense of self — and somehow that’s all people need to begin building a fantasy around her. Projection is fast. A steady gaze, a self-contained presence, and suddenly she’s not a person anymore; she’s a symbol.

People read her confidence as permission. They take her self-possession as invitation. Because she doesn’t apologize for existing, they assume she’s available for whatever version of her they want to imagine.

She handles it with weary humor, the practiced deflection of someone who’s been projected onto for years. She knows the pattern by heart: magnetism mistaken for access, curiosity mistaken for claim. People want the glow without the history. The presence without the person.

The toll isn’t theatrical.
It’s persistent.

A quiet erosion caused by being flattened by people who don’t realize they’re doing it.

It’s the Zevon problem: being assigned a role by strangers who think they already know the script.

My own version has never really been about projection. It’s about absorption.

For years people assumed I would figure things out simply because I usually did. Problems rolled downhill toward me by some natural law, and I didn’t complain — which only strengthened the gravity. Competence is its own trap. Once people realize you can hold the structure together, they stop asking whether you should.

Things shift, though. And lately I’ve noticed a small pattern unfolding in real time — a micro-pattern made visible by something as ordinary as Google Chat.

Each grade level has its own chat, and I’m on all of them. That means I get to watch what happens when a problem appears: who moves first, who coordinates, who quietly solves the thing before it grows teeth.

In the past, I could feel the vacuum forming the moment an issue appeared. People would glance in my direction, explicitly or implicitly, waiting for the gravitational pull to do its work.

But that’s not happening now.

Teachers read the situation.
They coordinate among themselves.
Pieces move before I even need to think about moving them.

The day gets handled in real time.

Good stuff.
Really good stuff.

Not dramatic, not heroic, not a speech. Just the quiet sound of a mature team taking weight off one of the people who used to carry too much of it without saying a word.

The feeling is surprisingly powerful: being seen accurately for once. Not as the backstop, not as the default fixer, but as one person inside a functioning system.

It’s the opposite of projection.

It’s recognition.

A quiet form of respect delivered through action.

The same thing shows up at home.

Sometimes I’ll ask my wife if I can hang the laundry and she’ll say yes. It’s such a small thing, barely a conversation, but it lands deeper than it should. Not because the task matters, but because of what it represents: ordinary work, passed back and forth without ceremony.

No projection.
No silent expectations.
No roles invented by other people.

Just two people in a house handling a life together.

Some of us carry the bruise longer than others. Zevon turned his into art — those sideways little stories where a single smirk can reveal an entire misunderstanding about who someone is.

The rest of us learn to recognize the moment when the smirk doesn’t arrive.

When people see you clearly.
When the system holds itself together.
When the work moves forward without anyone needing to play the part that was written for them years ago.

It’s a quiet victory, almost invisible. But once you notice it, you understand what Zevon was really writing about all along: not humiliation, but the strange relief of stepping out of a role you never agreed to play.

Dedication

For the one who knows the difference between energy and intention — and listens only to the real thing.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Talent and Talent Spotting

This piece grew out of ordinary days at school rather than any single dramatic event. It’s about leadership as I’ve experienced it—imperfect, iterative, and learned mostly through miscalibration. The Bash & Pop line isn’t about suppression; it’s about timing. Talent is fragile. So is trust.

Epigraph

“Lick it shut before I lose my guts
Or I might rip it to tiny pieces.”
—Bash & Pop, Tiny Pieces

I.

You can tell within thirty seconds which young person is carrying voltage and which one is carrying rehearsal. At Rits Uji it happens once or twice a year: a student, or a recent graduate drifting back onto campus, unmistakably alive. It’s not polish. It’s not performance. It’s the high of being, for once, unedited. They don’t need to say much. You see it in the way they stand, in the way they occupy air without apology.

When that happens, the moment goes strangely timeless. I don’t feel older or younger—I feel outside of age entirely, the way I used to at the International Student Forum when a handful of kids ran circles around the adults simply because their energy was cleaner. That’s when I have to be careful. The instinct to spill truth rises fast, to say something too honest or too directional. I’ve gotten it wrong before—said too much, too soon, watched a young person recoil from a truth they weren’t ready to carry. That’s when the Bash & Pop line surfaces: seal it before instinct turns into damage.

II.

Youth talent isn’t just something you identify; it’s something you steward. And stewardship starts long before contracts, titles, or decisions about who someone is going to become. At Rits Uji my job is mostly invisible: CAS, Student Council, the quiet nemawashi that turns chaos into consensus. But the real work happens in smaller moments—when someone bright crosses your field of vision and you feel the spark you could either fan or overwhelm.

That’s the danger. Talent doesn’t need fireworks; it needs pacing. Recognition without collapse. Direction without hijacking momentum. My own instinct can run hot—I want to give the whole truth at once, to offer the map before they’ve even decided where they’re going. Leadership, for me, has meant learning restraint. Not caution. Respect for the shape that hasn’t formed yet.

III.

The flip side of youth talent is youth fragility. It’s just as easy to read. Today it was a judo kid—curled in the nurse center, eyes red, voice small—caught in the churn that forms when discipline starts to eclipse humanity. You can see when excellence becomes pressure, when identity narrows to a single verb.

That responsibility feels heavier. One wrong word—one too-direct truth—can land harder than anything they face on the mat. So I measured my voice. Offered steadiness instead of analysis. The temptation to diagnose, to explain the larger pattern, was there. But not every insight needs to be spoken in real time. Sometimes leadership means keeping the ink from running red.

IV.

Restraint has a cost. Not dramatic. Just a quiet pressure in the chest—the sense of holding back a sentence that arrives fully formed but can’t yet be given. That’s the part of leadership no training covers: seeing a young person clearly and deciding how much of that clarity they can carry.

You swallow the rest. Not because you doubt it, but because timing matters more than brilliance. The wrong truth, delivered too early, can fracture trust. The right truth, delivered at the right moment, steadies the ground under someone who is still learning how to stand.

V.

With my son, talent has never been about molding or steering. It’s the opposite. I want his spark to move in whatever direction it’s already leaning, and I want to run alongside for as long as he’ll let me. That’s the calibration I carry into school without meaning to—the belief that momentum matters more than mastery, that the job isn’t to sculpt but to notice and match pace without crowding.

Watching him grow taught me the discipline I try to practice at Rits Uji: let the young be young. Let the talent be wide before it is refined. When the moment grows too bright or too raw, when the truth wants to spill too quickly, the choice isn’t silence. It’s timing.

VI.

In the end, talent spotting is less about brilliance than about restraint. Not leading from the front, not pushing from behind, but matching rhythm long enough for someone to find their stride. Youth talent dazzles. Youth fragility aches. Somewhere in that overlap, leadership becomes atmospheric rather than performative.

They don’t need speeches or interventions or the full weight of truths learned the hard way. They need someone who can read the moment, steady the air, and resist tearing it open before its time. And if you’ve judged the moment correctly, they outrun you.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Anima and the Animus: Dreams as Predictors of Mid-life Re-orientation

New Note: This essay began as a draft conference paper in 2019 and was never delivered in that form. I am publishing it now as a document of a particular period of questioning rather than as a finished thesis. Since writing it, my thinking about archetypes, gender, projection, and mid-life development has continued to evolve. I remain interested in the role dreams play in periods of re-orientation, but I am less certain of universal frameworks and more attentive to context, culture, and personal responsibility. Readers should take this piece as exploratory rather than definitive.

Note: The following is a draft of a conference presentation I was due to give at the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) in 2019. Life, as they say, intervened, and I was not able to give the presentation. The draft below is way too long, and was set to be edited a lot before prime time, however I do think there is material of interest here, perhaps especially for men (and hopefully women) in mid-life.

Stipulated:

The dream examples in this presentation lean heavily toward “anima” dreams, as this is my own experience. I hope that in the discussion period we can re-balance this weighting.

Advance Notice:

This presentation contains frank discussion about sexuality within the context of the main topic.

Postulate I:

The “mid-life crisis” is no less universal and acute than the challenging teenage period. It’s predictably is such that it is better termed “re-orientation” than “crisis.”

Postulate II:

Dreams can provide advanced warning and guidance about how to navigate this period.

Postulate III:

Following Carl Jung, the anima archetype (most commonly in the male) and the animus archetype (most commonly in the female) are the most commonly associated archetypes with the mid-life period, and therefore deserve especially close attention.

Postulate IV:

Although it is not clear how changing norms around gender (e.g. increased visibility of non-binary and other identities) might impact our understanding of the anima and animus in mid-life, we are advised to make space for the possibility that these archetypes develop/ evolve alongside culture.

Question #1:

What dreams have you had that might relate to the anima/ animus archetypes, and to what extent have they predicted/ informed a mid-life re-orientation?

Question #2:

Jung stresses the universal or near-universal nature of the anima/ animus archetypes (as well as other archetypes). To what extent is holding to Jung’s universalistic perspective helpful/ unhelpful for understanding the play of these archetypes today?

Question #3:

Jung says that “when a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears which {…} gains its way against all reason.” This not a very hopeful prognosis, even if it has an ample experiential basis. To what extent can understanding and attention to our dreams and unconscious decrease the force of an activated archetype?

Question #4: What other kind of dreams/ dream archetypes might also predict/ presage a mid-life re-orientation?

Postulate II expanded:

Dreams, if treated as basically integrative, give us both a heads up and also a faith/ confidence that we can survive and navigate mid-life re-orientation, although when we are in it we can feel totally overwhelmed.

Dream #: 1

7/20/13:

I am in a battle with some quasi-army people, running around a rainy landscape, ducking behind and in and out of cars. I am carrying a very small pistol, possible a “Derringer.” This action goes on for a long time. Finally, the two army factions meet in a parking lot. I am off to to side of where two groups are arguing heatedly. I try to fire my weapon to get everyone’s attention; it makes only a small sound and no one pays attention. However, just then a group forms beside me, to my right. There are quite a lot of people, more than the two factions combined. These people are aligned with one or the other sides in the battle, and are now trying to bring the two sides together. One women, middle aged or a little older and Caucasian, speaks to me very passionately about reconciliation, and grabs me. I put my hands on her shoulders and look deeply into her eyes. The argument is still going; there is a contest to see which group’s energy would prevail.

I disengage from the first women, and there is a younger woman, maybe early 20s with blondish hair. We embrace deeply; I am holding her and stroking her hair. She is “Dusty.” As with the first woman, Dusty and I are involved in some kind of structural reconciliation–we are not simply two people but representing two sides of a conflict.

Dusty has a friend, a thin girl, also in her 20s. The thin girl and Dusty are loosely connected to the older women’s movement. However, the thin girl seems like the prime mover and Dusty is just along for the ride. I get the distinct feeling that Dusty had been around a bit, young as she is. The three of us retire to a sofa—the argument is left behind. Dusty is on my lap, stretched out, while the thin girl, who is also sort of tanned, is to our left. We chat casually, as if we had all known each other for ages. I say, “you are foot soldiers in the women’s movement,” and the thin girl laughs and says yes. I am not in love with Dusty, rather I feel happy and blessed to be able to be connected with her for any amount of time.

THEMES: BATTLE, RECONCILIATION, EMBRACE, YOUNG WOMEN, OLDER WOMAN, CAUCASIAN WOMAN

Dream #: 2

1/17/17:

I arrive late to a pool party with a very deep swimming pool. I am wearing a suit. A lady in an elaborate purple gown falls in the pool (or maybe she jumps in on purpose). In any case, she begins to sink to the bottom. She is underwater for too long, and I decide to jump in and try to save her. I hesitate for a fraction of a second, either because I am fully dressed, or because I am afraid. I feel shame with this delay and dive down. The dive is successful and I go to the bottom of the pool. The woman is only a few feet away however when I try to swim over to her it is like I am swimming through jelly. I can barely move through the water. She drifts away slightly, and I keep trying to make progress aware that my own breath is limited. I resolve to take a few more hard strokes and in so doing try to kind of push the water under her to lift her up because I can’t reach her. Then I head back for the surface and emerge with labored breath—I have used about 90% of my capacity down there. The woman has already surfaced and has been pulled out of the pool by several people on the other side of the pool (the pool is quite large). She is seated on a raised platform kind of similar to a throne. I get out and only one or two people notice that I have been in the pool at all. Later though the woman thanks me for my efforts.

A few noticeable things about this dream are that I had the sense that the woman threw herself in on purpose and also that I knew through the dream that she would get out OK one way or the other. In fact, it was me that was in more danger than her even though she was under water for much longer.

THEMES: LADY, WATER, RESCUE, ROYALTY, INEFFECTIVENESS

Dream #: 3

2/5/17:

I am at an underground concert/ art event late at night. There are multiple acts playing in a series of narrow hallways and spaces between pipes as such with an audience, including myself, who is kind of milling about. All the acts are simultaneously being fed into an audio feed and there is a second audience in a separate, possibly more subterranean, room. I am not in this second room however somehow know of and can visualize it. The audio feed is being controlled be either Richard Branson or Jann Wenner or someone of that stature. This is kind of a big deal in a weird way—definitely an art event.

I am attached to a show that is beginning. The group is the Red Krayola, and the leader is a youngish female with short hair, creamy skin, a little Asian, probably in her mid-twenties. At first, I am appointed to be the lead singer, which is terrifying. Fortunately, the first part of the first song has a long, chugging, guitar and bass buildup which is transporting and awesome. Also fortunately, for me, the leader starts to sign or hum, no words only sounds. Maybe she will be the lead vocal after all? I begin to try to harmonize as best I can and it goes OK. I am deeply hopeful that my harmonies will stay down in the mix and that at no time will I need to be the lead singer as I know I will not be equal to the task.

The lead-in to the song goes on for several minutes, at least three or four, and it is the best music I have ever heard, which is amazing because the act is almost totally unknown—perhaps this is our debut? I start to fall in love with the leading lady, slowly, totally.

Suddenly, the electricity cuts off and so does the music. I hear a voice from the other audience room ask for our band’s signal to be brought back up. People are asking for more. However, Jann’s voice comes over the speaker and says we have lost power. The show is over.

I am both relieved (because I don’t need to sing anymore) and disappointed (because I wanted to hear the rest of the song). The disappointment registers in my stomach. Before she gets swept into the crowd (which is large and active), I approach the leading lady. She is gorgeous, slight, with earrings. She has a range of cards like small index cards with Taoist symbols in front of her as well as some jewellery and beads, not ostentatious—very tasteful. She asks me where I am from, where I live, and my spiritual orientation. I tell her, wondering if I should describe myself as a Taoist or whether she would see that as pretentious. I tell her I am a new-ager, but only in order to access ancient wisdom—things we have always known and have forgotten. As I tell her, we lean closer together and I am falling head over heels for her. I am sure that she has a line of people waiting for her and will move me along soon, however instead we began to kiss as we lean together. This operation is made difficult by a single metal spike in her lower left lip—a piercing that you sometimes see. The piercing is difficult for me to navigate and a little painful.

Scene cut and we are in bed together, unclothed, coupling. However, it turns out she has multiple piercings all over her body and no matter what arrangement we make the operation is too difficult. The dream ends, with a memory of the music.

THEMES: YOUNG WOMAN, SEMI-ASIAN WOMAN, MUSIC, SPIRTUALITY, FEAR, PIERCINGS, KISSING, FAILED SEXUAL INTERCOURSE

Dream #: 4

10/11/17:

I am in a parking lot with somebody, perhaps the parking lot of a gas station. There is a van that a woman is living in, traveling around in. I know this before seeing the woman. The woman leans out of the van which looks a bit like a food truck and may be. She is Asian but also not Asian and she leans right down in front of me. I kiss her, briefly, and she kisses me back, briefly. Then she pulls back and talks about her life on the road. She says her name is Mary. She is very attractive, with curls in the front of her pretty short hair and big cheeks. She gives me a business card that is handmade. The business card calls her “Wild Mary” and there is a drawing of a map which is full of squiggles and impossible to follow. She says this is a map to her live music event which I need to come to. I want to go, however feel like there is no way I will decipher the map.

THEMES: SEMI-ASIAN WOMAN, KISSING, MARY, MUSIC, INCOMPLETE MAP

Dream #: 5

2/27/18:

I am in a pool like a large whirlpool, maybe 8 feet deep or so, with a bunch of other people, mostly Japanese women. One woman is kind of sleeping in the pool and she leans on me like people sometimes will on trains. She is in a bathing suit and young and pretty good looking, wearing glasses. I allow her to lean on me, she floats away, then comes back. She appears to be relaxing. Then, everyone is getting out of the pool which appears to be closing. The woman becomes totally horizontal and looks at me. She asks for a doctor—just says “doctor.” She is unwell and can’t move herself. I scoop her up and swim to the side where various people are getting out and starting to dress. I tell another woman she needs a doctor and then repeat this in Japanese. Several people move off to find a doctor who will be downstairs (we are in some kind of complex and a doctor will be on hand.) The woman is laying comatose by the side of the pool and I hope the doctor comes soon. Then, my wife is there and I try to explain the situation with the woman. While I am doing this I look up and the woman is gone. She has rallied and disappeared without a word. The doctor never arrives.

THEMES: YOUNG WOMAN, ASIAN WOMAN, WATER, RESCUE, WIFE, ELUSIVITY

Dream #: 6

4/5/18:

I have been chasing a man I think I know up to the 7th floor of a tall building. Although I am athletic and running hard, I can’t catch him, and face a variety of set backs. Giving up, I retreat to the back of a dentist’s office where there are an assortment of rooms up some steps. Entering the highest room all the way in the back of this building I see a woman I know. She is from my college and I have a longstanding relationship with her. She is wearing a beige blouse which is buttoned at the neck and looks to be of Asian design. She comes over to me from the wall where she has apparently been waiting. We embrace and are very glad to see one another. We will spend the next few days together and I know in the course of those days I will be unfaithful to her in some way. I hope not to lose her as a consequence.

After waking briefly I try to renter the dream space to find her again. I am unable to do so–instead I see a bunch of filament-like strands in space. A voice says “maybe everything is connected.” It is possible that a single strand connects all elements in the unconscious and in the universe. Still, no woman.

THEMES: MIDDLE AGED WOMAN, ASIAN DRESS, ESCAPE, UNFAITHFULLNESS, METAPHYSICS

Dream #: 7

6/3/18:

I have a distinct feeling I am being called. This is not the first time I have had this feeling however this time it is as or more insistent than ever.

I dream I am seeking wisdom from some underground women spirits/ half women half spirits. They are locked behind a door and only accessible through an intermediary, also a woman. The intermediary takes my request for wisdom and something more to the women and comes back empty handed. She says the women rejected my request because I have the keys to the door. This is not saying that I have the wisdom, only that I have the keys and need to unlock it myself.

Later I dream of a teacher. I am walking down a hillside and there is a kind of encampment on my left. Here there is a teacher. The teacher quickly vacates the encampment. I see a man in purple on the far shore. He is bearded and serene. Perhaps he is a fisherman. I get a full body chill because he is the teacher. Then, another man appears closer to me on a more accessible bank. He is wearing flannel and also bearded. It is clear that the first man, though dignified, is not the teacher and this second man is. I consider approaching him but instead wind up in the encampment. There is a youngish woman, not so young but younger than me, there. She is the real teacher and she is in town for only a day or so. I go over to her and am ecstatic to be with her. She allows me to nuzzle her neck and we begin talking. She has signs like the dao on her body—not exactly tattoos more sort of birthmarks. A man is there who is kind of her minder and he lets me be close to her. I will take her teaching in a day or so.

I am seeking wisdom and instead of getting it from the underground women I need to make my own way. I see a vertical rectangle with three square boxes at the base. In the boxes are letter like SO, XOS, SXO. These are a symbolic alphabet and indicate a deeper knowledge that I should have access too. I understand that these symbols are the key to unlocking the door to the underworld.

THEMES: TEACHER, METAPHYSICS, UNDERWORLD, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, BODY MARKINGS

Dream #: 8

6/25/18:

I am skiing on a smallish yet pretty steep hill. There are some very good skiers who are blasting down and somehow also skiing back uphill, quite quickly. I am getting down ok but can only ski-walk partway back to the top each time. I am capable yet not fully confident on the skis.

A tall young Asian woman is there and I need to protect her a bit. Probably it is her first time on skis. Later, it is suggested that she does a ski jump. The ski jumps are supposed to take place over a 4-5 foot spiral cone of water but the cones aren’t ready today so I hold out a pointed object like a stick laterally at chest height instead. This seems a little dangerous and also I want her to succeed so I resolve to lower the stick as need be without telling anyone. There is a bit of a crowd around and some delay. Then, she is ready to go.

Suddenly I look up and realize that we are in a carpeted room which is only about 10 feet in depth and that there is a wooden ceiling closing the room from the ski slope. To do the jump, she will need to come across from the left side, jump diagonally, and stop almost immediately on carpet. This seems impossible so I try to call off the jump. The crowd protests and the skier also indicates willingness to continue. This is madness, so I try to demonstrate how little space she has by simulating a landing. I feel like I’m calling attention to something super obvious and the others are dense and irresponsible.

THEMES: YOUNG WOMAN, ASIAN WOMAN, SKIING, DANGER, RESCUE, INEFFECTIVENESS

Dream # 9:

7/29/18:

Last day in Bali. Dreams here have been intense and long. This dream is loaded with metaphysics. I will try to describe it carefully.

The dream starts with an image of a large whisky bottle. The bottle is very fat and also ceremic. So in fact it looks nothing like a normal whisky bottle. It is perhaps of Suntory brand. I know before I know that a story of some kind will unfold inside the bottle. I am reminded somehow of a ship inside a bottle. Suddenly I am inside the bottle itself. There is a whole word here and all sorts of people in a city-scape. I come to understand that everyone lives in relative fear of a species or group of overlords.

The overlords are both omni-present and also very distant. They rule by fear and have the power to rub out anyone at any time. Sort of. When a person is marked for removal their status is updated. Their status is displayed on a kind of glowing chip in their shoulder. There are basically theft types of statuses. First is “needing to have the life wrung out of them.” There are marked people and their time is limited. Apparently they are political criminals, thought criminals. Oddly, even when marked these people continue to circulate and take part in oppositional activity. I never actually see one of them removed, although their actions do take on a greater sense of urgency.

The second category is another worded status. This one is more elliptical and I forget the wording. Though safer than the first, this is still a status to be avoided if possible.

Third is a number. A voice tells the city that statuses will be updated and that anything under 40000 is a safe score. I check my update with bated breath, fearing the dreaded worded status. My number is 49500. Not bad I think—although not under 40000 this is perhaps for young people. 49500 seems reasonable for my age.

Suddenly the view shifts and I can see into the bottle from the outside. All of the people and various creatures and scrambling for the mouth of the body. The bottle begins to approach a wall into which is will soon merge. Here, the entrance to he bottle will be sealed. The I character in the dream is also scrambling for the exit although he doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance. Creatures spill over one another and one baby creature somewhere between a human baby and a little mouse slips through the mouth of the bottle to the other side of the wall. The bottle snaps closed and I am once again staring at the large ceremony bottle from the beginning of the dream. I feel a sense of relief that the perfect creature has escaped.

THEMES: DYSTOPIA, DOUBLE IDENTITY, METAPHYSICS, DEATH, REBIRTH, CREATURE

Dream # 10

12/19/18:

Only the second real dream since August and the first since the car crash dream three months ago.

I am in a large and ramshackle house which is apparently part of a larger complex of cabins. This may be some kind of resort, certainly it is out of town. There is a ranger hut as well so I guess we are in the woods.

After some interactions with the ranger which are painless (it is clear that I am welcome here) I begin exploring the house with a small team of people, maybe three or four. We are doing some kind of catalogue or space survey, and every space I see I have to climb in and have my picture taken in it. This means like alcoves, cubby spaces, closets, skylights, etc. Sometimes one of the other people also gets in the space, but I always do. It is unclear what the survey is for, however it is obvious that we need to do it. This process goes on for a long time and we cover much of this large house.

Eventually we come to a kind of alcove carved above a hallway, a space that doesn’t really exist in nature. An attractive Caucasian women in a white swimsuit climbs into the space and someone takes a picture. This picture becomes the definitive record of our whole trip. I don’t think I enter this space.

The group moves to a basement floor and suddenly there are a lot more people, maybe 20 or more. It’s crowded and a little noisy. The complexion of the group has changed. There is a trap door to a sub-basement and I open it and drop down. One person at least follows me, perhaps two, an older couple maybe. The sub-basement is about 4 and a half feet high and I have to stoop. It is full of junk, large foam blocks, other boxes. There is barely any room to move and nothing to see or find. I feel immediately claustrophobic and also have a flash of fear that one of the larger group will close the trap door. This fear comes and goes quickly, but it’s enough for me to ask myself why I have to always be the one exploring the spaces. If there is a group of twenty we can share the load. And, I don’t want to be in this claustrophobic sub-basement anymore.

THEMES: EXPLORATION, PSYCHE, CAUCASIAN WOMAN, BASEMENT, CLAUSTROPHOBIA