Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Periscope Platform and Annie Hardy’s “Band Car”

“Wake me up before California
Darling boy I’ve never known ya”

— Annie Hardy

1. Periscope (2018): Ambient Human Contact

In the fall of 2018, before TikTok Live and before Instagram learned how to professionalize everything, there was Periscope.

It was a live-video app owned by Twitter, but it never really felt like social media. It felt more like radio—with pictures. You could open it and see who was live anywhere in the world, zoom in on a city, drop into a stream, leave, move on. The scale was small enough that you could more or less take in the entire active population at any given moment. There was no sense of infinite scroll. The world was navigable.

It was also completely unpoliced. People streamed whole songs, movie clips, televisions playing in the background, themselves half-asleep or wandering around or doing nothing at all. No one cared. There were no warnings, no copyright bots, no friction. It was a free-for-all in the literal sense: free time, free speech, free form.

What Periscope allowed—what it uniquely allowed—was time. Long stretches of it. Silence. Repetition. Boredom. People would just sit there and talk, or not talk, or smoke on their porch and complain about their day. That kind of stream simply does not exist on Instagram Live. Instagram demands a reason. Periscope didn’t.

I loved it because it matched my temperament. I wasn’t looking to build anything. I wasn’t trying to grow an audience or perform a version of myself. I liked cursing around on the app, listening, occasionally speaking back. It was ambient human contact: voices moving through time, present but not demanding anything in return.

Most people didn’t want that. Periscope never offered a ladder—no clear path to recognition, no reliable virality, no payoff for effort. It didn’t protect users from themselves, and it didn’t compress experience into highlights. For most people, that felt pointless. For a few of us, it felt like oxygen.

I didn’t think of it as important while it was happening. It was just there, like a short-lived commons where people killed time together. Looking back, I’m amazed it existed at all.

2. Time, Leave, and the Split Feed

From September 2018 through February 2019, I was on leave from my school. The reasons sit elsewhere and don’t need explaining here. What mattered was that, for once, I had time—real time, not time carved out between obligations. I was based in Kyoto, and in October and November I spent long stretches staying in a hotel in Akasaka, moving back and forth between the two cities.

At the same moment Periscope entered my life, I started a new blog, The Kyoto Kibbitzer. The original idea was simple: walk around, notice things, write about bars, art, neighborhoods. Periscope became a sister project—not an escape from writing, but a parallel way of paying attention. One was private and slow; the other was live and provisional. They fed each other.

I quickly settled into two distinct kinds of streams.

During the day, I walked. Downtown Kyoto, north Kyoto, sometimes Tokyo. I talked, observed, played music, responded to comments. I never put my face on camera—not once. The camera always faced outward, toward streets, storefronts, light, movement. I got a simple phone holder so I could film without fuss. The stream wasn’t about me; it was about what I was seeing.

At night, I streamed from my desk in the upstairs room of my house. I usually stood, like a DJ or a lecturer, sitting only when I was reading something. The night streams were almost entirely art: music, films, writing. I’d play songs and talk about them, read long passages from essays or movie reviews, sometimes even play sections of films on my laptop and film the screen. It was all technically a grey area, but Periscope didn’t care, and neither did anyone watching.

Once I read an entire Roger Ebert essay on air—an interview he’d done with Lee Marvin—and laughed out loud the whole way through. “If I want to be an icon I’ll do it my own way, baby,” Marvin said. Mostly, that was the night feed: attention without urgency, commentary without stakes. Occasionally I’d take it back outside to a bar, or, early on, stay up all night wandering and streaming, the phone dying fast enough that I had to carry two battery packs. But those were exceptions. The form settled quickly.

The split mattered. Day feeds faced the world. Night feeds faced ideas. Both were ways of being present without self-display. Together, they created a rhythm that made Periscope feel less like a platform and more like a place of its own.

3. A Small World with Names

The audience was small, but it existed.

A few people watched consistently. My friend Andrew, who lives in Japan but not Kyoto, would sometimes tune in live or catch the replay later. John Innes watched as much as he could, and sometimes his wife, Kristi, would drop in too. When John commented, I’d usually stop whatever I was doing and talk with him at length. Conversation mattered because it was rare.

There were others who hovered at the edges. A French guitarist would sometimes watch silently for long stretches. Later, Mela would too, though I watched her far more than she watched me—mostly because she streamed for even longer than I did. And then there were the Periscope regulars: people who drifted in and out, stayed for a few minutes, disappeared, reappeared weeks later. That was the rhythm.

Periscope allowed replays, which changed the feel of everything. Not all attention was synchronous. A stream could be watched hours later, like a letter someone opened when they had time. It softened the sense of performance. You weren’t always talking to people; sometimes you were just sending something out into the day.

What mattered wasn’t numbers. Most streams—mine included—had only a handful of viewers at any given time. Even the people who seemed central to the platform often streamed to three or four names. The world was small enough that you could recognize it. You learned who was usually awake when you were. You noticed when someone stopped streaming altogether.

Because of that scale, recognition carried weight. When someone you knew appeared in the comments, it felt like a real arrival. The back-and-forth could stretch without interruption. There was no pressure to keep things moving, no sense that you were losing an audience if you paused to respond.

It didn’t feel lonely in the usual way. It felt communal in miniature. A village square that never got crowded enough to become anonymous.

4. Killing Time Together

I was somewhat lonely during that period, and looking for human companionship. Not intensity, not rescue—just being awake with other people. Periscope worked because it was like radio, only you could talk back. You could toggle around the world and find whatever level of interaction you wanted, then move on without consequence.

Some streams were playful and I would play along. There was a beautiful Russian woman who spoke mostly in Russian and replied to my comments in halting English. She’d do things like eat honey off a spoon, theatrically, and I’d type something juvenile and she’d play along too. It sounds silly, and it was, but it was also light. Once we talked longer and she told me she wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t afford it. I’d guess she was in her mid-to-late twenties. After that, I drifted away. The language barrier was real; the connection couldn’t sustain itself. That was normal.

There was a French guitarist I watched early on. He was very good—technically accomplished, friendly—and he seemed to have infinite time. He’d sit in my stream silently for long stretches, just there. Periscope people had time; that was one of the defining traits. After a few weeks I stopped watching him. Not because anything was wrong, but because it was all one thing. Skill without movement. No arc. Attention drifted, and that was allowed.

Other streams were even more minimal. I remember a woman in Oklahoma who would sit on her porch, rip bongs, and talk about her day. That was it. No premise, no performance. Just presence. That kind of stream doesn’t exist on Instagram Live. Periscope tolerated people doing nothing in public.

There was also Max, a trans woman from eastern Canada. She complained about her mother, about being broke. She usually had no viewers. Every time I came into her stream she lit up. Once I sent her fifty dollars for an art commission, and she reacted like she’d won the lottery. It wasn’t about the money. It was about being seen. On Periscope, small gestures carried disproportionate weight because the economy of attention was so thin.

People weren’t looking for transformation. They were killing time. Talking. Waiting. Passing hours together across time zones. The platform allowed that without apology. It was so free-form that it’s hard to explain now without it sounding unreal.

But that was the baseline. That was what “normal” looked like.

5. Mela: Process Recognizes Process

I didn’t find Mela right away. It wasn’t until mid-October that her stream appeared on my map. By then I already knew how Periscope worked—what it rewarded, what it ignored, what kinds of attention lasted.

The first stream I remember, she was just walking around New York City. Not driving. Walking. Taking stairs. Cutting through neighborhoods. Letting the city decide the route. Almost immediately I felt a shock of recognition: she’s me. Not biographically, not emotionally—procedurally. We were using the same method.

She would ask, “left or right?” I’d type “left,” and she’d take a left. That was it. No drama. No explanation. A shared orientation, moment to moment. I’d stay with her for hours, wandering the city together at walking speed.

People who showed up looking for something else—someone conventionally attractive to perform, flirt, deliver a payoff—would drift off. The stream filtered itself. What remained was patient, non-demanding attention. Process over outcome.

She was in her mid-to-late thirties and had worked in film props on sets around New York. At the time she was on sick leave after a back injury, which explained the free time. She streamed from her apartment, sometimes from a friend’s place she was house-sitting, and often from the streets and trains. The life context was legible. Nothing felt invented for the stream.

Eventually we connected on Instagram, but that’s not the story here. What mattered was simpler: real, undemanding, non-sexual attention feels good. In a micro-attention economy, it feels enormous.

Mela mattered because she showed that Periscope could sustain healthy, lateral connection—companionship without escalation, presence without claim. That mattered later, because it proved the platform itself wasn’t the problem. It was capable of holding something gentle and durable.

That made what came next easier to recognize as different.

6. Giant Drag (Came Late, Stayed Forever)

I came to Giant Drag late.

I first heard them sometime around 2015, years after their debut. The song was “Kevin Is Gay,” and I heard it on All Things Considered on NPR. I remember stopping short. It sounded like shoegaze, but with attitude—guitars that rang and crunched at the same time, a voice that was sharp, funny, unsentimental. I thought: who on earth is this woman?

I bought the CD immediately. The record was Hearts and Unicorns. There was “This Isn’t It,” “Slayer,” and a sense that this wasn’t a novelty discovery. It didn’t feel like a phase. It felt like something I’d been missing and had finally caught up to. Ten years later, the music is still with me.

Learning afterward that the album came out in 2005 only clarified things. I hadn’t encountered Giant Drag as part of a moment or a scene. There was no social reinforcement, no sense of being early or late. The music arrived on its own terms and stayed because it deserved to. It became part of my listening life in a quiet, durable way.

That matters here, because when Annie Hardy later appeared on Periscope, she didn’t arrive as a stranger or as “a streamer.” Her voice was already familiar to me. Not biographically, not personally—but aesthetically. I knew the intelligence. I knew the precision. I knew the attitude. What I didn’t expect was where or how I’d encounter it again.

At the time, none of this felt connected. It only looks that way in retrospect. Back then, Giant Drag was just music I loved, and Periscope was just a place people killed time together. I had no reason to think those two tracks would ever overlap.

Then they did.

7. Band Car → Band House

Because the number of active streams was limited, as I have said, I spent a lot of time just cruising around the map. One night in September 2018, I landed on Annie Hardy without looking for her. The stream was called Band Car, which turned out to be exactly what it sounded like.

She was driving. Talking. Rapping. Singing into some kind of vocoder or effects chain. Swearing at other drivers. There was no Giant Drag material, no backstory, no explanation. She’d say, “Give me three words,” and then build a rap off whatever came in. I gave her words. Over and over. It never went stale. The language was filthy—relentlessly so—but also precise. The filth wasn’t sloppy; it landed because it was aimed.

I watched every day. She streamed every day. She had no job and very little money, and she drove for hours, talking, rapping, improvising, stopping occasionally to run into Home Depot or some other errand. I’d wait. Dead air didn’t bother me. This was how Periscope worked.

Sometimes she used gay slurs, and I balked internally. That wasn’t my thing at all. But the space itself was unfiltered by design, and she used every word under the sun. I didn’t intervene or moralize. I noted it and stayed. Admiration and discomfort existed side by side.

I talked about her on my own stream. I told people she was the best thing on Periscope. I couldn’t believe I had such unfettered, generous access to a high-level artist just living inside her process. There were others watching too, but not many. I was probably her biggest fan, or one of a few. In a micro-attention economy, that mattered.

One night, very late in Los Angeles, I’d been with her for hours. The audience thinned until it was just me. She parked the car, got out, and said, almost casually, “Do you want to do band house?” It was a first. I said of course.

She went into her garage, then into a music room. There was a piano. She asked, “What do you want to hear?” I said how about After the Gold Rush. She sat down without ceremony and played the entire song. No sheet music. No warm-up. She hit the high parts cleanly. Musicians have an astonishing memory for songs, and she had it in full.

It was the greatest musical moment of my life, bar none. The only thing that comes close is hearing Spencer Krug play “Julia with Blue Jeans On” at Urbanguild in Kyoto. This was different. This was private, unadvertised, unrepeatable. When she finished, she said, “Okay, that’s band house,” and wrapped it up.

No encore. No processing. Just the sound, then silence.

That was the miracle. And it was already complete.

8. Running Its Course

In December, I used Periscope again in New York and Boston, mostly with Mela. The rhythm was familiar by then—long stretches of time, nothing urgent, companionship without demands. One night in a Boston hotel room, where I was staying to see Phosphorescent and Jay Som, I streamed the entire film Michael Clayton from my laptop. It was a grey area, as everything on Periscope was. She watched the whole thing with me, commenting occasionally—“bad guy, ooh”—the way someone does when they’re present but not trying to perform being present. It was fun. That was enough.

After that, things ended. Not abruptly. Not painfully. Periscope had simply ran its course.

Mela moved to Oklahoma and stopped streaming. I stopped too. The app thinned out. People disappeared. The small world became smaller and then, effectively, gone. There was no sense of loss that needed narrating, no aftermath to dramatize. The conditions that made Periscope feel possible—time, openness, a tolerance for doing nothing in public—shifted. Life resumed its usual density.

Looking back, what remains isn’t a lesson or a warning. It’s a memory of a brief commons where attention wasn’t monetized and presence didn’t have to justify itself. A place where someone could play a song once, perfectly, for one person, and then stop. And that could be enough.

That was Periscope. And then it wasn’t.

Dedication

For the micro-attention economy.
I had a total blast.

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 1 Comment

On David Bazan’s Crisis of Faith, and Mine

Note: This essay makes several references to my time as a teacher, coordinator, and administrator at Ritsumeikan Uji in Kyoto, Japan. I have written about my time at Ritsumeikan prior in my piece about good and great talkers, and in my piece about hiding in a hotel room for 36 hours after being seriously overworked for months in 2012.

In case parts of the timeline referred to above are not clear, I began working at Rits Uji in 2002, started with the IB program at Rits in 2008, left my job temporarily in 2018, and rejoined after COVID was settling down in 2021. Also, if you like this essay you will like my longform analysis of the great Michael Knott’s album “A Rocket and a Bomb.”

Epigraph:
“There’s real people in them big, big trucks…” 

David Bazan

I’ve always experienced David Bazan (the Christian-adjacent singer songwriter with Pedro the Lion and later solo) not as a songwriter but as a kind of emotional barometer for whatever stage of adulthood I’m in. Every few years I realize he’s already written the song I need, long before I know I need it. He’s not confessional; he’s just brutally, unfussily truthful in a way that feels like being read by somebody who doesn’t care whether you agree with him.


This is a field report on five Bazan songs—what they meant, what they revealed, and how they secretly mapped the last twenty plus years of my interior life.

1. BIG TRUCKS

I first heard “Big Trucks” in my early Ritsumeikan Uji years—2003 or 2004 when I was digging deeply on the site eMusic. The song was first released in 1998 on Pedro the Lion’s It’s Hard to Find a Friend on Made in Mexico records, and is track 3 of 12. There is also a single version which is track 6 on the 1999 EP The Only Reason I Feel Secure. I was into Pedro the Lion back when the air was still clean and my responsibilities hadn’t yet calcified into the adult structures that would come later. I was living in a rental apartment, and still had that sense that life was flexible: the rhythms of teaching, the long days, the long nights, all of it felt new and fresh.

The thing about “Big Trucks” is that it’s so effortlessly literal you almost miss the emotional charge. A child asking his father why he doesn’t respond when another driver flips him off. A parent trying to explain something unexplainable with reference to the humanity of truck drivers. The gap between innocence and knowledge opening in real time.

When I was 28, the resonance was simple: the world is bigger and harder than we think, and adulthood arrives the moment you realize you don’t get to choose the scale of the forces that hit you.

Even then, before IB coordination, before butting heads with my principal, before everything that happened in 2018 which led to me leaving my job, the line felt like a premonition. The big trucks are always coming after all.

2. BANDS WITH MANAGERS
Bands with Managers is the lead off track on Pedro the Lion’s 2004 record Achilles Heel. I was already into the band as mentioned above by this time, and Achilles Heel would prove critical listening in the years that followed. By 2007 the IB tidal wave was approaching, and my days were already starting to feel compressed. I was “going places,” as Bazan mocks himself for saying, which is exactly the problem: I actually was going places. I was acquiring managers, and then heavier managers, and then the structural expectations that come with being the adult in the room.

That’s why I love this song so much—because it’s funny, cutting, self-aware, and self-disparaging all at once:

“Bands with managers are going places.”

He’s laughing at the absurdity of ambition, the ridiculousness of believing your ascent is meaningful, and at the same time he’s wincing, because he knows he’s been swept up in the same machinery.

By 2007, I felt that too. The joke was aimed at me, but gently.

The line I lived was this:

“I’m going places, apparently — and it’s funny, and it’s ridiculous, and I think I’m about to be crushed.”

Ambition and pressure make strange bedfellows. Bazan gets that. He names what most adults won’t: that sometimes “success” feels like being hauled upward by a crane you didn’t ask for.

3. FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS
Foregone Conclusions is track two on Achilles Heel. This is one of his most devastating songs because of its simplicity. The line that gets me every time:

“I don’t wanna believe that all of the above is true.”

This is Bazan calling out doctrinaire Christianity and he’s not subtle about it. It’s almost embarrassingly plain. But middle-aged truth is often embarrassingly plain. For me the line hits in two places: first, in that long stretch where adulthood felt like a narrowing of options; and second, in the recognition of how many “beliefs” I’d inherited and carried long after they’d stopped serving me.


One idea that slowly died in me—over years, not months—was the belief that I could be happy in some uncomplicated, stable way. I don’t mean not depressed. I mean the fantasy that happiness arrives and then stays. By my early forties I knew better.


Happiness is local, flickering. It’s take what you can get. What lasts, perhaps, is meaning, purpose. Bazan already understood that twenty years ago. It took me a little longer.

4. YELLOW BIKE
Yellow Bike is track 2 on Pedro the Lion’s 2019 record Phoenix. If there’s a perfect adult loneliness song, this is it.

“My kingdom for someone to ride with me.”

This line is not necessarily about wanting a partner or romantic longing, although it could be. It’s about pace—finding someone who can move at the same internal speed as you without distorting your life. After 2018, I didn’t trust the world to ride with me in a clean way. Not institutions. Not leadership structures. Not women. The only sane posture was self-containment.


And then came Mela. Mela was first my Periscope friend (Twitter’s discontinued video live-streaming platform), and then my text buddy and then phone buddy in late fall and early winter, 2018. This was not a romance, nothing really other than hours on the phone, day after day. Neither of us were working, and we covered every subject under the sun, including prominently the boys she was with, the boys she was chasing, and the boys that were chasing here.

Mela was the first person after 2018 who matched my internal rhythm without triggering anything. She didn’t need anything from me; she didn’t misread me; she didn’t overstep. She just rode beside me lightly for a window of about six weeks.

That’s what Bazan means by “someone to ride with me.” Not permanence—just pacing. Not dependence—just parallel motion. A few blocks of shared speed. Enough to remember you’re not built for solitude.

5. LITTLE HELP
Little Help is track 3 on Pedro the Lion’s 2024 album Santa Cruz. This is the one that lands hardest in midlife.


“All I needed was a godsend/ All I needed was a little help from a friend.”

For me, that friend was Tommy. During COVID I was on sick leave, drifting, half-collapsed inside myself. Wine in bed, online chess all day, the sense of dissolving in slow motion. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was real. I wasn’t moving toward anything; I was sinking.

And it was Tommy who refused to let me disappear. Not gently. Not metaphorically. Literally. Texting. Calling. Telling me he’d drag me out of my house if he had to. Making me come out with him twice a week in Kyoto, even when I barely had a pulse.


One night we were in a tiny reggae club, drinking Red Stripe, and at around 10:30 p.m., in the restroom of all places, I felt happy for two seconds. Not enlightened. Not healed. Just briefly, unmistakably alive.

That moment didn’t save me. Tommy didn’t “fix” anything. But he interrupted the slide. He held me upright until I could stand on my own again. In the end, that’s what Bazan means. Not salvation. Not heroism. Just stubborn companionship. That moment when someone refuses to let you lose it. And that’s when the line stops being metaphor and becomes plain fact: All I needed was a little help from a friend.

6. CONCLUSION
Overall, I really like Pedro the Lion/ David Bazan. Even more so than Michael Knott, he is a kind of black sheep of the Christian rock movement, and he may even be cancelled by some, I’m not sure, but I think other people, even some of faith, appreciate his relentless questioning, his searing honesty. I don’t know what the state of his faith is today, but it’s been a fascinating and fruitful experience following along the twists and turns of his art and career.

Dedication:
For Tommy — I’ll knock down your door anytime.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Everybody Tips

Note: There’s a Ryan Adams song that’s always felt like a quiet diagnosis. The emotional math is simple: people give you just enough tenderness to keep you upright, but never quite enough to really move you from wherever you are. It’s from “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” — track 5 on Easy Tiger (2007).

You find out you’ve been underpaid, in a sense, for years, not because anyone meant you harm, but because the default setting in some long-forgotten form was never double-checked. The system assumed it was correct. Everyone assumed it was correct. And the thing is, it makes sense—you look like the sort of person who doesn’t need tending. So you stand there with the revised numbers in your hand, not angry exactly, just noticing the symmetry of it all. This is the pattern: people offer small kindnesses, small gestures, small acknowledgments.


Everybody tips.

Just not quite enough to knock me over.

It reminded me of something from years ago at my little IB school here in Japan. Back then I was stretched thin in a way you can only be in your thirties—trying to prove something, mostly to myself. I’d rush through lunch like it was another task to complete. One day Scott, one of our English teachers and a high school homeroom teacher, watched me finish a meal in about two minutes and said, gently, almost to himself, “That’s not good.” It wasn’t an intervention. It wasn’t even advice. Just a small observation from someone who was paying attention in the limited way people do. A tip, not a gesture. A flicker of care that landed, and then the moment passed.

Looking back, I think that’s why the moment stayed with me. It was concern, yes, but it was also something rarer: someone catching a glimpse of the strain I kept tucked under the surface. I wasn’t used to that. Most people saw the polished version—competent, fast, self-sufficient—and adjusted their care accordingly. Scott’s comment didn’t rearrange my life, but it landed in that narrow space where a person can be briefly seen without being exposed. A small kindness with a little weight on it, though not enough to shift anything. Another tip.

When I think about it now, it wasn’t an isolated moment. My life is full of small gestures like that—light touches of concern, half-noticed details, people offering just enough care to register but not enough to alter the trajectory. It’s not their fault; it’s how most of us move through the world. We read surfaces. We assume competence means comfort. We assume steadiness means abundance. So what comes my way is always the manageable version of kindness, the soft-edged form that stays within social limits. It accumulates, in its way, but it never quite tips the balance.

And then there’s the other meaning of the word I keep circling. To tip isn’t only to offer a small gesture—it also means to wobble, to shift the weight of something just enough that it might tilt. In that sense, everybody does tip me. Every small kindness knocks me a little off balance, just not in the dramatic way Adams means. It’s more like a brief lean in the direction of connection, a momentary swerve in the steady line of the day. A soft recalibration, not a collapse. The world nudges, not crashes. It’s movement—just not the kind that bowls you over or forces a change. The cumulative effect is real, but subtle enough that you only notice it in retrospect.

Most days, that’s all life is: a series of micro-tilts. A colleague covering five minutes without comment. A student bowing an extra beat longer than expected. A friend sending a small message at the exact right moment without knowing why. They don’t change your direction, but they do alter your angle by a degree or two. You barely feel it while it’s happening. You just register that your emotional center shifts slightly—a soft lean, a subtle recalibration, the faintest sense of being moved without being moved on. These moments don’t rewrite your story; they just keep it from calcifying. They are the human version of a brushstroke: slight, necessary, almost invisible unless you stand back and look at the whole canvas.

Every once in a while, though, someone doesn’t just tilt you—they land with actual force. It’s rare, but every few years, if you’re lucky, someone steps forward with something closer to full human weight. No calibration, no optics, no politeness. Just the clean, unmistakable feeling of another person showing up without trimming the edges of what they mean. Those are the moments you remember because they interrupt the pattern. They don’t just adjust your angle; they reset your coordinates.

That’s what happened to me in 2018. I’ve told this story in my Bad Moves piece, however to re-state I’d been traveling to see the band Phosphorescent in New York, Boston, Philly, and D.C. I was moving through my own private fog, the kind you don’t mention to anyone because you don’t want to make a spectacle of it. I told the merch gal I’d flown in from Japan, not as a plea for anything, just as passing context. She passed it on to Matthew Houck, the lead singer. And he didn’t do the socially appropriate thing, the small nod or the quick thanks. He came down off the stage and hugged me. A real hug, the full weight of it, twice across two different nights. No hesitation. No half-gesture. He gave me the exact amount of human force the moment called for.

What stayed with me wasn’t the hug itself, but the certainty behind it. Most gestures come wrapped in hesitation or self-consciousness; people soften their own impact before they even reach you. Houck didn’t. And part of the weight was this: he’d been through it himself—not abstractly, not a decade removed, but in the very songs he wrote on Muchacho, the record he made after his own life had come apart. He’d talked about it publicly, openly, without varnish. So when he came down off the stage to hug me, it wasn’t fandom or performance or politeness. It was recognition—one human being who had already walked through his own fire seeing another who was still in it. And the thing about weight is that you feel it instantly. It bypasses the usual filters, lands somewhere deeper, rearranges whatever you were carrying. For a second, you’re not holding yourself up alone. Someone else is taking on a share, however briefly. That’s why I remember it. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was unmistakably real.

I still don’t expect the big gestures. Most people don’t have them to give, and institutions certainly don’t. But my little allowance situation reminded me of something I should probably stop forgetting: I can be steady without letting people assume I’m inexhaustible. I can be competent without accepting the bare minimum as my baseline. Everybody tips, and I do appreciate it. But that doesn’t mean I should be content with being underpaid, overlooked, or treated as some kind of default. The small gestures matter; they keep things from freezing over. They’re just not a substitute for fairness, or for the kind of presence that actually moves you.

And if I’m honest, before the Houck hugs the last time I got knocked over didn’t happen at a show, or in a meeting, or anywhere you could itemize on a form. It was one of those chance crossings where someone walks in at full voltage, doesn’t shrink themselves, and then carries on while you’re still quietly recalibrating. Nothing official changes. Your job is the same, your allowance is the same, your life on paper is the same. But now you know, in your body, what real weight feels like when it lands. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to pretend that tips—however kind—are the whole story.

Dedication

For the White Russians — the ones who tilt the whole room just by arriving.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

I Have a Crush on Katie Park From Bad Moves

Could you read between the lines
Or was it just so obvious?

Bad Moves

New Note: This is an older piece, however I am re-releasing it here. I recently shared a longer piece about some aspects of my life, including, quite centrally, music, so this seemed like a good time.

As with anyone’s story, there are layers to mine. One pretty big layer is when in 2018 I traveled to New York/ Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. to see the band Phosphorescent. I saw Phosphorescent four times total on their C’est La Vis tour and they were amazing. I bought a sweatshirt from the merch table and the merch gal told Matthew Houck, the lead singer, about me because I told her I’d come all the way from Japan to see the band. He came down from the stage and gave me a big bearhug, not once but twice at two of the shows. He knew I was going through it, and I needed a hug. He’d been through it too, big time, before and when he was writing Muchacho a few years prior.

As I was seeing Phosphorescent I also took the opportunity to see a few other bands. I saw Yo La Tengo twice at the Borwey Ballroom, Jay Som in Boston, and most memorably The Hold Steady twice at the Brooklyn Bowl where they were playing a three night set. The opener for The Hold Steady was a band called Bad Moves. I had never heard of this band, however, and I don’t say this lightly, they put on a better show than The Hold Steady. Now an opener should try to do just this, to “steal the show,” so to speak. A Bad Moves stole it big time. I was enraptured by their lead singer Katie Park, and met her at the merch table which she was running, which is recounted below. My friend I met at the shows, Austin, pushed me to check out their album Tell No One in depth, which I did, and I loved it. On the train from Washington D.C. back to New York I wrote the first version of this piece, which has been fairly extensively edited since then. This is my sneaky favorite piece, maybe not my best, but you can be the judge. Here it is:

I love live music. More than that, I love live music fans, and music fans in general. This piece is basically about being a music fan, and was inspired when I saw the band Bad Moves open for The Hold Steady in 2018 at the Brooklyn Bowl. They were touring on the back of their first full length, Tell No One. While at the Bad Moves/ Hold Steady show a music geek introduced me to a band called Swearin’. Swearin’ has been around a little longer than Bad Moves, and in 2018 had released Fall Into the Sun. The two bands don’t really sound all that much alike (Bad Moves is basically “Power Pop” and Swearin’ is basically “Indie”) but they write somewhat similarly about matters of love and friendship.

Let’s play a game that we live in a world where a record by a band like Bad Moves or Swearin’ would produce radio hits. I want to live in that world. Or maybe I don’t; maybe it’s better for everyone that bands like these stay a little more on the DL. Let’s first take a look at Fall Into the Sun. (Swearin’s frontwoman is Allison Crutchfield, and the band is mostly her baby.) My pick for the single would be the lead off track, “Big Change.” 

The song opens with this soft-spoken reminiscence — basement shows, empty cans, old romances, long nights of half-drunken idealism. Crutchfield sketches a friendship held together by music, chaos, and the sense that they’d accidentally stumbled into their own mutant little world.

I really like what Crutchfield does here. She is basically writing about a friendship solidified over a shared love of music. Now, I know a lot of people. I also have some friends. When you ask an adult, “How many real friends do you have?” the number will vary widely. A lot of people will say “four or five,” something like that. People in general have surprisingly few real friends. I have ten or fifteen, maybe more, but am only in regular contact with about half that number. A good friendship, in my opinion, is one where no matter how long you and your friend have not hung out, if you see them it’s as if not a day has passed. With this sort of friend, I’ve found, there is between yourself and them something fundamental shared. It can be anything really. For example, I first met my good buddy when we were both in graduate school in Arizona, and at first I thought he was a total dick. He was loud, interrupted people constantly, and loved being the center of attention. One night we were drinking as a department and he started razzing me there on the street, just casually insulting me left and right. Suddenly I got where he was coming from. This was, in fact, his way of offering to be friends. Once I understood this, I began to give it right back to him. Called him every name in the book. And he ate it up. By the end of the night we were fast friends and have been ever since, because we share an understanding that our friendship is based, in part, on ripping on each other. Music, obviously, is another great basis for a friendship.

When Crutchfield sings “no art degree, no conservatory/ just Katie and me,” I’m reminded of the refrain from Don DiLillo’s Underworld: “who’s better than us.” If they can do it, why not us? Fuck ’em. That’s what attitude looks like kids–take notes.

So “Big Change” is my single from Fall Into the Sun. (“My single” here just means the song I would choose as the single. For some records, the single is super obvious, while for other records it’s debatable. Bands and producers, in my opinion, do not always get this right.) A good record will tend to have at least two singles; three is a bonus.

For Fall Into the Sun’s second single I’ll go with “Grow into a Ghost.” It opens with a chugging guitar riff with an almost Krautrock drum line. The song is a perfect 3:10–in and out. Do you know anything about lost love? Swearin’ does.

Midway through the record, she writes to an old love with that drifting, half-in-the-desert melancholy she does so well — remembering who she’d been before they met, watching someone fade into absence until they feel more like a ghost than a memory.

Swearin’ is good, but Bad Moves is better. And the star of Bad Moves is the exquisite Katie Park. (I know they are a collective, but my world is my world baby.) Before their show Katie was at the merch table selling…magic eye! That she made by hand. And what did it say? The magic eye said “Bad Moves.” Obviously. I checked it out and chatted for a few minutes with Katie, trying to play it cool. It was the highlight of my year. 20 minutes later she and the band were on stage, crushing it.

The single here is pretty easy. It’s “Crushed Out.” The band released “Crushed Out,” “Spirit FM” and “Cool Generator” as the singles, all of which are excellent. Maybe “Spirit FM” is catchier than “Crushed Out”? Possible. But “Crushed Out” has more lasting power in my opinion. “Crushed Out” is about exactly what it sounds like. It has a basically perfect power pop structure with a killer hook, a classic bridge, and a theme at once super obvious and super deep–the power of a crush.

The whole song is a tumble of infatuation — that feeling where you can’t focus, can’t think straight, and every look or scribbled message feels like it should be obvious to the other person. It captures the power-pop rush of a crush so clearly it almost stings.

Baby, if you are crush-prone that power never goes away. Bad Moves knows this–it’s kind of what the record is about. Crushing out that way can be pretty obvious–do you think I’m crushing out on Katie at all? Nah, this is just a piece of music appreciation.

Cool Generator is my second favorite song on the album, but my “sneaky favorite” is “Missing You.” A sneaky favorite is just what it sounds like: it’s that song that may fly under most people’s radar but that you have a special soft spot for. My all time sneaky favorite song is “Three Drinks” by Craig Finn of the aforementioned Hold Steady. “Three Drinks” shows up on Finn’s 2016 EP Newmyer’s Roof. It’s nearly acoustic, unlike most Hold Steady songs, and sounds just a little bit country. Three Drinks is about a woman (most great songs are) who may have been a child star once upon a time, and is now a drinker. It is an example of a certain type of song that Finn is amazing at, the deeply empathetic look at adult relationships in all of their gloriously flawed complexity. In this sense, Three Drinks fits in with “Spinners” from The Hold Steady’s 2014’s Teeth Dreams, “Tangletown” from Finn’s 2017 solo record We All Want the Same Things, and “Esther” a Hold Steady single from 2018. Finn’s writing on Three Drinks and Tangletown is at its absolute apex. 

“Three Drinks” delivers Finn at peak empathy. A woman with a messy past drifts through a hotel lobby filled with minor disasters, trying to hold herself together until that magic window — the hour between the third drink and the one that tips the night over the edge. Finn nails that space between fear and transcendence where people feel briefly holy.

The refrain focuses on that magic hour between drinks 3 and 4, when matters begin to move from the slightly anxious first stage of the evening to something entirely other:

So anyway, my sneaky favorite on Tell No One is “Missing You.” The song starts like the others, high-speed power pop, and after two verses switches to a near-spoken word breakdown of the tug-of-war between a crush and the expectations of the world around. Guess which wins?

“Missing You” turns into a spoken-word confession halfway through: the push-and-pull between what the world tells you not to do and the crush that keeps winning anyway. It’s simple rhyming, almost naive, but devastatingly effective.

I officially support these sentiments. .

So that’s my sneaky favorite –doesn’t mean it’s better than “Crushed Out” (it isn’t) it’s just a little sneaky. I’m all about sneaky babes and sneaky favorites, on all levels.

In addition to the Magic Eye, Bad Moves also engage in a little publishing. A little literature. Specifically they publish a pamphlet called “The Virtues of Wearing White.”

Chatting with Katie, she acknowledged more than a passing familiarity with the literature of the Jehovah Witnesses. I love Witness literature. Both Witness and Bad Moves publications have a real “it’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day” vibe. If you know me this is not a secret, but I’m a hardcore closet New Ager. There, secret’s out. I’ve messed around with all kinds of New Age action. Once I attended a Kabbala meetup in Manhattan. There were some hardcore New Agers there too, seriously. Those folks were not in the closet at all. Shining eyes, whatever color they are wearing. Me, I like black because it’s easier to launder, but Bad Moves have me thinking. (One other publication you should take a look at if you are into this kind of thing is the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a serious piece of literature. God is great baby, god is great.)

When I was younger my parents had a friend called Tom Hutchinson, who, predictably, went by “Hutch.” Hutch owned a boutique coffee shop there in town and I drove a delivery van for him for a bit. But that’s another story. Anyway, Hutch was a weird guy and he hated the Witnesses. It was one of his favorite topics. He’d call them the “Witlesses,” and say: “When they come to my house I turn the hose on ’em.” People thought this was pretty funny, but I was not that into Hutch’s attitude to the Witnesses. I mean, he didn’t want anyone trying to convert him on his property, which is fair; however, I felt, and still feel, that if someone wants to come to my door, give me a little literature, and talk about how god loves me I’m gonna let them. I genuinely like the Witnesses. They seem like lovely people. Read more

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 4 Comments

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

New Note: I am republishing this piece with a new note because I just finished a full piece on the breakup of the band Galaxie 500 which is mentioned in this piece on two of the three members of that band, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang. In addition, I wanted to add a few comments on how the venue of the gig I attended around 2006, Cafe Independents in Kyoto, has changed since that time. I have also slightly edited the title of this piece.

This is one of my favorite pieces in a sense because it was early in the life of my blog and it focussed on Kyoto. The original intention of this blog was to document my explorations of Kyoto, however it has evolved in several different directions since then. So this is sort of “bringing it all back home.” As for Cafe Independents, it is still the same place, however they no longer allow smoking and I don’t know that they have live gigs anymore. The food is kind of the same but dinner specifically has been upgraded and has also become more expensive. It’s still a decent place for lunch, or a dinner date, and one of the sets of stairs is still intact but I think the other one is blocked off or something. In any case, while I have dropped in on occasion recently, I don’t frequent the place as much as I used to. There are a few other, and better, live houses in Kyoto, specifically Urbanguild, which I will write about at another time. If you are stumbling on this one for the first time I do hope you enjoy it.

What follows is a true story.  Or, in the words of Damon Krukowski, formerly of Galaxie 500 and presently of Damon and Naomi, “here are the dirty facts.”

It was sometime in the first decade of the 21st century.  I was minding my own business in my fair adopted city of Kyoto.  You see, I live in North Kyoto and unless I have good reason, prefer to stay in orb of the north-central part of the city.  The south is for business, the east for the occasional mountain jaunt, and the west too wild and forbidding for a humble man such as myself.  Mostly, I just try to stay north of Shijo Dori (positively 4th street, so to speak).  That’s my zone.

As with any excellent locality, there is plenty to explore in North Kyoto.  One place that the locals know is Cafe Independants–a cafe with a small bar which from time to time hosts shows.  Cafe Independants is located in a basement with exposed white pipes and stone walls.  It’s hip if you’re into that kind of thing, certainly not trendy though.  And, it features a kick-ass pair of sneaky staircases that are worlds into themselves.  I have enjoyed those staircases many a time my own self.

I have had the pleasure of seeing the great Bill Callahan open for the immaculate harpist Joanna Newsom there when Newsom was just breaking through.  Callahan was the bigger name, and his generosity in opening for her was striking.  That was a great night.  I may have even smoked a rare cigarette.  I also saw my mate Darren Hannah play bass there with a bow.  That was something–and the dude executed a beauty of a bow toss at the end of the show.  A bow toss for a bassist is like a mic drop for an MC.  Show’s over folks.  So you see, I’d had some nights there.

The Cafe runs an open kitchen which serves right through gigs and back in the day also had a record shop open in the back.  It’s a small place, seating maybe 35 on a good day, and when a show is on people tend to pack around the big pole in the center and squeeze into communal tables.  Smoking is allowed.  The Cafe, at the best of times, is not a quiet place.  This is to be borne in mind with what followed.

So one evening I had secured tickets to see Damon and Naomi play.  Damon and Naomi were members of the late 80s/ early 90’s band Galaxie 500 with Dean Wareham.  The band didn’t really know what it was doing at first, like many a band before, and kind of stumbled into near-greatness before Wareham walked and started Luna, the world’s greatest band.  Wareham details the reasons behind the break-up in his memoir Black Postcards.  Poe is supposed to have said that any man who tells the simple truth of his life would write a masterpiece.  Wareham gets pretty close to following Poe’s dictum.

The ending of Galaxie 500 came about, according to Wareham, essentially because Wareham was tired of being treated like a child by the other two, a long-time couple.  I think he wanted his own band, and wanted to chill a little.  From Black Postcards:

Traveling is stressful.  And with Damon tour-managing, it seemed like every hotel check-in, every seat assignment, and every rental car was a problem.  Damon would argue about what floor his room was on.  He would get annoyed if he didn’t get the seat he wanted on the flight.  I shouldn’t have let this bother me.  I should have minded my own business.  But traveling together highlights your differences.

At one show in late 1990, a techie shone a spotlight on Dean as he stepped downstage for a solo.  This seems to have been the breaking point.  Black Postcards again:

Damon: “In retrospect I notice that Dean chose the L.A. show to launch this new trick, when the audience was full of music industry people.  We hadn’t had any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas!”

Dean in his contemporaneous tour diary: “Damon said he doesn’t like me walking in front of his drum kit–it throws him off.  I didn’t tell him to go f*** himself.”

Things were rough, and Dean split in 1991.  (Wareham quotes a Damon interview saying “Here are the dirty facts!  What happened was simply that Dean quit, more or less out of the blue, on the telephone one day.”  Ah oui, les sales faits.)  Galaxie 500 is still an interesting band and has a handful of great songs.  Then, Damon and Naomi formed their own group, named eponymously.  They are pretty good.  I like “This Car Climbed Mount Washington,” from More Sad Hits, and the whole record Playback Singers is strong.  Still, they are a far cry from Galaxie, much less Luna.

Nevertheless, I was excited to hear they were coming to little old North Kyoto in fact to play the Independants.  I showed up early with a friend and we had a few drinks, as you do.  There were 30 or 40 people there, as normal.  People were chatting, eating, smoking, and a local warm-up act started preparing on stage.  Actually, there is no stage at the Cafe, just floor space.  The show, from my point of view, HAD NOT STARTED.  Additionally, I WAS BEHIND THE POLE.  I wish at this time to stipulate this very clearly in light of what followed.  I also wish to stipulate that no-one is a bigger fan of the idea of the local warm up act than my good self.  Nobody.  By god, I remember seeing the Tenniscoats, a much beloved Japanese band that you won’t have heard of, open up in Kyoto for someone, Bonnie Prince Billy maybe, and saw the great Saya Ueno play in her barefeet.  I support the local art community with a whole heart.  And no blasted interloper will tell me otherwise.

Anyway, on the night in question I will admit I was talking to my buddy while the local artist was getting set up.  And yes, she may have said something into the microphone.  I don’t really know.  Because before I could do anything, here comes Damon bounding across the room, right in my face, and shushed me.  “Don’t speak when the ARTIST is talking,” he hissed.  Right…in…my…face.

Now, the human mind is a remarkable deal.  When Damon shushed me, two simulataneous and equally strong thoughts came into my head.  The first was, “wow, Damon from Galaxie 500 just shushed me.  Cool.”  The second was, “dude, fuck you!  This is my city you pompous SOB, the show HAS NOT STARTED, there is a room full of chattering people, and you are going to lecture me about the ARTIST.”

What did I do next, you will ask? Well, in my mind I like to think I produced a gesture equivalent to Dave Moss’s finger flips in Glengarry Glen Ross, the single best fuck you even put on screen. Or, I may have stared dumbly at the guy.  One or the other.

On the Velvet Underground’s Live at Max’s Kansas City, the future poet and songwriter Jim Carroll famously “ruins” the recording of “Sweet Jane” by asking for a double Pernod. You can find reference to this incident in works as scholarly as The Encyclopedia of Popular Music, published by Oxford Press: “‘Excuse me can I have a Pernod, get me a Pernod’. Poet and author Jim Carroll’s boorish demands for a bloody Pernod ruined (this) illegal cassette taping.”

Well, let’s look at the (dirty) facts.  Carroll’s supposedly boorish demands are almost entirely heard between songs when the band is tuning.  He doesn’t know that the show is being taped. On Sweet Jane, for example, Reed finishes the song and then we hear Carroll:

“Oh yeah, I wrote it, but it’s pretty new, yeah.  Did you get the Pernod?  You had to get the, you had to go to the downstairs floor.”

Sure, he is a little lit.  Sure he is close to the mic.  But the song is over.  There is downtime.  The man is thirsty.  The recording is “illegal.”  Now I ask you, is this “ruining” the song?  Only if you are an honest to god prat.  Otherwise, this is called local color.  Guess what Damon, buddy?  I’m a local.  This is my city.  I’m colorful.  And I’ll take my bloody Pernod whenever I goddamn well feel like it.

Stylistic Note: The style of this piece is deeply indebted to Eric Ambler’s The Intercom Conspiracy.  Inspiration from this master of form is acknowledged, with deep gratitude.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties

Killer Parties (Live) — Nights That Almost Killed Us, Nights That Made Us

Note: This is the second part of our series on songs of The Hold Steady that take up the intertwined themes of nightlife and the complexities of adult relationships. Part I is available. This piece will deal with “Killer Parties,” specifically the live version from A Positive Rage.

“Killer Parties,” written by Craig Finn, closes Almost Killed Me (2003) and provides its title line. But the 2008 live version is the definitive one for me — a 10-minute slow burn that opens not with guitars but with an invocation. Finn’s spoken intro sets the terms for who this band is, who the audience is, and why these communal nights matter.

I. The Invocation

Before a single lyric, Finn does what Finn does: greets the tribe.

He jokes, he rambles, he self-deprecates, he misdirects — and then he lands it:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here. Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

That’s the thesis of The Hold Steady.
Everything else is commentary.

The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there.

When I saw them twice at the Brooklyn Bowl in 2018, I wrote:

Hold Steady fans are pretty much fanatics… They were super possessive of their space, they all seemed to know each other. One guy sized me up and said, “I want to not like you, but there’s some kind of aura around you, man.”

That’s the thing: the fans are a little cliquey, but the band itself is radically welcoming. Finn means it when he thanks people. He means it when he says he’s met half the room. He means it when he collapses the distinction between performer and audience:

“We are, and you are, The Hold Steady.”

That’s what the spoken intro really says.

II. Charlemagne and the Unsaid

The song opens with a classic Finn move — an elliptical report of something that happened, but we’re not going to get the details:

If they ask about Charlemagne,
be polite and keep it vague —
another lover lost to the restaurant raids.

Charlemagne is the old recurring character, drug-dealer-adjacent, always on the edge of calamity. Did he OD? Get busted? Get swallowed by his own myth?
Finn doesn’t tell you. He protects the dignity of the fallen.

This is identical in spirit to the opening of “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.”

I’ve known people like this. You’ve known people like this. Someone falls off the map, and when they resurface, it’s a new person in the same body. The specifics get blurry; the compassion gets sharper.

III. Leaving, Loving, Running

The next verses broaden out:

We left because we were young and in love.
We left because we needed space.
We left because we heard about this mythical country called the United States.

When Finn sings that line, he’s not being literal — he’s describing the classic American story: the pilgrimage to the realbig city. The wide open possibility. The idea that somewhere else — New York, especially — is where the real life is.

I relate.
I left my hometown and moved halfway across the world.
Finn moved from Minneapolis to New York; I moved from Spokane to Asia.
And like him, I sometimes feel pangs for what I missed.

But I needed space. I needed something bigger.

IV. Killer Parties

Then we hit the geography of sin:

Virginia for lovers.
Philly for brotherhood.
Pensacola for pills.
Ybor City for the nights that go too far.

And then the line we can quote directly:

“Killer parties almost killed me.”

Finn doesn’t romanticize this. He’s looking back at the nights that were ecstatic and dangerous at the same time. Nights that reshaped his body chemistry. Nights that made him who he is.

I’ve had my run at nightlife — nothing like Finn’s, but enough to understand the way one night can rewrite your wiring, for better or worse.

V. The Blur and the Transcendence

The final verses repeat themselves, because that’s how memory works:

We partied (I think?).
We departed from our bodies.
We woke up in Ybor City.

The nights are a blur — Finn partied but gets the details secondhand. What he does remember is the transcendence, the weightless moment when the body gives out and the self floats somewhere above it. And then the long, punishing hangover that follows.

For me, Ybor City has always functioned like El Dorado — the mythical endpoint of the American night. Maybe Finn has been there; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe you can only reach it by running the gauntlet of long days and longer nights. Maybe you can only get there by losing yourself a little too fully.

I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me.

VI. The Ex-Introvert Who Still Wants the Night

And here’s where my story threads into the song:

I am an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert — something I’ve talked about with several friends. I’m too old for some of the clubbing I once did, but I still love the nightlife, still love running around, talking to strangers, seeing where the night wants to take me.

And it takes you to strange places.

I think this is the real theme of “Killer Parties”:
the appeal of the night, the call of the road, and the deep human need to leave the known world and find out what’s waiting elsewhere.

I return to this song in all kinds of circumstances — when I miss the road, when I need a reminder that the self is porous, when I want to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

VII. The Circle Closes: Community

And yet — for all the mythology and all the escapism — Finn always brings it back to community.

The Hold Steady isn’t just Finn narrating the lives of misfits. It’s Finn saying:

We survived the killer nights.
We made it home.
We found each other.

The live intro becomes the retrospective moral:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here.
Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

And so the whole arc — the wandering, the leaving, the nightlife, the blurring of memory, the near-death nights — ends where it must:

With the people who showed up.
The people who stayed.
The people in front of the stage.
The people who are, themselves, The Hold Steady.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs

I. Setting the Frame — What the Song Is “About,” and What Finn Says It’s About

“Most People Are DJs” appears on Almost Killed Me (2003), track three if you don’t count the spoken prologue. If “Killer Parties” is the band’s thesis on community, “Most People Are DJs” is the thesis on the scene—why it’s fun, why it’s corrosive, and why it matters.

Finn himself once said:

“Just a reaction to life in NYC in the 2000s… The part I don’t get is when I get emails that start with ‘Come see me DJ’ and end with ‘Here is what I’m going to play…’ I think DJing, like rock criticism, tends to be a way for people to participate in the ‘scene’ without the risks to the ego that go along with producing art.”

His hedge—“Of course, I don’t apply this to all DJs”—isn’t convincing. And that’s okay. Artists don’t owe us diplomatic consensus statements. What he’s really saying is: there is a gap between creating and curating. Between risk and commentary. Between the ones who make things and the ones who play things.

Now: I don’t fully agree with him.
And that’s part of what makes this song fun to write about.

Because the truth is:
Finn is reacting to a very specific time and place—New York in the early 2000s—where the “scene” was swollen with people who wanted proximity to art more than they wanted the agony of making it.

But he also wrote a song so overflowing with confidence and adrenaline that, even if you disagree with the premise, the song still wins.

II. Alliteration, Lineage, and the New York Scene (Early 2000s)

One thing that hits immediately in “Most People Are DJs” is the density—the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the almost cartoonish velocity of the lines. Finn came out of Lifter Puller, a band whose songs were so tightly coiled with alliteration they were practically tongue-twisters set to guitars. That sonic fingerprint carries directly into Almost Killed Me.

“Jet skis into the jetty,”
“skipping off the good ship,”
“searching for the merchant”—
this is Finn still flexing the Lifter Puller muscle.

But something is different now.
A subtle pivot.

With The Hold Steady, the alliteration stops feeling like a hallucinatory fever dream and starts to feel like a narrator in full command of his mythmaking. LP was chaos; THS is authorship. LP was young-person disorientation; THS is a guy in his early thirties cataloguing his own survival.

And that survival intersects directly with Finn’s take on the early-millennium New York City “scene.”

If you didn’t live there then, it’s hard to reconstruct the vibe, but from the outside—I was never a New York resident, just a visitor—it felt like every bar and backroom was filled with:

  • people wanting to be seen
  • people curating themselves more than expressing themselves
  • self-mythologizing in real time
  • and a thousand micro-scenes stacked on top of each other

New York has always been a city where people come to reinvent themselves, but in the 2000s, with the rise of the internet, music blogs, Vice magazine, and the early social media era, there was suddenly an audience for every aesthetic micro-gesture. DJ nights proliferated not necessarily because people loved vinyl but because DJing let you participate in culture without risking the humiliation of failure that comes with creation.

Finn clearly bristled at this dynamic—at least enough to write this song about it.
But crucially: he’s not sneering. He’s needling.
He’s amused and annoyed in equal measure.

Because he had just spent years in a band (LP) that nearly no one outside Minneapolis cared about. He’d paid his dues in the purest sense—tiny clubs, no money, hardcore kids, bad drives, worse mornings—and so when he encountered the Manhattan version of a “scene,” it must have felt surreal. A party ecosystem where participation wasn’t dependent on talent or risk, just aesthetics.

And so the song becomes a little manifesto:

Some people create.
Most people curate.
I know which side I’m on.

But I don’t fully agree with Finn here. DJing, like criticism, can absolutely be an art. Plenty of DJs are actual geniuses of sequencing, mood, texture, and propulsion. And Finn’s own songs rely heavily on the idea that everyone constructs a soundtrack for their life. He lives inside the psychology of people who soundtrack their heartbreak, their addictions, their breakthroughs, their mistakes.

So his jab at DJs is both sincere and playful—an elbow thrown by someone who knows perfectly well that without DJs, nightlife wouldn’t exist.

Still, the tension is productive.
It pushes the song forward.
It gives it its bite.

This is where Finn’s shift from Lifter Puller to The Hold Steady becomes clear:
LP described nightlife as a labyrinth; THS describes it as a world he made it out of, barely, and will now narrate for the rest of us.

Almost Killed Me is a debut in name only—it’s actually a rebirth.

III. The Ice Machine, the Trash Bin, and the Myth of Mis-Spent Youth

If the early verses of “Most People Are DJs” sketch out the external landscape—Ybor City confetti, jet skis, five-second dealers, Phil Lynott doppelgängers—then the center of the song turns inward. The gaze shifts from the scene itself to the person who once tried to survive inside it.

And it starts with a line that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t:

“I was a teenage ice machine…”

It’s metaphorical, but also literal in the sideways way Finn always manages:
a kid who kept it cold, kept it contained, kept taking in whatever the night handed him. Drinking until he dreamed, and when he dreamed, dreaming only of the scene. It’s the way youth can feel like preparation for nightlife, not the other way around.

Then comes the image of the little lambs looking up at him—those younger kids just entering the arena. There’s no arrogance in it; it’s simply the moment you realize you’ve shifted from participant to veteran, from the kid on the floor to the older presence leaning against the bar. It’s an eerie, recognizable sensation for anyone who came up in tight little music worlds, whether Minneapolis hardcore or the DIY venues that orbit all cities.

And then the next admission hits harder:

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin…”

Here Finn stops ornamenting the story. He talks frankly about taking everything the scene gave him and jamming it into his system. He doesn’t romanticize those years—he frames them as messy, hungry, adrenaline-charged, and sometimes self-destructive. It’s the classic Hold Steady blend of humor, regret, and affection for the person he once was. Anyone who’s lived through their own version of that era understands the mixture of pride and embarrassment that comes with looking back.

Then the song shifts again, suddenly back in a room, back in a body:

“She got me cornered by the kitchen…”

It’s one of those instantly recognizable nightlife moments—some stranger with a lot on her mind talking too closely, too sincerely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finn’s response, “I’ll do anything but listen,” is both funny and revealing. It’s the impatience of a younger self who wants motion, wants noise, wants the next thing, not the emotional monologue of someone he’s just met.

But the real anchor of this section comes next:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This is the line that echoes back to the earlier “tiny white specks” but deepens it. We may be insignificant on the grand scale, but we’re still soft, still human, still easily bruised. For all the bluster and late nights, there’s vulnerability baked into every corner of the scene. Finn recognizes it, even here, even in a song that pretends to be about DJs and parties.

And this middle section becomes the emotional axis for the entire track. The drug years, the clubs, the kitchens, the impatience, the kids, the tiny planets we all carried around–it’s Finn turning his own biography into something mythic and still somehow intimate. It’s the moment the song stops being an anecdote about nightlife and becomes a portrait of the person who lived it.

IV. “Teenage Ice Machine”: Finn’s Youth, My Youth, Everyone’s Youth

This is where the song really cracks open — the run of verses where Finn folds his own misspent youth into the larger portrait of nightlife. It’s the part where the memoirist in him steps forward.

“I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed…”

Finn describes his early years in Minneapolis with blunt clarity: he was taking whatever the night handed him, jamming it into his system, chasing scenes and dreams and any story worth telling. He’s frank about the drugs, the bravado, the hunger. And that image of “kids like little lambs looking up at me” shows the strange dynamic of growing older inside a scene — one day you realize the new kids think you know something. They think you’ve made it out of the maze.

And Finn knows these kids. He knows their impulsiveness, their devotion, their need to be part of something burning and bright. He knows it because he lived it.

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they’d give me…”

It’s funny, and a little raw — Finn admitting he was just shoveling it all in, whatever “it” was. And the lines about being cornered in the kitchen and doing “anything but listen” land perfectly. This is the social physics of nightlife: the way adrenaline and self-invention outrun patience or reflection. The kitchen confrontation is a tiny scene, but it captures the whole era — Finn always moving, always dodging, always hungry for the next thing, the next rush, the next room.

And then the knockout line:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This connects back to the earlier perspective shift — from Minneapolis sidewalks to this tiny-blue-dot cosmic backdrop. It’s Finn’s version of existentialism: the world is hard, unforgiving, indifferent; we are temporary flashes of warmth against it. But the point isn’t despair. The point is urgency. You don’t get that many nights where it all lines up. You don’t get that many years where your body and your heart and your recklessness harmonize. You take the nights when they come.

This is where the song clicks for me. That line is the thesis.

V. “Everyone’s a Critic and Most People Are DJs”: The Thesis and the Tension

“Baby, take off your beret
Everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs
And everything gets played.”

This is the line that gives the song its name and its pulse. Finn has already sketched the landscape — Ybor City’s chaos, New York’s 2000s absurdities, his own Twin Cities coming-of-age — and now he turns outward, toward the observation that set this whole song off in the first place.

Finn has said himself that this was his early-2000s response to the particular New York ecosystem where everyone wanted to be adjacent to culture without the exposure of making anything. The emails that said “come see me DJ, here’s what I’m going to play,” the ubiquity of people who curated rather than created. And he delivers the line with this mixture of mockery and affection — like a guy who remembers how much he once needed subcultural scaffolding and who also knows how flimsy that scaffolding can be.

But I don’t totally agree with the dismissiveness, and that’s part of why the line hits so hard for me. I think critics can make art, and DJs — literal or metaphorical — can shape the emotional weather of a room. I DJ my own life, like anyone who uses music to modulate their mood or define a moment. Spotify is my deck. The commute is my booth. There’s a pleasure in that autonomy that isn’t fake or lesser, just different.

Still, I get Finn’s point. There’s a risk he’s insisting on: the risk of putting something authentic into the world, the risk of failing publicly, the risk of making something instead of just spinning something. And this is the part where he plants his flag:
he is a maker, not a curator.
And he’s calling out everyone else — kindly, but unmistakably.

The song is gentler than the critique. It’s not a scolding. It’s a reminder: life isn’t a playlist you assemble from the safety of the booth. You have to actually step into the room. You have to actually take the hit.

This is where the song becomes more than a snapshot of early-2000s New York. It’s a life instruction.

Get in the game.

Because eventually everything gets played — your choices, your nights out, the people you loved, the things you messed up, the mornings you woke up on the floor of a city you barely knew. And at the end of all that, you want to be able to say you did it, not that you watched someone else do it.

VI. The Night Rolls On

The final verse snaps everything into focus. Finn works backwards through the chain of a night out—doctor to drugs, packie to taxi, taxi to club—like retracing the evidence after the damage is done. It’s funny and a little grim, but honest: this is how people actually live when they’re young, restless, and trying to outrun something unnamed.

A thousand kids fall in love in these clubs; a thousand end up bleeding.
Two thousand don’t sleep; two thousand still feel pretty sweet.

That’s the gamble of the night. Always has been.

And this is where my own life sits closest to Finn’s. I’ve said before that I’m an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert, and the night has been part of that transformation. I’m long past the age where I should be closing clubs, but I still love the energy of being out in the world, meeting people, letting chance decide the direction. The night takes you to weird places, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sketchy, and if you’re wired like me—or like Finn—that current is hard to resist.

And then there’s Ybor City, which in the Finn cosmology feels half-real, half-mythic. A kind of El Dorado of the American night. Did he actually go there? Maybe. But in the logic of the song, it doesn’t matter. Ybor City is where you wake up when the night has taken you further than planned. A place that might kill you or crown you, or both. I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone.

But the truth is:
the pull of that world—the risk, the release, the possibility—is part of what makes these songs hit as hard as they do.

VII. Closing Thoughts

In the end, Most People Are DJs isn’t one of Finn’s masterpieces, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a mission statement disguised as a party track. An early announcement that he wasn’t done writing about the night, about the kids who rush into it headlong, about the way music becomes a map for people who don’t quite know where they’re going but desperately want to get there fast.

The song is chaotic, generous, a little arrogant, and very alive—exactly what Almost Killed Me needed to be. It sketches the outlines of the universe Finn will later fill with addicts, romantics, bartenders, prophets, screwups, saints, and that long list of people who show up again and again in his songs because he sees them clearly. Because he was them once.

I keep returning to it not because it’s Finn at his deepest but because it’s Finn at his most open-throated:
young, wired, taking in the world at full volume.

It’s the sound of the door swinging open on everything that would follow—from the great epics (Separation Sunday, Stay Positive, Teeth Dreams) to the late-career short-story gems. You can hear the whole project of The Hold Steady rumbling under this song, even if Finn himself shrugs the song off as a joke at the expense of DJs and critics.

Maybe that’s the secret: sometimes the songs artists dismiss end up revealing more than the ones they cherish.

For me, this one captures something essential about the moment you step into the night—
when the lights go up, the bass starts running, and you feel, for just a second, like anything could happen.

It’s a snapshot of youth, of movement, of mischief and possibility.

And yeah—
I still feel pretty sweet.

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 2 Comments

Scenes from Hamilton College III: Sophomore Year I (with cameos from Sonic the Hedgehog, Ani DiFranco, and Candle Time)

Note: In Part I and Part II of this series I wrote about my freshman year at Hamilton. Part III will take up sophomore year where I lived down the hill in Bundy Dorm.

All you ladies and gentlemen
Who made this all so probable

Big Star

After freshman year I returned back to Washington State for the summer. I have written glancingly about this period, suffice it to say I was not up to much. Still broke, I did have a short lived girlfriend but she dumped me mid-summer. I spent a few days moping around playing nerf golf at my parents’ house, then got over it. I don’t remember much else from that summer except that I got back in good running shape, and when I got back to campus in the fall I turned out, once again, for the running team.

One thing I neglected to mention in my pieces on freshman year is that I actually competed on the JV running team at Hamilton for a time and ran a few races. I was not in great shape that year, and JV was not that exciting. As I have written, I had other pursuits. Sophomore year, however, I was in better shape and had a shot at making the top five. The only other runner I recall was called Harry. I thought Harry lived in Sig, but Jake tells me he was in a frat called THX, about which I remember nothing. In any case, Jake knew him. Harry was a hardcore runner and scolded me about my lifestyle, wanting me to devote myself to the team. I was not going to do this, but I was able to run with Harry and the first team for a number of practices. In the long run though it didn’t work out–they ran mornings and afternoons, and my summer shape wasn’t going to carry me through a hyper-competitive season. I was a good runner, but I just didn’t have the drive. Sooner or later I left the team, this time for good. I look back fondly on Harry however–he was right; I was lazy and needed a kick in the rear.

As a sophomore I roomed in a double with John Innes (there were two John’s in my friend group, John Innes and John Slack), in a dorm halfway down the hill to Clinton called Bundy. Marc Campbell was also on our floor. Ian was living in his frat, but spent a lot of time in Bundy as he was dating Ann, someone who I became close with over the year as well. Jake was over at Sig and I didn’t see much of him, mostly for geographic reasons.

Bundy was a way different story than North. First, I spent a lot more time in my dorm room with John Innes. Innes would watch the soap opera Days of Our Lives and insist I watched it too. I could have cared less, but watched it to be a good friend. We also played Sega, almost exclusively Sonic the Hedgehog and Sega Hockey, at which John usually beat me (however not in the biggest matches, as I’ll get to later). Innes liked rap music and had a pretty good collection. I could get into some of the rap; I liked Public Enemy, KRS One, De La Soul, and a minor band called Basehead which wasn’t really rap. However I was by then deep into what would today be described as alternative or indie music, so Innes’ taste and mine mostly diverged. We were both good about sharing airtime though, so he got to know my music and I his.

The record I listened to the most, by far, that year was Big Star Third: Sister Lovers from the then mostly forgotten American band Big Star. I loved this record (which was on Rykodisc), and played it endlessly while trying to advance in Sonic the Hedgehog. I stuck my mattress in the closet and hung a tapestry over the door area so I had a little cubby to sleep in. Overall, the whole scene was much more domestic than the pretty chaotic North.

Other than Marc and John Innes, I don’t remember exactly who the other guys who were on our floor, but I’ve been reminded that John Slack was one of them. Ian and Jake were living in frats, and over the year I got to know a new crew of people, including several girls. These included firstly Jenny and Jen, who lived in the female area on our same floor (maybe the second floor? Innes will remember). Innes and I became very close to Jenny and Jen, and spent almost every evening hanging out in their room doing something called “Candle Time.” Candle Time was pretty much exactly what it sounds like–we would turn down the lights, light candles (which was probably against school rules) and talk for hours. We would talk about our days, people and goings on in the dorm, and just life in general. It was really wholesome and again, a major change from North.

Candle Time lasted, in my recollection, for a number of months, but not all through the year. Despite spending so much time together, there was no romantic involvement, although I believe Innes and Jen did get together later, and briefly; I’m not really sure. I think it was supposed by some that I myself had a crush on Jen; however although I liked her a lot this was not the case. I did have a little bit of a crush on Jenny, but she had other people who were interested in her and we all hung out so nothing ever happened. That was fine–it was actually really nice to just have close female friends with no expectations.

Jenny and Jen were both from the upstate New York area, broader Rochester as I recall. My guess is they came from relatively less money than many of our classmates, who came from preppier areas, and schools. I actually visited Jenny’s house once or twice, and I think a bunch of us slept over once and watched the film Glengarry Glen Ross. These included Amy Holland, who was one of the coolest chicks around. She was called “Red,” on account of her red hair, and was totally my speed. Everyone else fell asleep during the movie except Amy and I and as I recall she loved what is, to be fair, a pretty stereotypically male film.

Jenny’s house was nice, but seemed pretty middle-class and maybe that’s part of why we all bonded–the richer kids, although I obviously hung around with them a lot, had their own life ways to some extent. I remember one evening Jenny and I went to see the band The New Dylans on campus. I thought they were a good band, and had found their cassette at the campus radio station where John Innes and I had a sports talk show. Their record has a song I liked called “The Prodigal Son Returns Today.” They sounded kind of like a minor league Big Head Todd and the Monsters or something, and are kind of dated today if I’m honest, but I was excited for the show. At first it was pretty full, but people left little by little and by the end it was just me and Jenny. The band played their hearts out for the two of us, including encores! After the show, I joined them for a cigarette outside and chatted. I told them that I really liked the show and they said thanks and all with no mention of the fact that the venue was totally empty. That’s professionalism, I thought, and I imagined that as a band trying to break through playing small colleges and sending cassettes to radio stations they’d had their share of ups and downs. I doubt they are still around, but if so I’m rooting for you guys!

A bigger star that played Hamilton was Ani DiFranco. I saw Ani several times, both on campus and off, as she was pretty huge in New York State at the time. She had not yet released “Dilate,” which came in 1996 and was her mainstream breakthrough to the extent she ever had one, but she was a star on campus, mostly with the women but with a lot of the guys too. Ani put on a great show, and I totally got the appeal. She was kind of the Jeff Rosenstock of the day I suppose.

Shawn Colvin also came, and I knew some of the people who were assigned to take care of her backstage. They reported that she was a total asshole, asked for coke, and generally threw her weight around big time. Shawn Colvin was OK, but no so great that she could act like a diva I don’t think. Full on divas are acceptable-like Joni Mitchell might be a diva and what are you going to do–but minor league divas pretty much suck.

Anyway, like I say over the year although we still saw each other, I saw less of Jenny and Jen, and more of other people like Ann, Amy, and Matt Thornton. I’m not sure where Matt lived, maybe Bundy and maybe not, and I don’t recall either how or when I met him, but we soon became fast friends. Matt was full speed ahead, and argumentative, but I can handle my own in an argument, and I really liked him. Matt ran with an interesting group of friends, including several Asian-Americans who I believe lived on the Kirkland side of campus. Hamilton used to be a guys’ school and Kirkland was the attached girls’ school. Then at some point they merged, but the Kirkland side and the old Hamilton side always felt distinct to me and were separated by a bridge.

One time we were talking about going to New York and Matt told me about some clubs for Asians that he was interested in. Matt’s friends told him that he (or I) could not go to these clubs because we would get the shit kicked out of us. Had to be at least half-Asian apparently. But I think Matt went to these kinds of clubs anyway and did not get beat up, because he just sort of rolled that way.

Matt and I and Ian did go to New York eventually, and spent a few days uptown at some person’s apartment where I commandeered a prime sleeping space and we ordered pizza three times a day. I believe this was actually after graduation, as Matt transferred before graduating from Hamilton.

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, this was also the year Ian and I went to Boston to see music shows. We went with a fellow called Cale who was a freshman. Cale was cool, and also we liked him because of his name, reminiscent of John Cale, violist for the Velvet Underground who Ian and I were both fans of. With Ian and Cale I felt like I was in good company–we were all very simpatico.

My academic performance sophomore year was just OK. I took more English classes, and also started to take some History classes including some Asian History with Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson was a good professor, but I think he was one of those guys who really saw himself at U. Chicago or Yale or something. A lot of academics are like that. Nevertheless, Tom was good–tough but fair–and pushed me to really deepen my research abilities. Outside of Tom’s class, my effort was a little mixed, and during the dead of winter I skipped some morning classes because the climb up the hill was just too tough. The winters in upstate New York are pretty brutal, and I preferred to stay local down in Bundy a lot of the time.

One more thing I remember from this year is starting, and then dropping, photography class. I had an old camera that barely worked, and was interested in learning how to develop film in a darkroom. However, photography class was really expensive because we had to regularly buy these huge rolls of film which cost like $50 at the school store. A classmate I’ll call C. to protect his identity told me, “just tuck your pants into your socks and drop the film down your pants and walk out. That’s what I do.” But I wasn’t going to steal film all year and there was no way I could pay the outrageous costs. On top of that, I wasn’t all that good–certainly my classmates outclassed me, crappy camera or not. So I dropped it after six weeks or so; however now that I think about it I may well have met Matt Thornton in that exact class. It’s a possibility.

Note: That will do it for Part III. In Part IV I’ll write more about my friendship with Ann as well as the Sports Talk Show we did on the Hamilton radio station.

Dedication: For the whole Bundy dorm, actually. It was a pretty chill year.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas · 4 Comments

Scenes from Hamilton College I: Meeting Ian and Jake

And I recall the moment
More distant than it seems
When five green queens
On a black bin bag
Meant all the world to me

The Pogues

I attended Hamilton College, and managed to graduate–possibly in linen. At Hamilton I was an English major, and intended to be from when I enrolled. This was a decent choice; however both Hamilton and English were kind of my father’s choices. I also managed to cobble together an Asian Studies minor through the good auspices of my advisor who checked out my credits and told me I could put that together. This was a good call on his part, and even though I kind of stumbled into it, the Asian Studies minor was my choice.

I was pretty unprepared for college. Before going I was asked to fill out a kind of questionnaire to help the college place me with roommates. One of the questions was, are you clean, messy, or in the middle. I chose in the middle, which was sort of a mistake because it turns out men are pigs, and I was cleaner than most. At the same time though it wasn’t a mistake because if I had selected clean I may not have met Ian and Jake. Jake was my roommate, and we lived in a quad. The other two roommates were B. and G. and although I had a relationship of a sort with both of them freshman year, we were not really on the same page. Jake and I were. Ian was our next door neighbor, and he roomed with Marc Campbell, and two other people. Ian, Jake, and Marc are still in my life.

My parents came with me to upstate New York, and before I moved into the dorm we stayed for a few days in a hotel near campus. I was kind of apprehensive, and spent the days listening to The Pogues and quietly stressing. But when I moved into the quad things were fine. This was mostly because of Jake.

Jake was a bit of a wild character. He was from either New York or Connecticut as I recall, and I think he came from decent money. When I visited his house later that year it was very patrician, for lack of a better word. His father seemed like a super old-school WASP patriarch, and his mother didn’t work I don’t believe. His younger brother held right-wing political views at the time, while Jake was a lefty. This was a point of serious disagreement between the brothers, but other than that the family seemed pretty solid. I believe that his brother has since switched his political views.

I didn’t meet Jake’s family until Thanksgiving however, and got to know him first in the context of the quad. We lived in a dorm called North, on the first floor right by the door. (My buddy John Innes, who joined me at Hamilton from our high school lived in the neighboring dorm Kirkland, and next to that was South.) The door to North would be locked at night, and other dorm folks would regularly misplace their key and crawl through our always open window. Jake and I rarely slept, and I got in the habit of staying up until about five AM. After that I would get a little sleep before first period English class. Then I would attend Geology class, which satisfied some kind of Science graduation credit. For English class I was alert and on top of it, although I was still hand-writing my papers, which changed once I got in the habit of using the computers in the library. English class was small, maybe 12-15 people, whereas Geology was huge and held in a lecture hall. I would go lay down in the back in the aisle and try and sleep. I ended up getting As in almost all my English classes, and a C- in Geology, which was deserved to an extent because of the sleeping. However, the main question on the final was brutal and pretty unfair, which was to draw a seismograph. Literally, draw one, which we had never studied and I did cram for the final. Brutal action. Somehow I still made the honor roll that year, and every year, because of my performance in humanities.

Jake was an English major as well as far as I recall, I kind of forget but he knew a lot of the teachers I knew. In any case, we did not bond primarily in the classroom, but in the dorm and then at “Sig,” the frat he was associated with and later pledged. Sig was the alternative frat. I hung out there a bit, but when pledge season started they kind of cracked down on non-pledges attending parties. For Halloween, Jake snuck me in early, and although that night I got a few looks I was good with Jake’s blessing. That night I wore all black with a turtleneck and a paper sign on my back saying “No future for you.” As in the Sex Pistols. I was talking with an older guy, an alum (there were always some alums that hung at the frat parties at Sig) at the party and he said something to the effect of “I like you, but I don’t like your shirt.” OK dude.

That was the same night I believe that inspired the following little ditty I later shared with Jake:

I pissed in the toilet

He pissed in the sink

He said I haven’t got a god above

I haven’t got a drink

Jake took umbrage with the lines, not the sink part, which was and remains credible, but the god part. I think he is, or was, a believer. In any case, he’s my friend and won’t sue.

I appreciated Jake showing me the ropes at Sig and elsewhere. In the dorm we would play his music–he was into the classics, Beatles and Stones, Kinks, Bowie. We would sing “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and “Come Together,” mostly the former over and over, no doubt to the annoyance of our roommates. Jake also liked The Pogues, and this made me think even more highly of him.

Jake smoked, Marlboro Reds, and I soon started smoking too, the same brand. This was not out of a desire to be a smoker, but rather as a way to keep my hands occupied and look busy at parties, where I had some difficulty mixing. I picked up, or invented, a little trick where I would fold up the flaps of a cigarette pack so they looked like a paper airplane, and then lob the cigs around the room, usually to any girl that wanted one. This got me some attention and some affection, and I kind of became known for the move. It didn’t get me laid, but at least it was something. Jake and I were fast friends, and hung out a lot in the early part of the year, before he began to branch out. Once he started pledging Sig though I saw less of him, naturally enough I guess.

By the time Jake started pledging, and even before, I was spending more time with Ian. Ian was from Boston and his father was a medical doctor. He lived in a nice house in the suburbs–both Jake and Ian had quite a bit more money than I, a common feature at Hamilton where pretty much everyone had money expect me. I was on a pretty decent scholarship, despite my not so impressive high school record, and could not have afforded the school without the scholarship. I visited Ian once or twice I believe in college, and then stayed with his family for a few months in the fall after college, but that’s a story for a future post.

Ian had a massive record collection in his quad, next door to mine as I have said. I liked Jake’s music, especially “Rebel Rebel,” “Come Dancing,” and The Stones, however his selection was somewhat limited. Ian’s was capacious. He was into bands like The Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Ride, and a bunch of other British bands I didn’t know at the time. But he was really into everything. I spent hours in Ian’s room soaking up his music, and my association with him kind of took over where Dyche Alsaker’s left off. I think it was Ian who also introduced me to Luna, who was coming up at the time and is still one of my favorite bands to this day. Later, in senior year I think, Ian and I had a radio show together and one night we got to play records all night long when a few other people canceled suddenly. I would play The Replacements and the Pogues, and Ian would play his music, but I was also getting deep into the 4AD label and bands like Big Star, This Mortal Coil, and a little known band called The Binsey Poplars (who I’m not sure were even on 4AD), named after a Hopkins poem. But my favorite around that time was Nick Drake, who was on Rykodisc.

Drake is now pretty well known, mostly on the back of his song “Pink Moon,” which was featured on a Volkswagen commercial, but back then he was not well known outside serious music circles. I loved his song “Rider on the Wheel,” and was an evangelist for him, telling all and sundry to listen. Most people didn’t, of course, but the whole move was just odd enough to get a little attention, which I was definitely seeking. (Another friend from that time John mentioned to me a few years ago that I would sit on the front steps of his frat in my trench coat and read a book. I don’t really remember this, but if it’s true it was for sure for attention.) I remember one evening Ian had a kind of band that was playing and I “opened” for them. My act was simply talking about Nick Drake, painting him as a forgotten genius, which he was, and pleading with the crowd to listen. It went over pretty well, like I said probably just because it was different.

Later on, mostly the next year I think, Ian and I went to a few shows in Boston, including The Red House Painters, The Fall, and Love Spit Love. Ian would drive, and blast The Pogues with the window down to stay awake on the way home. Before one of these shows we managed to source a little green, which was enjoyable. We would park, illegally, in some lot Ian knew. In the lot, there were rats.

Jake and I were sort of on the same level–both semi-degenerate English majors–but Ian I looked up to. He was definitely the leader in the friendship, although he must have seen something in me because we hung out a fair bit. Ian was also friends with Marc, but he was perhaps closer to another group of guys who lived in two adjacent quads on the third floor. This included John and a guy called Will. I would go up there too, and Will would ask “what Dead do you want to listen to?” I always went with Reckoning because I liked the country-folk sound and the song “It Must Have Been the Roses.” I liked the third floor guys too, especially John.

Next door to Jake and my quad was Adam and Basmo. Adam and Basmo (a nickname) were seniors who for some reason decided to stay in what was basically a freshman dorm. Adam was cool, but pretty grown up. Basmo was still a kid, and loved to get high. Loved to get high. Early on in the year he would come over and ask “anyone want to get stoned and session?” A session, it turned out, was you would smoke, put on The Beatles, and watch Bugs Bunny or something with the sound down. The idea was the music would synch up with the cartoon and it would be hysterical. It totally worked, although I just liked to listen to music and bullshit rather than session. Real heads will remember the session. (Jake told me that sadly Basmo later took his own life as a result of the worsening effects of epilepsy. That was really too bad because Basmo was just a pure open-hearted soul.) So basically we would get stoned when we could, smoke Reds, and stay up all night and listen to music, which was a pretty decent life all in all. Jake and Ian took me in, and made the first part of freshman year so much better in all ways than it would have been if I hadn’t known them.

Dedication: For Ian and Jake, for seeing something in me, and helping make me a little somebody.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

For the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties,” which I hope to write about soon. This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on “I was drinking, I was dancing,” packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.