Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Tragic Death of Mia Zapata

Epigraphs:

Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die

—Neil Young

Here’s to Your Fuck

—The Gits

I love Mia Zapata.

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

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

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

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

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

Seattle Before the Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Voice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Twenty-Seven Club

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

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

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

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

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

A Stolen Future

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

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

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

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

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

I find her death entirely pointless and totally stupid.

The Long Wait for Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It went another way.

What Remains

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: Just Listen

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedication:

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

Selected Sources

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

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

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

Home Alive, “History.”

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

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

—    —

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Three Musicians Who Walked Away from Great Bands

Epigraphs:

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

—The Rolling Stones

Maybe I should just change my style.

—Dean Wareham

Just another cigarette, staring at my shoes.

—Izzy Stradlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I am interested in the leaver.

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

There is something reckless about this.

There can be something rational about it as well.

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

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

Think about that for a minute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was twenty-five.

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

That last part particularly interests me.

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

So Taylor quit.

This is where hindsight becomes dangerous.

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

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

And Taylor was a musician. He wanted to play.

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

This is the point.

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

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

What price do we put on that?

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

There is something almost shocking about the simplicity of that.

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

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

The Dean Wareham case is the one I know best.

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

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

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

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

Somehow they developed an extraordinary sound.

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

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

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

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

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

The phone exploded for three days.

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

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

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

Wareham had been documenting his frustrations.

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

That’s just true.

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

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

Then there was the spotlight.

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

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

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

Dean’s restraint did not save Galaxie 500.

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe I should just change my style.

Well yes Dean. Maybe you should dude.

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

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

Then Sean Eden arrived and Luna became Luna.

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

Luna Was Dean’s Band

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

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

He took a risk. And it worked out.

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

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

Nobody knows.

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

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

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

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

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

III. Izzy Stradlin: Just Another Cigarette

And then we get to Izzy.

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

I loved “Shuffle It All.”

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

Jesus fucking christ, Izzy Stradlin fucking rocks.

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

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

Who exactly is this guy?

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

Izzy never looked entirely comfortable with the circus.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes my friend. Right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And apparently he could live with that.

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

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

“Shuffle It All” is a masterpiece.

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

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

A bus. Another cigarette. Staring at his shoes.

And one great song.

IV. Three Gambles

So who took the biggest risk?

In purely financial terms, probably Izzy.

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

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

Wareham’s gamble was different.

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

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

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

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

This is valuable. I am leaving anyway.

That’s what fascinates me.

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

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

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

V. The Price of Staying

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

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

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

Nobody is presently offering me a stadium tour.

Damn.

But the underlying calculation interests me because it is recognizable.

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

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

What does staying cost?

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

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

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

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

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

Is this working to not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine. Fuck em.

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

Sometimes you change your style.

Sometimes you go play the blues.

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

Motherfucker.

Dedication:

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

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

Music motherfucking rules

Me

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

Bob Dylan

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

Conor Obrest

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

1. Cape Canaveral — Conor Oberst

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

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

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

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

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

2. Leaving LA — Father John Misty 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Number two. Father John Misty fucking rules.

3. Cruiser — Red House Painters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Number three. My man.

4 (t). Houses on the Hill

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

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

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

Motherfucking full-body goosebumps. Full-body tears.

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

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

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

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

It simply fucking rules. Stay tuned.

4 (t). It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

5. Tulsa Queen — Emmylou Harris.

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

Then straight into:

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Faded — Afghan Whigs.

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

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

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

7. My Life Is Sweet — Simon Joyner.

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

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

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

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

8 (T). Never Aim to Please —

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

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

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

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

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

9. A Bathtub in the Kitchen — Craig Finn.

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

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

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

10. Dreadful — The Violet Burning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Nothing wasted.

Number nine.

This bad boy fucking slaps.

11. The Traitor — Leonard Cohen

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

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

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

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

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

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

His best by a mile. Simply marvelous.

12. Gorgeous (live)— The Violet Burning

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

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

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

Motherfucker.

Of course.

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

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

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

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

And Michael Pritzl makes me believe him every goddamn time.

13. Albuquerque — Mark Kozelek (Neil Young Cover)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably other periods too.

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

Motherfucker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. Oh My Sweet Carolina — Ryan Adams

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

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

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

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

15. (T) Montreal Rock Band Somewhere — Happyness

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

They suck.

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

So yeah, I don’t like Arcade Fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. (T) Crushed Out — Bad Moves

17. Caribbean Wind — Bob Dylan

18. (T) Center of Asia — Paul Pena 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Conor Oberst’s “Cape Canaveral”: The Greatest Song of All Time

Note:

I have been working for several months on pretty challenging project: ranking my top 250 favorite songs of all time. Yeah I know. It’s a lot.

There are now nearly 500 songs under consideration for what I continue, somewhat inaccurately, to call my Top 250. Songs rise. Songs fall. Songs appear from nowhere and kick the living shit out of songs I have loved for thirty years.

And then something genuinely unexpected happened.

For the past decade of more, Emmylou Harris’s “Tulsa Queen” has been my favorite song of all time. I assumed it probably always would be.

I was wrong,

The new number one is Conor Oberst’s “Cape Canaveral.”

This essay is partly about that song and partly about the forty-plus years of listening that somehow brought me to it: childhood folk records, American musical history, Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan, Craig Finn, Bright Eyes, Better Oblivion Community Center, Ryan Adams, live music, and the strange experience of discovering that a song you have known for years has suddenly become something else entirely.

Music rules, everybody.

Long live music.

Epigraphs:

Music rules
—Evervbody

I support the French Revolution
—Dean Wareham

I heard that victory’s sweet/ even deep in the cheap seats
—Conor Oberst

Introduction:

For the last several months on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, I’ve been working on a piece entitled “The Top 250 Songs of All Time.” This is, of course my list, and it is therefore entirely subjective. Nevertheless, it is the product of more than forty years of intensive, daily listening to music of all kinds.

“Cape Canaveral,” by Conor Oberst, recently displaced “Tulsa Queen” as my number-one song of all time.

This is no small thing. “Tulsa Queen” has been my favorite song for at least ten years, possibly longer. The first full album of hers that I fell in love with was the 2008 live record Spyboy. I knew of Emmylou before that, of course, and I especially liked “’Til I Gain Control Again,” which at that point I knew largely through the immaculate This Mortal Coil cover. I was also familiar with her connection to Gram Parsons, and knew how devastated she had been by his death. I knew songs like “Boulder to Birmingham,” and I may or may not have heard “Tulsa Queen” a time or two. I don’r know. It was all a long time ago.

In any case, it was Spyboy that really made me pay attention to Emmylou for the first time. I devoured the record and loved it. I still do.

Listening For Something

By the time I heard Spyboy, I had already listened intensively to hundreds and hundreds—probably thousands—of records. In fact, my relationship with music goes much farther back than that.

When I was six or seven, Joan Baez’s “The Sweet Sunny South” was the first song I truly fell in love with. It simply captivated me. About a year earlier, I had dug an old record of American folk songs out of what we called the “back closet,” which was actually the front closet. I forget the title. It was something straightforward, along the lines of The Greatest American Folk Songs.

The song I really fell in love with was “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” This song contains the great verse:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alcohol
Come a-trickling down the rocks

I understood the song, even then, to be a fantasy of escape: the mythical paradise of the hobo, where ordinary deprivation and misery have somehow been turned upside down.

American musical history fascinates me. In the mid-twentieth century, collectors such as Alan Lomax preserved thousands upon thousands of American folk performances that might otherwise have disappeared. Those archives remain an invaluable resource for musicians, critics, historians, and ordinary music fans alike.

I’ve poked around in archives like Lomax’s myself, and I find them endlessly fascinating. My primary musical preference remains American and British folk and Americana. I also love most forms of country music, although, to be honest, some popular country gets a little too saccharine and sappy for me.

I also love indie and alternative rock, especially the indie music of the 1990s and early aughts. As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t keep up with new music these days as much as I probably should. I do try to keep up with new releases from favorite active artists: Conor Oberst, Craig Finn, Sun Kil Moon, Ryan Adams, Neil Young, and even Bob Dylan, who remarkably continues making music well into old age.

And this brings me back to “Cape Canaveral.”

When I finally fully appreciated the song, I realized something strange:

I had been listening for it my entire life.

Cape Canaveral

For my money, “Cape Canaveral” is primarily a song about escape.

It is also a song about the vicissitudes of patriotism, about being an American, about the Fourth of July, and the American space program. It is one of the sweetest songs I have ever heard. It is also super sad. Conor just has a way of breaking a guy’s heart.

There is one particular acoustic live performance on KCRW in 2014 that I particularly love. Conor introduces the song by talking casually to the audience about his big backyard in Omaha, being outside at night, looking up at the stars, and relaxing with whoever happens to be beside you. Then the first few notes hit, and the effect is devastating.

I love music. I love live music the most. I also love musicians introducing their songs. I’ve written about this at some length elsewhere. These little introductions can become almost as important to me as the songs themselves. They cement a song in a place and a moment. They also give you a little insight into the artistic process, which I find super cool.

And then the song starts.

What gets me first is the sound. “Cape Canaveral” is remarkably spare. Conor doesn’t overplay things. The acoustic guitar carries the song along gently, and his voice sounds simultaneously intimate and far away. The whole thing has the quality of somebody sitting outside late at night, thinking about his life while everyone else has gone to bed.

And then there are the images: rockets, orange groves, interstate highways, television, war movies, stars, cheap seats. The song keeps moving between the enormous and the ordinary: outer space and somebody’s backyard; American history and private memory; the grand technological dream of the space program and one lonely human being trying to understand where he is.

That scale is part of what makes the song so beautiful to me. The rocket goes up. The stars get smaller. Everything changes.

And then there is the line that just breaks my heart every time:

Victory’s sweet
Even deep in the cheap seats

FUCK YEAH CONOR. You know it, baby.

And underneath all of this, I hear escape.

That is the thread that connects “Cape Canaveral” to “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” for me. One song imagines a hobo’s paradise and the other looks toward rockets, highways, and the night sky, but both contain the same ancient human impulse: maybe there is somewhere else to go.

Maybe there is some kind of life beyond this one. Maybe if you keep moving long enough, something will finally open up for ya.

For now, anyway, “Cape Canaveral” is my favorite song of all time.

Is Conor Obrest My Favorite Songwriter?

As I write this today, when I really think about it, Conor Oberst may be my favorite songwriter of all time.

Actually, I have three favorite songwriters and a close fourth. My three are Conor Oberst, my current favorite; Bob Dylan, the historical champion; and Craig Finn.

Until very recently, I would have sworn to you that Finn was—and probably always would remain—my favorite songwriter. But it has now been a few weeks since I replaced “Tulsa Queen” with “Cape Canaveral,” and during that time I have probably listened to “Cape Canaveral” eighty or a hundred times. Sometimes I listen on Spotify. More often, I return to the live performance.

Conor first burst onto the scene as a teenage wunderkind with Bright Eyes. I like Bright Eyes a lot. I especially love “Easy/Lucky/Free” and “Gold Mine Gutted,” both from 2008’s Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. This is a curious and funny title, and I like it.

A lot of people also know I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. I like that record too, but it has never really floated my boat.

When it comes to Conor’s solo catalog, however—and then Better Oblivion Community Center, his collaboration with Phoebe Bridgers—the picture starts to shift.

In addition to “Cape Canaveral,” I love “Classic Cars,” and “A Little Uncanny,” which is totally out of control. I love “Next of Kin,” including this wonderfully deadpan line:

Yeah I met Lou Reed and Patty Smith
I didn’t make me feel different.

I liked these lines so much that I used them as an epigraph to an earlier piece.

I love “No One Changes,” one of Conor’s saddest songs. I love “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital),” which is also extremely funny. I love “The Rockaways.” I love so many of his songs.

And then there is Better Oblivion Community Center.

When I first hear the record, the immediate standout was “Dylan Thomas.” I wrote about it almost immediately in an essay called “On the Song Dylan Thomas and Rhyme.”

I wrote that piece very fast—in ten or twelve minutes, as I recall—while standing on a train from Akasaka Station to Tokyo Station.

I’m proud of the piece. Quite improbably, it has also experienced a dramatic resurgence in readers recently.

I find all this very exciting. It makes me proud to be a writer and proud to have kept a near-daily blog for all these years. I love writing. I love reading. I love everything about them, and I always have.

There are many other great Conor and Bright Eyes songs I could name, but the list would tale up too much space. Suffice it to say that today I believe Conor Oberst and Craig Finn are the two greatest songwriters working, while Dylan remains the historical champion.

Ryan Adams

If Conor is my current favorite, Finn is tied or running a very close second, and Dylan remains the historical champion, I would be remiss not to mention Ryan Adams in the four spot.

There is one ugly episode in Conor’s history worth addressing first. In 2013, a woman publicly accused Oberst of raping her after a Bright Eyes concert years earlier. Oberst denied it. The woman subsequently retracted the accusation entirely apologized, and admitted that she had fabricated it.

Making a knowingly false accusation of rape is an appalling thing to do. It harms the falsely accused person, and it also makes life harder for actual victims of sexual violence. Rape is an atrocious crime. Deliberately inventing one is a different act with different consequences, and there is no reason for me to construct some kind of grand hierarchy here. The relevant point is simpler: the allegation against Oberst was withdrawn by the person who made it, who acknowledged that she had fabricated it.

Ryan Adams presents a messier case.

In 2019, multiple women, including his former wife Mandy Moore and Phoebe Bridgers, a then up and coming musician who toured with Ryan around this time, publicly accused Adams of manipulative or abusive behavior. Moore described psychologically controlling behavior, and said that Adams had not sufficiently helped to advance her music career. Specifically, she accused Adams of not giving her free studio time. At the time and still today, I find this accusation completely ridiculous. It is his studio. He can with it whatver he wants.

Bridgers, in turn, described a romantic and professional relationship that she said had became emotionally abusive. She finished the tour with Adams, and the two went their separate ways. Another accusation was more serious. Adams disputed significant portions of the reporting. As of this writing, Adams has never been arrested or charged for any of these incidents.

Whatever judgment one makes about Ryan Adams the man, none of this changes his greatness as a songwriter.

“Oh My Sweet Carolina,” “Damn, Sam (I Love a Woman That Rains),” and “Come Pick Me Up” are indelibly etched into the American folk-rock canon. Mandy Moore has had an successful career of her own, but she and Adams occupy very different musical territories, and comparing their importance as songwriters isn’t particularly helpful.

There is also a curious connection here. Bridgers later formed Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst, an older man like Adama. I have no idea whether Conor and Phoebe were ever lovers, however it is fun to ship them. I kind of hope they got together once or twice in the studio or at the hotel or something.

I’ll never know. And it’s none of my business.

Ryan therefore stays in the four spot: a difficult man by numerous accounts, a songwriter whose work has meant an enormous amount to me, and another tributary feeding the musical river that eventually brought me to “Cape Canaveral.”

The biography matters. The allegations matter. But this is an essay about listening.

And his songs are why Ryan Adams is here.

A New Number One

So that’s about it. I have a new favorite song, and it’s “Cape Canaveral.”

I don’t foresee it getting knocked out of the number-one spot anytime soon. Of course, I thought the same thing about “Tulsa Queen.”

And I was wrong.

Right now, “Leaving LA,” the glorious song by Father John Misty, is number two. “Cruiser” is number three. The totally slapping “Dreadful,” by The Violet Burning, is number four. And “Tulsa Queen” has now been bumped all the way down to number five.

Sorry, baby. You know I love you.

I continue to listen to music every day, often for several hours. I sleep to music. I wake up to music. I shower and brush my teeth to music. I read to music. I eat to music. I drink coffee and tea to music. I make love to music.

I love music more than almost anything in my life, except my son, of course. I love nearly every form of music, and I love live music most of all. The thrill of a great live concert is unequaled by almost any other experience under the sun.

I did get the chance to see Conor live in Osaka just a few months ago with my friend Jack. It was a small venue downtown. Conor was great. He opened with a few songs I knew and a few I had never heard before.

Although I was having a good time, unfortunately I was so zonked that I had to leave after only about twenty-five minutes. I was disappointed, but I was so tired that I simply had no choice.

Jack told me on the phone the next day that he had left only about five minutes after I did. I guess he too was beyond all help.

That night, anyway, we were completely out of control.

Long Live Music

Part of me wants “Cape Canaveral” to hold onto the number-one spot forever.

Another part of me hopes a new challenger emerges.

“Leaving LA” and “Cruiser” are the obvious contenders, with “Dreadful” right there too. “Tulsa Queen” has already fallen four places, so I don’t see her charging back to number one anytime soon.

But who knows?

The artists I listen to most frequently these days include Whiskeytown and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Both absolutely slap and totally rule. Whiskeytown occupies the folk/country side of my canon; The Jesus and Mary Chain occupy the alternative and early-indie side.

Other artists I play constantly include Craig Finn, Happiness, Daddy Issues, The Violet Burning, and Michael Knott, and many others.

R.I.P. Michael Knott. R.I.P. to a legend.

I listen to so many songs every day that I can hardly keep count. That is one reason I’ve taken to making these lists in the first place. The rankings change. The artists change. I change. Some song I’ve heard fifty times suddenly opens itself up on the fifty-first listen and becomes an entirely different thing.

That is part of the fun. That is part of the mystery. That is why I keep listening.

Long live music. Long live live music. Long live music fans.

Long live Conor Oberst. And long live “Cape Canaveral.”

Amen.

Dedication:

For musicians and music fans everywhere. I love you. And for Conor Oberst. You’re the fucking man, baby.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Night of My 50s IV, 7/24/26: Am I Bisexual?

The locus of action is always in motion.

— Erving Goffman

This one goes to out to somebody watching tonight. She knows who she is.

— Bob Dylan

“Come on, baby, let’s rock and roll.”
— Michael Knott

Rock and roll motherfucking rules.

It just does.

Music in general rules. Live music rules even harder. I love almost every kind of music there is, from Appalachian folk to Georgian polyphony, from Miles Davis to Papa M, although admittedly not always in equal measure. Music has been one of the great organizing forces of my life for as long as I can remember. It has rescued bad days, elevated good ones, carried me through grief, celebrated victories, and made long train rides, lonely hotel rooms, and empty apartments feel just a little less empty. If today’s essay seems to wander off in musical directions more often than usual, that’s because today belongs to music.

The last couple of days have been filled with minor crises, accumulated errands, and one rather difficult conversation with my mother that I’ll briefly update readers on in a moment. None of these problems were especially serious in isolation. Collectively, however, they had begun to clutter the landscape of my mind. I woke up this morning with an unusually simple goal: clear away the small stuff, stay close to the hotel, listen to music, write, and otherwise leave myself alone.

There were still a handful of practical matters that needed attention. I’d been meaning to buy a new pair of headphones for several days. My hair was beginning to reach the point where even I had to admit it probably needed cutting. More importantly, ever since returning to Japan six weeks ago, my phone’s SIM card had been behaving erratically. The hotel Wi-Fi had been excellent, as Japanese hotel Wi-Fi almost always is, but every time I stepped outside I was reminded that “mostly functional” isn’t really functional at all. Since I’m planning to leave Japan again later this summer, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. Today I had a two o’clock appointment at the nearby SoftBank store, barely a three-minute walk from the hotel. The haircut could wait. The headphones could wait. The SIM card could not.

Readers of yesterday’s essay may be wondering about my mother and me. After our rather tense exchange yesterday morning, we exchanged messages later in the day. We still see a number of things differently, particularly regarding my writing and my dating life, and I doubt those differences will disappear anytime soon. On the other hand, we also love each other very much, and hopefully neither of us has any interest in staying angry for long. Families have disagreements. Good families keep talking anyway. I suspect that’s where we’re headed.

The same goes for Litz and me.

After nearly a month of trying to coordinate our schedules, we’re still trying. Unfortunately, her work situation remains remarkably unpredictable. She’s effectively working under a zero-hour arrangement, which totally sucks, which means an off day that appears available for her to travel one day can disappear the next. We’d hoped to meet in Takamatsu, roughly halfway between Kochi and Kyoto, but another last-minute change at work forced us to postpone yet again. We were both disappointed, but neither of us blamed the other. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. We’ll keep talking, keep laughing, and eventually the calendars will line up. If they don’t before I leave for Thailand and then Spokane later this summer, we’ll simply keep doing what we’ve been doing remarkably well for months now: staying close despite the distance.

Once those thoughts were out of the way, the day became pleasantly ordinary.

II: Afternoon

I left the hotel a little before two carrying both my residence card and my My Number card, even though SoftBank had only asked me to bring one. Years of dealing with paperwork have taught me that bringing too much identification is infinitely preferable to bringing too little.

The walk to the station took only a couple of minutes. As usual, I finished a cigarette on the way, tossed it before entering, and descended into the cool underground passage. Every Japanese station seems to have its own invisible weather system. Long before you see the platform, you feel the wind. Part of it comes from the enormous ventilation system. Part of it comes from the trains themselves, which push columns of air through the tunnels like giant pistons every time they arrive. Whatever the engineering explanation, it always feels faintly magical. Before you hear the train, before you see another passenger, the station announces itself with moving air.

The appointment itself took exactly eight minutes.

The young SoftBank employee helping me wore a SoftBank Hawks baseball jersey instead of an office shirt, complete with a day’s worth of black stubble. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the whole thing struck me as perfectly Japanese. Professional without being overly formal. Efficient without pretending to be important. He checked my identification, installed the new SIM, and, naturally, it didn’t work right away. We both stared at the screen for a few seconds before I restarted the phone. It restarted almost instantly, found the network, and returned to life.

Problem solved. It’s funny how satisfying it is to cross one genuinely useful task off your list.

Afterwards I wandered no farther than the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. I stopped by a drugstore and a Lawson to purchase provisions. By the time I walked back through the hotel doors, less than forty minutes had passed since I’d left. The room was cool. The new SIM card worked. The refrigerator was full. The errands were finished. For the first time in several days, there was nothing left to do except what I’d wanted to do all along. Listen to music. Write my essays. Do my job.

Every now and then, simply sit there and enjoy the fact that not every thought requires action, not every errand deserves urgency, and not every day has to become an adventure. Sometimes crossing three small things off the list is more than enough. From there, all that’s left is to press play.

There were still a couple of unanswered questions hanging over the afternoon. My son might text. If he did, we’d decide whether to meet in Kyoto tomorrow evening before I returned to what has unexpectedly become my little base camp here in Osaka.

Litz was still trying to untangle her work schedule. We’ve become surprisingly good at living with uncertainty, talking several times a day while waiting for circumstances to cooperate. By Sunday evening I should have a much clearer idea whether we’ll finally meet before I leave Japan again or whether Thailand will arrive first.

I sat down to today’s journal. As I’ve mentioned before, this daily series is still brand new, but I’m working harder on it than almost anything I’ve written in quite a while. The response so far has been encouraging. Whether it eventually approaches the readership of my St. George’s series remains to be seen, but I’m quietly hopeful.

The St. George’s essays continue to surprise me. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, that series gradually climbed Google’s rankings until searches for “St. George’s Spokane History” began returning my essays near the very top of the page, sometimes directly beneath Wikipedia and occasionally even ahead of the school’s own website.

I find this oddly gratifying.

For the first several years of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, I cross-posted almost everything to Medium with very little success. I did almost no search-engine optimization, almost no promotion, and almost all of my readership came through Facebook and WordPress. Then, almost without warning, the St. George’s pieces found an audience.

I’d like to think that somewhere along the way some perspective parents trying to learn about the history of the school may have stumbled across my recollections instead. If this is true, it makes me smile.

The series is affectionate. It’s nostalgic. But it’s also honest. I attended St. George’s from 1980 until 1992, and schools in the 1980s operated according to a very different set of expectations than schools today. Discipline was different. Student life was different. The relationships between students and teachers were different. Sexual mores were different. My only goal was to reflect those years as accurately and fairly as I could.

Whether readers agreed with every conclusion hardly mattered. They read the stories. For that, I’ll always be grateful. As soon as I began thinking about today’s essay, I knew I was going to start with music.

Music has been one of the central joys of my life for as long as I can remember.

As a young boy I wanted to learn the piano. I asked my mother several times if I could take lessons, however she replied that she could not afford them at the time. A few years later my parents’ financial situation improved enough that my younger brother Mike was able to study the cello for several years. He eventually became an excellent young player before other interests gradually took over. I was genuinely happy for him, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that I’d missed my chance.

Over time I got over it, however in the back of my mind I always to learn to play.

After a major change in my work circumstances in 2018, I finally bought myself an inexpensive electronic keyboard and decided that, instead of taking formal lessons, I’d simply see how much I could teach myself. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than a chord-finder app and an unreasonable amount of free time, I slowly made a little progress, and was able to read and play several simple pieces.

I only performed publicly once—if “publicly” is the right word. A friend named Mela, whom I’d met through the wonderful and sadly now defunct Periscope app, eventually persuaded me to play two songs over the phone. I stumbled my way through “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers and then attempted Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain.” As I’ve written elsewhere, I didn’t exactly dominate Ocean Rain. But it was at least passable. Mela applauded politely, and for one brief afternoon I felt like I’d accomplished something I’d wanted to do since childhood.

After playing for Mela, I began lose interest in the keyboard. I was never going to be good to play in public, and playing for Mela was a lot of fun. I decided to go out on a high note. Sometimes achieving a childhood dream doesn’t require becoming great at it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to discover that the dream itself was real.

III. A Lifetime of Listening

I have listened to music everyday for 38 years since 1988. Music is simply part of the furniture of my life. Like everyone else, there are genres I return to almost every day and genres I will never listen to again. Even so, with remarkably few exceptions, I can usually find at least one artist in almost every style that I genuinely admire. There are even bands—Genesis immediately comes to mind—that I respect enormously while almost never choosing to play them. Great musicianship and personal taste are not always the same thing, and I’ve become more comfortable with that distinction as I’ve gotten older.

Perhaps because I never learned to play an instrument as a child, I became obsessed with listening to music instead. By the time I was fourteen, I was spending every spare dollar I could scrape together on cassettes, and then, almost overnight, CDs when they replaced cassettes as the dominant medium. Looking back, I probably should have tried to some of my money. Instead, I spent virtually all of it on music.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Music became my education. It taught me geography, history, politics, religion, literature, relationships, heartbreak, humor, and more than a little philosophy. Long before streaming services provided almost every song ever recorded, discovering a great new band required effort. Somebody recommended them. You took a chance. You saved your money. You bought the record. If you loved it, it became part of your life.

Some artists from my teenage years have stayed with me. Others have not. This is OK with me.

The first cassette I ever bought with my own money was Martika’s self-titled debut. I haven’t listened to it in decades, but I don’t regret buying it for a second. It was the beginning of a lifetime spent chasing songs.

Soon enough my classmates introduced me to bands like R.E.M., the Violent Femmes and Fine Young Cannibals. Before long I discovered Bob Dylan and the Replacements on my own, and after that there was no turning back.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton College in the fall of 1992, I was already spending almost every extra dollar on music. That habit has never really gone away. Today my Spotify library contains thousands of liked songs spanning almost every genre imaginable.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton music had become a major part of my life. I was into artists such as Bob Dylan, the Replacements, The Pogues, Dire Straits, R.E.M, the Violent Femmes, and several others. Many of my favorite bands would soon come to be described as alternative or indie rock. Looking back, I was only beginning to scratch the surface.

One of roommates freshman year, Jake, loved music almost as much as I did, although his tastes tended to run in a more traditional direction. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were his touchstones, and before long they became mine as well. We spent countless hours listening to records in our quad, arguing over songs, recommending albums to one another, and gradually building the sort of musical vocabulary that only develops when people live together and have far too much free time.

Next door lived Ian Murphy. Ian remains one of my closest friends to this day, and he is the only person I have ever met who knows more about music than I do.

That is not a sentence I write lightly. I’ve spent most of my adult life buying and listening to records, reading about records, ranking records, writing about records, and generally annoying other people by going on and on about. Over the years I’ve accumulated many thousands of CDs and listened to what must be hundreds of thousands of songs. Music has never really been a hobby for me. It’s simply part of the way I move through the world.

Ian somehow manages to go even further. When we first met, he introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, many of whom I may not have discovered on my own. Luna immediately became one of my favorite bands of all time. He also pointed me toward the Auteurs, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Ride, and dozens of other artists, particularly from Britain’s remarkable alternative scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of those bands became lifelong companions. Others I admired without ever fully embracing. All of them expanded my musical horizons.

What impressed me most, however, wasn’t simply the breadth of Ian’s knowledge. It was his curiosity.

Ian has always approached music the way an historian approaches a historical period or a scientist approaches a research question. He doesn’t merely listen to an artist. He disappears into them. If Nick Cave captures his imagination, he’ll spend months tracing every album, every collaboration, every side project, every live recording, and every obscure appearance he can find. More recently he’s done the same thing with classic country artists such as Merle Haggard and Steve Earle—a development that amuses me slightly, since I can still remember him gently teasing me about my own love of country back in college.

We continue to recommend records to each other today. I honestly can’t imagine what my musical life would look like if I’d never met him.

IV: Musical Genres I Like I Folk/ Americana

My favorite musical genre, without question, is folk music and its close cousin, Americana. Looking back, I suspect I know why.

When I was about six years old I discovered my parents’ tiny record collection. For reasons I still can’t explain, I pulled out an old folk compilation with the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” on it. I played it over and over again in our living room. Not long afterwards I also found a Joan Baez record, and fell hopelessly in love with “Sweet Sunny South.” I had no idea what the lyrics meant. I just knew I wanted to hear the song again.


By about 2010, like many people as they begin to age, my ability to keep up with new bands began to wane somewhat. I did my best to keep up with the bands that I already knew and loved, however I found myself becoming less omnivorous in my listening. In the last couple of years, with the help of Spotify, I have endeavored to change this, and I’ve discovered dozens and dozens of new artists and bands that I really like.

Among my favourite folk and Americana artists are, in no particular order, Phosphorescent, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo and Conor Oberst.

I’ve only seen Phosphorescent and Wilco live. Whiskeytown no longer exists, Ryan Adams still tours, and Uncle Tupelo eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt. These days I probably listen to Son Volt more than I once did, but Wilco remains my favourite of the two.

I’ll never stop listening.

V: Musical Genres I Like II Indie

Alternative and indie rock became the soundtrack of my teenage years.

As I mentioned earlier, I inherited my classmates’ love of bands like R.E.M. and Violent Femmes. I discovered The Replacements on my own, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time.

Some of my favourite indie artists today include Happiness, Daddy Issues, Giant Drag, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Afghan Whigs, Luna, Car Seat Headrest, Yo La Tengo, Seam and many others.

Like folk music, indie has been a constant companion for almost forty years. I can’t imagine that changing.

I also love jazz and ambient music, but those are enormous subjects that deserve essays of their own.

VI: Musical Genres I Do Not Like

Then there are the genres I do not like. Mainstream hard rock has never really appealed to me. Bon Jovi and Van Halen simply aren’t my thing. Grunge is more complicated. I admired what bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are trying to doing, but I just don’t like him.


I don’t especially like heavy metal, although I do like several glam metal bands, probably because glam metal becoming popular, right when I was an early teenager and really listening to music for the first time. My favorite of these are Cinderella and Poison and I still have a soft spot Skid Row.

Then there is Progressive Rock or Prog. Prog and I have simply never gotten along.

Yes leaves me cold. Kansas does absolutely nothing for me. Toto has me running for the hills. And Genesis deserves special mention.

Many years ago I wrote what I thought was an entirely harmless one-star Amazon review of the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I assumed perhaps three people would read it. Apparently every Genesis fan on Earth was one of those three people.

The abuse began almost immediately. It turned out that among the hundreds of glowing reviews of the record, mine was the lone dissenting voice. For weeks strangers explained, in increasingly colorful language, exactly why I was an idiot. Eventually I deleted the review, not because I had changed my mind, but because I was just sick of the whole thing. I still don’t like the album.

VII. Evening: My Evolving Sexuality

Between about 7 and 10 PM I spent nearly three hours staring at what might have been the worst website ever designed.

It was supposedly the best escort aggregator in Osaka. It certainly aggregated everything. Hundreds of women. Dozens of agencies. Flashing banners. Pop-ups. Prices that changed the moment you clicked through. Every page had to be translated, and every time I went back it reverted to Japanese and I had to translate it again. After a while I wasn’t browsing anymore. I was wrestling with the website.

Eventually I admitted defeat.

The practical lesson was simple enough. If I wanted reasonable prices, I was probably going to have to get over my preference for outcalls and start looking at incalls instead. Fair enough. That was useful information. Three hours for one sentence.

Then, just as I was about to give up entirely, two completely unrelated things happened.

The first was my friend Doug in China. He messaged to say he’d finally finished my recently published novel The Adventures of The Thin Man and Andrea.

His note was everything a novelist hopes to hear. He hadn’t read it as “Matt playing the Thin Man.” He’d read it as a fully realized novel that happened to contain pieces of me. That was probably the single nicest compliment anyone could have paid me. I had been wandering around wondering whether the evening had been wasted, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. Doug had already given me something far better.

=====

When I was six and seven years old I was badly abused by my aunt’s first husband. I detail these experiences here. Childhood sexual abuse is the worst, and this fucking guy is simply the biggest dick imaginable. Fuck off.

It has taken me more than forty years to overcome some the effects of the abuse. This may seem like a long time ago, however this is just how CSA works. It sucks. So hard. One of the major effects was my eventual questioning of my sexuality. Around the time I hit puberty at 14 to the ago of 16 I wondered if I was gay. I was deeply attracted to girls, however the gay idea was never far from my mind.

By the time I was sixteen I had begun dating girls, however awkwardly, and my thoughts that I might be gay gradually faded into the background.

Throughout my marriage, two affairs, and a few other relationships, I remained consistently attracted to women. I never seriously thought of myself as gay. Even so, the question never disappeared entirely. It simply became quieter.

A few years ago I found myself occasionally turning to pornography featuring trans women. My favorite actress is Daisy Taylor, who is so gorgeous and whose picture leads this essay. It isn’t perhaps my favorite genre, but I kept returning to it often enough that I eventually stopped dismissing it as a curiosity.

Eventually mere curiosity became practical curiosity. Over the past six weeks I have booked four escorts here in Osaka, all biological women. Tonight, I found myself browsing agencies that advertised trans women.

The first woman that caught my eye was Mio. She was purely feminine in appearance and was absolutely stunning. Sadly however, she was working in a different city and not available in Osaka tonight.

Then I saw Takane. She was also very beautiful, and looked like a women, however perhaps ever so slightly androgynous. Three years earlier I probably would have clicked away without another thought. This time I found myself thinking, why not?

Then I remembered the great John McAfee, the software pioneer who is totally outta control. Years ago, while happily disappearing down one of my periodic McAfee rabbit holes, I came across an interview—I think it was an interview, although it may have been buried somewhere in the fragments of the autobiography he never finished.

The interviewer asked him about dating trans women in Thailand. Were they actually woman, the interviewer asked?

McAfee shrugged it off.

“Dude,” he said, “trust me. They’re all woman.” Hilarious.

Whether you agree with him or not isn’t really the point. For some reason, trying to book a trans escort in my hotel room years later, that line floated back into my head.

So I rolled the dice, as I sometimes do, and called her agency. Not because I had reached some grand philosophical conclusion. Because curiosity had quietly outrun hesitation. I was ready to spend more than I’d planned and just see what happened. The guy from the agency quoted me the real outcall price. Thirty-three thousand yen. That ended the experiment rather quickly. I thanked him and said I would call him another if I changed my mind.

VII. Am I Bisexual?

Today, I think I may simply be naturally bisexual. Whether my abuse obscured this truth, complicated my understanding of it, or is largely unrelated, I cannot honestly say.

What I can say is, my sexuality seems to be evolving rather quickly. I really have no idea where this attraction to trans woman is coming, however I do know that I will need to do something sometime soon.

Dedication:

For Takane. And for John McAfee. Baby, you are totally outta control. But man are you funny. Dude, you rock. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Nina Van Pallandt: Muse, Witness, Residual Character, and Her Own Woman

Note: Nina Van Pallandt moves through this piece as a kind of drifting hinge figure between art and biography, cinema and scandal, half-real and half-mythologised: from her striking, uncanny presence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye—where she plays the abused, luminous spouse of Roger Wade and becomes, briefly, a kind of muse/anima figure for Philip Marlowe—to her earlier life in the Danish pop duo The Baronets, through her entanglement with Clifford Irving and the great Howard Hughes hoax that later reverberates through Orson Welles’ F for Fake, and onward into the quieter aftermath of fame, reinvention, and partial retreat. The essay follows her not as a stable “character” but as a site where male-authored narratives—Hollywood noir, literary fraud, journalistic myth-making—keep trying (and failing) to fix her meaning, while she keeps slipping free in ways that are at once accidental and oddly deliberate. In the end she becomes something like a case study in cinematic and cultural afterlives: a woman repeatedly written by others, occasionally complicit, sometimes resistant, and finally legible only as a residue of performance, gossip, and unfinished stories that refuse to settle.

I first became aware of Nina Van Pallandt the way most people probably do: not through biography, but through atmosphere—specifically Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, The Long Goodbye), a film that feels less like a narrative than a slow collapse of narrative reliability itself. It is a film in which people drift through scenes as if they have forgotten whether they are supposed to be characters or witnesses, and Nina arrives inside it already slightly misfiled, already too composed for the emotional weather she is asked to endure.

She plays Roger Wade’s wife, but “plays” is almost the wrong verb. Altman’s casting logic is not psychological realism in the classical sense; it is something closer to behavioral residue. People are dropped into the frame and asked not to perform identity but to inhabit proximity—to money, to violence, to desire, to failure. Nina’s presence has that peculiar Altman quality: she does not dominate the scene, but she stabilizes it just enough to make everything else look unstable.

Roger Wade (the blocked writer, the alcoholic genius-in-decline) is already collapsing before the plot admits it. Nina is the counterweight that never quite becomes balance. She is care without resolution, intimacy without clarity, the kind of emotional presence that suggests there is a story somewhere but refuses to confirm what it is. And then there is Marlowe, Elliott Gould’s version of Marlowe—half-stoned, half-wandering, permanently a few seconds behind the moral implications of what he is witnessing.

The film keeps staging small ruptures in epistemology. One of the most famous arrives early and feels almost accidental in its perfection: Terry Lennox appearing at 4 AM, asking for a ride to Tijuana. There is a moment—“Tijuana now?”—where Gould’s Marlowe is briefly jolted out of his procedural fog into genuine surprise, as if even he cannot believe how far the plot is willing to drift from explanation. That tonal instability is the world Nina inhabits as well, except she does not get Marlowe’s ironic distance. She gets consequence.

There is a domestic sequence—one of the film’s most disarming—that feels almost out of register with the noir frame: Nina cooking, the soft logic of food and attention, a candlelit dinner shared with Marlowe, where violence and absence are temporarily suspended by something as ordinary as butter and chicken. It is precisely the kind of scene that should resolve emotional ambiguity, but in Altman it does the opposite: it deepens it. Intimacy here is not revelation; it is another form of deferral.

What the film keeps doing, quietly and persistently, is refusing to assign stable moral weight to anyone. Roger Wade is both victim and self-destroyer. Marlowe is both agent and sleepwalker. Nina is both witness and participant, but never allowed the comfort of explanation. Even her suffering—when it arrives—is not narratively sanctified; it is simply another event in a world where events do not accumulate into meaning.

And this is where Nina becomes interesting beyond the film itself. Because she does not resolve into a character arc, she persists as something else: a figure who has been “used” by multiple narrative systems without ever fully belonging to them. In a conventional noir, she would be femme fatale or redemption object or tragic spouse. In Altman, she is none of these cleanly. She is what remains when genre stops enforcing coherence.

What begins to emerge, if one steps back slightly from her, is that she belongs to a broader category of women who are not simply “in” cultural narratives but are written into them by proximity to men who are doing the narrating. The pattern is subtle but persistent: women become legible to the public through the structural gravity of male projects—films, scandals, bands, memoirs—while simultaneously attempting, with varying degrees of success, to assert an interior life that resists that formatting.

It is difficult not to think here of Marianne Faithfull, who occupies a parallel register in the British version of the same phenomenon. Marianne Faithfull is initially rendered publicly intelligible through association—romantic, cultural, chemical—with the Rolling Stones orbit, and specifically through a media ecosystem eager to translate her into a kind of emblem: muse, fallen angel, tragic accessory to male genius. But what is striking about her trajectory is not the initial inscription but the long, stubborn insistence on rewriting it from within.

In both cases—Faithfull and Van Pallandt—the question is not simply “agency” in the abstract liberal sense, but something more structurally constrained: how does a person reassert authorship of self once they have already been written as a function in someone else’s story? Faithfull does this through survival, reinvention, and the eventual authority of her own voice as an artist. Nina does it more quietly, less performatively, by simply not continuing to cooperate with the demand that her life be endlessly narrativized into legible arcs.

And this is where Nina stops being just a cinematic presence and becomes entangled with a second, more volatile narrative system: the world of Clifford Irving and manufactured truth. I remain, in a slightly persistent way, puzzled by Clifford Irving—not in the sense that his actions are obscure, but in the sense that the scale of the gamble still feels oddly disproportionate to the era in which it occurred. Clifford Irving occupies that 1970s threshold where narrative fraud still had room to breathe: before the internet, before instantaneous archival correction, before every claim arrived already cross-checked by a thousand invisible clerks. The rope, in other words, was longer. Not infinitely elastic—but long enough that someone could plausibly believe they might walk it all the way across.

What he did, of course, was fabricate the authorized autobiography of Howard Hughes and briefly convince a publishing system that this fiction was fact. And one cannot quite shake the sense that this sits in a parallel register to Orson Welles’ late-career meditation on forgery and authorship, F for Fake, where the art forger is not simply a criminal but a kind of metaphysical irritant—someone who reveals how fragile the category of “authenticity” already is, even before it is attacked. In Welles’ world, the faker is almost honest about the fact that everyone is faking something. In Irving’s world, the system briefly forgets to notice.

The irony, of course, is that Irving’s fraud depended on a very pre-digital faith in paper trails, intermediaries, and the general slowness of institutional verification. Today it feels almost quaintly physical: forged documents, publishing contracts, phone calls that had to be believed in real time. One can imagine the same scheme now collapsing within hours, not because people are more moral, but because the feedback loops are instantaneous.

And then there is prison. Irving did time—real time, not narrative time—and emerged into a world that had already moved on to other, faster deceptions. Yeah, I mean what did you expect, dude. The arc compresses there in a way that feels almost unsatisfying: scandal, exposure, incarceration, partial reinvention. One wants something more operatic, but what you get is the bureaucratic version of consequence.

The interesting part is not that he was punished, but that for a brief historical window the system was even buildable enough that his plan could function as a kind of temporary reality. That is the shared atmosphere he has with Nina Van Pallandt: not guilt, not innocence, but proximity to narrative systems that were still slow enough to be fooled by their own assumptions.

In later life, Nina becomes harder to place in any of the familiar compartments that earlier decades tried to assign her. The cinematic afterglow fades into cult memory, and the Irving episode recedes into archival texture. What remains is a quietness that feels deliberate rather than accidental—not disappearance, but refusal of continued amplification. She does not convert notoriety into permanent self-mythology in the way later media ecosystems would almost require. Instead, she settles into a lower frequency of visibility: remembered, cited, intermittently revived, but no longer authored by the same pressures that once pulled her forward.

And here the comparison widens again, because what she resembles is not a “sidekick” at all—that word is too structurally comic, too dependent on hierarchy—but something closer to an attendant presence: a figure whose job, in other people’s stories, is to make emotional or moral instability legible without ever fully resolving it.

There is a related category, more neutral and slightly more precise: the faithful interlocutor. Not in the devotional sense, but in the structural one—the person who remains close enough to the main character’s instability to render it speakable, without ever becoming fully absorbed into its explanatory system. Nina performs this function in The Long Goodbyewithout being granted interpretive authority over it.

And there is another: the witness who does not testify cleanly. Not unreliable, but resistant to conversion into stable narrative fact.

We all make mistakes; that much is banal. The more interesting question is what kind of cultural weather those mistakes occur in, and how much agency is genuinely available inside it. Nina Van Pallandt seems, in retrospect, to have lived inside a period when men were still doing a great deal of the writing—of scripts, scandals, explanations—and women were often expected to appear inside those scripts as if they had authored them themselves. Her resistance to that framing is not always loud or declarative. Sometimes it is simply a matter of stepping out of the demand to be continuously interpretable.

And in that sense, what she ultimately carved out is not a grand public myth but something more modest and, arguably, more durable: a minor legacy, lightly held, slightly resistant to over-definition. Not central, not erased, not simplified—just there, in a way that feels unexpectedly intact.

I really like Nina Van Pallandt. In The Long Goodbye, and in the shadow of the Clifford Irving story, it is impossible not to root for her—not because she is resolved, but because she is never fully reducible. She drifts through systems built by men who are busy writing meaning onto the world, and she does not quite consent to being finalized inside any of them. We all make mistakes. She was written into a few. She was also, quietly, a drifter inside Hollywood’s narrative machinery, and what she ultimately leaves behind is a minor but distinct and instinctively cool legacy: not the center of anyone’s story, but one of the few figures who never fully became owned by it.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Lou Reed and John Cale’s Album Songs for Drella (aka The Trouble With Classicists)

Note: This post takes up Songs for Drella (1990), Lou Reed and John Cale’s uneasy reunion album/biographical song-cycle about Andy Warhol, moving track by track through Warhol’s trajectory from Pittsburgh outsider to Factory-era icon to post-shooting isolation and mythic afterlife. Along the way it reads the record not just as tribute or elegy, but as a sustained meditation on work, style, and the thin boundary between populist gesture and aesthetic theory—especially in the pointed figure of “classicists” versus Warhol’s downtown anti-orthodoxy. What emerges is less a linear album review than a set of reflections on art, authorship, and cultural literacy, with Warhol as both subject and pretext for thinking about what it means to make anything count as art in the first place.

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In 1990, Lou Reed and John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, latterly famously not getting along, reunited to make Songs for Drella, a tribute/ musical biography of their first patron, Andy Warhol. Drella is a 15 song cycle which takes the listener through Andy’s life and career, from his early days in Pittsburgh, through success in New York, getting shot, latter-day isolation and and loneliness, and ending with an epitaph. The songs fit loosely together in chronological order. Here is the basic scheme: “Smalltown” sees Andy unhappy in Pittsburgh and dreaming of the big city; “Open House” describes the early days of the factory, when all and sundry stopped by and provided Andy with inspiration; “Style it Takes” gives an overview of some of Andy’s famous works and his working method; “Work” explains the considerable work ethic that underlay Warhol’s success; “Trouble with Classicists,” in what is presumably Andy’s voice, provides a series of opinions about “classicists”, “impressionists”, and “personalities”; “Starlight” appears to consider Andy’s flirtation with Hollywood, or Hollywood’s flirtation with him; “Faces and Names” kicks off the second section of the record and finds Andy in despair, something like a midlife crisis; “Images” details Andy’s philosophy of art and hits back at the critics of his method; “Slip Away,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and “I Believe” represent the nadir of the record in which Andy is warned about the people he associates with, confronts a junkie, and is shot by Valerie Solanis; “Nobody But You” sees Andy bereft of companionship hanging out and paying the price of dinner of a nobody; “A Dream” synthesizes all which has come before and puts Andy’s life into fuller perspective; “Forever Changed” sees Andy’s past slipping away; and “Hello It’s Me” represents Reed’s epitaph and apology to Warhol.

Some of the songs are better than others; specifically, I get comparatively little out of “Starlight,” “It Wasn’t Me” and “Forever Changed,” but every song has its place in the story of Warhol’s life and his influence on Reed and Cale, his circle, New York city, and the art world in general. This post will take up the first five songs as a bridge into a wider discussion of the meaning of “classicism” today. There may or may not be a part two to this post.

“Smalltown” is about leaving Pittsburgh, and introduces us to the fact that Andy was gay:

When you’re growing up in a small town
Bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty
People look at you funny
When you’re in a small town

New York is more to his liking, and provides a context for his art to flourish:

Where did Picasso come from
There’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh

I hate being odd in a small town
If they stare let them stare in New York City

The theme of small town boy (girl) made good in the big city is classic and well worn, of course, but Andy thrives in NYC, and soon “The Factory” is open to all comers (“Open House”):

Come over to 81st street I’m in the apartment above the bar
You know you can’t miss it, it’s across from the subway
and the tacky store with the Mylar scarves

Andy wants people around him, and this is one of the major themes of the record; his ability to work is dependent on company and inspiration from associates, peers, and even hangers-on:

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
The way to make friends Andy is invite them up for tea

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
Give people little presents so they remember me

Whereas “Smalltown” is loud and bracing, the music on “Open House” is soft, elegant, gentle even. But even in his halcyon early days in NYC Andy cannot entirely escape the demands of the market or of other people’s ideas of what he should be doing:

I think I got a job today they want me to draw shoes
The ones I drew were old and used
They told me — draw something new
Open house, open house 

You scared yourself with music, I scared myself with paint
I drew five-hundred fifty different shoes today
It almost made me faint
Open house, open house

Andy’s career takes off, and he clearly has something that people want–he has “The Style It Takes.”

You’ve got connections and I’ve got the art
You like attention and I like your looks
and I have the style it takes and you know the people it takes

I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art
It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket
‘Cause I’ve got the style it takes

Here, Reed and Cale delve into the perennial question of the definition of art–what’s good, what’s bad, and how do we know the difference? The answer which “Style It Takes” seems to offer is: the status of something as “art” is dependent upon someone with “style” telling so. This observation is at once banal (we know art is art because it hangs in a museum and because of the reverent hush of the patrons), and somehow inspiring (a kid from Pittsburgh, “bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty,” can take the New York art world by storm simply be possessing some quicksilver attribute called “style,” something so powerful that a simple box of soap pads becomes accepted as art less on its own merit and more on the strength of its association with Warhol, who by 1964 was rapidly ascending to the status of an icon). This song also sees the first appearance on the record of a little group called The Velvet Underground, who Andy “shows movies on.”

“I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art”–is this a populist claim or an elitist one? Is it classical? Certainly not classically classical, but is there not a way in which Warhol’s “pop art”–which is often read as representing the “emptiness” of modern popular culture, is perfectly sincere and actually uninflected with irony? Another major theme of the record is Andy’s work ethic–he was a working artist on whose sweat the whole Factory scene was dependent. Andy’s work ethic, according to Reed and Cale, even had a religious aspect. “Work” starts with Andy in prayer, and despite the neat twist on the phrase “Protestant ethic” here, we are left with the strong feeling that Andy was no self-ironizing dilettante, and that his blue-collar background stuck with him throughout his life:

Andy was a Catholic,
the ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother,
collecting gossip and toys
Every Sunday when he went to church
He’d kneel in his pew and he’d say,
“It’s work,
all that matters is work.”

He was a lot of things,
what I remember most
He’d say, “I’ve got to bring home the bacon,
someone’s got to bring home the roast.”
He’d get to the factory early
If you asked him he’d told you straight out
It’s work 

In “Work,” Andy stresses quantity over quality; just as he had painted 550 different shoes in “Open House,” here he advises Reed to write like there is no tomorrow:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough
He said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, “How many songs did you write?”
I’d written zero, I’d lied and said, “Ten.”
“You won’t be young forever
You should have written fifteen”
It’s work

But despite his working artist approach, Andy is not content to merely record the surface of what he sees. Neither, however, is he given to too much soul-searching or self-analysis about why he is who he is, or why he does what he does. “The Trouble with Classicists” is the central song on the record, the song where Reed and Cale get closest to defining Warhol’s attitude toward art. It is also here from which I was moved to take on the issue of classicism in our times:

The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree
That’s all he sees, he paints a tree
The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky
He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky

The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log
He doesn’t know who he is,
standing, staring, at this log {…}
That’s the trouble with impressionists 

If neither classicism nor impressionism, than who or what is Warhol drawn to? The answer is graffiti artists, of all things:

I like the druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains
I like their lack of training, their primitive technique
I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school
I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool
That’s the trouble with classicists

Let’s dig a little deeper. Cale, who sings “Classicists,” is himself famously a “classically trained” musician, who has drunk heavily of modernism and dissonance without surrendering what I still see as a fundamentally classical musical and aesthetic sensibility. Moreover, writing a song called “The Trouble with Classicists” in this day and age is in itself a classical act. This I think is a key point; whereas once upon a time a Romantic poet could have defined himself or herself in violent opposition to Classicism and made it stick, today, and perhaps even in Warhol’s day, the ability to criticize classicism as a form or style is evidence of a degree of learning and cultural literacy which can only be described as classical, and, yes, a little elitist.

Is this right? It sounds right, at least, and I would add the following: a) the vagueness with which I am approaching the question of a modern definition for classicism in these paragraphs is symptomatic of the generally pitiable state of true learning on that part of what Edward Said calls “the general intellectual”; b) Said’s general intellectual today tends also to be as Dean Williams has said a “profound modernist”–which is a nice way of saying someone who knows, and cares, very little about Western culture’s classical roots, very little about the Bible, very little about the great religion (at least in any fine grained way), probably very little about Shakespeare for that matter; c) today’s general intellectual knows very little about music compared with his 18th or 19th century counterpart. This is a point which Said makes in his chapter on Glenn Gould in On Late Style: “Today’s literary or general intellectual has little practical knowledge of music as an art, has hardly any experience playing an instrument or studying solfege or theory, and except for buying records or collecting a few names like Karajan and Callas, does not as a matter of course have a sustained literacy–whether that concerns being able to relate performance, interpretation, and style to one another, or recognizing the difference between harmonic and rhythmical characteristics in Mozart, Berg, and Messiaen–in the actual practice of music” (115). Any of my general intellectual readership care to take this argument on? If so, please produce 100 words on solfege without reference to Wikipedia before wading in.

My point, which is, I fear, on the verge of getting lost, is less that Warhol or for that matter Reed and Cale are in any specific way “classical,” but that because what Said calls the lack of “sustained literacy” in music on the part of the general intellectual is not confined to music, but extends to art, classical and great literature (how many of us who name drop Aristotle have actually spent any time reading him? how many of us who attempt to evince first-hand knowledge of Marx have actually broached Capital?), and philosophy. That is to say that the general intellectual today is apt not only to be a profound modernist, but also to be a profound generalist, who knows a miniscule amount about a huge number of things, a little bit about a few things, and knows almost nothing is any truly extensive or impressive detail. In this context, not only is “The Trouble with Classicists” deeply classical, not only is Classical Sympathies, by very virtue of its being and intent, classical, but any attempt to engage in a serious way with issues of aesthetic definition marks one out as both a classicist, and at least a minor elitist. Certainly Said, for all his “oppositional” stances and leftist politics, was both–but the question of how leftism and classicism can co-exist is best left for a latter date; it is time to stop work on this post and risk being called a fool.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Film My Dinner with Andre Part II: Andre in Poland

Note: This is the second in our series on the 1981 Film My Dinner with Andre. An early installment from first blog Classical Sympathies in 2009, this essay takes the Poland episode of My Dinner with Andre as a way into Andre Gregory’s search for “impulse” as a criterion of authenticity, moving carefully through the beehive workshop, Grotowski’s theatrical provocations, and the film’s broader tension between structured performance and lived spontaneity. Reading Andre’s retreat into experimental theatre, ceremony, and liminal group exercises, the piece argues that what appears to be a flight from social form is in fact only possible through highly artificial frames that permit “authentic” behavior to be staged, bracketed, and later resumed as ordinary life. Alongside close attention to the screenplay’s language of impulse, the essay folds in autobiographical reflection to test the boundary between experiment and everyday constraint, ultimately suggesting that Andre’s quest for unmediated action exposes both the appeal and the fundamental instability of authenticity as a lived ideal.

When we left off, Wally was just arriving at the fancy restaurant to which Andre had invited him. While Andre seems quite comfortable in his immediate surroundings throughout the film, he has not been well; in fact it is clear that he has experienced a prolonged period of painful self-questioning. Wally tells us in the voice-over that he re-connected with Andre only after a mutual friend (George Grassfield) found Andre weeping in the street:

George had been out walking his dog in some odd section of town when he had suddenly come upon a solitary man leaning against a crumbling building, sobbing uncontrollably. Well, George was about to walk by rapidly, as one does in New York, when he suddenly realized that the man was Andre {…} Andre explained to him that he’d been watching the Igmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he’d been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life” (19).

It turns out that a few years previously Andre had lost the ability to “live in his art,” and began to struggle with living his life as well. Wally meets Andre, they embrace (“I remember, when I first started working with Andre’s company, I couldn’t get over the way actors would hug when they greeted people. ‘Now I’m really in the theater’, I thought” (20)) and move to the bar. Wally tells Andre that he looks “terrific” to which Andre responds “Well, thank you. I feel terrible” (20). 

This exchange is a touchstone for the entire film, and also stands as a joke that can only be appreciated after seeing the whole film as the issue between how we read the surface expressions of our friends or lovers and how surface impressions often mask deeper issues and problems pervades the film. The exchange also indicates the shallowness of Wally’s observation of Andre at this point in the film, and his desire to simply get through the evening, even if this requires a reliance on cliche. Wally’s uncertainty about the state of his friendship with Andre and the state of the evening leads him to fall back on his “secret profession” as a private investigator. He begins to question Andre about his experiences and Andre begins his tale, which, from the very beginning, oscillates between profundity and absurdity, and between self-knowledge and self-pity.

About five years previous Andre had been invited to Poland to teach a workshop by a fellow director Jerzy Grotowski. He didn’t want to go “because, really, I had nothing left to teach. I had nothing left to say. I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t teach anything. Exercises meant nothing to me anymore. Working on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous. I didn’t know what to do” (22). Grotowski tells Andre to ask for anything he’d like as an attempt to lure him, and Andre responds: “If you could give me forty Jewish women who spoke neither English nor French, either women who have been in the theater for a long time and want to leave it but don’t know why, or young women who love the theater but have never seen a theater they could love, and if these women could play the trumpet or the harp, and if I could work in a forest, I’d come” (22). Grotowski can’t come up with forty Jewish women, but he comes close and finds forty women, plus some men, all of whom are questioning the theater and none of whom speak English. He also finds for Andre a forest which is populated by only “some wild boar and a hermit” (23). Andre agrees to go to Poland.

What we see here is that Andre, unable to live in his life or his art, is looking to get out of his comfort zone; he courts discomfort and discombobulation. He is, in short, a seeker. Once in the forest, Andre is adrift: “technically, of course, technically, the situation was a very interesting one, because if you find yourself in a forest with a group of forty people who don’t speak your language, then all your moorings are gone” (24). This potentially scary situation forces the participants back onto themselves in the absence of familiar structure, organization, hierarchy, or character. Andre likens what occurred in the forest to improvisation, but “in this case you’re the character, so you have no imaginary situation to hide behind. What you’re doing, in fact, is asking those questions that Stanislavski said that the actor should constantly ask himself as a character–Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? and Where am I going?–but instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself” (25-26). 

And indeed the first three quarters of the film is primarily dedicated to the story of Andre’s travels as he tries to answer precisely these questions. The Polish episode, which lasts for several minutes in the film and several pages in the script, has two parts; Andre attends a “beehive” in town and then decamps to the forest with his “workshop”. Grotowski tells Andre about the beehive which Andre decides to attend. Grotowski then asks Andre to lead the beehive: “And I got very nervous, you know, and I said, ‘Well, what is a beehive?’ And he said, ‘Well, a beehive is, at eight o’clock a hundred strangers come into a room.’ And I said, ‘Yes?’ And he said, ‘Yes, and then whatever happens is a beehive” (27).

The beehive begins with a women singing a song of St. Francis and the hundred strangers join in; when this runs its course Andre breaks up the activity. One woman in the group had brought a teddy bear, and Andre uses the bear as a means of breaking the frame of the beehive. The way he describes his action is revealing, and leads us into the main point of this post: “Now there is, of course, as in any improvisation or a performance, an instinct for when it’s going to get boring. So, at a certain point, but I think it may have taken an hour to get there, or an hour and a half, I suddenly grabbed this teddy bear and threw it into the air” (29-30). The singing ends, and the group re-forms into two circles doing a rhythmic dance; the teddy bear flies around the room; Andre “{gives} the teddy bear suck” (31); and a number of people cluster around some candles. “I felt in that moment I could go with my own impulse, you know, and follow my impulse instead of trying to be aware of the whole thing–I saw that Grotowski had his hand right in the flame and was holding it there {…} and I wondered if I could do it” (32-33). Andre succeeds in keeping his left hand, but not his right hand, in the flame, and in due time, the beehive having gone well, Andre wants to wrap it up. Again, he uses the word impulse: “My impulse is that if the show’s been good–get out and leave them laughing” (33). But what differs with this performance is that the participants won’t leave at any determined time, but rather “the farewell took two hours, at least, because nobody left until they had a true impulse to leave” (34). 

In the span of just a few minutes, Andre uses the word “impulse” four separate times. People leave the beehive at their own speed and on their own terms, and for Andre, in retrospect, this seems to have been the point of the exercise: “You see, also we’re talking about trying to find the truthful impulse, to not do what you should do or ought to do or what is expected of you, but trying to find what it is that you really want to do or need to do or have to do” (34).

The whole discussion of Poland, the beehive, and the forest is predicated upon Andre’s insecurity and inability to live either in his art or in his life. Thus, he is seeking some kind of liminal band where art and life meet and in which authentic action can be achieved. The key point here is that this liminal band, this performance space on the margins of art, where art bleeds into life and vice versa, is very much a constructed space. Andre is aware of this, and introduces the beehive explicitly as a type of performance: “I remember watching people preparing for this evening, and of course there was no makeup, there were no costumes, but it was exactly the way people prepare for a performance. You know, people sort of taking off their jewelry and their watches and stowing them away and making sure it’s all secure” (29). Likewise, at the end of the evening “everyone put on their earrings and their wristwatches and went off to the railroad station to drink a lot of beer and have a good dinner” (35). Presumably, over dinner and drinks the beehivers reverted to their “normal,” non-performative selves; after all, they were wearing their jewelry and their watches.

The point here is that although Andre’s account of the beehive suggests something both exciting and moving, the energy required to run the beehive, as well as the freedom required to act on impulse, are only made possible by the very artificiality of the scenario. The shedding of jewelry and watches is an indicator of the intentionality of the evening, a marker that tells us that the normal rules of daily life and human interactions will be suspended. So, while the beehive is not exactly theater, and not exactly performance, for most adults the impulse to throw teddy bears and hold one’s hands in candle flames can only be acted upon under deliberately constructed and constrained conditions. The challenge for Andre throughout his travels is how to “find the truthful impulse” within the context of everyday life.

Throughout the first three-quarters of the film Wally’s input into the conversation is limited almost entirely to “uh-huh,” “ha ha,” “God, really” and “So, what happened then?” We will see in a later post, however, that when Wally does become comfortable enough with the conversation he challenges Andre on exactly this point, asking if it is necessary to travel to the ends of the earth to have an authentic and “real” experience. Indeed, the issue of authenticity arises again and again throughout the film; one way that Andre and his group in Poland attempts to create authenticity is through ceremony. Ceremony, baptisms, mock funerals, sacraments, these are central features of “My Dinner with Andre,” and as Andre and his company prepare to leave the Polish forest his group engages in ceremony in order to celebrate his leadership: “On the final day in the forest the whole group did something so wonderful for me, Wally. They arranged a christening–a baptism–for me. And they filled the castle with flowers. And it was just a miracle of light, because they had set up literally hundreds of candles and torches. I mean, no church could have looked more beautiful” (36). One of the things which strikes me when watching the film is the extent to which Andre in his years of wandering seems to have depended on such ceremonial interludes–it is almost as if simple diurnal existence without explicit indexing of exceptionality and consecrated ceremony was not sufficient to satisfy his longing for authentic, meaningful experience.

So, where does this leave us? Certainly, we can relate to Andre’s desire to forge from ordinary experience a sense of life as sacrament and ceremony, can relate to the urge to transcend the mundanity of the daily grind, whether, as for Andre, this be embodied by “working on scenes” or by the routine of the office and one’s commute. But it is not as easy as all that. At the end of the film, Andre himself admits as much when he says: “I can imagine a life, Wally, in which each day would become an incredible, monumental creative task–a life in which everybody would just go with their impulses, all day long–they would just be themselves every moment, with others. And we’re not necessarily up to it” (109). But perhaps the problem lies deeper yet, and closer to the bone–the very strictures which Andre seeks to escape, those of form, of structure, of organizational reality, of hierarchy and deference, of repression of impulses and desires, these are what make social life in fact possible in the first place. Read thusly, Andre’s quest has about it an element of fundamental futility, of quixotic insistence on a purity of action that is unsustainable within the context of actual social life.

And yet, this is only one side of the argument. I fully understand the impulse behind the desire to act on impulse, understand as well the urge to create a space where anything goes, a space at once dangerous (in the range of actions that can be sanctioned by a sequestered zone which recognizes the viability of non-normal activity) and safe (in the fact that the other participants are trusted to remain “in-group,” and therefore to “behave” within the broadest definition of the term). When I was in university, some friends and I engineered an evening of “pants down.” Four of us sat around a friend’s dorm room sans trousers etc. and then attempted to act as normal as possible. One of us was gay. The exact rationale for the stunt now escapes me, but the general idea was to test to what degree pants were necessary for normal life to proceed. While nothing particularly memorable was said or done, the evening remains memorable: my primary memory is the initial frisson which accompanied the experiment–it felt like we were putting something on the line. Andre through the film suffers from a similar need to put himself on the line.

The trouble with authenticity and living on impulse is, simply, that one person’s authenticity is another’s callousness; one person’s impulse is another’s betrayal; one person’s honesty is another’s arrogance. Believe me on this last point, dear reader, for I know of what I write. Still, even for the more responsibly minded among us there are moments when the tissue which constrains our behavior within the realm of social acceptability begins to fray, and the liminal zone between life and art, between normality and some version of outre performance, may appear on our event horizon. In “My Dinner with Andre,” Andre moves from the intentional structuring of events in which the barrier between acceptable and bizarre may be broached, to simply ignoring this barrier altogether, and finally back to more class-appropriate activities such as telling tall tales of lost years over fine wines in a Manhattan restaurant. This is not to suggest, however, that Andre’s concerns are rendered in any way passe by the film–indeed the issues which his relentless self-questioning brings to bear haunt one past bedtime, and deep into the night.

* This post deals with pages 19-37 of the screenplay.

to be continued…

Posted on by Matt Thomas

Review of the Film Code 46

Note: We don’t do a lot of film reviews here, but Code 46 earns the exception—partly because Michael Winterbottom is one of my very favorite directors, and still wildly underrated, and partly because this film quietly seeps into you in a way that feels unshakable; set in a world that is clearly not ours but just similar enough to be discomforting—real Shanghai that isn’t quite real, deserts that feel earned, a system of “cover” and genetic law that replaces freedom without ever announcing itself—the film follows William, a kind of intuitive investigator who lives more than feels, and Maria, who works in a bureaucratic “fate factory” and senses, before she knows, that something is already off; their connection unfolds in fragments—interrogation as flirtation, impulse as rebellion, intimacy as violation—until the central truth emerges: in a world where memory can be edited and biology legislated, even love itself can be illegal; the genius of the film is its restraint.

Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton don’t overwhelm you with chemistry, which actually makes the relationship feel more provisional, more real, more doomed—and by the time the system reasserts itself (memory erased, lives restored, Maria exiled with the burden of remembering), you realize the film hasn’t been building to a climax so much as a quiet erasure; it’s less than 90 minutes, barely announces its futurism beyond small details (languages blending, empathy viruses, low-fi surveillance), and yet it lingers in a way much louder films don’t; it also clearly fed into the DNA of the Thin Man—this idea of movement through controlled spaces, of intuition over evidence, of relationships that feel both fated and structurally impossible—and in that sense it’s not just a film I admire, it’s one that got under the skin and stayed there.

Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46 is less a conventional sci-fi film than a drifting, half-lucid meditation on love, control, and memory. It runs under 90 minutes, but it feels strangely elongated—like a dream you keep slipping back into.

The hero, William (Tim Robbins), isn’t exactly living—he’s existing. A kind of insurance investigator, a “driver” moving through a world defined by pollution, restriction, and bureaucratic control. This isn’t the neon overload of something like Blade Runner—Shanghai here feels real, but off. The deserts outside the cities are harsh and empty; if people can’t get “cover” to move, there’s a reason. The world is closed, stratified, quietly oppressive.

William is established early as compassionate—at a checkpoint, he shows a kind of human softness that marks him apart. But he’s also slippery. He bluffs and charms his way through situations, his “cunning” explicitly noted as one of his professional tools. He doesn’t rely on evidence so much as intuition: “It’s intuition you’re paying for.”

Maria (Samantha Morton) narrates parts of the film, grounding it in something more intimate and unstable. Her sense of time is fractured—lucid dreaming, recurring visions, a sense that something is about to happen. “Every year I have this dream… is this the night I wake?” There’s a constant feeling that fate is closing in. She works in what is essentially a “fate factory,” issuing the cover documents that determine where people can go and what they can do. In this world, fate substitutes for freedom.

When William meets Maria, there’s an immediate sense of déjà vu—she feels she’s met him before. Their early interactions blend interrogation and flirtation. The dynamic is unusual: older man, younger woman, but the aesthetic—her shaved head, the stripped-down environments—blunts the cliché. Their connection feels tentative, exploratory. She tests him; he reads her. There’s attraction, but it’s not fully trusted on either side.

Their relationship develops in fragments: subway encounters, shared meals, small rule-breaking gestures. William knows she’s impulsive—she admits it. The film introduces the idea of engineered “viruses” that alter human ability—perfect pitch, empathy. It’s a strange, understated sci-fi touch that reinforces how mediated everything is, even emotion.

There’s a looseness to their chemistry. Robbins and Morton don’t generate overwhelming heat, but that actually works. The relationship feels uncertain, provisional—two people circling something they don’t fully understand. Their intimacy is uneven, sometimes tentative, sometimes urgent. Maria seems to need William more than he needs her, or at least she feels the stakes more sharply.

The world around them continues to intrude. There are hints of smuggling, of bureaucratic corruption, of quiet desperation. Maria has lived “outside” for ten years—without cover, presumably—which raises questions the film never fully answers. William’s moral stance, when it emerges, feels weak, almost performative.

When he returns home, he tries to reassert control—rejecting Maria, then calling her back. But the narrative destabilizes. A colleague dies; William is sent back to investigate. The technology—video links, surveillance—feels oddly low-fi, as if the future never quite fully arrived.

As William digs deeper, the film’s central taboo emerges. Maria has violated Code 46—a genetic restriction law. Through fragments of dialogue and investigation, William pieces together the truth: they are biologically too similar. A “50% match.” Worse, her mother was a clone—one of many. The implications are quietly devastating.

Maria’s past is altered—an illegal pregnancy erased, along with the associated “memory cluster.” Identity itself becomes unstable. Memory, love, and experience can all be edited, removed, rewritten.

Their attempts to escape—to flee together, to build something outside the system—feel almost doomed from the start. The idea of Jebel Ali, drawn from her father’s stories, becomes a kind of imagined refuge. But the system closes in. A car crash. Memory erasure. Reintegration.

In the end, William is returned home, restored to his life, his wife, his routine. Covered for. Maria, by contrast, is exiled—sent out into the desert with her memories intact. She becomes the one who remembers, who carries the weight of what happened.

The final note is pure loss. Lost love, stripped of even the possibility of reunion. Maria staring out into the distance, holding onto something the world has decided should not exist.

Code 46 is not a perfect film. It’s uneven, sometimes opaque, and emotionally muted in ways that can frustrate. But its ideas linger. It captures something rare: a future where control is soft but absolute, where love is possible but prohibited, and where memory itself becomes the final battleground.

It doesn’t hit you all at once. It seeps in.

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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine (Craig Finn’s Miniature Masterpiece)

Epigraph:

Jessamine must have had some dreams/ but she never really said what they were.

Craig Finn

Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Part I and Part II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: A Bathtub in a Kitchen and It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.

Jessamine is track 8 off of A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight 3 minutes and 25 seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived. 

Jessamine tells the story of a three week relationship between the narrator, who we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs, the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and Jessamine. I would love to write about The Year We Fell Behind as well, however Jessamine falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough. 

Jessamine is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song that it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. “The party ended suddenly, suddenly it’s over/ That left me and Esther all alone and getting older/ All alone and getting older smoking in the street/ Now everything is Esther and it’s been that way all week.”

Jessamine opens thusly:

I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill

Her dress all done in daffodils

The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”

And yeah, it probably did just what it said

Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The first verse foreshadows her ultimate fate. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was junior year of college with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my Art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.

Verse II adds a little more context.

I only knew her for like three weeks straight

And the whole time we were wide awake

You know “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?”

She had it spray-painted over her bed

It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valance from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded saying “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.

The wording “three weeks straight” implies that C. and Jessamine were, temporarily, inseparable, sleep deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard of the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.

Verses III and IV introduce Jessamine’s death obsession, and to me anyway suggest that she is what I would call a kind of a goth.

We used to hang around her room

Getting off on all the gloom and the doom

Watching cavemen in the cartoons

Playing xylophones made out of bones

She was sexy, but still death-obsessed

She said the bloodshed makes such a mess

But you really don’t even have to market it

Yeah, it pretty much sells itself

Now I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, like Jessamine, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.

Jessamine has a number of semi-chourses, and the first one goes like this: 

I should’ve asked her before she departed

How did all these wars get started?

Why do rival crews show up to the same parties

If they hate each other so much?

It’s like they’re secretly in love

Again, we foresee Jessamine’s demise up front. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure, however the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling. However, it is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.

Verse V and Chorus II go like this:

She said, “Suspicion isn’t wisdom

And the drones look just like doves”

And there was something laying siege to her kingdom

But she never really said what it was

While the incense turned to ashes

And the sunrise was unsure

Jessamine musta had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine musta had some dreams/ But she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams; instead this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.

The next verse and chorus show that Jessamine in the end, and probably in the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship.

We kinda ended how we began

With Jessamine meeting a man

And liking that man just a little bit more

Than the boy she had before

I hadn’t even seen her since

I guess this new guy was some kind of prince

I guess his castle was a front for some fence

And then the whole damn city got warm

And they were trying to ride out that storm

Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature, Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make, her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent (so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world), and the whole damn city mirrors Jessamine’s flightiness. The crush is over; C. is dumped and he never sees her again. That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships–while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on and the moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.

The next verse points toward C. getting over Jessamine, and alludes to the idea that what may seem for a time to be a storm will pass; a crush, with all its power, is also somewhat illusory.

‘Cause the rain is inconsistent

And the thunder is insincere

‘Cause it makes a big commotion

But eventually it clears

The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.

I went out to San Francisco

And some sailor stole my shirt

I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi

The first time that I heard

That she was probably speeding

And no one else was hurt

Jessamine must’ve had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.

Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.

I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.

Dedication:

For goth girls everywhere.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”
On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”