Concept albums are notoriously tough to pull off, but with the Roots’ eleventh album Undun, the legendary crew has triumphed, using a boatload of artists and instruments to craft a focused, sonically surprising, socially-relevant tragedy more…
We played up and around the Northwest this weekend, and low vitamin-D combined with the dreary similitudes of the hockey arenas of winter touring left me reaching for the medicine of earnest music. I chose a Tennessean…
While I sit here watching BET with my father in my grandmother’s house in Fuquay-Varina, NC, I’m overcome with self-loathing. I hate being white. I hate my fragile, pasty skin, I hate my foppish lankiness, and…
Before sending my first letter to Jake, I ought to provide the reader with some details about this person I’ve chosen to be the sole beneficiary of my wisdom and experiences. Because the reader might wonder…
Bill Ryder-Jones is the ex-lead guitarist for neo-psychedelic Brit-rockers, The Coral. His debut solo album, If…, is a soundtrack to an imaginary adaptation of Italo Calvino’s po-mo masterpiece, If on a winter’s night a traveler… There…
Don’t think just because I’m a lifelong Broncos fan I was one of those people chanting “Tebow” at the beginning of the 2011–2012 NFL season. I didn’t (and don’t) want him as our starting quarterback. But I…
I went out on a date last night. She’s a singer from Spokane, and she’s in town to meet a mutual friend of ours to co-write. We’re in Vegas—ugh. I’m there to fake-play on the ACAs,…
Alex Gilvarry’s debut novel, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, is about a young Filipino who comes to New York to conquer the fashion world. The story takes place in the aftermath of September 11th,…
I’m on a hot streak of aborted tweets. Meaning I keep thinking of tweets, and then decide against them, either because I’m lazy or driving or because they’re not very clever. But then… what if they…
I don’t know what this adds up to exactly, but eating depresses me. It doesn’t depress me because it makes me sad, though. It depresses me when it makes me happy. Like, “Damn this egg sandwich…
I was eating breakfast alone, at the counter, at the Route 101 Coffee Shop on Franklin, where they filmed a scene from Swingers. A woman took the stool beside me. She had on a round brimmed felt…
It was nine on Sunday morning as I crossed through the slots in the Monte Carlo, on my way to the food court Starbucks. Las Vegas had taken its toll, and I needed provisions: coffee, water,…
During my first winter in Los Angeles there have been two particularly windy days; days when the wind was enough to knock dead palm fronds from the trees lining my Echo Park street. The first was…
“Is it still snowing out there?” Sharon Van Etten asked a bundled up, sold out crowd at the Black Cat in Washington, DC. “Yes!” they shouted, some bitter, some excited. “Man,” she said, tuning her guitar.…
I’m sitting here in the Claremont Colleges’ library, confronted with a distinctly collegiate conversation. It’s two girls: one pretty and husky voiced, the other plain and young sounding. They are, ostensibly, studying together. But the husky…
I just witnessed a gruesome accident at Franklin and Wilton in East Hollywood. I was heading north, crossing Franklin, in the crosswalk barely behind an older woman in a purple jumpsuit. A PT Cruiser with used…
Last week I drove with Elizabeth from The New Kroger, Milledgeville, Georgia, where temps were peaking around seventy, to Liz’s hometown of Traverse City, Michigan. It’s a two-day trip, and we stayed one night in a…