"Our Happiness Is Guarenteed" - Quasi

Hello, old friend. It's been a while, hasn't it? 

Today's song comes from a band that I'm ashamed to realize that I've yet to write about - Quasi. Comprised of Janet Weiss (who you probably know from Sleater-Kinney and/or Wild Flag) and her husband Sam Coomes, the group was originally conceived as a drums and keyboards (and etc.) duo in the mid-'90s, with an occasional bassist added in since then. Although I first discovered them at the Hideout/Touch & Go Block Party in 2006 touring off of When The Going Gets Dark, their favorite album of mine (and of many others) is probably 1997's Featuring "Birds". Quasi has never been a "feel-good" band, always keen to expose the darker side of life, politics, the universe and everything and their best song exposes just how skilled they are at turning pessimism into insightful, energizing music.

"Jeff Davis County Blues" - Mountain Goats

I'm sweating as I write this. Even sitting next to my propped-open window as it clamps down tight to cradle a humming box fan, I can still feel the day's trapped heat leaking out of streets and sidewalks. Living with heat like this wasn't a skill I learned growing up, as I was always ensconced in the artificial chill of air-conditioning at home or school. It wasn't until I started driving in high school that I really began to dig the heat. I'd drive to my baseball games or, later on, home from work on a grounds crew and, even though I was already soaked with sweat, I'd leave the windows down. After a while I would start to thrive on the heat, enjoying the way it surrounds you like a physical medium and how it allows you to live intensely in the moment.

"Like Dreamers Do" - The Radiators

This weekend was a bizarre time to be in Chicago. Ours was a schizophrenic city with its attention divided between baseball, beer and batons (in fact, perhaps the only thing we in the city didn't obsess over was the actual substance of the NATO summit). Twitter feeds and news cameras may have runneth over with downtown protestations but in most neighborhoods people were more concerned with finding a cool place to lounge about in the luxuriant mid-90s swelter. It was a sentiment that, after a few hours of watching NATO coverage I myself shared - the need to step back, exhale and live in the moment with what's in front of me, unconcerned with external events. As you might expect, I achieved this most easily with aid of music.

"Bridges, Squares" - Ted Leo & the Pharmacists

...here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came...                                                                                                                       - William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey 

There's something about Sunday nights that always make me reflective (as does the changing of the seasons), so you'll forgive me if I wax a little poetic. You see, this evening I went for a walk and, as so often happens when I go for a vernal constitutional, I put on "Bridges, Squares" and let my mind wander. When it wanders, my thoughts inevitably turn to my own aging, William Wordsworth, the progress of human history and Francis Fukuyama. To say the least, this is an incredibly evocative song with more going on than initially meets the eye.

How A Resurrection Really Feels - The Hold Steady

I was at a show last weekend and I mentioned to an acquaintance that I'd given up beer for Lent when he looked at me, a little surprised and said "don't take this wrong way but you're not the kind of person I expected to be religious." Leaving aside my beliefs about the equivalency between belief and metaphysics, the positive power of organized belief or any other religious justifications, let me just say that I took his statement as a compliment.

Yes, I'm a Catholic. Not even of the "lapsed" variety (at least not entirely), which might be a bit more common in the music world, Craig Finn and I have that in common. Without sounding too much like some guy with an acoustic guitar who wants to tell how how Jesus is the biggest "rock star" of all time, I would like to argue that religion and rock are just as natural bedfellows as foes. While at best, most people might cop to being "spiritual but not religious", organized religion and music subcultures fill a lot of the same basic needs. They're centered around ways of trying to understand the world each with it's own group worship sessions and holy books/songs to be mediated upon at home. In the same way that cops and criminals often end up with more similarities to each other than to others they know, I feel like religion and rock (or "underground culture" in general) are often just doing the same thing differently. Anyway, that's the kind of thing I often think about this time of year as I punch up The Hold Steady on my headphones for it's annual heavy Lenten/Easter rotation.

Celebrate Leap Day With Chisel!

Sometimes spring is just as much a state of mind as a season and today was one of those days. Chicago may have had an historically warm winter this year but that doesn't mean that it was an easy one. Personally speaking, this season has been more than its usual grind. So it was without shedding a tear for my beloved snow that never fell, that I awoke to nearly 60 degree temperatures with a smile on my lips and spring in my step. On these early spring-like days I'm a sucker for two things - driving with the windows down and relentlessly energetic music. So with my trebly speakers blaring out the open windows, I headed off to work this morning, my ears full of Chisel and my head full of Leap Day cheer.

"Fred Jones, Pt. 2" - Ben Folds

There are certain times in our lives when we're just perfectly wired to GET music. Times of change and upheaval, times of questioning and times when we're unsure of ourselves leave us vulnerable and searching. We search for answers, for reassurance, for something that can ground us and pop music is an ever-ready, sympathetic companion with whatever answer you want (or hopefully need) to hear.


I don't know much about Ben Folds' personal life, but it seems to me that he must have been in some state of change while writing his debut solo album, Rockin' The Suburbs. If he wasn't, then his characters sure as hell were, with almost every song but the title track featuring people breaking up, moving, giving up, having kids, etc. It was just the sort of album that is almost dangerous to give an eighteen year old kid, wrapped in the narcissistic melancholia of getting ready to go to college. It can lead to prolonged mopeyness, exaggerated attempts at ennui and occasionally a few worthwhile reflections on life. I speak from experience here.

Wildside - Scott H. Biram

Scott H. Biram. The man Just. Doesn't. Give. A fuck. And it shows. The so-called "Dirty One-Man Band" has been playing scuzzy Americana and bluegrass with a punk fervor and ethos since the mid-nineties, but he won his fame as a solo act with an old-fashioned mic and a hollow-body Gibson. This is a guy who built his reputation by surviving a crash in his truck, then performing from his wheelchair, IV's and all. Most of his music is aggressive and angry and heavily steeped in a Depression-era (and earlier) folk and blues tradition that used music was cheap therapy for life's crushing problems. His albums are mostly filled with tales of loss, desperation, deprivation, in short, the darker side of life.

But sometimes even someone like Scott H. Biram discovers a riff so magical and melancholy that even he can't help but crank it out, pen some fitting lyrics and then get the hell out of the way. When done right, it's a beautiful thing (see, "The Passenger") reminding us that great music is often compelling due to its simplicity. "Wildside" is a perfect example of that, a great intro to Scott H. Biram, even though it sounds little like the rest of his songs. It appeared on his 2009 Bloodshot album, appropriately titled Something's Wrong / Lost Forever and it manages to meld that glass three-quarters empty outlook with a sliver of hope and an series of power chords that would make most ax-men salivate. It's a song of optimism that pessimists can get down to and vice-versa.

"Unhappy" - OutKast

Music is one of life's great mood regulators. When you're feeling good, music affirms you and when things are going well it alternately helps you wallow or find strength. This has been a tough week with minor illness personally, major health problems in my family and more things to do than time to do them in. Oh, and it's been cold and rainy all week. It's precisely this type of week upon which the foundation of modern popular music - the blues - was built. However, straight-up bluesmen are scarcer these days than scientists at a Rick Perry rally. Rock has mostly left its 12-bar roots behind for garage-y power chords and genre hopping while modern R&B is heavy on "R" with no time for po-faced done-me-wrong tales of woe. So in the 21st century we're left to take our solace where we can find it and for my money, there are few better modern blues songs than Big Boi's 2003 cut, "Unhappy".

"Three Button Hand Me Down" - The Faces

I've reached that point in my life. It's not a strictly "good" or "bad" thing, but it's definitely happening. You don't imagine that it's gonna happen to people your age, at least not in large numbers, and yet all of a sudden, there it is, happening all around you. I'm referring of course, to the time in your life when all your friends start getting married. Besides being besieged with nuptial news via social network, I've already seen two high school friends tie the knot and am a week away from seeing a couple of friends from college do the same.


At times like this, it's hard not think about the important things in life, like clothing. If you're a man who shares my mindset then you know that weddings are nothing more than crude negotiations between hosts and guests that go as follows, "OK, you dress up for three hours and tell my wife how beautiful she looks and I'll provide bottomless booze and restaurant-quality food to soak it up." As someone whose long abhorred the discomfort and ridiculous airs that are involved in putting on pinstriped wool and a dangling triangle of silk to go to a suburban hotel ballroom, I have to say that I've actually been coming around the the joys of a well-tailored suit for such occasions.

"Johnny Appleseed" - Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros

Transmission of ideas has always been something that's interested me. As a history major, I'm attuned to how the spread of concepts, the course, speed and mechanism of their journey alter both global and personal history. Writing about music also brings up this idea, because, it is by its very nature at attempt to spread both musical content and analysis. You do it because you're passionate enough about something that you feel compelled to share your opinions and passions (and also self-important enough to think they might appeal to anyone).

"Desperate" - Rogue Wave

Like every other bearded white male my age writing about music, Nick Hornby was one of the people who first turned me on to the idea of writing about music. Sure, High Fidelity got me hooked but it was a first printing of his Songbook, complete with CD, given to me by a friend of my father's that really turned me on. In it, he has an essay about the difficulty of being a Rod Stewart fan, going from The Faces to good solo work to the crime against music (taste?) that is "If You Think I'm Sexy". At the time I didn't really process what Hornby was talking about. I was just getting into music and I started with the big names: The Beatles, Bod Dylan, the Pixies, The Clash. These were icons who seemed to be bottomless fonts of musical genius. 

"Nightswimming" - R.E.M.

I always feel conflicted towards the end of summer. No matter how hot or long, I'm always loathe to say goodbye to another year's worth of warmth. Even though autumn holds the promise of color and cool, we all know that we're still inevitably a little closer to the dark and cold. R.E.M. captured this feeling perfectly in Automatic For The People's penultimate track, "Nightswimming." Pitchfork recently crowned it the 73rd best song of the 90's (obviously) and it's no wonder, as it shows the band at their money-down best.

"40 Bucks" - The Hold Steady

"Craig Finn is an Irish poet!"


That was me, talking to (err, yelling at) a friend two years ago. At the time the Hold Steady was in the midst of absolutely destroying a 90 minute set to close out a Chicago block party, which might be the perfect showcase to see these boozy Minnesota-via-Brooklynites who sound like Zeppelin meets the Clash with a little Kerouac thrown in for good measure. Finn is the band's songwriter and he writes dense, intertwining narratives about invented characters that stretch across albums. His songs manage to be both cerebral and visceral and have that ring of vérité that comes from writing out of experience.


The Hold Steady have never been afraid to reserve classic songs for B-Sides or other non-album sources (see: "Girls Like Status" and "You Gotta Dance (With Who You Came With)") and "40 Bucks" is perhaps the ultimate example of this. The song came as a bonus download with the purchase of their 2009 live album, A Positive Rage and has never, to my knowledge, been played live but it's one of those songs that in another, better reality would be a massive radio hit.

When The Month Changes Numbers It's Time To Go

Life goes faster as you get older, it's a fact. I'm not too young to realize that if I'm already starting to feel this way, aging will not be as much like becoming a fine wine as I've been led me too believe. So besides saying "Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit" as soon as I wake up (as a friend's grandmother once taught me long ago), I also try to mark the turning of calendar pages with a song that helps me put the loss of another 30 days into perspective.

Tonight's entry is from Leslie Feist, a singer probably know best for her irresistable, but sadly over-exposed 2007 single "1, 2, 3, 4", but this song is from a half-decade earlier, before she joined Broken Social Scene or released her own debut album.

Robbie Fulks - "Let's Kill Saturday Night"

Country music can be a tricky passion for the Stuff White People Like-crowd that so often frequents the mp3 blogs. One crowd feels icky about the Wal-Mart, plastic Nashville, Garth Brooks/Toby Keith-aura that many associate with the genre. There are others who risk censure for "ironic" appropriation of poor white working-class music that smacks of condescension.

Track Review - "On Warmer Music" - Chisel

“On Warmer Music”

A fitting call-to-arms for this blog, “On Warmer Music” is the lead track off Chisel’s third and final album, Set You Free. Chisel was Ted Leo’s first band with bassist Chris Norberg and drummer John Dugan. They formed at Notre Dame and were indie stalwarts throughout the 90s, turning out three albums and assorted singles of wickedly catchy and fuzzy mod-punk before breaking up in 1997.