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Albums of Our Lives: Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads’ Rock Immortal
Go home, back to my parents’ house; open the closet door; find the three boxes buried in the corner; dig them out; drag them out; peal off the duct tape and take out their contents: notebooks, photo...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Three Songs from the Pixies’s Surfer Rosa
Halloween afternoon, my senior year of high school. At the end of the school day, shadows already stretch from the huge white pines near Newton Square. The Pixies’s record Surfer Rosa came out in the...
View ArticleWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Diana Whitney reviews Cynthia Cruz’s poetry collection, Wunderkammer, meaning “cabinet of curiosities.” This is a book of “delicious… detail.” Cruz’s poems, Whitney declares, “have a wry sense...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Björk’s Debut
Every artistic genius stupefies us in their own way. In the case of Björk, listening to her is like peering through a glass darkly. Björk evokes—screaming, gasping, and gliding her vocal instrument...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm
I’m out for a run on a beautiful sunny day in March, a rarity in this famously dreary part of the country, and I’m listening to Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm. I’m listening to Silent Alarm now, ten years...
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Albums of Our Lives: Les Savy Fav’s Go Forth
Not too long ago I woke up and for no particular reason immediately started humming the coda of a fairly unremarked upon Les Savy Fav song called “Pills.” It’s a real humdinger. I think it is about...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: The National’s High Violet
Sorrow found me when I was youngSorrow waited, sorrow won.I’ve always known depression by the way it makes me feel like there’s no way for me to make eye contact with the world. Depression is too much...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Guided by Voices’s Alien Lanes
I discovered Guided by Voices fifteen years ago, while miserably married and fully employed, teaching ESL in Atlanta. In those days, I was earning money for curtains, towels, and bedspreads. Instead of...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: The Cure’s Disintegration
Picture me, if you will, in the fall of 1989: skinny, befreckled, wearing an army jacket and a pair of Chuck Taylors. Standing alone. Bangs self-consciously plastered to one side of my forehead in my...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Beck’s Odelay
Was that a sample or something that just sounds like a sample? There are sounds like this on Beck’s Odelay that seem somehow out of place and totally at home. The screeching guitars and smooth sax in...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs
A dozen years ago, I came back from class to a dorm room of unfamiliar music. My freshman roommate Tara handed me a silver CD with “Ben Folds—Rockin The Suburbs” scrawled in black Sharpie. “It’s really...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City
After living in Cambodia for two years, I spent June in New York City. I was disoriented, cold, jumpy. I couldn’t understand the thick way cashiers spoke, and I couldn’t navigate the Union Square...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree
When my daughter Cassidy was tiny, I used to sing her an old Mountain Goats song, “Cubs in Five.” I liked it because it was quirky and witty and lo-fi in the ways I liked my music back then. I liked it...
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Albums of Our Lives: Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports
1/1I offer to sleep on the floor. “Be not silly!” Emily says. Her bed is stark white. So is everything else in her room except a mostly blue painting of a Romanesque woman that she had done.It is...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Scissor Sisters’s Night Work
When Scissor Sisters’s Night Work came out during the summer of 2010, I was working at the mall—again. It probably wasn’t the night work Jake Shears was singing about, but music generously allows...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade
Now come one, come all to this tragic affair.Wipe off that makeup, what’s in is despair.So throw on the black dress, mix in with the lot.You might wake up and notice you’re someone you’re not.At my...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac
All I can do is drive. Past cornfields and cotton fields. Past churches and casinos. Past fireworks stands and billboards asking, “Got Jesus?”His voice leads me forward: “I met a girl in...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
The summer of 2012 was my worst summer.Let me preface that by saying that the details aren’t very mind-blowing. Nothing impressively terrible occurred. But the only way I could feel somewhat okay was...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity
What’s your favorite song?My fingers hovered over my phone and Tim’s text. We’d both anticipated hearing Damages, Jimmy Eat World’s eighth and newest album, the month leading to its June 11, 2013,...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight
I live in a two-bedroom apartment above a bar called Whiskey Rebel with a roommate who leaves banana peels in the bathtub, and I have a broken heart. When he finally left me, we were sitting on the...
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