For the last 45 days, I’ve been participating in another Blue Sky music challenge: #UncoolTwo50. Organized by the account @uncooltwo50.bsky.social, the idea is to is…
For me, 2005 was an entirely new era for the discovery of and interaction with music—establishing habits and patterns that I basically still follow today. Many of those tracks I added in those first few months of the iPod age are still among my most played and most beloved songs.
A plodding piano ballad about abortion was being played on mainstream radio stations across the country. Only in 1997 could something like this happen. It seemed weird at the time. But so did the Spice Girls.
Being There still feels monumental 25 years later. It also announced the arrival of Wilco: The Band That Jams and Takes Risks. Risks like recording a double album, opening it with a 45-second drums-and-feedback freakout, and then spending the next 76 minutes alternating between ennui-filled ballads and surreal-nonsense-filled bangers.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of its release The details of that night are fuzzy, but I remember it was bitter cold. I…
The lyrics are impressionistic, aside from a clear, early reference to the victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius—a tragedy that may or may not keep coming up throughout the song and may or may not serve as a stand-in for the tragedy of 9/11. Who knows? The meaning of a dream is rarely overt. More likely, you’re left with just the feelings it inspired—and everyone you describe it to is going to have a different interpretation.
Now, my knowledge of firearms is limited at best, but I do know this: You load shotgun cartridges with rock salt, not rifles. (At least I’m pretty sure, based on 30 minutes of research and a few Tarantino movies.)
Perhaps no band’s lyrics better lend themselves to pseudo-academic analysis than those of The Decemberists. The Annotated Decemberists is an attempt to puzzle through the Portland, Oregon,…
Two songs enter. One song leaves. Well, OK, both leave. It’s not like we erase all traces of the losing song from the Internet, but…
Let’s see if you can identify the song it references. To answer your next question–“What, is this blog a webcomic now?”: Yes, apparently it is.…