alternative rock
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Albums of Our Lives: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Before you came along, I don’t think I actually had a musical identity.
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Sound Takes: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
At once soothing and horrifying, it became for me the soundtrack of grief and hope for my wounded city and country.
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Albums of Our Lives: My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade
The summer before my final year at college, my fear started to manifest as an anxiety disorder specializing in sickness and disease.
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Albums of Our Lives: Ben Folds’s Rockin’ The Suburbs
“Annie Waits” summed me up in ways that I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time and not only because Annie was my childhood nickname.
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Albums of Our Lives: Beck’s Odelay
A friend once showed me his dad’s copy of the Beatles’s White Album and said you could find secret messages hidden in the lyrics. I tried to look for the same things in Odelay, but it resisted.
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Woman-Size: Female Image-Making and PJ Harvey
A raw video of a diminutive woman howling “I’m the king of the world!” and nearly eating the camera was a welcome assault on late-night TV. It’s why I stayed up on a school night.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Cure’s Disintegration
The end is always tragic. I’d known that from the start. What kind of sucker would expect to hold on to a girl named Misty Hayes?
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Albums of Our Lives: The National’s High Violet
I wanted to feel sheltered under the cathedral of his voice, to feel, always, the way his songs made me feel.
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Song of the Day: “Fall On Me”
The pioneering alternative rock band R.E.M. officially disbanded in 2011, after more than 30 years making music that defied description. Allegedly, singer Michael Stipe chose the band’s name in 1980 by picking it at random from a dictionary. The reference…