Mimesis of Girlhood in Three Acts featuring Bright Eyes
In those days, it was not uncommon for me to dream about having sex with Matt Damon and wake from those dreams convinced it was possible.
...more
Posts Tagged: Rumpus music
Songs of Our Lives: Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
There’s you and him, and you and me. You seem to want each of us all to yourself, and that’s fine; you’re the one we both care about.
...more
Elegy with Records on the Doorstep
The old music still filled pits in him like sawdust and wood glue do a nail hole. The songs didn’t say anything new over the years, but they provided home when he missed it.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: As Cities Burn’s Come Now Sleep
Most often, I do not speak when I am alone. That morning I sat on the couch and said Oh my God. I said it aloud, again and again, Oh my God.
...more
My Life with Annie Lennox: Nostalgia
I don’t use the term “lifelong hero” frivolously. There are a lot of people I respect and wish to emulate; Annie Lennox, however, is the only “lifelong hero” I’ll ever have. I need her.
...more
Sound Takes: You Want it Darker
There are hard lessons about aging and dying and living on You Want It Darker that we’re not going to ever be done with until we either cure death or forget Leonard Cohen.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Mister Loveless’s Grow Up
These golden years, precious and ephemeral, are falling in pieces at your feet everywhere you turn, and part of you thinks, let them. You almost wish, despite yourself, for this all to just go faster.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight
Something about the twangy banjo and the melancholy vocals just made me feel less alone. And I hated being alone.
...more
Sound Takes: Schmilco
For a band wreathed with as many indictments as laurels, as many charges of settling into post-avant-garde “dad-rock” as praise for their artistry, it’s no surprise that Wilco’s always been preoccupied with getting reborn.
...more
On Self-Reliance: Frank Ocean as Emersonian Hero
As Emerson recognizes, someone who couldn’t care less about how they come across is all the more charismatic and convincing.
...more
Sound Takes: A Charlie Brown Christmas
But what distinguishes Guaraldi from his superiors is his respect for the tried and true. If “O Tannenbaum” has worked for a few hundred years, maybe it’s worth kicking around the block a time or two.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity
Regardless of where or how I listen to the CD, I can still imagine myself in the car’s passenger seat, smell Tim’s cologne, or see the sun setting in a mix of fiery colors beyond us.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
When I first heard Brian Sella’s sweet, pathetic voice sing these words, they seared a sense of guilt into me.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac
In her voice, I am held, cradled even. I am equal parts longing and hope. I am home.
...more
Songs of Our Lives: Stereolab’s “Pause”
“Pause,” like the nostalgia it references, possesses the qualities of ceremony. My ceremony: I played and replayed this song that year, transforming past into present into past over and over.
...more
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.
...more
My Life with Annie Lennox: A Christmas Cornucopia
Perhaps part of what prompted me to get clean and sober was the fact I kept making myself uncomfortable.
...more
Sound Takes: Good Advice
Look at the hand on the cover: it is an older hand, an experienced one. It is an empathetic hand.
...more
A Ringing in Your Ears That Would Disappear by Morning
Soon, you would discover the local isle of misfits. Every town has at least one if you do some digging. Yours was The Boathouse.
...more
Songs of Our Lives: Guns N’ Roses’s “Paradise City”
When people asked what I was going to do after high school, I said, “Leave town.” I wasn’t kidding. I hadn’t applied to a single college.
...more
Sound Takes: Here the Blue River & Rumpus Video Premiere
She takes a simple story and turns it into something the listener can hold in the palm of their hand.
...more
My Life with Annie Lennox: Honestly
Oh, Annie, I thought, opening a can of beer. We’re going to be okay. Aren’t we?
...more
The Recipe to Decolonized Love is in Beyoncé’s Lemonade
“There is a curse that will be broken,” she promises.
...more
You’re Just a Sinner I Am Told: Prince & the Sexual Revolution
It was all about desire, including women’s desire, Prince’s music. Women were not degraded. They were exalted, body and mind both.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports
I drifted off and dreamed that Emily and I donned riding hoods and ran through the forest to escape from wolves.
...more
My Life with Annie Lennox: Don’t Let it Bring You Down
Whereas I once was “Abby, the girl who harbored a ridiculous but harmless amount of love for that weird ’80s singer, Annie Lennox,” I was now suddenly “Abby, the girl most parents might want their teenage children to avoid.”
...more
Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree
I knew if I could make it out of town, make it to college, I would survive. But I wasn’t sure I would.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City
Could the idea of a god be reconciled with the things I saw around me? This question obsessed me in my last month in Cambodia.
...more
A Year in the Life: Deadlines, A Love Story
Deadlines make me crazy. They cause me anxiety, sleepless nights, and self-hatred, but they also make me work very hard, and to manage to always, somehow, so far, pull it off.
...more
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.
...more