I haven’t been listening to many records this year. This is unusual for me. Hell, my record player is sitting disconnected on my dining room table (the toddler loves nothing more than playing with the lid of the turntable and yanking around the arm and cartridge), but that’s not why I haven’t been spinning vinyl.

Since January, I’ve been listening to a single playlist again and again and again. Every night, for hours on end. Starting at about 8:30 pm and going until 1:00 or 2:00 am. The songs on this playlist have created note-perfect neural grooves in my gray matter. It’s made me think a lot about how soundtracks shape the world around them.

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Ask most writers about their writing routine, and you’ll find that every book has its own soundtrack. A mix tape or playlist, an album or artist that played on repeat during the writing of the novel. One of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon (whose Substack you should absolutely check out and subscribe to), said this about his own process:

I always listen to music when I work. I find that I’ll be listening to something for years, then I change project and it doesn’t work anymore. On Telegraph Avenue, I was listening to 1960s and 1970s soul jazz and jazz funk — I call it backbeat jazz. I discovered this music in the process of writing the book. I listened to it and it even became incorporated in the prose in some way.1

There is something about the shape of the music that helps shape the world of the novel, and in the case of a novel like Telegraph Avenue (or, I suspect Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, etc., etc.), I cannot fathom how you would go about writing without being immersed in a very specific sonic playground.2

The repeated nightly ritual of putting the little monster to bed, finishing dinner, putting on my headphones, and opening my narrow writing desk creates something of a trance. Some of that may be exhaustion—I’ve likely been up since six. But more than the fatigue, it’s the music of Pennhollow that sets me down in 1940s Pittsburgh. Some days I’m surprised I don’t have soot on my shoulders when I finally stand to go to bed.

One of the few deliberate choices I made when writing Pennhollow was that the music—the swing and bop, the clubs, the postwar tension—and the city of Pittsburgh had to be fully formed characters in their own right. Music and city were always intertwined. Jazz flowed through the Hill; making both central to the novel was less a choice than a necessity.

Making the music and the city central features of the book gives shape, but each presents its own challenges. We’ll talk a bit more about music in a moment, but a quick note about writing Pittsburgh as a character. The city is one of the few in the United States that is immediately and only itself. Columbus is Indianapolis is Des Moines is Omaha. When you are dropped in New York or New Orleans or San Francisco, you know instantly where you are. Pittsburgh is the same way.

And yet, there’s not much of a literary language that sustains Pittsburgh as a place. Chabon has done more than anyone recently to create a literary Pittsburgh with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. Maybe he’s the only writer lately who has broken through using Pittsburgh as place. You have August Wilson, of course. If I wrote that a woman is walking down Bleecker Street or Baker Street, meandering through the Tenderloin or the Left Bank—I bet in your head you’re thinking, “New York, London, San Francisco, Paris.”

But if I write Wylie Avenue, the Strip District, or Walnut Street? You’re probably coming up blank.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Billie Holiday is the muse I invoked each night as I sat down to write. The first song on the playlist is “Lover Man,”3 which one of the characters whispers into the ear of another character in the opening chapter as they dance at the Musician’s Club.

Lady Day is, to my mind, the sine qua non of jazz singers. In a novel overflowing with music (the first twenty-three songs on the playlist appear in the novel, in that order), this is the song that we first encounter. She captures more in a slight break in her voice than the most “perfect” singers in the game. There is something deeply human about Billie, something just devastating, and that is the mood I wanted to set for the book. “Lover Man” was the first song I wanted readers to hear when moving through Pennhollow. I think the first chapter of any book is something of a contract with the reader. By the end of the chapter, the reader should know what to expect from the novel; I don’t mean that the reader should understand the plot or every one of the characters, but there probably shouldn’t be something that is formally shocking later. The tone and the mood should be established. Billie tells you all you need to know about what’s coming.

1946 was a threshold year, a time of change—and with change comes conflict. One way I wanted to explore these social fissures was through the evolution of jazz from swing to bebop. We now think of all of this simply as “jazz,” but time collapses difference; it’s hard now to hear much between Bach and Mozart.

Swing was prewar music: dance music played with full bands (or “orchestras”). Some of the most memorable jazz standards—“Sing Sing Sing” and “In the Mood”—come from this period. This is good music, often great music. We still use some of the innovations in contemporary music. (Modern drumming leads right back to Gene Krupa.) Still, it’s pop music.

Bebop was something else entirely. Gone were the big bands; in their place were tight four-, five-, or six-piece bands. Everything was stripped down, elemental, peripatetic. Esoteric. Bop introduces names you surely know: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie. It was this music that distinguished jazz as not merely dance music but serious music.

This tonal shift mirrored the social one. The older generation was left at a loss by bop and the boys returning from the front found themselves changed. As Pittsburgh exited the war, it was the industrial capital of the world. For decades during the Cold War, the city was third in line for a Soviet nuclear strike, after only DC and NYC. Japanese steel was not yet a thing. The city was about to unleash its first Renaissance.4

And yet, for all of what Pittsburgh, and the United States more generally, had going for it, this was a time of fracture and repair. An anxious time of return and a new world not yet quite born.

There’s no better music for such a moment than bebop. And after Harlem, there was no better scene than the one in Pittsburgh. It’s the soundtrack of a city—and a century—learning to live with the noise of its own becoming.

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Saturdays used to mean an On the Record in your inbox. After a break to focus on my novel Pennhollow, I’m bringing it back—now as a monthly dispatch. For new subscribers, OTR is an exploration of music and life.

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I want to discuss how things were. Or rather, how we think they were—and how we unconsciously rewrite our memories to fit the stories we need to tell ourselves. We are living through a moment awash in nostalgia. (We are always in such moments, but this moment is acute.) We’re hard at work making things great again. Reliving past glories. Imagining that literature, movies, music, politics, life—that they were all somehow better, and that the way forward is backward.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself caught up in a strong wave of yearning for a moment in my past. No, not a moment. A feeling from my childhood. As Oasis and the Brothers Gallagher retook the stage, reunited to rip through a two-plus hour setlist of straight bangers, I felt an inescapable wave of wanting the time back. Wanting to feel that rush in 1994 when I first heard “Slide Away” and rushed to Borders to get Definitely Maybe, holing myself up in my room and listening to the thing on repeat. Deciding that very day that I had to learn to play guitar because whatever this was, I had to know how to do it.

I managed to cajole my mom into buying me a guitar. Learning to play an instrument is good for kids! It helps with learning and brain function! Give me those six strings so I can make the thing growl and scream.

I was sitting alone in my parents’ basement on the Fourth of July, trying to insulate my poor dog from the incessant shelling the suburbs of Pittsburgh were taking, when video of Oasis’s first reunion show began percolating onto the net. I was unprepared for the wave of emotion that overtook me. They sounded way better than I would have expected. Liam’s voice was fresh, clean. Noel was on form. Bonehead was back! I felt like I’d been transported back twenty-five years.

You see, Oasis was my first love. There was a period when I was hesitant to own up to that. Huge band. Simple songs. Massive choruses. Unsophisticated lads. That was the standard take, at least here in the U.S. I had moved on to Dismemberment Plan and Talking Heads, gotten hooked on bop and hip hop. Oasis was passé.

And yet. I heard the clip of the band playing “Acquiesce” in Cardiff, transitioning from Liam’s swaggering verses to Noel’s towering chorus—and there is no denying it. Resistance is futile.

I’ve seen Oasis about twenty times, mostly from 1996 through 2004 or so. I managed to see them despite having no money. Now that I have disposable income, I can’t get tickets to their reunion shows to save my life.

I’m a bit perplexed why it means so much to me, this nostalgia, this yearning to partake in something that is, at root, itself premised on a wave of nostalgia for a moment that was built on nostalgia—and perhaps something even more complicated than that.

Generally, around here, I’d post a photo of my record player with the record cover. But this isn’t a normal Saturday. I don’t have access to my record player. I’m basically living in my office because my son got his one-year vaccinations and I’m immunocompromised. Instead, I’m listening to (WTS)MG through headphones on Tidal, sitting alone and feeling pretty isolated.

“Some Might Say” just came on and I’m struck by how different it sounds from the rest of the album. I love the melody of the chorus, soaring over the D-G-Em-G progression. But everything about the recording of the song sounds off. There’s a reason for that: the song was the first single off the album and was recorded before Noel finally lost it and fired original drummer Tony McCarroll. The drums sound starkly different, as does the guitar tone—it’s thinner, more trebly than the rest of the album. They left it on the album because the lawyers said they couldn’t advertise the album as having the “Number 1 Single” if they re-recorded it.

Listening back to the album, I think I still remember how to play every last note. I genuinely think I could pick up a guitar and play the album straight through, part by part, even though I haven’t played any of the songs, probably, in twenty years.

All of this to say, I have much to say about the album itself, but that’s not what interests me at the moment, so I beg your forgiveness when I say: this is a great album and you should go listen to it with fresh ears.

Now, let’s talk about more pressing concerns.

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Oasis were, along with Blur, the face of Britpop. I’ve always hated that term: neither Oasis nor Blur were pop bands. Go listen to “Bring it on Down” and tell me Oasis is a pop band. In the 1990s, they led a revival of British pride and culture. After the dour years of Thatcher and Major, it the UK suddenly became cool again.

Cool Britannia.

Oasis and a bunch of the bands of the era consciously adopted a retro British Invasion sound. Noel was notorious for borrowing licks and melodies from the Beatles, Stones, and…Stevie Wonder.1 The band adopted the Union Jack as a symbol. Even Noel’s signature guitar is painted as the Union Jack. Hell, this is standard merch for the reunion tour.

So here we are, in 2025 reliving the glory of an English band who brought past musical glory back in the 90s. A band who gave not just one generation a soundtrack of anthems that take over pubs when they hit, but songs that have become so engrained in the national culture that they’ve transcended generations. Gen Z are mad fer it too.

And here’s where national stories, our collective imaginations, and nostalgia can be problematic. All of the above is taken as truth. Oasis gave Britain reason to be proud again, brought together the underclass and provided reason to go on. Tony fucking Blair rode to 10 Downing Street on Oasis’s coattails.

The great English musical act.

Except they’re Irish.

They’re not English at all. Every original member of the band were born to Irish immigrants. Look at their last names: Gallagher, McGuigan, McCarroll, Arthurs. All of them had Irish mams, spent summers in Ireland. The Gallaghers are as much of County Mayo as of Manchester.

What are we to make of this? Our lust after a past that we are making up in real time, that itself was made up of half-remembered and curated history itself? We're not just nostalgic for a past that never existed—we're nostalgic for a story that was already nostalgic, already a construction. The 90s Britpop moment was itself an attempt to recapture the 60s British Invasion, and both were built on selective memory and strategic forgetting. That may sound like relativism, but it isn’t. I’m not saying the past is unknowable—I’m saying it’s always being shaped by what we need from it.

We create meaning and belonging, we don’t find it.

This is an anthropological reality, not an epistemological sentence. The question is what it is that we are creating, who is accepted into the circle of belonging. We narrow and expand our notion of these groups—nations, peoples, fans, cultures—and we pretend as though our creations are natural. They are not.

And so, I leave you with a song about disappearing under the weight of things, sung by the most English of bands, comprised of a bunch of Irishmen. Turtles all the way down.

Here's a thought for every man
Who tries to understand what is in his hands (what's in his hands)
He walks along the open road of love and life
Surviving if he can (surviving if he can)

Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
Chained to all the places that he never wished to stay
Bound with all the weight of all the words he tried to say
As he faced the sun he cast no shadow

As they took his soul they stole his pride
As they took his soul they stole his pride
As they took his soul they stole his pride
As he faced the sun he cast no shadow

Perhaps more than anything else, the thing I struggle with most is the fact that I am not limitless. For as obvious a statement as it is – that I am not limitless – my little pea brain does not comprehend this simple truth. And so I try to do everything, holding myself to impossible goals and higher standards.

In a fit of self care, I've decided to become ruthless in the pursuit of the things that mean the most to me. That means setting aside – perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently – other things that also matter to me.

I must finish Pennhollow, and to do this, I am going to set some limitations on my writing time. If I'm writing, it will be in service of Pennhollow. Period. And that means On the Record is a (probably temporary) casualty.

In any event, my goal is to get the shitty first draft of Pennhollow finished by my birthday in June. Then the real work starts, but I intend to hire help for that part.

Thanks for reading OTR. It's a pleasure to write and gratifying that there's a dedicated group of you who read this madness. I hope to get a 85,000 word noir gut punch out to you in the next couple of years – and for those of you insane enough to want to follow along on the shitty first draft, I have some good (?) news for you!

I will not die before I finish this novel. (Especially because it's the introduction to a larger story, god help me...)

Onward!
O

Listen along via Tidal or Spotify.

March, 2003.

A Saturday, the first mid-60s blue-sky day of the year – the day commonly known as Skirt Day around Denison. I had spent much of the previous week working 20 hour days on my symposium paper, the longform work of "original" philosophy each philosophy major had to draft and present to the faculty and fellow senior majors. I was weeks away from graduation, pondering what the next phase of life would be like.

That afternoon, after a discussion with my suitemate Aru – the smartest person I've ever met, and an even better person – I decided to take a nap, head full of ideas and lusting after some rest.

I lived in a four-person suite, with each of us having our own bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, eating area, and large common area. We felt rich that year: we had our own coffee maker, could make food without timing the cafeterias, and Aru would fry up bacon and make the best rice I've ever eaten in an old Japanese ricemaker that the rest of us didn't know how to use.

My bedroom, and I wish I had a photo of it, was probably what you might imagine: wall to wall books, a ludicrous surround sound stereo for a 10x10 room, and a small desk with a large desktop that I didn't often use. I spent most of my work time at a fortress I made in the library, complete with mini fridge and Foreman grill. My least favorite place in my room was the bed, a single mattress designed for someone at least a half-foot shorter than me. I slept poorly for all four years of college, folded up like an old road map.

Nevertheless, I shamboled back to my room and, pulling my knees nearly to my chest, fell under the covers.

It was the best rest I have ever had.

Although I did not make the connection at the time, I have come to associate that nap with Broken Social Scene's Feel Good Lost, a record so immersive and beguiling as to make laughable any real genre label. Broken Social Scene's later albums fit pretty neatly in the indie rock genre, but Feel Good Lost? It's too airy and loose and tangential to be pinned down like a butterfly, label affixed under it.

I remember a golden glow around my room, the sun seeping through the closed blinds and imbuing the rows of books with a visible hum. I rarely fall asleep easily – with my ADHD, my mind is always sprinting to the next thought, the new idea, the looming syncretic bonding of strange bedfellows. If I am honest with you, I don't know whether I fell asleep that day or not. I think so. Or I fell into such a deep trance, a reverie that presented as a lucid dream, that there is no useful distinction.

Have you ever seen Richard Linklater's film Waking Life? I saw this in a little art theatre my junior year. It's a worthwhile film, a touch on the nose but quite good. In it, the protagonist goes on a surreal quest through events that may or may not be one long lucid dream, encountering people who would be impossible to actually meet (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's characters from Before Sunrise, for instance) and delving into questions about metaphysics, existentialism, reality, etc. This felt like a much more chill version of what the protagonist of Waking Life went through.

There's something about that floaty feeling of not being entirely tethered to "reality" that sometimes makes me anxious and other times makes me feel complete and free. That sense of everything being possible and everything having always already happened. That brief insight, that short connection with understanding that this moment is forever and not at all.

Feel Good Lost. A exhortation, a demand. An invitation, with a soundtrack for the journey to nowhere and everywhere. I think sometimes about the perpetual process of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation – and I wonder whether we are better served becoming comfortable, becoming home in that state of disorientation, with little, floating guitar arpeggios and lilting notes buffering us.

Must we reorient?

What would happen if we learned to feel good lost? If we laid, a compressed accordion, in bed and let the surreality and the disorientation embrace us?

Let me tell you: this isn't the album I expected to be writing about this morning. I spent Wednesday through Friday squirreled away in a hotel thinking, planning. Plotting. For the first time, I decided to ignore the mind trash that said annual planning retreats are for "successful" people – people who had made it – and chose to shed excuses and put in the work. And my friends, it was glorious.

You definitely want to listen to today's record. Tune in on Tidal or Spotify.

I don't think I was aware of how much noise there has been rattling through my head for the past five months, since McNugget's arrival. Just a constant din crowding out deep, uninterrupted thinking – hell, even when he's sleeping, I'm at attention for a cry. My life has not been my own. I gather that's part of the new state of affairs, but forgive me: I'm a slow learner.

So I spent my first days and nights away from the boy since his birth here, a place that led Tony Albrecht, upon seeing this photo, to ask: "Is that a fucking Best Western?"

C'mon now. That's a Hilton Garden Inn. And those polka dot curtains? 🤌🏻

Anyway, I spent much of the retreat listening to jazz (Money Jungle by Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach was on heavy rotation) and thought I'd wake up this morning in that frame of mind. I still have some planning to finish this weekend. But no: I dropped the needle on this perfect album, another of my all-time favorites, and let the devil in. Next week, a holiday treat. But for today, let's party with the pirates.

Oh, walk around, know you are beautiful
Aimless and alive, broken and divine

Like so many "New York" bands, TV on the Radio mostly comes from the provinces. The man with the astonishing voice behind the band, Tunde Adebimpe, and the band's guitarist, Kyp Malone, are Pittsburgh-born and bred. I learned this early in the band's touring career, as they always, always stopped in Pittsburgh. One night, before a show at Mr. Small's in August 2007 (about a year after this album came out), I saw Tunde and an older man who looked like Tunde from thirty years in the future had come back to see the show.

I walked up and introduced myself, and I cannot tell you how excited Tunde was to introduce his father. His and Kyp's family were all there for the show and they were hyped up. It is so easy to think about artists and public people as somehow different from us. They're not: they are exactly like us, but often lonelier: because we view them as these untouchable royal figures, it's really hard for them to have normal relationships. Their families are often a refuge from this, for their family members know just how painfully human they are.

I've seen the band about ten times, and they played like their family's pride depended on it that night. What a show.

I remember thinking at the time how odd it must be to put so much of yourself into your art and then perform it on a big stage for your friends and family. It's one thing to craft something potent, a distilled essence of yourself and to give it to people you don't know. Something entirely different to look into the eyes of people who really matter to you while performing those same things.

So let's get the necessary piece out of the way when discussing Return to Cookie Mountain. That song.

Say say my playmate, won't you lay hands on me?
Mirror my malady? Transfer my tragedy?

I first ran across TVOTR when they released their first EP, Young Liars. It's not often that you run across something that sounds familiar and yet completely new or alien. From the very beginning, TVOTR melded the familiar tropes and structures of rock and pop music, but always disturbed the sound or our expectations just enough to stop me cold. Their first full album, Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes, is an excellent album. You can tell now, in hindsight, that the band was still finding itself: Tunde and Kyp were figuring out how to sing together, Dave Sitek was performing his magic on the production, but the drum loops and drum machine didn't have the punch that later albums would find after bringing Jaleel Bunton into the fold.

I liked the band. Quite a bit. But it wasn't until I heard "Wolf Like Me" that I got it. Here's the second time they played it on Letterman:

This song is transcendent: the vanishingly rare perfect embodiment of exactly what it means to be. Nine months after this performance, that stage gave birth.

I don't want to spend a huge amount of time on "Wolf Like Me" because if there's only one thing you've heard from TVOTR, it's almost certainly this song. But I do want to point out a few things from this video.

1. Just listen to that bass tone. God, it's rich and aggressive and booming. We miss you, Gerard.

2. These are incredibly well mic'd and mixed drums for a TV appearance.

3. Look at how Sitek is playing guitar! He has enough gain running through those pickups that he can play his part by fingering the fretboard and smashing a casaba against the body of his guitar.

4. Kyp is just cool as fuck.

5. Tunde is possessed by Dionysus. He is electric: at once charming and vaguely menacing, alluring and sharp edges.

Now imagine what this is like in an actual club, not in a TV audience. I have never once seen these guys live (and I've seen them in tiny clubs to large venues) where the entire crowd doesn't lose themselves during this song – even those who are too cool and watch from a distance cannot help themselves. By the time the drop comes (did I mention this rock song has a drop?!), every last sumbitch in that audience is sweating.

Now imagine being on stage and performing it for your father, the psychiatrist.

We locked eyes, felt our loneliness abate

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about the burden we give our loved ones when we create things that reveal things about ourselves that most people keep hidden. I have to think that Tunde just had to pretend his parents were there when performing "Wolf Like Me" or some of their other songs. But that kind of relationship isn't unipolar. I've felt a growing awareness that my work – my writing, especially, but my professional work too – will be something McNugget will have to live with and confront too.

Pennhollow has some wild things in it, difficult human situations that I explore in ways that I don't generally talk with people about. One of the great things about writing, especially writing fiction, is it gives you license to really explore and push on boundaries. It does, however, inherently put more of you out there, and a part of you that is more delicate and vulnerable.

I've come to the preliminary decision that I have to pretend he doesn't exist when pursuing my creative work. Whatever I produce, whether it is published or not, will be part of what I leave behind. It will be up to him to do with it what he will, and I cannot control his reading of it or shield him from the import of the work any more than I can any random reader. That's a bit scary.

Life deals a measly portion

For as individually great a song "Wolf Like Me" is, the whole of Return to Cookie Mountain is even better. It is an album twitching with anxiety and fraught with a hint of despair just barely held at bay. OK Computer is a masterpiece in describing the technological trap we find ourselves in, but it lacks humanity, the warmth of breath. Return to Cookie Mountain traffics in the same ennui, but it is a deeply human felt-in-the-contracting-chest moment of panic. (Tunde and Sitek's first collaboration was a collection of four-track recordings titled OK Calculator.)

The album opens with the stuttering drum loop of "I Was a Lover" and with little ceremony, Tunde sets the tone for everything that comes: "I was a lover before this war/held up in a luxury suite/behind a well-barricaded door." It's kinda hard to remember now, 23 years after the fact, how odd it felt on September 11 and the months and year or two afterward. A psychological break of sorts. Tunde had moved to NYC not long before the towers came down and the whole thing affected him pretty profoundly.

Describing this period, Tunde said, "This is after 9/11, after Y2K, and all of that shit. It was really fucking disturbing; especially that winter and into the next year. Listening to those songs on Young Liars now, it's a vast, dystopian, science fiction soundtrack to me." TVOTR early work is a coming-to-terms with this new world, and "I Was a Lover" is the synthesis of how this all played out: he "joined a priest class, plastic, inert/In a slowdance with commerce/Like a lens up a skirt."

Fitter, happier.

How the blues sound from up there?

There's a little trick that great art has, wherein it beats the shit out of you, reveals to you just how beautiful things can be and how easy it is to lose it in this world of artifact and greed. And just when you're reaching that moment of despair, just when you feel most bereft – it refuses to give you an easy solution, throws it all back on you and, perhaps, gives you a glimmer of hope.

Because we know they'd be lying to us if they made everything right.

Let's talk about the true pièce de résistance of Return to Cookie Mountain, a song so perfect they needed to call in the Thin White Duke to pin it down. Let's talk "Province."

God, I love this song. Let's table set:

Suddenly, all your history's ablaze
Try to breathe, as the world disintegrates
Just like autumn leaves, we're in for change
Holding tenderly to what remains

I don't think you can appreciate the ache in this unless you hear it.

From the opening vocal melody, which repeats with growing complexity as the song proceeds, to the pristine, almost angelic sound that escalates slowly into a huge mash of noise...there's nothing I don't love about this song. Just listen to how the vocals are all double or triple-tracked with the strangest use of harmony/counterpoint in popular music. There's nothing like it, sonically.

And the composition of the song helps elevate the message, which ultimately is one of hope, albeit a hope borne by work and courage. While the world disintegrates around us, our hope is ourselves. There is no one coming to save us.

I think of Tunde on stage with his family in the audience, of any artist who has the courage to create not only for him or herself, but as a gift or an uncontrollable need to share, to connect – despite the gaze of those who might be affected by the work. Because the work is an act of love. And here's the kernel of hope in this devastating album:

Hold these hearts courageously
As we walk into this dark place
Stand steadfast beside me and see
That love is the province of the brave

Earlier this year, I mentioned that I would start rolling out some OTRs featuring my favorite records, the ones so close to me that I feel are constitutive parts of me. I've done a few (The Moon and Antarctica, Cherry Tree, Speaking in Tongues) and let me tell you, they take it out of me.

Please pull up this masterpiece of a record while reading: Tidal / Spotify

Most editions of On the Record are, as I think of them, something of a magic trick: I pull out a record from the shelves, play it a few times, find some theme or themes that are initially not obviously related to the real story of that edition, weave, play with themes, and then by the end the Prestige – a reveal that ties things together in such a way that a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces now cohere. It's yeoman's work. I like to think it's skillful work, but I'm really not the best person to judge that, huh? This still has a small distro list, so I guess maybe not that skillful!

But the albums that are foundational to who I am are different. There's no trick that's going to be enough. There has to be something of an expurgation of my soul onto these digital pages. If I'm going to present to you something that I love, that is somehow of me and I of it, I feel as though I have to do both it and me justice. This one is especially dear to me, so please forgive me if this slips into inanity. I'm determined to publish.

I'll turn off the TV, it's killing us, we never speak
There's a radio in the corner that's dying to make us see

I first found The Midnight Organ Fight in the first semester of my 3L year. (Had a moment of deja vu and remembered I wrote about this, a little bit, when I wrote about the band's Pedestrian Verse.)

The first thing you need to know about Frightened Rabbit is that they are a band of Scotsmen. Why is that important? It's a whole mood, a sardonic turn of mind and attitude. Here in the US, we tend to think of the inhabitants of the British Isles as somewhat uniform, but that is quite off. The English are different from the Welsh are different from the Scottish are different from the Irish. Entirely different cultures, attitudes, and histories. Despite the reputation for being seething crazy redheads (and some are!), the Scottish are in many ways the most civilized of the lot.

But the "dour Scot" is a stereotype for a reason. (Hell, "dour" is a Scots word meaning relentlessly severe, stern, or gloomy. I love the word, from the old Gaelic dúr.) Scott Hutchinson was a form of the dour Scot: gloomy in tone, wildly honest in ways most of us are uncomfortable being, and unapologetically forthright.

The Midnight Organ Fight is his account of an especially painful breakup. It is unlike anything you've ever heard and, perhaps, something you will recognize immediately if you have the capacity to be honest with yourself.

If we both got the same diseases, it's irrelevant, girl

Every relationship I've been in have flashpoint memories that, while tiny moments, come to embody something key about the relationship. I suspect the same is true for you, if you think back. Tiny moments that go unseen, perhaps unnoticed, by the other person but that are revelatory to you.

Being an uncivilized 27 year old male, I remember being very excited to share The Midnight Organ Fight with my girlfriend. She had decent music taste and I loved this album. It didn't occur to me what sharing the album might convey to her, nor did it occur to me what an off-handed comment of hers might reveal to me.

One night, after I made a nice dinner (nice by law-school-budget standards, anyway), we curled up on the couch and I put on this album. I have only a vague recollection of listening to the first part of the album with her – only that she liked it well enough. "Keep Yourself Warm" came on, though, I remember this very well indeed.

Here's the chorus of the song:

Can you see in the dark?
Can you see the look on your face?
The flashing white light's been turned off
You don't know who's in your bed

It takes more than fucking someone you don't know
To keep warm
Do you really think that for a house beat
You'll find your love in a hole?

But you won't find love in a
Won't find love in a hole
It takes more than fucking someone
To keep yourself warm

As the song came to the end of the second chorus, after Scott sang, "It takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm," she whispered in my ear, "That's not true."

Lift your dress enough to show me those shins
Let your hair stick to your forehead

One of the things that I try to do in my writing – here, in Bitter Buffaloes, in my fiction, on LinkedIn – is to say the things that we shy away from saying, at least without some veneer of respectability. Many of you are lawyers or in professions where a certain decorum are required.

This neuters us, if we let it. We express ourselves in an acceptable, presentable manner. No wonder so many of us begin sounding like reverberations rather than people with a distinct experience trying desperately to reach other people to feel less alone.

I don't think it's an accident that the art that I love most is almost always transgressive. Honest in distinctly uncomfortable ways. My favorite writers and musicians destabilize in order to invite in. They do this in different ways: plainspoken stories that do not flinch from the details of the tale, deliberately "offensive" in an effort to reveal the absurdity of the norm that is being broken, terse understatement or manic maximalism.

There's something to be said for just saying the fucking thing, without stopping to set up the best pose for the press photo. Sometimes we need to show the bloodied face, the hurt, the unresolved pain. There's nothing remarkable about the lyrics to "My Backwards Walk" except the sparseness of it, the unmitigated heartbreak seeking both escape and reentry. For once, I'm going to simply give it to you without exegesis.

I'm working on my backwards walk
Walking with no shoes or socks
And when the time rewinds to the end of May
I wish we'd never met, then met today

I'm working on my faults and cracks
Filling in the blanks and gaps
And when I write them out they don't make sense
I need you to pencil in the rest

I'm working on drawing a straight line
And I'll draw until I get one right
It's bold and dark girl, can't you see
I done drawn a line between you and me

I'm working on erasing you
Just don't have the proper tools
I get hammered, forget that you exist
There's no way I'm forgetting this

I'm working hard on walking out
Shoes keep sticking to the ground
My clothes won't let me close the door
Cause my trousers seem to love your floor

I been working on my backwards walk
There's nowhere else for me to go
Except back to you just one last time
Say yes before I change my mind
Say yes before I
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it, you're
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it
You're the shit and I'm knee-deep in it, you're

Once in my life I want to be brave and talented enough to just say the fucking thing so clearly.

It's got lots to do with magnets and the pull of the moon

We've gotten 1500 words in and I haven't touched on the two things that drew me in the first place to this album this morning. The first: this album sounds great. It is beautifully recorded and played imperfectly, giving it that raw edge that helps it ring true. I give you the two quietest songs on the album.

The first, "Good Arms vs. Bad Arms," has a gorgeous cascading Bb - Gm7 - D#add9 chord progression that propels the song long before the shuffling drums of Scott's brother, Grant, enter the mix. It is a stunner of a song. Take a listen.

The second, "Poke" is one of the most heartbreaking elegies to a dying love, and the struggle at the end around whether to fight for it or "kick its cunt in and watch as it dies of bleeding." Can you tell me you haven't felt something like this acutely? If so, I am deeply and sincerely sorry.

You should look through some old photos
I adored you in every one of those
If someone took a picture of us now, they'd need to be told
That we had ever clung and tied
A navy knot with arms at night
I'd say she was his sister, but she doesn't have his nose
And now we're unrelated and rid of all the shit we hated
But I hate when I feel like this
And I never hated you

I am armed with the past, and the will, and a brick

Hanging over any piece about Frightened Rabbit is the inevitable fact that Scott, the beautiful soul behind these songs, killed himself. It's easy, as they say, to connect the dots in hindsight. Hell, one of the songs on The Midnight Organ Fight, "Floating in the Forth" is a song about suicide – and he died by wandering out into and drowning in the Forth. All of the signs were there, if you knew what to look for.

After someone like Scott kills himself, the easy, disingenuous response is something like, “He was so talented, I wouldn’t have ever thought he’d do this!” Except that isn’t true in the slightest.

It was clear that he could do this. He was telling us the entire damn time. His songs were gifts, yes, but also the work of a man so aware, so keyed into the world and his own existence that if you really listen, you begin to wonder how he lasted so long.

The mystery is how those of us who become aware of the hurt, absurdity, and ruthless beauty of this life—who are able to articulate this knowledge so that others might also have access—are able to hold on long enough to gift these works of art. Hold tightly those around you who have this kind of insight, who are able to get it out in words or songs or in visual form. They feel everything and it is often too much to bear.

I miss you, buddy.

When my blood stops, someone else's will not
When my head rolls off, someone else's will turn
You can mark my words, I'll make changes to earth
While I'm alive, I'll make tiny changes to earth

"Will you turn that damned thing off?!"

But the little monk's cry? My eyes shoot open and I have a difficult time falling back asleep, even if I don't entirely wake up. The Walking Dead is really just a show about parents of young children. (I've never watched the show, so this is pure speculation that feels more correct than the actual premise of the show.)

McNugget woke me up around 5 this morning and I've been in a bit of a haze. Tried going for a walk with Clare to clear some of that muddiness, to no avail. So let's try a more acute tincture: the banjo blues.

When Audra and I first met, I lived with my youngest brother. I'd been recently divorced and our place in Lawrenceville was nice, but definitely a bachelor's pad. The place was overrun with books and musical instruments. (I guess our house now is, too – but it's less chaotic now.) My brother and I had a drum set, four bass guitars, three acoustic guitars, six electric guitars, a keyboard, four amps, and a banjo.

For the most part, I think Audra found this a bit much, but perhaps slightly charming. At least peculiar enough for a quasi pat-on-the-head "that's cute." But the banjo was something she didn't understand then and to this day fails to appreciate. She does not see the appeal of this strange African instrument that hillbillies have adopted. Over the years, I've given away the drum set, but I still have the banjo despite her pleas.

When she saw how excited I was at a new record purchase, she asked what I got. "There's a reissue of a rare Gus Cannon album he recorded for Stax when he was like 90 years old!" None of this seemed to her to justify my excitement.

I wish you could have seen the excitement-to-crestfallen transition in her face when I told her it was old-time banjo blues.

As I was searching for the photo of the music room, I ran across this old daguerreotype of Audra and me in the before times. Look at us! We look so alert and happy! It's like 11 pm!

Gus Cannon was born on a plantation sometime in the second half of the 19th century. We don't know exactly when. It's good to remember that, not long ago, basic records like birth and death weren't always well kept – especially for certain classes of us. In an age where we are overrun with data (a ton of information, little knowledge, and less wisdom), it's worth stepping back to understand that this ready access to data doesn't necessarily help us understand anything, even if it gives us the illusion of knowing things. Anybody who's sat in a leadership team meeting puzzling over complicated dashboards knows what I mean.

Cannon moved around the South as a young man, mostly in Mississippi and Tennessee. By 1907-08, he'd settled in Memphis and began playing music around time and for medicine shows, when he wasn't sharecropping or digging ditches.

The "early" Cannon recordings date from the 1920s, both under the name Banjo Joe and with his more famous Cannon's Jug Stompers. What's wild is these early recordings were likely done when Cannon was in his 50s. The fact that he was "discovered" in the 60s and then recorded the album I'm listening to right now sometimes in his 90s or early 100s makes you realize just how much amazing art we've missed.

There's a game classicists play: give up to get. We know of a ton of ancient works lost to us because they're referenced in works that have survived. The game is, what work that we do have would you give up to get one of the lost pieces? "Yeah dude, I would totally give up Atheneausus's Deipnosophistae for, like, even just one of Menander's lost plays!"

Me? I'd give up 95% of early 60s folk for 10% of the lost black blues and bluegrass of the 20s and 30s.

I'm pretty familiar with Cannon's Jug Stompers and Banjo Joe work, but this morning is the first time I've listened to this album, recorded in 1963. The fact that we have this record at all is thanks to a cover of the song "Walk Right In" that The Rooftop Singers took to #1 in 1962.

Around this time, the folk movement was "discovering" blues musicians like Son House, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, etc., which were palatable given the acoustic guitar-driven tunes. Cannon was a bit tougher to adapt (despite having sold many, many more records back in their heyday) because of the centrality of the banjo. This one cover, though, breathed some life into Cannon's music career.

I'm fascinated by how musicians push and pull each other when playing different versions of the same song. Everybody knows the Oasis version of "Wonderwall." Ryan Adams released a cover that influenced the way Noel now plays the song. Trent Reznor now simply refuses to play "Hurt" after Johnny Cash's version, and Otis Redding famously said that "Respect" was "a song that a girl took away from me. Good friend of mine. This girl, she just took that song, but I'm still gonna do it anyway."

Listening to this album, I'm struck by how the Rooftop Singer's version of "Walk Right In" affected Cannon's version here. The original version has a different, more forward articulation of the main phrase, a more aggressive and catching cadence, while the '63 version mirrors the more mannered version of the Rooftop Singers. Further, Cannon follows lyric changes made by the Rooftop Singers! Their version sanitizes the song. Here's the Rooftop Singer's version:

Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on

Everybody's talkin' 'bout a new way of walkin'
Do you want to lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down
Daddy, let your mind roll on

But here's the original:

Walk right in, sit right down
And baby, let your mind roll on
Walk right in, stay a little while
But daddy, you can't stay too long
Now, everybody’s talking 'bout
That evil way of walking
Do you wanna lose your mind?
Walk right in, sit right down
And daddy let your mind roll on

Maybe it's just me, but those subtle changes to the lyrics make it a different song. Something different is happening in these two tales.

That man? That man knows what's going on in this song, and it doesn't belong in a church.

I've spun Walk Right In three times now, while writing this, and I should take it easy on my very patient wife. Let's hang the banjo up for the day. I find myself thinking about heritage, legacy, what's lost and retained.

More and more, as I'm working through a sudden and inescapable constriction of time, attention, and endurance, I'm focused on signal and noise, looking to find the next higher layer in the data > information > knowledge > wisdom pyramid.

Seek out the signal. Be relentless...if you can keep your eyes open and your focus trained.

We made it. I made it. A frenetic week of work, alone with the creatures. We are all alive and thriving – a minor miracle. But hey, a saint only needs three, right?

One of the recurring thoughts I've been having over the past year or so is that it's incredibly easy to forget and lose track of how fortunate we are to have help and systems that support us. The scaffolds we work so hard to erect and the people we come to rely on can become expected, as though the whole system were natural.

It isn't. And when pieces are pulled from the edifice, weakening it just enough for it to wobble, the sudden recognition of the absence can be quite destabilizing. Suffice it to say, I'm very happy – for many reasons – that Audra is back home after being gone this week for a work trip.

This will likely be a short OTR and I'm not apologetic about it. For a long time, I've held myself to invisible, imagined standards that I suspect other people have for the work I do. Despite my seeming iconoclasm, there's a deep seam of people-pleasing in me. I want you to love me. Hell, I get hung up on writing emails, because I want each one to be a bespoke work of art, savored by the recipient. (I know.)

Lately, I've been moving slowly into a new era, where I'm just doing what I want to do. If you like it, that's amazing. But fuck it, I'm going to do it whether you do or not. You're most welcome along for the ride.

Each of us has about a decade, give or take, that serves as our musical foundation. For men, this will be roughly the years between 14 and 25. Women, because they are more evolved creatures, develop more quickly and that window shifts to 12 to 23 or so. During those years, the music we're exposed to and internalize becomes our musical home base. It may not remain our favorite music – we may move beyond it, refine our tastes in ways that may not be entirely predictable given that core sensibility.

For me, these years were 1995 to 2006 or so. Some of this foundational music still pulls at me (witness my frustration with not getting Oasis tickets when they went on sale this week and the budding realization that I'm going to spend stupid money to buy tickets on the aftermarket), but some of it retains its space in the database without having much interest to me at all (see the crystal clear memory of seeing the debut of "Smooth" live on MTV, knowing instantly that the song was going to be a monster hit).

As I was thumbing through my records this morning, determining what to listen to, I noticed how much of the music I have was released in this window – and how many of those records I know note-for-note but rarely listen to anymore. So I'm going to sprinkle in some of these records over the next several OTRs.

Here's the first: Gorillaz's Demon Days.

Damon Albarn strikes me as a restless kind of guy. Blur was one of the leading Britpop bands, a distinctly English flavor of the genre. (There's an interesting discussion to be had about whether Oasis or Blur were more English; Blur generally gets the not because they were more literary and the upper middle-class London accent came through, but Oasis were a different kind of English: working class, hardscrabble, blunt and brutish in comparison to the posh boys of Blur.) Nevertheless, if you listen carefully to Blur, you see Albarn pushing against the box the band put him in.

Every band has a character, a sensibility. It's more than just the accumulated tastes of the bandmembers; each grouping of musicians has a natural musical vocabulary. And so, on nearly every Blur album after Parklife, you'll find a song that didn't belong. It wasn't a Blur song. I'm not saying it was a bad song, so much as it was like finding a Stephen King short story mashed into a Raymond Carver collection.

So when Gorillaz first burst onto the scene in 2001, my first thought was that Albarn finally got so bored he wanted a silly outlet for his Island of Misfit Toys songs. I mean, Gorillaz announced itself as a cartoon band.

I first heard "Clint Eastwood" in February or March of my sophomore year of college and promptly added it to party playlists. But the eponymous first album was uneven, with some really good tracks and a lot of things that badly needed an editor or an executor. I can't claim I was surprised: this often happens when a successful musician launches a side project. Lots of ego and a belief that anything he or she creates is magic – without realizing that it was the other members of the main band that tethered him to quality. It was the very limitations he was trying to escape that helped make him great.

Demon Days was released right after I graduated from grad school, ushering me into a year of drift before starting law school. I initially moved to Cleveland (note: never do this, it is a bad idea) to reconnect with bandmates and become a rockstar. That didn't pan out and I ran out of money, leading me to get a job grantwriting at a nonprofit back in Pittsburgh and return to a civilized city.

I listened to Demon Days pretty frequently during this time, whether driving to work (a 45 minute commute) or while writing mind-numbing government grant applications. My main recollection of the album at the time was it was suitably dark and it was easy to keep in the background as I worked.

Albarn switched up the team for Demon Days, swapping out Dan, The Automator for Danger Mouse, adding MF Doom (always a good idea), and had a revolving cast of collaborators. The album is better than Gorillaz, but still pretty uneven – especially listening to it this morning. The opening of the record feels tremendously weak to me. "Last Living Souls," "Kids With Guns" (amazing bass sound notwithstanding), and "O Green World" are...fine. They strike me as odd choices to kick off the album.

Things pick up with "Dirty Harry" (enough with the Eastwood references, Damon, and good god, what's with the choirs? "Tender" was enough) and the transcendent "Feel Good Inc." But the album never really crests. There are a number of highs, but an equal number of lows. Every time I feel like I'm settling into a groove with the album, something comes on that jars me into paying attention, in a bad way.

And yet, there's a part of this album that has sinewed its way deep into my sensibilities. Something familiar, comfortable to the point of being unquestioned. It holds a different place in my head than does Blur, although I love Blur and enjoy Gorillaz.

I wonder sometimes how much of our understanding of the world is informed by things we don't hate. Songs, books, tv shows, movies, people that are fine. Not bad enough to actively excise from our lives. As I'm listening to Demon Days, I find myself wondering why I'm wasting my time on something that is fine.

The implications of this are radical. If we follow it to its end, how much of our day-to-day lives would we need to cut out? How many difficult conversations or awkward derilictions of relationships does it require?

Would it help us get closer to a focused and fulfilled life? How ruthless must we be.

Please do yourself a favor and listen to this one. Tidal or Spotify.

And in the faces you meet, you'll see the place where you die

During my discussion with Chris Sellers in the most recent episode of Sonder Union, we got to a place that was one part very dark and another part hopeful survival story. We spoke of our fathers and our parents' expectations, the way we felt both stifled and somehow free because of this. In some senses, we felt that those expectations helped inform the revolt at the center of our lives.

I've been thinking a good bit about this since we taped last week, wondering not only to what extent the concerns, personality, and drives I have make sense only in relief to the expectations set for me. That's the thing about revolt, isn't it? It's reactive. I love to go back to the roots of these words because the words so often tell on themselves. Revolt and revolution are from the Latin: re-volvo. The easiest way to think of it is to turn in a circle and reach the beginning.

That's the joke of most revolutions, right? The successful revolution almost inevitably reinstantiates a version of what came before it. (For my pop-culture-infused friends, this is the lesson of The Hunger Games.) The trick is to rebel without revolting. Perhaps this seems like pointless semantics to you – and it may well be – but welcome to my broken brain.

Nevertheless, it leads me inexorably to this quandry: how best to provide values and frameworks for McNugget without forcing him into my dreams for him? I've often though that I am unwittingly a master character actor, playing roles that have been foisted on me. More than anything else, it was important to my dad that I was smart...so I learned to play that part. While that may sound silly – one is or isn't smart, you might mistakenly think – it's not hard to conjure images of what a "smart person" looks, acts, talks, and thinks like. I may have wound up a fun-house mirror version of the part I was raised to play, but I would be lying if I said there isn't a significant part of my thoughtless (I don't choose words accidentally) presentation to the world. It's become internalized. I give you Kurt Vonnegut:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Everyone's life ends, but no one completes it

In college, I discovered three bands that hit me hard and changed the way I thought about music then and that remain permanent members of the weekly-listen club. There aren't that many musicians in that club, so for three to have been a massive influence when I was young and dumb and still hold my esteem is pretty unusual. Those bands are Built to Spill, Jimmy Eat World, and Modest Mouse. I've written about Jimmy Eat World before, but haven't written about BtS or MM. I almost wrote about BtS's There's Nothing Wrong With Love this morning, given that it reached it's 30th anniversary just over a week ago, but the topic and tenor of that record doesn't suit what's on my mind.

The Moon and Antarctica is not my favorite Modest Mouse record (it may well be my third favorite), but it is undoubtedly the only perfect record they've released. And, boy, is it a mood.

From the very outset, as the gentle plucking of "3rd Planet" woozily breathes life into the album, we get a sense for what is in store. The very first line of the album – "Everything that keeps me together is falling apart" – encapsulates the entropy-driven, death-obsessed theme of the record. Again and again, Isaac Brock speaks to, interrogates, and falls prey to the inevitable truth of life: it is an incurable condition. It eventually gets you.

Laugh hard, it's a long way to the bank

The Moon and Antarctica wasn't exactly a clean break or a brand new sound for MM when it debuted in 2000. It has many of the hallmarks that the band developed over the previous five years, but Modest Mouse managed to pull off the rare magic trick of signing to a major label and using that money to transform not into a stadium-sized parody of itself but into a band more adventurous and willing to expand its sonic palate.

MM's first two records, This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About and The Lonesome Crowded West, both comfortably fit into my 25 favorite records – with The Lonesome Crowded West easily in the top 10 and perhaps top 5. They are rough, dirty, heart-on-the-sleeve rollicks through the wastelands of the pacific northwest. Isaac Brock was in his Old Testament prophet mode, shouting truths at full yelp into the air as people walked by pointing at the weirdo saying crazy shit.

Modest Mouse's first two records were polarizing, and I was one of those with the antenna that dialed right in. I heard them with perfect reception from the moment I first listened to "Trucker's Atlas." Part of their sound was a sense that everything was this close to going off the tracks, crashing to a halt with a great, terrible din. That was the trick of it: they sounded like they were out of control, the music projected messages that were on the edge, they looked like they were barely holding it together – and they walked that high wire while flailing their arms around.

And then came The Moon and Antarctica, something different in kind, oddly assured and confident in feel, even if the lyrics were less certain and more probing. There is no other album in MM's oevure that is anything like it.

It's hard to remember to live before you die

On my first day of grad school, I sat down in a Contemporary Lit class with a number of new and established students. Professor Strehle asked us all to introduce ourselves and say what we were interested in. Everybody was quiet at first, so after about 30 seconds, I jumped in and introduced myself. When I said what I was interested in, I mentioned that I played guitar, liked to design websites and code backend applications, and loved Notre Dame football. We proceeded around the room with people sharing things about them as people.

After we were done, Prof Strehle said, "Fascinating. That's the first time in twenty-five years doing this that the class introduced themselves through things other than saying they loved literature. Owen, why'd you lead how you did?"

"I just figured all of us love to read. Why else would we be in a graduate program for English literature?"

It's very easy to fall into well-trodden paths. Ready-made lives. These are the most treacherous paths, for two reasons. First, they were not blazed by or for you. Second, it's nearly impossible for life to live up to their promise. Why are so many people disappointed by marriage or romance? The stories we've been told about them as children are fantasies, and the real-life experience doesn't match. It doesn't matter that the lived version is deeper, more profound, and richer than the superficial bullshit fed to us – it's not what we expected and it can be hard to learn to appreciate it for what it is.

Fitting into these roles, these ready-made parts, is something a little less than living. Perhaps that's a too-harsh and judgmental way of putting it. It leads to a life unfulfilled, a life that lacks the magic of what only you can bring to it.

I think back to how easily I adopted the guise of "smart" to fulfill other people's wishes for me and wonder what would have happened if I was rewarded for different things. And this seems, now, like an overwhelming responsibility.

How is one to instill values and virtue without laying out a ready-made costume for a child who doesn't know any better?

Everyone wants a double feature

The centerpiece of The Moon and Antarctica is "The Stars Are Projectors," an absolute monster of a song.

It is literally at the mid-point of the album and demands attention for its virtuosity. But I don't think it's the emotional heart of the record. "3rd Planet" gets the album rolling with big, expansive questions and the middle of the album plays with and expands on these themes. It's the last three tracks, though, that hold the key to the album.

"Lives" is a song that stops me from doing whatever I'm doing each and every time it comes on. When I was listening to it this morning, I was also feeding McNugget, and I lost track of what I was doing. Near the end of the song, I noticed that my hands were wet and sticky with milk. I'd let the bottle fall out of his mouth and he threw up on me. It took me minutes to notice, because this song took me elsewhere.

Everyone's afraid of their own life
If you could be anything
You'd be disappointed, am I right?

That line is not as straightforward as you might think. If we could be anything! Man, I remember being told as a kid that I could be anything and that seemed like too much: I didn't want to be anything I wanted to be me.

It's hard to remember, it's hard to remember
We're alive for the first time
It's hard to remember we're alive for the last time

And yet here we are, making it up as we go in this live-action play without rehearsals, figuring out our character and lines on the spot. Good god.

"Lives" and "Life Like Weeds" brings to bear that in our own mortality, meaning is derived from and provided to other people. "In the faces you see you'll see just who you've been." In a life that is so easy to spend defining and seeking yourself, we find ourselves not in a mirror, but in the faces of those we've impacted. In those who love us because of the person we are as opposed to the person we've tried to be.

I hope McNugget understands that. That I will love him not because he's smart, or a lawyer like daddy, a doctor like mommy, a great sports star or a plumber – I will love him forever because of how he's already impacted me and what I have learned about myself from looking in his eyes.

And I hope he learns the final, unbearable, and true final message given on this album. The final track is titled "What People Are Made Of." The answer is humbling and grounding, providing wonder in the fact that we've managed to create so many beautiful things.

They ain't made of nothin' but water and shit.

A final programming note: those of you who have signed up for the newsletter received a short announcement earlier this week about a new project. For anybody who has read this far and hasn't submitted your email, really: now's the time.

OTR will be announced bimonthly on LinkedIn, as usual, but the new project will be mostly just kept to subscribers.

Go on, I'll make it worth your time.

Everything dies baby, that's a fact

Life is choice. Choice after choice, providing definition in a sea of possibilities. Brad Miller reminded me of this on Wednesday when I stated my intention to step away from regular LinkedIn posting – a timely framing as I've been ruminating on choice, consequences, and acceptance quite a lot these last few weeks.

Some of us like to think of ourselves as infinite. We want to chase every possibility, be everything to everyone, to give ourselves endlessly. In my case, I want to be a husband and a dad, a writer and a business owner, a musician and a trusted confidant, a reliable friend and sage speaker of truth – and on and on. We begin obsessing over becoming more efficient and effective at maximizing our impact.

And we burn ourselves out because despite what we believe about ourselves, we are each but one person with all of the frailty and limitations that come with that.

After many years of the burnout cycle (I am stubborn and stupidly insistent on my infinitude!), I've come not only to understand but accept that I must make choices that limit my focus to have any impact at all. Initially, I wrote "sustainable impact" and then laughed at my hubris: do you remember your great-grandmother's name? Do you remember or know anything about her? I'd guess that any "sustainable impact" lasts for, at best, two generations.

Sorry, Cula: I doubt McNugget will have any sense of who you were. (Cula's brother was named Tunis; suffice it to say I understand why I and my family members are strange. We're descended from people named Cula and Tunis, who sound like they had hard lives judging only by their names. The past is a foreign country.)

Anyway, a paradoxical freedom comes when we accept our finitude. When we accept that we cannot do everything we might be capable of doing, we are freed to do something. When we come to this recognition, we become mass murderers of our potential selves.

A man turn his back on his family,
Well he just ain't no good

For the last four or five weeks, I've been struggling with a feeling that took me until earlier this week to pin down. I suspect it's a feeling many first-time parents feel – especially if they become parents later in life after establishing something of a stable life. I also suspect we don't often acknowledge or talk about it because it can appear ungrateful or unloving.

I've been mourning the death of a version of myself and of my relationship with Audra. Certain events fundamentally change things, and bringing a child into your world is one of them. The choice to have a child – and it was a choice, excruciatingly expensive on both an emotional and financial basis – laid to rest an iteration of my life that will never come back.

Yes: my new life is wonderful and hard and joyous. I don't regret the choices I made. But in any choice like this, you do lose something. Making new wonderful friends doesn't make up for or replace a friend who passes away. We can hold two true things in our heads and hearts at once, can't we? I am so happy to be where I am and mourn some of the aspects of an exceptionally great life that I lost, never to return.

Any real choice has attendant consequences, actual stakes. Those stakes give a frame to the choice, informing us of our sometimes surprising verdict on what is most important to us.

Now mister, the day my number comes in...

I have two admissions to make:

1. I like Springsteen just fine, I guess, but I don't love him or his E-Street Band. I take that back; I mostly dislike him. This is a truth-telling zone and let's not couch it to be polite: your Jersey demigod is mostly trash.

2. When I first heard Nebraska as, I'd guess, a middle-school kid, I thought it was utter garbage.

With those stipulations made, I want to provide a little context for Nebraska and how it came about. Springsteen and his band had just done a massive tour for his double album, The River. I actively hate this album. It's got one song you've definitely heard ("Hungry Heart") and a bunch of shit that had already become cliche Springsteen. Listen to Max Weinberg's snare snap and machine-gun fills; Bittan's stocatto piano filling in the right channel, just loud enough to be heard but still background; Clarence Clemons's sax filing space because you expect a sax in a Springsteen song. There isn't much redeeming about The River. This is heresy, I know.

Springsteen drives me crazy, because when he's in full-on Springsteen mode he can be as good or as bad as anyone. The consistency is in the sound, but not in the quality of the songwriting. It's the worst kind of consistency: like how you know when you're reading a Tom Clancy book...even though he doesn't write his own books any longer. Springsteen created some pastiche of himself and only every once in a while breaks out of that self-parody to make something genuinely brilliant.

The River was a massive success, building on the success of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born to Run. Each of those albums got progressively enervated, programmatic, and trite. Toward the end of the tour supporting The River, Bruuuuuuuuuce asked for a brand new technology: a four-track recorder. It's difficult to imagine now, in the age of having a fully functional studio on your laptop, but the emergence of a four-track, which allowed you to do multi-track home recordings on a cassete tape, was a game-changer for musicians. To this day, my favorite recordings are the home demos of songs that then mostly get spit-polished into a boring perfection in the studio.

After the tour ended, Springsteen escaped to a rented house in Colt's Neck, NJ, with his Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio. He must have been reading and watching some weird shit, because the songs that he started penning...

Last night I dreamed that I was a child
Out where the pines grow wild and tall

It is so easy to succumb to the easy thing that gets you praise. I speak only for myself here: I love being told what a clever boy I am, love the pats on the head. So that behavior is reinforced and I unthinkingly double down on it. It turns out that I'm pretty good at drafting entertaining, engaging, and sometimes insightful short, punchy stories that pass as LinkedIn posts. And lots of people told me so. I liked that, and I kept doing it.

I'm embarrassed to say how much of a part of my own conception of self this has become. And yet.

For quite some time, I've felt a nagging, background frustration and uneasiness with the whole LinkedIn game. In hindsight, looking at some of my old posts, this is glaringly obvious. Earlier this year, I had a post about being the character "Owen" that I play on LinkedIn. Now, I read that post as a warning to myself disguised as a clever tongue-in-cheek unmasking of what's actually happening on LinkedIn, the land of "authenticity."

I've known for some time that my writing for LinkedIn was affecting my ability to do the work that is most meaningful to me. I love writing OTR because it affords me a larger palate to work with: I get bored with a singular focus and find most interesting the connection of things, especially in things that might not appear to be connected. It takes time to tell those stories, to weave together strands that appear unconnected so that at the end, you realize you've been holding a single rope the whole time.

If this is the writing that interests me, fulfills me – the writing that I arrogantly think that I am unusually suited for and capable of doing – why am I training my brain for inconsequential mic drop moments on LinkedIn?

There's a place out on the edge of town, sir
Rising above the factories and the fields

Springsteen wrote and recorded the songs that formed Nebraska in that rental. The recordings are raw and spectral, haunted. He took the songs into the studio several times, looking to run them through the Springsteen song factory, seeking that studio sheen.

And they refused. The songs would not have it.

After nearly a decade of feeding the E-Street Band musical chum to turn into the same fucking song over and over. He broke the formula that was making him tons of money, bringing him adulation most musicians could only dream of. He decided to just release the original tapes, in all their imperfected glory.

One of the things that I can't quite stand about so much of Springsteen's work is the topics he writes about and the way the songs are delivered. "Factory" off Darkness on the Edge of Town is a fine song that is delivered in such a way that the working-class populism of it just doesn't hit for me. Yet there is track after track on Nebraska treading the same worn-down world-weary territory and they are absolutely riveting. Believable because of their rawness.

What I love about Nebraska is it sounds like Springsteen without the need and comfort of sugarcoating the message, without the need to gussy up the mix with a chintzy guitar solo or a sax run. Just the straight shit. No chaser.

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Life is about making choices, and choices have consequences. Stepping away from LinkedIn is not without risk for me, as vapid and ludicrous as that sounds. Over the two years I've been active, I've been able to drive a significant amount of business from LinkedIn by telling stories. I am hopeful that those relationships have been made and the work will continue to flow, but I don't know that it will. I'll probably pop in for a post a couple of times a month outside of Accountability Friday (funny how a throw-in thing became the keeper) to remind people I exist.

But really, I'm out here. Working on projects that mean something to me, projects that I hope will mean something to you, too. I have some ideas about how I can evolve OTR, but for right now, with all of the new responsibility in my life, I'm going to take it pretty easy.

I want you to know that you have permission to go chase the things that are meaningful to you, even if they come with a cost. The cost is often the proof that the thing you're chasing is meaningful.

Everybody talks about following your passion. I agree, but not for the reasons that most people give. Look at the meaning of the word: passion comes from the Latin and means that you must suffer for it. You do things you are passionate about because they mean enough to you that you will suffer to achieve them.

Let that be a guiding query: what is important enough to me that I will suffer for it?

Oh! Well hello, old friend. It's been a while. So good to see you!

Me? Yeah, things are totally normal over on my end. The bags under my eyes? I haven't been keeping up with my skincare routine; nothing to worry about.

I know, I haven't reached out into your inbox for a little while. Ages? Well, that might be a bit of an exagger–

No, in fact, I wouldn't believe that you look forward to hearing from me. But that's probably a me-thing. Well anyway, I'm here now.

Death Cab has a song titled "The New Year" that centers around the line, So this is the new year/and I don't feel any different. I've always loved that song because it zeroes in on this notion of a moment of rebirth, of starting anew, as being artificially drawn. What? Just because we went from December 31 to January 1, I'm free to start over?

We're always free to make a change, to engage in the world differently.

But because of the collective notion that the new year offers new beginnings, there's a sense of obligation to partake – in resolutions, in new business visions, renewed devotion to a relationship. Change doesn't occur like that, on schedule and via outside pressure.

I cannot tell you how many people told me that everything will change when McNugget shows up. Everything will change! I think most people meant it in a positive way: there's an amazing thing that's going to happen to your life!

But it can also feel like a threat, no? And here's the truth of my experience having a child: not much has really changed at the core of our lives, except that we have many more routine, menial tasks to do and a lot less sleep. Please don't mistake me: I love my son and am thrilled he's home and healthy. Audra's life has changed a bit more, temporarily, due to being on leave. But he's been additive to our lives rather than fundamentally changing our world.

Maybe I'm doing it wrong? The most difficult aspect of all of this is a consistent, screaming self-doubt. It's been a long time since I've had no idea what I was doing. By the time you hit 40, you've got a pretty good idea of what you're good at – the things that people will pay you to do, that will get you a pat on the head for being such a clever boy, the things you do because you just really enjoy them. And once we get a sense of those, we stick mostly in that safe area of competence and excellence. Some of us routinely push out of that safe space to grow, but even that is a deliberate act: we know we're not good at something and have decided to suck at it for a while so that eventually we get competent and maybe someday very good at it.

Having a child thrust into your life is a different thing entirely. Yes, we chose it. Hell, we fought like crazy to get here. But the move from abstract into very evident reality is, at times, shocking and usually humbling. We're getting the hang of it.

(Audra and I have chosen not to share McNugget's name or visage on social media. You may find it hard to believe, given my apparent openness, but we are pretty private people.)

The day after McNugget was born, an edition of On the Record was on my calendar. We were sitting in the hospital, on zero sleep, Audra less than 24 hours post c-section, McNugget sleeping in one of my first, pathetic attempts at swaddling. Audra turned and asked me, "Aren't you going to do OTR?"

"Do you see a record player in here?"

That reads harsher than I said it. Still, she scowled and responded, "Since when was On the Record about the record?"

I had to concede the point. The record focus is a trojan horse, my friends, a storytelling structure that allows me an excuse to write about most anything I want.

And then, out of the blue, she said: "I'm going to buy you some good records to talk about. I'm sick of all your 'cool' records for the 'cool kids.'" Cut down to size, just like that. She has a way!

So here we go with our first in the Audra Series.

Let's jump back 30 years to one of the richest years in music history: 1994. There are a few anni mirabiles in music, but for people of my generation, 1994 was the year. Just think of all the amazing, groundbreaking music that was released:

• Illmatic, Nas

• Blue Album, Weezer

• MTV Unplugged, Nirvana

• Definitely Maybe, Oasis

• Ready to Die, Notorious B.I.G.

• The Downward Spiral, NIN

• Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast

• Grace, Jeff Buckley

• Ill Communication, Beastie Boys

• Dummy, Portishead

• Parklife, Blur

• Mellow Gold, Beck

• Monster, R.E.M.

• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement

• Diary, Sunny Day Real Estate

• Selected Ambient Works, Vol II, Aphex Twin

• There's Nothing Wrong With Love, Built to Spill

• Rubberneck, Toadies

• Do You Want More?!!!??!, The Roots

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. One of the standouts from this standout year is CrazySexyCool, the sophomore album from TLC, who – along with Outkast – was beginning to make a name for Atlanta as a hub of hip hop and r&b.

Audra bought this record thinking she was going to be making me review something that isn't to my taste; she was quite wrong on that front!

I have a very distinct memory of watching SportsCenter on June 9, 1994. It was the first time that I'd become aware of TLC. A weird introduction, right? Well, on June 9, 1994, Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes accidentally burned down her boyfriend's mansion. That boyfriend? Atlanta Falcon's wide receiver Andre Rison. Always known as the "crazy" one in the group, Left Eye and Rison got into a fight the night of June 8th. When Left Eye woke up, she looked in the mirror and saw the bruises resulting from the fight. Although Left Eye took the hit to reputation, Rison was physically abusive toward her and very controlling.

Seeing the bruising, Left Eye took a bunch of boxes of brand-new sneakers that Rison had just purchased, dumped them into a bathtub, set them alight, and walked away. The rest, as they say...

The group had just begun recording what became CrazySexyCool. The court-ordered anger management and therapy imposed on Left Eye severely limited her availability for the sessions. She would pop in and out of the studio as often as possible, but the majority of the recording was left to Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozanda "Chilli" Thomas.

One of the things I love about looking at the credits of old records is seeing lineages, seeing names that now mean something to us but at the time were just names printed in the album notes. Here are some names listed on CrazySexyCool: Busta Rhymes, Phife, Babyface, Andre Benjamin, Organized Noize, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Jermaine Dupri, and Prince. Back in the 90s, when I was listening to TLC, none of those names meant anything to me. Well, almost: I knew Prince and of A Tribe Called Quest (although it wasn't until high school that I listened to Tribe).

But looking at those names now is a different story – especially when you realize that "Andre Benjamin" is better known as Andre 3000. You can sense the currents steering T-Box, Left Eye, and Chilli – the stamp of approval given by Prince, notoriously stingy in approving covers, in welcoming TLC's version of "If I Was Your Girlfriend." You listen to "Red Light Special" and hear Babyface all over the song and all of the downstream Babyface productions that grew from it.

More than anything as I get older, it becomes apparent to me that all of the amazing works of art I revere were made by normal people. It's normal to have talent, statistically predictable for people to have such gifts. But those people are still people who grow by being around other interesting, talented, troubled people.

The giants we now revere as Pfife-Dog and Andre 3000, Busta and P-Diddy (although he's been knocked off a pedestal pretty fucking hard) were just a bunch of people making things.

And it has always been thus.

Those American ex-pats hanging out on the Left Bank were just a bunch of folks pushing each other to write better stuff. Before they were Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and Stein, they were simply Ernest, Scott, Ezra, and Gertrude.

If they can do amazing things, so can we. Evidence shows they felt exactly the same mix of arrogance and deep insecurity that we do; we've just learned to see the mask as the person.

I've been thinking about this a lot, lately: the fact that we reify current states as natural, limiting our ability to give ourselves the grace to grow. When I feel like I'm bad at being a dad – and, right now, that's pretty often – I have to fight the urge to think of myself as a Bad Father, a permanent state. When I feel resentful for having to take a break from work to feed the baby, I immediately doubt my suitability for being a parent.

But then, we are ever in a state of becoming, are we not? If we stop becoming, are we still living? Artists fear repeating ourselves, falling into a rut. We want forever to be forging into new, undiscovered territory. Yet we also fear losing our voice in the process. My personal coat of arms must prominently feature Janus.

So, here we are, with a distinctly uneven and uncohesive OTR, touching on a fundamental riddle of human existence. I have more to say about the record, and about fatherhood, and could do some editing to clean this up. But I never edit this, and I'm not going to start now. Right now, in this moment, this is the best I can do.

I'm learning to welcome the best I can do in the moment. It's slow work, but I'm growing into many things, these days. All of us are, here at the McGranns.

One of my favorite concepts to noodle on is time. You may have heard my riff on how our notion of time is merely the phenomenological result of our mental incapacity to comprehend all of this, our brains serving as an event horizon of experience so as not to experience everything at once. Or you may have heard me go on about how our modern notion of time didn't really exist three hundred years ago, our time-regulated existence being an artifact of industrialization. Or...well, I love to go on about this shit, but it's not why we're here today.

Forgive the late-in-the-day release of this OTR. I had written a completely different one, discussing Los Campesinos' We Are Beautiful, We Are Damned and realized 3/4 of the way through it I was avoiding the Thing. And, you know, sometimes you just have to say the fucking Thing. So, time be damned, we're throwing out that OTR and getting down to business: time, but not in hours and minutes, but years and generations.

Our sense of time is more attuned to connection and relationship than any clock. A smell can open a wormhole in time and place you instantly elsewhere, everything in that moment accessible. Hell, the more we learn about epigenetics, the more apparent it is that we carry experiences and traumas with us from our ancestors. Our experiences aren't something beholden to time in the way we generally think about it, so much as an artificial construct placed over our brief experiment as a cell in the ongoing human project.

If it seems as though I am circling an idea without being able to hit the target, I feel the same way. Yesterday, I posted on LinkedIn that I would issue OTR today, and then who knows, as Audra and I are going to become parents imminently (perhaps immanently, too). There were jokes about folks looking forward to future OTRs on Baby Shark (thanks, Chad!) and, after shuddering and conspiring to ensure such a thing would never happen, it began to really hit home how much things are about to change. That and the fact that we ended up in L&D triage at the hospital yesterday afternoon for a false alarm has brought a lot of hypothetical things into stark relief.

As I was drafting the abandoned OTR on Los Campesinos! I was reminded how OTR got started, over two years ago now – and, let me tell you, things come full circle.

Every Saturday morning, I wake up early, well before Audra gets up, and take Clare for a walk. When we get home, I make a cup of coffee and peruse my records. Then I play a record, sit on the floor, and just listen. No phones, computers, books. Just music. It is one of the few times I can count on during the week that is expressly and solely for me. It is one of the main pieces of my mental health routine.

But that's not how it began. I listen to records on Saturday mornings because my dad would sit down with me in our old house in Mt. Lebanon (a neighborhood in Pittsburgh, for those who aren't Yinzers), turn on the hi-fi and play a record on Saturday mornings. Often, he'd already been to the office and come home. And, if it was a fall weekend, I'd not only get time with him listening to music but a Notre Dame game with him in the afternoon too.

I know I've mentioned this here before. My dad is a wonderful man and one of my best friends. When I was a young child, he worked like mad. Off to work before I woke up and generally home after I was in bed. My time with him was limited, so I cherished any time I could reliably count on with him. Saturday morning vinyl was and remains a sacred time for me, first because it was time with dad, then time for myself, and – perhaps – soon time with my son.

Setting the needle down on "Where the Streets Have No Name" transports me to the morning of March 14, 1987. I was 5, in kindergarten, and not to turn 6 for several months. Those three months until my sixth birthday would have been about 4.5% of my life, a meaningful amount of time. That's akin to nearly two years of my lived experience now. Logarithms, man.

Anyway, because of my age, my dad generally would spin jazz or classical music on Saturday mornings, with an occasional Beatles album thrown in for good measure. (There was also the time my mother was away and we listened to Talking Heads, an experience more strange than confusing, but definitely not something I was ready for.) So, at five years old, I was pretty familiar with Glenn Gould's 1955 version of the Goldberg Variations, but not super up on rock. But that Pi Day, my dad walked into the living room with a brand new record and declared, "There's an Irish band I want to play for you, Owen!"

He placed the record on the table and lowered the needle. Even at five years old, I knew. I knew this album was something different, something unique. It's hard to get back to that space now because U2 has become so fucking omnipresent, just a constant presence in our cultural firmament. It sounds normal now, but it was something alien then, something that immediately stood out. (I say this as someone who isn't much of a post ~2000 U2 fan – but everything through Achtung Baby? Gold, Jerry!)

Generally speaking, dad would just sit there quietly and listen to the music. (I was certainly silent, as heavy breathing would annoy him and risk my participation.) But that morning, he had a different energy. And, really, can you blame him? Is there a better four-song opening cycle on an album than "Where the Streets Have No Name" --> "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" --> "With or Without You" --> "Bullet the Blue Sky"?

No. The answer is no. Maybe some as good, but none better. I will never forget how happy he was in that moment, and how happy I was that he was happy.

Over the past month or so, I've been asked the same question ad nauseum: "Aren't you so excited?!" It's an invitation to the club. "It's the best thing you'll ever do!"

It's more complicated than that, though – isn't it? Am I excited? Of course I'm excited. But that's not all: I'm also nervous, apprehensive, annoyed, scared, and mournful. These aren't things that we're "supposed" to be, though. Our vocabulary about having children comes in, basically, two flavors: it's unmitigated joy or a catastrophe. You can play out the different valences of those flavors. I feel that there's a whole, very real and powerful, set of emotions that we simply gloss over and ignore.

I'm thrilled that I'm going to have the opportunity to be a father; I've wanted this for quite some time. Audra and I have spent an ungodly amount of money to make this happen. And yet I do mourn the passing of a version of myself and the suffocation of a future path. Each major life event stifles potential lives we could lead. There are trade-offs, no? Parents, don't tell me that there aren't days you wish you could just up and fly to the Amalfi Coast with your spouse without any ties, just because. Hell, just having a dog makes that difficult. Don't tell me you don't sometimes wish that you weren't an unpaid Uber service or that you didn't have the Paw Patrol theme song constantly playing in your head.

"Oh, but it's worth it!"

Yes, and that response gives away the fact that there's a trade-off.

I am stupidly ambitious. I don't want this child to get in the way of that ambition. He will, almost certainly, and it will likely be worth it. It's a choice I've willingly made. This might well be the best thing ever, the best thing I'll ever do, and yes, I'm excited for it. But I am also feeling these other things.

We must kill off versions of ourselves to become who we want to be. It's the nature of how all of this works. We define ourselves not by potential but by elimination, and as Audra and I are stepping into a brave new world, we are also mourning the loss of potential selves.

This is normal and we should be able to talk about this openly, without shame.

The closer I get to having a little monster to care for, the more empathy I have for my father. I've long thought about and understood the sacrifices my mom made for my three siblings and me. She is a sainted woman. But I've been hard on my dad in my mind. He worked a ton and I thought this was selfish. I am beginning to understand the existential weight of it all.

When I was a newborn, dad read me Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as he was trying to pacify me to sleep. (This turned out to be a mistake: I have always been fascinated by the Romans and did not sleep much as a baby.) Me? I'm thinking Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago or maybe something happier like Mann's The Magic Mountain.

I have a theory that parents overcorrect for the mistakes their parents made and don't pay enough attention to what their parents did well. While I'm sure Audra and I will be overcorrecting for certain behaviors, I want to double down on some of the things our parents got right – and there was a lot they got right.

So, fear not: OTR is going nowhere, nor will it be featuring Baby Shark. Perhaps, though, it will morph a bit into an intergenerational exercise.

"Hey, little man! I've got a new one I want to share with you this morning!"

Listen along to this masterpiece on Tidal or Spotify.

Why put a new address on the same old loneliness

Ever since Steve Albini passed away last month, I've wanted to write about this singular figure in American music. I wasn't sure how to crack open my feelings about Albini. He lived as he died: doing the work without much fuss. I have to admit being surprised by how deeply I felt his loss. I'd always admired his own music with Shellac and other bands more than I liked it. His work making records for others at Electrical Audio, his Chicago studio, is the stuff of legend.

Much has been written about Albini in the wake of his too-early passing at 61 and I don't know him or his work well enough to add anything new or interesting. And then it dawned on me as I was flipping through my records this morning that Albini recorded one of my favorite albums ever. (Truthfully, he engineered many of my favorite albums – Mclusky, Mclusky Do Dallas; Don Caballero, American Don; Dirty Three, Ocean Songs; Palace Music, Viva Last Blues; Low, Secret Name and Things We Lost in the Fire; Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory; a ton of The Wedding Present albums; and on and on.)

So we'll get to Songs: Ohia's final album, The Magnolia Electric Co. in a moment, but first – thanks, Steve. You made the music world a much, much better place.

I hear that station bell ring
You might be holding the last light I see
Before the dark finally gets a hold of me

Jason Molina was one of the greatest songwriters of the past fifty years, whether you've heard of him or not. He had impeccable taste, a deeply human lyrical sensibility grounded in the despair and hope of existence, and he literally drank himself to death from organ failure in 2013 at 39 years of age. As someone who has suffered from failing organs, let me tell you: that's not a fun way to go.

I sometimes think of art as an attempt to see the world as it is, stripped of the patina of the stories we tell ourselves about our lives to justify (gestures wildly) all this. If this is remotely accurate, that art enables us to glimpse the world without the comforting stories we tell ourselves, then it's not much of a surprise that artists tend to be a bit on the depressive side of things.

If you came to On the Record for an uplifting read, I don't know what to tell you. You should know better 🤣

But I'll offer a glimmer of hope. I offer this album, one of the most dead-eyed stares into the void I've ever encountered, one of the rare moments of human courage to retain hope despite it all.

John Henry split my heart, split this full moon heart

I first heard Songs: Ohia when I was in grad school, dead in the middle of an upstate New York winter. I thought I'd experienced winters; I'm from Pittsburgh, after all! I've been caught in three-foot snowfalls! I moved to Binghamton, NY without once giving thought to what winter would be like. I wouldn't call this a mistake so much as hilariously naive.

Upstate winters have a relentlessness that is a quality of its own. It's not that there's a ton of snow (although there's a lot of it) or that it's cold (and it is). What gets you is that from November 1 through April 15, or thereabouts, it never relents. Every night for four months, a fresh four to six inches of snow drop. Every day for that same period, you huddle inside because the wind cuts through you and leaves you half sleepy and half wired, some middle passage that has a hazy and clarifying quality all at once.

A friend told me I should check out Molina's work. He heard that I liked Will Oldham's music and, back then, Molina and Oldham were considered to be similar artists. (I heard only superficial similarities both then and now, but that's for a different discussion.) So I downloaded Ghost Tropic and Didn't It Rain in January 2004. Didn't It Rain became the soundtrack of the period of my life between college and law school. I listened to it on my big studio headphones as I huffed it around campus, as I drove around town, as I sat grading papers.

And, it occurs to me now, the second track on Didn't It Rain is titled, "Steve Albini's Blues."

Anyway, Didn't It Rain is a spartan, elemental record. You can hear the space, the lyrics hanging in a purposeful void. It's my favorite Molina record, even if not his best. From the first time I heard "Blue Factory Flame" I was riveted. I mean, the opening verse drops this like it's nothing:

When I die
Put my bones in an empty street
To remind me how it used to be
Don't write my name on stone
Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio
A Cleveland game and two fishing poles
And watch with me from the shore
Ghostly steel and iron ore
Ships coming home

There was a short period when I passed the flame he discusses in the song regularly when I lived in Cleveland in 2005-06. It haunted me. No: present tense. It haunts me still.

I remember when it didn't used to be so hard
This used to be impossible

The Magnolia Electric Co. directly follows Didn't It Rain, recorded in 2002 and released in March 2003. It has that signature Albini sound: it just sounds like a bunch of folks in a room, playing music. And boy, could these guys play!

As music has moved more and more into singles and songs crammed-to-the-gills with stuff happening, it's easy to forget that albums exist where the whole is greater than the parts, where each song reverberates and refracts common themes, metaphors, and tropes. This album is one of those, with each song circling Molina's overriding concern: how to be human, how to stay alive, how to keep trying. On the first track, "Farewell Transmission," Molina sets forth one of the most plainspoken call to arms for what we're all supposed to do here that I've ever come across:

The real truth about it is
No one gets it right
The real truth about it is
We're all supposed to try

If that's not a perfect distillation of pragmatism as a life philosophy, I don't know what is.

Death pervades all of Molina's music, but perhaps more than any other album of his, The Magnolia Electric Co. confronts not just death but the will to live. Nowhere is this more front-and-center than in "Almost Was Good Enough."

A few OTRs back, I wrote about keeping things truly dear to me a little too close to the vest. I promised to be more open about the things closest to my heart. Well, friends, "Almost Was Good Enough" is a song that's saved my life. It is as close to my heart as anything I can share in these pages. It's a song about depression and the lies it tells us. It is, ultimately, a song offering hope. It is so good, I'm going to let it have the last word. No clever tying up of seemingly loose threads. Just Molina:

It's been hard doing anything
Winter's stuck around so long
I kept trying anyhow and I'm still trying now
Just to keep working, just to keep working.

I remember when it didn't use to be so hard
This used to be impossible
A new season has to begin
I can feel it leaning in whispering
"Nothing's lonely now
Nothing anymore in pain."

A tall shadow dressed how secrets always dress
When they want everyone to know that they're around.
Leaning in whispering
"My friend over there don't know what he's talking about."

Did you really believe, come one, did you really believe
That everyone makes it out?
Almost no one makes it out.
Almost no one makes it out.
Almost no one makes it out.
I'm going to us that street to hide
From that human doubt
To hide from what was shining and has finally burned us out.
Almost no one makes it out.
Almost no one makes it out.

No one makes it out
You're talking to one right now
For once almost was good enough

You're talking to one right now.

Two years ago, I was flailing, somewhat, in figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I'm still figuring that out, but with less flailing now. Progress.

I decided to enroll in the altMBA, a month-long intensive learning program developed by Seth Godin. It changed my life. Two months ago, I (and all the other altMBA alumni) learned that altMBA was shutting down after one last cohort. With some finagling, we managed to get Audra into that final cohort. I'm thrilled she was able to experience such a momentous program in my life and very sad that the program has shut its doors. But every project has a lifespan, and altMBA did the Work.

I've been up at the lake and so didn't put out your regularly scheduled OTR on Saturday. I'm going to be back at Denison for a reunion next weekend. So I thought we'd do something a little bit different this time around. altMBA was composed of 13 prompts, which you worked in small groups to think through, and then were individually responsible for posting your work on that prompt. This is one of my prompt responses, to Prompt 11, which was titled "Everything costs something."

I went off script and produced something very different from everybody else in my cohort. Some of this may not make sense to those who haven't done altMBA – or, honestly, to anyone who wasn't in my cohort – but there's some good stuff in here.

Let's keep this one within the newsletter. I won't be posting the link to this one on LinkedIn. I'm happy to discuss, if you'd like: please email me at iam@owenmcgrann.com. And now for something completely different!

We all owe death a life

1. On making choices

Time is zero-sum.

During the third week of February 2018, my younger sister gave birth to a miracle baby. She was told three years prior that she’d entered early menopause and could not have another natural child. She was devastated. So when two years later she found herself getting weird food cravings and the smell of bacon drove her straight out of a Waffle House, she was incredibly surprised and elated to learn she was pregnant with her second.

My parents, over the moon that at least one of their four children was giving them grandchildren, drove out to Indianapolis to be there for the birth of their second grandchild.

The same day my sister welcomed Helena into the world, I began vomiting blood and took an Uber to the emergency room. It turns out that vomiting blood is a bad sign.

After some inconclusive overnight tests, the doctors discovered that a blood vessel burst through an ulcer just south of my duodenum, flooding my stomach with blood. The first few treatments and a minor procedure failed to stop the bleeding. The next step was a highly risky IR procedure that had about a 10% chance of succeeding.

My then-fiancee and now-wife called my parents and apprised them of the situation. How about this as an example of opportunity cost: you can choose to be there to celebrate the birth of your second miracle grandchild and potentially miss the last moments of your son’s life, or you can get in the car, drive six hours back to Pittsburgh to be there for your son and miss out on the precious first moments of the life of your miracle grandchild.

Reader, my parents made different decisions.  (And not in a you take one and I’ve got the other kind of way.) We needn’t get into the fallout of that little mindfuck, but let it be said my mother’s decision has subtly altered our relationship–not on my end, but from a guilt she carries for not coming back.

2. On intentionality and consciousness

In November, I applied for the altMBA seeking discomfort, a fresh wound. There are many reasons as to why altMBA: just as I was a terrible employee, I was a terrible student. When I fell in love with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I taught myself Middle English and nearly failed Early British Literature because I wrote my final paper in Middle English. I am easily bored by repetition and will create fresh ways of doing the same task just to entertain myself, which, truth be told, is more enjoyable for me than for a boss trying to parse through different memo formats each time I turned them in. In altMBA, I was seeking a community of misfits.

What I did not expect to find was kin. People I would get in my car and drive across the country to go help if they but asked. “Strangers” I would end up crying in front of and with.

I love the word “conscious” because it reveals so much. The Latin root is con-scio: to know with. To be conscious is to know with another person. To be human is to be in a community. And, I would argue, it follows that different communities of knowing-with engenders new and different consciousnesses. Camus once said that to learn a second language was to grow a second soul. To grow in consciousness with a community of fellow-seekers is to learn a new vocabulary and to sense a different grammar through which we can organize and talk about the world.

In this, I recognize now that but for this communal journey, this open-ended, “Great, and what else?” I would not have developed the capacity to write this post.

3. On stories and hiding in plain sight

I tell a lot of stories. I have an analogic mind–everything reminds me of something else and I find that instead of telling someone directly what I think, I tell stories that circle what I mean. Metaphor and gesturing toward the Thing Itself leaves just enough work for the person on the other end for it to be more memorable, if that person has any idea what inane thing I’m going on about is.

I’ve been telling myself a lot of stories about what I want and why I can or cannot get it. In Prompt 1 I laid out four goals. Three of them were extrapolations of the quarterly goals for the firm and one of them was to start working more consistently on my writing.

The goals were neat and tidy, the very definition of smart goals. They were also stories I was telling myself to provide myself the illusion that I was moving forward toward what I want: here are four actionable goals, check the boxes, Owen!

The nine prompts that followed helped clarify and deconstruct those goals, the firm’s purpose, what I want to do with the book. All of that was good and I gave my best effort to go all-in on the work. And all of the work was, it turns out, just glancing at the surface.

Stories are wonderful explorations and invite other people into the journey, but they can also be a place to hide. And sometimes, the story isn’t enough. It’s not the work. Sometimes you just have to say the fucking thing.

4. The fucking thing

A few weeks ago, my wife and I learned that our second round of IVF again failed to yield any viable embryos. Yesterday morning we learned from additional genetic testing that I am almost certainly unable to have biological children. Some combination of my illness and my transplant has made having children with my genetic makeup next to impossible.

Oooooooooof.

There’s nothing wrong with the four goals I outlined in Prompt 1, but they didn’t answer the right question. The question those goals addressed was tactical: here are some steps to take to move toward some things I’d like to do. There’s a place for that, but the story I was telling, perhaps deliberately, gracefully danced around the fear.

That’s not why we’re here, though, is it–to dance around the fear? We, people like us, people who have developed this consciousness, we’re supposed to use a different preposition in that phrase. We dance with the fear.

Here’s the fucking thing: what I’ve been chasing from the moment I woke up alive from my transplant is a notion of legacy. I distinctly remember thinking as I was confidently-but-shitting-myself talking with the surgeon in the operating room that I hadn’t even begun doing my work, that if I didn’t make it, I was leaving nothing of meaning. Just before the anesthesia took me I recognized that I wasn’t afraid of dying but that I was very afraid of not having lived.

5. On legacies and the monkey mind

It’s funny what evolution teaches us; or rather, what story we take from evolution. For instance, one lesson biological evolution wants to instill is: “have lots of offspring.” What we’ve heard is, “have lots of sex.” Our species evolved an instinct to fear risk–it’s hardwired into our brains, and our amygdala can preempt any rational response. That worked great when we were hunters and gathers: that sense of immediate foreboding kept the species going. Now we call it anxiety, and it cripples many of us.

Intellectually, I know that it’s wired into my limbic system to want to have children, to pass along my DNA. It’s a hardwired biological form of legacy. And yet I am shocked by how disappointed I am.

There are other kinds of legacies. Perhaps it’s the news that my wife and I received the past two weeks that pushed this recognition, and perhaps I am shoehorning my experience into what we’re doing here in altMBA. But I don’t think so. The natural progression of these prompts is designed to invite me to go as far as I can, then show me that I’ve been withholding.

Try again. Give more. Rinse, repeat–until there’s no more story, no narrative to shield me from the unyielding gaze of the fucking thing. What is a legacy but a primal need to say I WAS HERE?

6. What am I supposed to be doing for this prompt, again?

This. Whatever this is.

7. On risks known and unknown

When I was in graduate school, I dated a lovely young woman. She was smart (if incurious) and brought a sense of playful danger into every room she entered. After we had been dating for a few months, she invited me to her parents’ house for dinner. And I, 23 and dumb, thought this was no big deal–parents love me! Easy.

So I show up at the “house.” Except it’s a mansion hidden in the hills of upstate New York. I park the 1997 Maxima I bought from my parents behind a 1956 Mercedes Gullwing in the circular drive. Her mother greeted me at the door and warmly welcomed me into the house. I grew up fairly privileged and had been in several very nice homes, but this was something of a different order–they were all houses in the same way as a chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound are both dogs.

We walk into one of the drawing rooms and sit down to talk. My girlfriend, her mom, and younger brother banter about Borat (which had just been released) and I notice a really nice Picasso print on the wall. I mention the quality of the print. The mother, embarrassed for me, kindly informed me that it was in fact an original Picasso.

Shortly after this, my girlfriend’s father walked into the room, wearing a stained chef’s apron and, barely acknowledging my presence, announced dinner was about ready. As I walked down the hallway to the kitchen I began smelling scents that were entirely foreign to me. Spices wafting toward me that I’d never come across before.

“I hope you like Armenian food, Owen! I made a feast for you!” Her father was wielding a knife as he pointed toward a mountain of food. “Maritza told me you like good wine. I had a few Bordeauxs pulled from the cellar.”

The food was astonishingly good, to this day perhaps the best meal I’ve ever had. That wine? Two bottles of Château Petrus. We drank over $15,000 worth of wine that dinner.

Everybody was just stupidly kind and interesting. As I was driving home, I thought to myself that I was going to marry that girl.

A few weeks later, I learned that my girlfriend’s father was, with his brother, the world’s largest arms dealer. That Mercedes Gullwing? A gift from the King of Jordan. The Picasso? That one was from Saddam Hussein.

I let her break up with me.

Every day we have on earth is like dating the daughter of the world’s largest arms dealer.

8. On doing the work

The goals I set in Prompt 1 and modified in Prompt 9 are fine. They are the tactics that enact the work. I now recognize that the work is leaving a legacy of work and impact. Of not leaving the world as I found it. Of becoming conscious with fellow travelers. Of writing from a perspective and experience that only I have.

Is it a coincidence that my law firm is focused on helping people build legacies and then protect those legacies? Is it a coincidence that I think of my writing as a potentially lasting mark of this mind, this quirky impossible thinking box?

I’ve been focused on the firm because it’s a problem I can solve, and my monkey mind likes problem-solving. The work the firm does is important, especially to our clients. The work of building the firm is a creative endeavor and it’s important to me.

But it’s not work that only I can do. There are lots of law firms that do wonderful work. Maybe not work with my personality, and maybe not with as much antipathy for the way law firms typically operate. But good work.

The only person who can write my books is me. That work is not fungible and as such, that work requires more of my attention. Not to the exclusion of the firm, by any means, but it’s time for me to stop running from the work. It’s time to write.

Because time is zero-sum.

Here are your links to this absolute masterpiece: Tidal and Spotify.

The sun fell behind you and never stood up

This might be a short On the Record; I woke up a bit late and today is Audra's baby shower. That doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on you, or on myself.

It's an odd feeling to be roughly two months away from your first child being born. Audra and I began trying to have kids in another life, way back in 2018. I was incredibly ill and it may not have been the most responsible thing to do, but then this isn't a reasonable desire, is it? My illness made it quite difficult for a number of biological reasons. I underwent surgery – twice – in an attempt to get a step closer, to no avail.

Eventually, I became so ill we put this pursuit on hold. I was trying not to get unalived, as the kids say. I barely succeeded, for now. It's a race we all eventually lose.

After my transplant, gluttons for punishment that we are, we began to try again. Audra got pregnant in July 2020 via IUI. For a few months, we were stunned by our fortune. I had received a transplant before Covid hit, we were building a house, and despite everything being shut down, we got pregnant with the help of science.

We lost the baby in the second trimester. The baby was not genetically viable. This, we learned, is one of the downsides of IUI: there's no genetic testing component. You're at the mercy of Mother Nature, and she's ruthless, unapologetic, and final. I recorded a short episode of Sonder Union about this time.

Can we show a little discipline

It took nearly a year to pick ourselves up and think about trying again. This time armed with the hard-won understanding that genetic testing is a critical component to ensuring we don't repeat a mistake, we moved on to IVF, where science plays a confidence game with Mother Nature – pretending to be in control, while holding on for dear life.

Friends: if you want to go to one of the most desperate places in your city, just visit a fertility clinic between 7 and 9 am. I cannot begin to describe the pit of wanting, desire, and pure existential dread that exists in those pale lavender walls. (Some consultant, I was informed, decided that the particular shade on the walls was "calming" for the edgy patients.)

From the first moment I walked into the first of the two, mostly indistinguishable, clinics we paid well over $100,000 to, the unique atmosphere of the place grabbed me. The stark divide between these women (generally there by themselves) seeking a child and the cattle-call machine of the clinic was such a fucking mess. The clinic had an endless supply of patients and acted like it: the service provided was clumsy, unfeeling, and utterly without compassion. To wit: we learned via voicemail that after getting our hopes up with ten embryos sent off for genetic testing, none of them were viable. We were sitting in the parking lot of a Get Go, having just got some food, on a Friday night when that message rang through the cabin of the car like a death knell.

There's a part of me that wants to volunteer my services to engineer a better system for these places. Truly: it is shameful, and I would venture that anyone (and there are waaaaay more of us than you might imagine) would agree that the state of this care is abysmal. It wouldn't be hard to make it more humane, to not leave a couple eating french fries in a parking lot finding out via an absent-minded voicemail that their dream had died.

Imagine that ride home, hand in hand, trying to see the blurry lines of the road through your tears.

Your eyes are broken bottles, and I'm afraid to ask

I mentioned a few OTRs back that The National is one of my two or three favorite bands. This EP, Cherry Tree, is when the band stepped into itself. They'd previously released two albums, the self-titled debut that is fine, and the much better follow-up, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. They were a good band, enjoyable. Some good tunes.

And then came Cherry Tree.

This EP is different from any of the records that followed – it is primarily acoustic, it features Matt Berninger in hushed, acerbic form, and the trademark percussion is muted – but nothing comes after but for Cherry Tree. This is the National's coming out party and it might just be my favorite of all their records. They have better records, but nothing quite as affecting as this.

Let's just take the lyrics of the first track:

You're cussing a storm in a cocktail dress
your mother wore when she was young
Red sun saint around your neck
A wet martini in a paper cup

You're a wasp nest
you're a wasp nest.

Your eyes are broken bottles
And I'm afraid to ask
And all your wrath and cutting beauty
You're poison in the pretty glass

You're a wasp nest
you're a wasp nest

You're all humming live wires
under your killing clothes.
Get over here, I wanna
kiss your skinny throat

You're a wasp nest
you're a wasp nest

Tell me that this doesn't paint a crystal clear picture for you of both the woman and the narrator. Tell me this isn't also commentary on upper-class white East Coast society: a WASP nest, if there ever was one.

The EP only gets richer and more cutting, building and building the stakes until the crash and catharsis of "About Today" – which on some days is my favorite song. The EP version is great, but when they play it live, it is transformative:

Don't look at me, I'm only breathing
Don't look at me, I'm indiscrete

Audra and I went through another three rounds of IVF. This is more trying than you can imagine, if you haven't done it yourself. Emotionally, it guts you, dries you out, and leaves you desiccated. We went on for three straight years pretending that things were normal, only to find that the insanity of the whole thing in fact became normal. On our journey, we exhausted the ways IVF could go wrong until, to our disbelief, an embryo implantation had taken.

Going into the transfer procedure, we'd agreed that if this one didn't take, we were done. We had come to terms with not having a child: we were happy as-is. So, as we sat in the clinic on Halloween waiting for the doctor to come in and transfer the embryo, Audra asked me to play some music to take her mind off her ludicrously full bladder. Rather perversely, I opened Tidal and played Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" for reasons I cannot explain. We sat in that lavender room, laughing about the absurdity of the moment, content with the inevitable failure of the procedure and ready to move on.

And here we are, seven months later, boxes of strollers and pack-and-plays littering the house, getting ready to see friends, family, and loved ones come together to celebrate simultaneously the least likely and most fought-for baby in the family. I cannot say that we are without our hesitations; we had, after all, come to terms with a childless life, and now this child is bursting onto the scene.

Is that wrong to say? That we have our doubts and hesitations after trying so fucking hard to make this happen? No matter: it's true, and what's OTR for other than to say things I am thinking? I've been considering a short Owen-only Sonder Union episode about this, but that's for another time. Christ, we're complicated animals, aren't we?

It is also true – two contradictory things can be true at once! – that we are incredibly excited to be having a little boy in a few months.

So here we are, little man, willing a world filled with love into existence for you. Look at all these people coming out just to say hello!

We live in an age of abundance, and it's made us sleepily arrogant. Our streaming services provide us the illusion of having all of the world's television and music right at our fingertips. Amazon has fooled us into thinking that any book ever written is just a download away. Google has shifted the way we think: we no longer need to know anything, we just need to know how to run a search.

The sheer amount of information available at our beck and call is indeed astonishing. In some ways, there's never been a better time to be an artist. Musicians can record studio quality music on their laptops with the right software and plugins and put it right up on Bandcamp and Spotify. Writers can self-publish. Nearly all of the intermediaries, the arbiters of taste, can be removed from the process.

And yet.

It is, of course, an illusion. I'm all for opening the lines of distribution and removing the A&R asshole, the editor who wants only what he or she wants, the gallery owner who fancies himself a tastemaker as a necessary hurdle in the process to reach people. That's not the issue. The issue is we have this arrogant assumption that removing all of these arbiters of access means everything is accessible.

When I was in high school, I geeked out on music – obsessed over it, devoured it, picked up the guitar so I could create it. After I saw my first live show (my first four shows were Oasis, U2, the Rolling Stones, and Page & Plant, spoiling me rotten), I realized that the albums were one face of the music. The live shows had an entirely different energy, a different aesthetic.

So I started collecting bootlegs of live shows of my favorite bands, trading tapes with people from all over the world (the first moment that I realized how the internet would change the world was when I traded Oasis bootlegs with a guy in Rio). By the end of my senior year in high school, I had well over 500 bootlegged shows from Oasis, U2, the Jam, my bloody valentine, Radiohead, Built to Spill, and Hum. Almost none of the shows I had on tape or CD are available on any streaming service, and most of them are probably lost to time. I don't have my copies, anymore.

But, I hear you object, we have the studio versions! Yes, we do, and we can find those on nearly any streaming service. But to this day, I withhold my fervor for any musician until I can see them live: a studio (or a laptop) can make nearly anyone sound good. On stage, especially a stage like the one above, there's nowhere to hide. It's you, your mates, and the audience. You can either play or you can't. It's about as binary an experience as you get – on both ends of the equation. Even if you can play, you have off-nights, where you let yourself and the crowd down; you have nights that are perfectly good shows; and you have transcendent nights, where some alchemy happens and the music you produce has a magic to it.

Every night is a bit different, and everyone of those tapes revealed a different incarnation of the bands. Songs took on different tones and inflections, the musicians, bored with playing the same fucking parts night after night would freelance, either to the delight or frustration of his bandmates and the crowd.

The easy access to "music" has changed the way we think about it. It's now a fixed thing in our heads, a song being the thing on record, rather than what music has been for the rest of human existence: a unique live performance, often of standard songs that everybody knew. Hell, the last show I went to, the folks behind me were bitching that Jason Isbell wasn't playing the songs exactly the same as they are on the record.

We generally think of jazz, now, as a single thing. Miles and Bird and Basie and Benny and Glen and Louis and Dizzy. We only think this now because we have, mostly, moved beyond it as a dominant art form. But in the same way that we thin-slice rock ("post-rock" and "post-hardcore" and "post-punk" will all sound the same in 50 years, after the culture has moved), there are many different kinds of jazz.

In the 1930s and early 40s, Swing was king. You know this sound, if you let yourself think about it: this sound is defined by Big Bands, rousing melodies, often with lead vocals from names you know well. Count Basie and his Orchestra was one of the finest of these Swing bands.

Originally forming in 1936 in Kansas City, before moving up to Chicago later that year, Basie and his Orchestra had a kick to their sound that nobody else did. Much of this came directly from Basie's piano, which almost never played what you expected; his playing was contrapuntal and, while never attention-seeking, very attention-grabbing in the accents it added to the music.

So many great musicians moved in and out of Basie's Orchestra: Freddie Green, Lester Young, Sweets Edison, Herschel Evans, etc. It was impossible for his band not to be great because he was so much fun to play with, so generous with giving other players space to shine, that Basie drew great musicians into his orbit.

It might be an exaggeration to say that Swing was a pre-War artform and Bebop was the post-War change, but not much of one. Wars are cultural touchstones for many reasons: there's generally a significant loss of young men, destruction of things, and often the dissolution of ideas or worldviews.

American Pragmatism could not have been developed without the utter devastation of the Civil War. Peirce, James, and co. all lived through the Civil War and much of the thinking at the heart of Pragmatism is an attempt to piece together a world that no longer offers stable access to truth and reality. (Peirce is an intellectual hero of mine, but I would be remiss if I didn't say he and his family were casually okay with slavery and he was exempted from military service as he was otherwise serving in the United States Coast Survey, a government scientific endeavor at the time.)

World War I saw the destruction of Europe as it existed. Perhaps no writer captured this better than Ford Madox Ford in his two major works, The Good Soldier, which was written pre-war and published right as the lions of July were roaring, and Parade's End, his four-part masterpiece casually laying bare the destruction of European civilization. We see these ideas in so much of the post-WWI literature and poetry, with the sweet lie laid bare: dulce et decorum est, pro patriae mori.

The Swing sound of pre-WWII jazz sounds to me like a confident country coming into its own, brash, forward, and danceable. Post-war Bebop, though, is something different entirely: a form that had reached maturity, aware of its place in the world, and challenging.

I put on Basie this morning for a few reasons, not the least being that I love this recording. (You can't find this anywhere streaming, so I guess it never happened.) But also because I've been thinking about the move from Swing to Bebop in the context of my novel, Pennhollow. Jazz is, in a way, a character in the book and the cultural move from Swing to Bebop sits at a cultural divide that animates some of the conflict.

I was looking over a passage from earlier in the book last night as I was writing to ensure that what I remembered was in fact what happened. I came across this passage, which I'd forgotten about (it's amazing how much of your own book you forget about...) and it made me want to listen to some Swing this morning to get at the struggle James is having here (the excerpt is marked by dividers):

The bass line stopped his heart, broke it into tiny pieces. The poor muscle was already pumping at capacity, straining to keep up with Lexis, but James thought he’d have a moment to rest between songs. Then the bass kicked in and it was too much to bear.

It was unlike anything he had ever heard – not your standard walking jazz line but an ostinato figure, something with sharp edges and a mission. The bass was at once immensely sad, a melody poking and prodding one’s capacity for melancholy. But it was also insistent: aching though not morose, vacillating between a frantic pace that civilians associated with war and a languid melody that lingered in the fiber of your being. The pattern of half-step chord changes, subtly changing the bass pattern, evoked an eerie, otherworldly sensation.

“Why don’t we sit this one out, James?” Lexis had taken his hand and led him to the edges of the room. She wiped a tear from James’s cheek and he realized for the first time that he was crying. Big, wet tears were streaming down his face and Lexis patiently used the sleeve of her dress to sop them up. “You look like you just missed your best friend’s funeral.”

“I’m – I’m sorry, I don’ know what’s come over me….” He removed his glasses to better rub his eyes.

Although there wasn’t much room for further retreat in the small room, Lexis navigated them to a dusky, smoke-filled corner of the club. The bassist had been playing solo for a minute or two, smiling as the drummer began feeling out his place, what space he needed to fill. With a nod from the bassist, the sax came in hot, contrapuntal to the bass, destabilizing the little bit of solid ground James had found following the base.

“What is this?” His tone was one of honest wonder, trying to comprehend music at once so familiar and yet so fundamentally new.

Next to him, Lexis had stopped dancing – although she never really stopped moving in time with the music – and was tending to James. She was wearing a knee-length full sleeved black dress. James had grown accustomed to the attention that Lexis drew from both men and women, though Lexis seemed to be entirely unaware of the effect she had on a room. Perhaps because she had never known otherwise, James thought the morning after another night out where every door opened to Lexis as if she herself was the skeleton key.

“This, G.I. James, is bop. Serious jazz. It’s amazing, isn’t it?” She took hold of a gin that someone had made appear without, to James’s knowledge, Lexis making any signal for one. As though everybody knew that she could not be trusted alone without a gin lest she failed to make it back to the dance floor.

Can you imagine a world where that bassline would have been edited out by a producer because it wasn't catchy enough? Where the real-time discovery would be mediated by the Spotify algorithm?

We're moving from a world where chance and choice drive human behavior to one where the decisions are made for us, without our full awareness. There are compelling business reasons that Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix want this to be the case. If I owned one of those companies, I would probably be pushing these same things because I'm merely human and will selfishly manipulate systems and situations for my own gain if given the opportunity.

But let's be a bit more cognizant of what it is we're ceding away. So many of the most meaningful moments of my life have been happy accidents, shared moments that happen only once, communal occasions that defy expectation – and moments, sitting alone, reading a book I chose to read or listening to a record that spoke to me in that moment.

Is the algorithm ever going to stop your heart and break it into tiny little pieces?

Here's today's album on Tidal and Spotify, if you'd like to listen along.

The old familiar sting

Going back to something that was once familiar but that has drifted away and out of your consciousness is a dangerous exercise. This is why going "home" is often such a tenuous thing; nostalgia cuts both ways, as the loss of something that was and the reminder of something you had to escape. We have two intrinsically linked impulses as we grow up, the first to falsify our memory to create some halcyon time and the other to create a new life built entirely out of new pieces, "leaving" everything else behind.

We tend to be either Protean in the creation of our lives or conservators of the lives we were born into. Usually both, though not many of us admit that. The human ego is a knotty beast. We inherit so much; the question is whether we want that inheritance, whether we are looking to escape the imprint and consequences of that inheritance or whether we're looking to leverage it to advantage. (Again: usually both.)

A few weeks back, my buddy Rob (he of Slayer fame in these pages) asked me whether I've written about Nine Inch Nails's The Downward Spiral yet. I said that I don't have the album on vinyl, so it hasn't been an option. Earlier this week, the 2017 remaster showed up at my doorstep, so I guess it's time to return to something from my past – a record I listened to a lot in my teens but have drifted away from.

Going home is fraught, visiting with the characters of adolescence, those figures we thought were so important, teaches us sometimes uncomfortable lessons about ourselves.

God is dead and no one cares

For the past two or so weeks, I've been mostly off LinkedIn. I didn't release an episode of Sonder Union, even thought I have the next one completed, edited, and ready to go. I haven't stopped working on Pennhollow, but by the end of this newsletter, I'll have written probably four times as many words here (this generally runs 1500-2000 words) than I've written for my book the past two weeks.

Nobody has noticed. This is rather reassuring, really, a reminder of my own smallness. I mean that genuinely: we all think we want to be important and famous, but we don't, really. If you've ever known anyone who has built a platform for his or herself, you have certainly heard that it is a real fucking headache. I've carved out a tiny little corner where a few people will lend a little bit of attention now and again and go on with your days. I appreciate the audience and the low-stakes of it.

But – you knew there was a but coming, right? – this is all a lot of work and I'm starting to feel a bit burned out. Maintaining one business, building out another, writing a novel, recording and releasing a podcast, writing a longform newsletter, posting on LinkedIn nearly every day...I feel like a six year old at the end of a party. It's been a good time, but maybe it's time for a nap?

Recently, I ran across two old photos of me, one the week before law school started:

And one taken the sometime during my first year of private practice:

Something changed. A weight dropped on me somewhere along the line. There's something in my eyes in the second photo that looks like a dude bracing for something terrible. (Something terrible was coming.)

I've done a lot of work to move beyond both of these versions of myself: not nearly as naive as the first, not as unhappy and uptight as the second. I've mostly settled into a happy place – or as happy as someone with anxiety, depression, and ADHD can reach – and I don't want to invite that sense of overwhelm and dread back into my life. I would like to remain properly whelmed.

So I may be reconsidering my dedication to some of my projects. I doubt any will go away, but we'll see if they're as consistent. The one thing I want to preserve at all costs is Pennhollow, which is also the first one I'll set aside when I get busy.

Funny how your most important work, the work that means most to you and has the deepest hold on you, is the first you set aside, isn't it? Resistance is a wily, shameless opponent.

Help me I've got no soul to sell

1994 was an absolutely absurd year for music. Here are just a few albums that came out:

• Illmatic, Nas

• Definitely Maybe, Oasis

• crazysexycool, TLC

• Grace, Jeff Buckley

• [Blue Album], Weezer

• Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, OutKast

• Superunknown, Soundgarden

• Selected Ambient Works, Vol II, Aphex Twin

• Parklife, Blur

• Diary, Sunny Day Real Estate

• Rubberneck, Toadies

• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Pavement

I could go on and on. These are just off the top of my head. It was an annus mirabilis for music. What's amazing is how many of these are, in effect, the coming-out parties for the musicians. 1994 was the year that they made it, and I remember being 13 and thinking I was living through something magical.

Some of these bands were right at the center of popular music (Soundgarden, Nirvana (Unplugged was released), Pearl Jam, TLC), but off to the side was Nine Inch Nails, dressed not in flannel but all in black fishnets, as though Robert Smith got lost in Berlin and found a bunch of distortion pedals and a drum machine.

At the time, I remember thinking that NIN was on the edge, out of the mainstream; of course, they were a different kind of mainstream: The Downward Spiral sold over three million copies. I was a little young for The Downward Spiral when it first came out when I was in 7th grade, but I distinctly remember the NIN logo beginning to show up all over the place. Kids with older siblings wearing NIN shirts on the bus, yelling, "I want to fuck you like an animal!" without really knowing what they were saying.

It wasn't until several years later that I listened to NIN with any purpose – probably my sophomore year of high school. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Oasis, Manic Street Preachers, My Bloody Valentine, Jam, and the Smiths. I'd become a full devotee of English music. NIN offered something different, both more sterile and harsher. It was moody music, and I was only occasionally a moody kid.

goddamn this noise in my head

The thing I'm struck by more than anything as I listen to The Downward Spiral for the first time in a decade or so is how great much of it sounds. It's really beautifully mixed, with juicy bits of ear candy all over the spectrum. When the distorted guitar comes in, I find myself trying to ignore it so I can listen to all of the atmospherics in the rest of the mix.

This was really bothering me at first: I kept wanting to listen to the quiet parts and I kept wanting Reznor to stop talking about his dick. (Seriously: listening to this today, I was struck by how many of these songs are horndog missives clothed in industrial production.) The production on these tracks really stands up: Reznor & co. were doing some really interesting things, but going hard for shock value.

Then it dawned on me, as counterintuitive as it may be: Nine Inch Nails was Reznor's juvenalia. Very successful juvenalia, for sure, but still the immature work of a superb musician.

After I spun The Downward Spiral twice this morning, I put on the soundtrack from The Social Network and then Watchmen. This clicked: all of the compelling aspects of NIN were here, forefronted. Reznor (and his soundtrack partner, Atticus Ross) have a gift for creating atmosphere and leaving space, for inviting you into co-creation of something. I doubt Reznor expected to win his first Grammy for a soundtrack, but sometimes it takes us a while to find our way to our true gifts.

Problems do have solutions, you know

The funny thing about going home is that you can't, really. I drove past the house I grew up in a few weeks ago and saw a whole new batch of kids playing in the yard. The dog running around wasn't ours. You can go home, but it will have changed. We cannot access our past but in memory, and our memories lie to us. We can get together with family, revisit with old friends – but we will all have changed. Our pursuits, our desires, our focus changes.

Change isn't good or bad, intrinsically. But it is inevitable. I'm trying to figure out what this guy – who both is and is not the same as the two guys above, from decades ago – wants now. Perhaps it's time to remove the loud, distorted guitar from the mix and to stop shouting about my dick all the time. I mean...well, you get it.

Listen along on Tidal or Spotify.

This pricy stuff makes me dizzy

How often do you feel suddenly aware that you're caught in a spiral in which you're just cycling through obligations, each coming faster than the last time, each time bringing slightly less joy? A regression of sorts, each time reverting back to the beginning, each obligation its own beginning and end.

Giambattista Vico, an 18th-century Italian philosopher (technology a professor of rhetoric, which shows how little our job titles mean), has a really compelling theory of historical spirals – not cycles, as we generally think about them, nor the "history repeats" nonsense. Rather, societies proceed through natural flows of affluence, advancement, prosperity before forgetting everything that drove these things and making the same fucking mistakes that led to a decline the last time. The thing that distinguishes Vico from the history-repeats nonsense is that he recognizes that it's never the same fucking mistakes, but similar mistakes, each time tuned to the new socio-political moment. I don't know if Walter Miller was familiar with Vico, but his novel A Canticle for Liebowitz is a masterpiece playing out this idea.

Two digressions by the end of the first two paragraphs. My brain is already very ADHD, but these past few weeks have, I feel, weakened my ability to hold the cords in the rope together. So we'll see how this edition of On the Record goes...

I'm Mr. November, I won't fuck us over

The truth of the matter is that entrepreneurship is a highwire act: exhilarating (literally, "losing breath") and frightening, with a healthy dose of anxiety thrown into the mix. Growth brings on its own additional risks: added payroll, calculated bets – still bets! – on additional revenue streams, investment in infrastructure. It's really difficult to calibrate this accurately as you're building. The mix gets out of wack, with payroll and investment outpacing new receipts, with additional work outpacing the infrastructure or people needed to service it.

It can be dizzying, all while trying to improve as a manager and leader, trying to think through logistics for workflow, putting out small fires...and, oh yeah, doing customer work.

I've had some well-meaning folks ask, "Why the haste? What's with the manic pace?" And they're good questions, questions that I'd ask someone else if I saw them acting like I am. I mean, Clare watches me go and taps out.

Is it a good sign when you leave your super-sized terrier sputtering to keep up?

If only to be a resolute man

In the last OTR, I mentioned that I would be featuring some more of my absolute favorite bands in the newsletter and wrote about Speaking in Tongues by Talking Heads. After spending some time with Byrne & co., I revisited Byrne's beautiful, quirky-as-hell book Arboretum, and I fell in love all over again. We hear all the time how important it is to create authentically – but so few of us do. We shape our work to be just normal enough that it's recognizable, easily assimilated to others' experience.

But that's not really what great art does. Great art requires a shift from and in us, rather than accommodating us. We should be changed by it, moved, left a little undone and put back together anew.

I think that's what I respect about Byrne. He gives no quarter. He invites you over and pulls up a chair for you, but he's not going to sugarcoat anything or make it easy for you, and books like Arboretum are perfect examples of this.

Today I offer a pretty unique piece in my pantheon of favorite artists: an album of covers performed by my favorite new musician in the last five years of songs by my favorite band still playing.

Yeah, it's a strange conflagration of things, and that's partly why I love it. The other part is...well, we'll get to that. So, today's record is Bartees Strange's Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, an album covering songs by The National.

We're the heirs to the glimmering world

I've written about Bartees Strange in these parts before. Bartees spent much of his early life around the world, as his father was in the Air Force, stationed in England and various other places. His mother is an opera singer. After his dad retired from the military, the family settled down in Mustang, Oklahoma for middle and high school. He learned to play guitar from local country and blues players and quickly got into the hardcore and punk scene. After college, he moved to Brooklyn and played in several bands while working in public relations, before moving to DC to do PR at a climate change NGO. His is a distinctly American story.

It's interesting: when I've given the precis above about Bartees, most people are then surprised to find out he's black. And it's his sense of blackness in some white-dominated spaces that led to the creation of this album.

Like me, one of Bartees's favorite bands is The National. Back in 2019 (in the before-times), he went to a National show in DC and felt the awkwardness of being the only, or one of the very few, people of color at the show. It was a sea of early-middle-aged white dudes, letting the tails of their shirts slip out of their slacks as they sang along to lyrics like:

Underline everything, I'm a professional
in my beloved white shirt
I'm going down among the saints

He went home and ruminated on the experience. He was in the process of writing and recording his first album, Live Forever, and shopping around the album to various folks in the industry. He had a conversation with someone at Brassland Records (which is owned by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, the guitarist twins in The National) about his record and mentioned that The National was one of his favorite bands. The label guy nodded absently – yeah, yeah, buddy, cool story.

But then Bartees said, "Yeah dude. I'm working on some covers of their songs."

"Oh? Cool. Why don't you send some over for us to hear?"

I carry the dollhouse safe on my shoulders

One of the eternal truths about life (and there are very few) is that we're all making it up as we go. Even the most experty-expert is making it up, albeit with better information and more experience.

There's something reassuring about this, if you let yourself get past the initial panic attack. The way things are being done? There's nothing immutable about it. You can change it. There's no shame in not knowing how to do something. Just start doing it and see what happens. There is no path for your life except the one you blaze. (There are paths other people will give you, pre-made and with the promise of ease; be wary.)

So why the haste I'm acting with right now? A few reasons, one business-related and the other decidedly not.

We have to do important things before we're ready. We figure out how to do important things by doing them, and no amount of non-doing learning will prepare us. Pushing our lives forward is a confidence game. (I love how words give themselves away: confidence – "con-fido" or "with faith," though there's no hint of religion in the Latin.)

Purely Estates right now has a window to capitalize on a business opportunity and to spin that opportunity into a much larger and stable one, if I play it right. It involves hiring, engaging technical vendors, and partnering with subject matter experts. So there's a big investment of time and money upfront. And the thing that keeps me up at night? I don't know what I'm doing.

I know better than I did two years ago, but like all the rest of you, I'm making it up as I go, running a series of rapid experiments in the process.

But why the hurry? Because Audra and I have something else we're not prepared for arriving sometime in July and I'm going to need to be able to step away from the business without fear of it falling apart.

After nearly six years, more rounds of IVF than we thought our bank account could handle, and lots of heartache, we're expecting our first, and perhaps only, child this summer.

How close am I to losing you?

Bartees walked out of the meeting with Brassland in a bit of a panic. While he loved the National, he had no covers worked out, let alone recorded. He put himself on the hook for a lift he wasn't prepared for.

He had a few options at this point. He could go dark and never contact anyone at Brassland ever again. Except he wanted to sign to Brassland pretty badly. He could pull up tabs of some songs, gather some bandmates, and pound out some standard covers. This would have been easy, if forgettable. Even though people want to hear note-perfect recreations of classics when they see a cover or tribute band, that's incredibly boring except in that particular nostalgiac circumstance.

Rather than take the easy way out, he sat down and thought about the songs he thought he could bring something new to and set about reimagining some tunes. Because here's the thing: what's the fun in playing someone else's song note for note? What do you learn about yourself? What do you add to the world?

The truth is, when we do things in our own voice, there's no roadmap. We have to figure it out on our own – even when there's a rough guide, whether it be a song performed by someone else or a business operated by someone else. For it to be yours, you have to go out on a limb...and as Sam Clemmons always sez, you've gotta go out on the limb, because that's where all the fruit is.

So I leave you with two thoughts:

Take a listen to these two versions of "Lemonworld," the first by The National and the second reimagined by Bartees Strange. This is an absolute masterclass in owning a song, creating it anew. There are some covers that are so transcendent you might not know they're covers (Aretha straight robbed Otis Redding of "Respect" and left nothing in his pockets, while Whitney's version of "I Will Always Love You" leaves Dolly's stuck in neutral).

Let's have more of that energy, both in art and in the confidence game of our lives. I'll be over here, frantically trying to prepare for something you can't prepare for.

Listen along on Tidal or Spotify.

I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac

I read this morning about the fascinating backstory of Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer," and you're lucky I don't have that record. In fact, I generally loathe The Eagles.

At the same time, I've always kinda liked "The Boys of Summer," what with that three-note descending signature synth part and the whispy guitar filigrees. That sad nostalgia that permeates the whole thing. The song was offered first to Tom Petty, who turned it down because the "jazzy" track didn't fit on the album the Heartbreakers were recording at the time, Southern Accents. And it was one of the very first songs to be built around a drum machine. For those in the know, Roger Linn was the mad genius behind the drum machine, and the drum track on "The Boys of Summer" was generated from one of Linn's early models – well before the famous Linn 9000 was introduced.

This is something of an exercise in how my week has gone: false starts, interesting but ultimately useless errata, avoidance of the Thing Itself, and helping others face their Things. Some weeks feel heavy: dense with layers of events, lessons, and labor that will take a while to unpack, to lay out on the table and examine.

Building big things – undertaking big projects – is a curious endeavor. On the one hand, I'm quite aware of the immensity of the lift. I'm almost a full quarter into this build and (to the extent any business endeavor is ever "completed") have another full two to three quarters left until v1 is completed. I know how much there is to do, and yet...there's that other hand grasping and grasping, furious that I haven't made more progress, that I don't feel closer to an end state.

This is one of the biggest risks in any significant endeavor: the obsessive focus on the next step blinds us to the work we've done and done well. It becomes nearly impossible to appreciate the progress we've made because there's always the next step to move on to. So we find ourselves forever focused on what's next, that endless line of tasks, of system builds, of drip campaigns, call scripts, document automation – and we don't take even a moment to look back and recognize how much ground we've covered.

My ADHD and business coach/minder, Marshall Lichty, stopped me a few weeks back and insisted I pause for a moment and acknowledge that I've made, by leaps and bounds, more progress on Purely Estates in the last four weeks than I made in the year and a half of its existence before now. I instinctively wanted to brush that off and refocus back on the work ahead. But he is right, and it's important to maintaining energy, focus, and morale.

We must acknowledge the gains made, celebrate the work accomplished, and then get back to it.

Fooled around enough with numbers
Let's not be ourselves today

The other day, a friend of mine asked me why I never write about my favorite bands on On the Record. I was somewhat dumbstruck; I'd just written about Frightened Rabbit and, while it's not a universal truth, if I own the record, I like the band. But that's not what he meant.

Specifically, he wanted to know why I haven't written much, if any, about Talking Heads or The National. (To a lesser extent early Modest Mouse and Radiohead.) And he's right: I haven't written much about Talking Heads or The National, and only a little about Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Mingus, etc.

I don't know, really, other than perhaps it's natural to hold the things you love closest. Am I the only one who finds it harder to write about something that is so embedded in your life, a direct part of your consciousness – the voices and words of David Byrne and Matt Berninger playing through my own thoughts and voice unconsciously? To write about these bands feels a bit like telling on myself and putting myself out for dissection.

"But Owen," you say, "you are endlessly – shamelessly – putting yourself out there for the world to see. You won't shut up." It may appear that way, but I can assure you, for as open as I am, I'm no different from most anyone else out here: I'm carefully curating how I'm presenting myself to all of you.

With that said, if you were to walk into my office or house, there's little doubt that, statistically, there's a higher chance of hearing Talking Heads or The National playing than nearly anything else. Maybe some Eno or Philip Glass in certain working moods.

So let's give this a go, shall we?

Watch out. You might get what you're after.

My father introduced me to Talking Heads in the early 90s. In 1993, at 12, I bought Green Day's Kerplunk! and got into "punk." I could swear I saw my dad's soul leave his body as I played Green Day for him and called it punk. It just up and left in one of my first vivid memories of seeing him go ghostfaced in the face of popular culture continuing to evolve beyond his very Boomer "The late 60s were the pinnacle of pop culture and everything that came after is decadent" attitude. I mean, look at the dude:

He sat me down and went digging through his records and pulled out some records, muttering something about CBGB. He dropped the needle on Talking Heads' 77 and said, "This is punk."

I'm going to shoot you straight, here: my immediate reaction was incredulity. Whatever Talking Heads was, it wasn't punk to my twelve-year-old sensibilities. Where were the power chords?! The faux British affectation? The puerile drug jokes?

But I did like it. A lot, despite the fact that I had no idea what it all meant. Now that I've lived with Talking Heads for 30 years, I can say with assurance that I continue to not know what it all means. But I know how it feels, and I've come to terms with the reality that art isn't meant to be pinned down so that we can say, "Ah, well, that's that. I guess we've solved that riddle!"

You might laugh but not for long

It's unfair to Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison to call David Byrne the man behind Talking Heads – each of the other members were and are wonderful musicians and artists in their own right – but it also wouldn't be untrue. Hearing Byrne's voice was the first time I realized that having an imperfect, limited voice could be a tremendous asset for a band.

We oooh and aaaaah over people with impeccable voices: Aretha, Sam Cooke, Whitney, Van Morrison, Christina, Freddy Mercury. But I've always been drawn to musicians with imperfections, whose sound is defined by the distinct limitation offered by an aspect of the band's repertoire.

Nobody would argue that Leonard Cohen has a classically great voice, but his voice defined his songs. The same can be said for Nick Cave, The National, Modest Mouse, and Talking Heads. At the end of Stop Making Sense, there's a bonus scene in which David Byrne interviews himself. He asks himself whether his voice is any good, and responds: "The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying."

That has always stuck with me. This notion that the more polished and slick and perfect anything is, the harder it is to believe it. This winds itself into so much of what I do. Back when I played music, I was always interested in the fissure points, the moments where you can hear a hand move up or down the strings quickly and the sound of the instrument – not the sound the instrument makes – comes front and center. The moment when you can hear a drummer quietly counting out a pause before clamoring back in. The note that a singer reaches for that is just outside his or her range and you hear the voice break a little bit.

(Don Henley, after recording all of "The Boys of Summer" came in to listen to the mix and said, "I think we need to change the key to F#." That required re-recording everything except the programmed drums. Nobody was very happy about this, until they heard the vocal track, right at the top of Henley's range, bringing a note of desperation to the track.)

Byrne's voice is the quintessential example of this. He often sounds lost or rambling. An innocent fool walking through life making observations about things we've forgotten to see. A narrator of the world as it is without the gloss of our learned explanations.

You believe him because he's talking out your own thoughts without the shadow of artifice.

It's always showtime, here at the edge of the stage

Byrne was notoriously difficult to work with in the studio. An unrelenting and exacting composer of sonic landscapes. Talking Heads albums are just littered with interesting minutiae of sounds, packed in at the edges of the mix and sometimes hidden right down the middle of the track.

When everyone was ready to put a bow on a song or on an album, there was David, unsatisfied. Something was missing. Something extraneous was there, if only he could identify it. His bandmates would beg him to take it easy and he would torture them. Talking Heads broke up, officially, in 1991, but they'd been finished for years before then. It took years for several band members to speak with Byrne and they only recently got all together again – for A24's re-release of Stop Making Sense.

It's hard to argue with the results. To this day, nobody sounds like Talking Heads. Nobody can. From the way Byrne used his guitar as a percussive instrument (when everybody else uses it to, you know, play notes...) to the way punk mixed with funk, African polyrhythms, absurdist lyrics...there is no replicating the sound. Hell, Byrne can't quite recreate the sound. I've seen him live five times and he sounds like David Byrne, but even when playing Talking Heads songs, he and his band(s) don't sound like Talking Heads.

There's magic in that: recognizing the alchemy of a grouping of people. How many times have you wished you had a specific group you used to work with back together? Because the group, even if led by or dominated by one member, created something more than anyone could have created on his or her own.

Sometimes that magic can only happen for a specific period. Perhaps there's some wisdom in accepting the temporary nature of all wonderful things. They're more precious because of it, aren't they?

Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head

There's also a lesson in the fact that when Talking Heads broke up, none of the members simply gave up and stopped creating. Some of their projects are as or more dear to them than Talking Heads, even if those projects did not catch our attention in the same way. (I'm particularly fond of Byrne's very weird and fascinating books.)

One of the aspects of the business I'm building that I've been thinking about a lot is this attempt to create a business where people can come and go, plug into defined roles, and unplug when it's time. In a perfect business world, you'd design this to be plug-and-play. The people fit in, perform the defined tasks, and that's that.

I've spent a lot of time creating these structures, roles, and workflows over the past two and a half months. One of the things that sticks in my craw, though, is this: if the most meaningful things to me require a bit of a raw edge, a series of imperfect pieces that combine into something better than the pieces, why am I trying to create a plug-and-play structure?

Ultimately, it's a give-and-take here, right? The structure, the workflows, the processes and roles, gesture toward the form of the business. But the people matter. And each addition, each loss, each moment of growth recreates the firm anew in some respect. The goal isn't to create a static thing. What fun would that be.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Well if happiness won't come to me, hand me the nitrous gas

One aspect of ADHD that isn't often understood is how important routines are to those of us with it. We're led to believe that ADHD means that, like overactive little boys, we are unable to focus on anything, leaving us mercy to our passing whims. But that's not close to being right. Generally, ADHD involves a dysregulation of focus, not the inability to focus. This is why when I enter a period of hyperfocus, I can do more work in five hours than most people can do in a week: the intensity of focus is profound. The challenge is directing that focus.

Here are your Tidal and Spotify links to today's albums.

Routines are the bumpers we put in the gutters of our lives' bowling lanes. You may have noticed that I'm pretty good about getting out an On the Record every other Saturday. You may have also noticed that I issue a new episode of Sonder Union generally every other Monday (on the off week of OTR). I get into the routine of doing it and it just keeps happening. You don't get to 47 editions of a newsletter by happenstance – certainly not a longform newsletter like this one.

So routines help regulate my general dysregulation of focus, they keep me on track and each iteration deepens the neural groove of doing the thing.

When the routine is interrupted, though...I can get disoriented, testy, and unforgiving of myself. Two weeks ago, I sat down to write an OTR and instead called an audible, recording a short, unusual episode of Sonder Union and releasing that instead. I don't regret doing it, but it made my brain jump the tracks.

My calendar reminders were all off. Last weekend, I didn't write an OTR, because it wasn't the week for it, but then I didn't release an episode of Sonder Union I have locked and loaded because I was doing a LinkedIn Live on SAFEs and startup fundraising that Monday. For some reason, I felt like I couldn't or shouldn't do both the live event and an episode of the podcast.

In short, I've felt like Benjy from The Sound and Fury all week – irritated and frustrated because things weren't in their right place. So, at the risk of continuing my discombobulation, I'm giving you an even-for-me unusually navelgazing OTR today, an episode of Sonder Union on Monday, and then getting back to my calendar schedule – which means no OTR next week but another new Sonder Union episode on the 11th. These next two episodes are great and I'm looking forward to releasing them.

Before you go any further, please note that what follows discusses suicide. If that's not for you, you might want to skip the rest. Also, this is a bit heavy and I want to assure everyone that I'm doing just fine. Sometimes I write about heavy things.

Oh, you're acting all holy
Me, I'm just full of holes

I first heard Frightened Rabbit in 2008, probably in the first semester of my 3L year. I distinctly remember walking through Shadyside with my first adult dog of my own, Percy, listening to The Midnight Organ Fight. It was unlike anything I'd heard before. There's lots of music that's sad, that paints a pretty picture of heartbreak, that gives a gloss on the thing itself. The Midnight Organ Fight is the ugly crying version of the thing: raw, honest, unvarnished.

There's nobody quite like the Scottish to give life to that acerbic and hangdog aspect of life, is there? I hear different souls in the different English accents. In the English, I hear a sense of assertive command, as though they expect people to simply obey. If I want something musical or someone to read me a poem or work of literature, I'm going to find me someone with that Irish lilt. If I need to close a deal, I'm seeking out an American. If I want to drink and party (and I don't), I'm finding myself an Aussie. And, if I want to drink and ponder the endless misery and suffering of life, Scotland, here I come.

Is this reductive and simplistic? You know it. But there's an element of truth to it, and Scott Hutchinson, the songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist in Frightened Rabbit is exactly the kind of friend you want to ponder the absurdities of life with, to get lost in rueful and sometimes manic laughter alongside.

Inevitably, perhaps, he died by suicide in 2018. But I'm getting ahead of myself, again.

Just need a spine to dig into
A chest for the head and a hand for the holding

You might rightfully think that Frightened Rabbit were a dour, lifeless band given what I've said thus far – but you'd be very, very wrong. Isn't it always the case that the most vibrant lives are paired with the threat or promise of darkness?

One of the first concerts Audra and I went to when we started dating was a Frightened Rabbit show at Mr. Small's. (It's a real venue: a church converted into a righteous concert venue, a vaulted room put at last to good use.) We were still in the phase where she wanted to do things with me simply because I'd be there, so I was able to get her to go to shows that I probably couldn't get her to go to now. I'm not sure she'd be as excited to go to the Hey Mercedes! reunion tour now, although she found it highly amusing to see a bunch of late 30s dudes get so excited about a band she'd never heard of.

Anyway, Audra joined me at Smalls to see Scott and the boys in July 2016. I think it was July 24th, but I can't be bothered to check, and you don't care, so. I'd seen Frightened Rabbit seven or eight times before, so I knew what we were in for. Audra had played some tracks from The Midnight Organ Fight and The Winter of Mixed Drinks and she was game, though not prepared.

In an age of high-end recording studios on your laptop, it can be hard to discern whether a band is actually any good by listening to recordings. Then there's the reality that recorded music and live music are two different art forms. However you parse it, there's little that prepares you for how astonishing Frightened Rabbit were live.

Part of the show, perhaps, was the feint of a bunch of slightly overweight normal-looking blokes just walking onto stage as if they'd gotten a bit lost. Scott raised his hand in greeting and absentmindedly looked around for his guitar, before picking it up and opening the set with "Get Out." There, standing where the pulpit would have been 100 years ago, he spat out the first verse:

I'm in the arch of a church
Between her thumb and her forefinger
I'm a worshiper
A zealot king, cursed, a devotee
Of the heady golden dance she does
She's an uncut drug
Find the vein and pulse
Chased it and for a minute
I was floating dead above myself

And there we were, Audra and me, under the arch of a church, falling in love, at the intersection of the sacred and the profane, watching a band so good they made you forget that their lead singer was telling you exactly what terrible things were coming for him – and for us.

There's a funeral in your eyes and a drunk priest at your side

Pedestrian Verse is Frabbit's (as they are lovingly known) fourth album, released in early 2013. One of Scott's great themes was the pretension of the sacred and the elevation of the profane. You can see that just in the title of the record and the cover art. There's also a bit of a wink with the title: there is nothing pedestrian about Hutch's writing. His words are some of the tightest and most beautifully written I have ever come across. He's probably one of my three or four favorite lyricists.

It's telling, how a person approaches songwriting. Another of my favorite lyricists, Matt Berninger of The National, is a natural foil for Hutch. (Incidentally, they were good friends and the bands toured together – one of the best shows I've ever seen.) Where Matt's stories are oblique and full of symbols, tangential observations, and a sort of gestalt painting of scenes, Scott's lyrics are embodied and right there, often uncomfortably so. Frightened Rabbit's songs are filled to brimming with body parts, religious imagery, expertly detailed scenes of post-coital desperation.

There's no escape. That's the point. Here's a story you will almost certainly recognize yourself in, and good luck facing the truth you just learned about yourself.

I'm trapped in a collapsing building

One of my overriding concerns, an obsessive and repeated thought is the messy puzzle we inevitably leave for our loved ones. I wonder whether leaving a record of our thoughts, experiences, felt moments, hopes, dreams, and fears helps or burdens these people left behind. Scott Hutchinson's work, in hindsight, looks like the papering of an inexorable end. A fact of nature. But I wonder if those who loved him, who still love him, listen to his work and think, "Godammit, he was warning us this whole time, asking desperately for help. Could we have done more?" (There's a song on Big Red Machine's newest album titled "Hutch" that asks these questions.)

The opening salvo in my novel, Pennhollow, is a journal entry from one of the main characters. It's written 55 years after the events of the book. I think it's an apt way to conclude this OTR. A promise to all of you. Or a threat, depending on how you want to parse it.

I speak now more to the dead than to the living. It’s inevitable, if you live long enough. The dead haunt you and the living never come around. Very well.

One of these days I will get around to haunting you, too.