TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

Morning, fuckers. It’s a foggy, foggy morning in Nashville. 732 a.m. Feels like 632 since the time change was just... just happened. I'm gonna take a photo of this fog. Hmm. Here we go. Okay, I haven't done a... sort of off the cuff voice memo in a minute, and my brain's going in circles, so I'm just gonna try to talk some shit out and see if it's worth posting.

Okay, my wife said that the past few days, she’s sensed that I've been irritable, which is a huge problem, late, uh, recently, when I was, like... fucking depressed and irritable and angry and shit. Damn, look at that sun. hold on. Fog is crazy.

Anyway, uh... Yeah, I've been irritable and... Or I was irritable, and she said lately it's happened again the past few days, and it made her scared. She just looks sort of like, I think, nervous that I'm going back into being bummed, which I don't think is happening. Because I don't feel depressed and angry and stuff, but I think the irritability is coming from anxiety about what's about thinking about what's all the shit I want to do coming up to put my novel out in the world. Which is now on a real timeline. So, I'm trying to think about how to get my shit in check, so I'm not freaking her out. It's okay to be anxious, but maybe there's a different way it can manifest if I put my head to it.

Okay, so good morning. Um, there's a novelist, a writer that I love who I heard talking last year, saying they had like been in the bunker, working thinking reading, kind of solitary. Stuff that writers do and and then they were talking about how the work was done. And the ideas on how to say things and do things were baked. And so, the quote was, “Now it's time to be your ideas.” And I almost had to pull the car over, and I thought it was such an amazing challenge. It's time to be your ideas. And I've had like a shitload of ideas the past few years about what a book, how to do a book, how to do my book. And I think I've got them organized now and now it's time to do them. And so, I'm moving forward with getting ready to publish this thing.

I've also been listening to a shitload of The War on Drugs. The novel, I've been doing one last revision, and as I get a chapter done, I send it to a proofreader who sends back their stuff. And through all this, I've been, in particular listening to the 2 live albums that The War on Drugs put out over the past few years, and then that's also taken me back to going to listen to some of the studio albums. I haven't listened to them in a long time. And I'm just realizing that they're, how they're like one of my favorite bands. Um... I don't love the production on their last two studio albums. And actually hearing the live songs, I'm like, fuck, I wish these could be rerecorded. There's just something about them that isn't, it doesn't, like, it kicks me out. I don't have the technical language to talk about production, to see why, but or to say why, but, uh, I wish, well, whatever. I've got the live records. I'm not a big live record person. I don't really give a fuck about live records, but these 2 are insane. If you're a fan of The War on Drugs, or live rock and roll music, I'd say check them out. It's called Live Drugs and Live Drugs Again. Different songs on each one.

Um, so yeah, I've been listening to War on Drugs and going through my edits. My last revision, and then these edits from the proofreader. And trying to reckon with being done with the book. I think I've revised it 8 or 9 times now. And even now, if I sat down with one of the chapters, I'm sure I'd put a bunch of red ink on the page. And I just, I'm not sure where that line is, where you are revising, and it's improving, or you're just, maybe you're taking away some of the spark. But anyway, I've decided I'm fucking done. And I think the book's gonna be ready this summer. But as I think about how to be my ideas, I am realizing some of my limitations. Um... I gotta keep taking, I wanna take, keep on... These pictures of this fog. I hope they come out good. The sun is coming up. It just looks so cool.

Okay, anyway. Yeah, I've been thinking about whether. This is my 3rd book. I wrote 2 books when I was younger, right out of college, when I had my 1st little underground publishing company. The 1st one was like a collection of journals and essays, and nah, fuck, I don't think they were essays. Journals, stories, poems. Very much like a zine in book form, I think. And then the 2nd one was a novel. And, um, I self-published them through my little company and toured and, um, and all that, and now it's been forever. I think the 2nd book came out in 2003. So it's been over 20 years since I put out a book. And so I've been wondering if my 3rd book can be my debut. Not that I'm not proud of those books, and they don't count, but I feel like a very different writer now, and I've read primarily the main difference is I've read so much more, and it's almost laughable how little I had read back when I was writing books. Like, it was a ballsy. position to be like, hey, I haven't read that much shit, but I'm gonna write a couple books. Now I've read so much, and even while revising this book, I would, over the course of one revision, I would read, you know, several other amazing novels, which would change my brain, rearrange my brain, and how I think and write, probably as well. So, I feel like a new writer from when I was doing books earlier. So yeah, maybe this 3rd book is my debut. There's a lot of similarities too about how I wrote and revised and, um, how it felt to write a book and how the ideas were, how they coalesced, feels very similar to 20 some years ago, but the difference this time is how many times I've revised, how much more patient I've been, how much more, I guess, curious I am to push myself further and further with the books or with the book compared to those last ones. So. Yeah.

What was I saying about limitations? Oh yeah, so my limitations. Um, Obviously self-publishing. creates limitations, but I like those. And I think the reason I'm back when I had the publishing company and basically was self publishing before, it was because, well, there was a lot of reasons, but a big one was, I didn't have patience. As a young college graduate, I was impatient. I didn't want to try to learn how to do the publishing world, and I was a punk who had watched punk labels and DIY bands and labels do their thing, and I was like, I'm just gonna do it that way. And now, as a middle-aged writer, I am still incredibly impatient. So that's a big part of it again. But another thing is that I, as I've like learned about publishing again, since the pandemic, when I kind of started thinking about this stuff again, seriously, um, I just saw things about the world of publishing that seemed weird and potentially dangerous for me. After having kind of burned out on music, I was like, man, this could easily be that again. And so, In some ways, I'm trying to sidestep that shit.

Uh... And, of course, there's a part of me... self conscious, self doubting part of me that's like, maybe you're just a chicken shit. And you don't want to put yourself out there and try in a real, the quote unquote real world publishing, but whatever. I’m not doing it.

But my limitations are that I'm a one person publishing machine, and I'm realizing, not, I've always kind of known this. I'm not good at social media. I've been on social media since it became a thing and keep being on social media and, um, but I'm always just like, mediocre at it, I guess. If there's a measure of what's successful on social media, I'm not successful. And I don't really know the way to be so. And then when it comes to like marketing and promo and shit, which is what a lot of social media is, it's just not my strong suit. And so I'm thinking of ways like, how do you, if you're going to self-publish this without, without the publishing world, how do you? How do I answer those issues? Damn, this fucking sun. So cool.

Yeah, how do I fill in the gaps of stuff I can't do on my own? And, um, so yeah, if you're a good, if you're a social media genius, and or... a clever copywriter. Uh, I'm throwing up my help wanted sign. Help wanted, Copywriter and or social media star, colon, extremely part time. Qualifications include being smarter than me. Funnier than me. Uh, maybe... more well read than me. And have as much heart as me.

The arena was completed in 1974, same year as me, designed in the Diet Brutalist style by architecture students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where I was born. The building’s long gone now, imploded in 2001 just before the twin towers came down.

I didn’t go to concerts often growing up, and exceptions were isolated to the sanctuary at church and a Christian festival called Creation where my big sisters were thrilled to see Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and DeGarmo & Key in 1984. Al Green was there too, but I don’t think my family cared. I mostly hung out in the kids’ tent watching Bible skits and singing along to songs played by people in animal costumes.

When punk rock hit me in the head and I started going to underground shows, a venue for 200 people was huge. Bands played basements or community centers for tiny crowds, and my crew and I liked it that way.

I saw my first arena show in 1992, when a friend’s mom was the ninth caller to the radio station and won tickets to Bryan Adams at Market Square. She passed them to us thinking we’d be hyped, but we only went for a laugh.

We clowned the pop rock normies and nascant minivan moms among us while The Storm, a short-lived group featuring ex-members of Journey and AOR, warmed up the stage. When Bryan Adams came on, we crossed our arms and snickered through the first few songs, but when he played “It’s Only Love,” the first bona fide hit of the night, a unifying force spread through the crowd, impossible to ignore. When he did “Run to You” and “Somebody,” my buddy and I were startled to find ourselves out of our seats and on our feet. His assault on our armor continued with big-gun ballads “Heaven” and “Everything I Do (I Do it For You)” coming back-to-back. By the time he played “Cuts Like A Knife,” goddamnit, we were belting out the NaNaNas with ten thousand of our newest friends.

“Summer of ‘69” came in the encore. The lights in the arena went down for anticipation to rise. The opening riff—instantly recognizable, eternal—was teased for a single measure, its reverb tail echoed in the dark, and every head was screaming. The blackout ended when a spotlight cut a silhouette of Adams and his six-string on a riser at the back of the stage, and I understood the cunning tricks of concert production for the first time. When the riff returned and Bryan sang the immortal opening lines, my guy from school and I added the night to the best days of our lives.

I saw my second arena show twelve years later when my client Hella opened for System of a Down and The Mars Volta in Seattle in 2005. Hella was the weirdest band I booked; the least likely to play a venue that size. Their set started just after doors opened, an unfair but common plight of artists playing first of three in the big leagues. Hella spazzed out for mostly empty seats, the scanty early-arrivals bemused. It’s not like The Mars Volta and System were playing it straight, but Hella’s post-art-rock noise was a step too far.

Like many artists I got into around the time, it was my friend David Dickenson from Suicide Squeeze Records who first played Sacramento’s Hella for me. He would eventually put out an EP and album from the band, but Olympia’s 5RC, sister label to Kill Rock Stars, had recently released their debut, a beguiling stake in the ground called Hold Your Horse Is. I saw Hella play live for the first time at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco, along with David and 5RC/KRS honcho Slim Moon. The shit they did on stage that night was like nothing I’d seen.

The duo’s experimental, instrumental racket, orchestrated by guitarist Spencer Seim and drummer Zach Hill, was removed from much of what I listened to, but a handful of forebears appeared in my record collection like U.S. Maple, Don Caballero, Drive Like Jehu, and Polvo. Now I know the roots go deeper, but I was not versed in Mr. Bungle and Primus at the time, nor the more classic lineage; stuff like Zappa, Beefheart, and outsider jazz. But references only go so far. Hella was singular and paved their own lane.

Another duo, Lightning Bolt, were kings of the Rhode Island warehouse scene, and it was easy to see Hella as the California counterpart. Lightning Bolt lore, backed up by grainy video in a documentary, said the mayhem of their shows caused spontaneous make-outs among their fans. Hella shows were not sexualized, but I often saw people laughing while they played, but not because the band was funny. Their hard-to-solve equation of time signatures and changes, the preternatural tapping of Spencer’s guitar, and the athleticism of Zach’s hectic drumming are legitimately confounding. Trying to dance to a momentarily sensical riff or fleeting rhythm only made one look silly. And so fans laughed.

And I guess… okay fine, Spencer was funny. His pulled faces and herky jerky head, his haircuts and his clothes; all necessary foils to Zach’s dead-seriousness. After a few songs, the drummer’s snare was streaked and splattered red as his fingers gathered cuts and bled.

Hella’s album and song titles were absurd and humorous, too. Here’s a partial list:

• Total Bugs Bunny on Wild Bass

• Bitches Ain’t Shit but Good People

• “Been a Long Time Cousin”

• “Post-Ivy Leave Depression”

• “Welcome to the Jungle Baby, You’re Gonna Live”

• “We Was Just Boys, Living in a Dead German Shepard”

• “Mind Over Butter”

• “Kid Life Crisis”

• “The Ungrateful Dead”

• “Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun”

When I met them, Hella was self-booking gigs, playing warehouses and DIY spaces. After they hired me, some kids throwing shows took little interest in, if not full offense at, dealing with a professional agent, though I only barely qualified. But the band warmed up to (and grew into) traditional venues. Hella toured relentlessly, converting more fans with bonkers shows and attaining the coveted status of a band’s band, eventually getting invites to play big gigs with some of their heroes.

By the time they got the offer from System of a Down tour, Hella had fleshed out their live configuration to a 5-piece. I went to the show at Key Arena in Seattle with David from Suicide Squeeze, who had recently released Hella’s new album, an OutKast-esque double LP, one by Zach and one by Spencer, each made independently. As mentioned, I’m not sure they went over, but they had fun with the fantasy. I booked a lot of arena shows eventually, but Hella as the first gave me much pleasure.

After they played and The Mars Volta did their thing (also bewildering many in attendance), Zach took us up to the 300 section, the last row of seats at the back of the building. “You gotta see this,” he said. By now every seat was full. System came on and opened with a one-minute acoustic snippet from “Soldier Slide,” then played “B.Y.O.B.”

Blast off, it’s party time / And we don’t live in a fascist nation / Blast off, it’s party time / And where the fuck are you? / Where the fuck are you?

The fans were right there with the band, that’s where the fuck they were. It was as though they’d rehearsed synchronized devil horns and headbanging with System in advance. The panorama from the top of the arena was arresting. The steep grade of the upper deck, combined with the lights, the sound, and the raging, was disorienting. I worried I might tumble down over the metalheads, which seemed bad. Lyrics aside, the vibe was closer to a bad-guy political rally than my innocent night with Bryan Adams as a teen.

SIDE PROJECTS:

While booking Hella, I was also publishing underground books, and those worlds overlapped now and then. Teaming up with David and Suicide Squeeze, we co-published an inscrutable book written and illustrated by Zach Hill called Destroying Yourself is Too Accessible. It came packaged with an album called Masculine Drugs from his side-project Holy Smokes. It’s very rare.

As for Spencer’s life outside Hella, I briefly booked his band The Advantage (Ex-Artists 022). They played covers of songs from classic 8-bit Nintendo games. There are a few records and EPs out there to enjoy, and they are a blast.

But my friend Chris Parham, The Weekly Soundtrack sleuth, sent me a secret sidecar for fans who want more. These songs would’ve been recorded when Cameron Winter was 16 or 17. His voice probably hadn’t fully changed.

Men of the Reef’s three singles, co-written by Cameron and the artist Oliver Seda, play it more straight than Geese or Winter’s solo LP. I don’t know what teenagers in New York City were listening to in 2019, but Thom Yorke’s influence is on display, and my ears detect a little Walkmen DNA.

I started the year rereading Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me, kicked over by the opening page again. I heard he revised it a hundred times. I read On the Calculation of Volume 1 & 2, enjoying the first but bored by the second until the cliffhanger finally came. I pre-ordered book 3 which has since arrived, but haven’t cracked the spine. I wonder if this is steaming TV fodder rather than the next great septological series of Scandinavian literature. It spells trouble when scores of readers say it’s Groundhog Day-esque and little more, but time will tell. I’ll dip into the third episode soon to check my inclination. I read Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler, which was probably not written for me, then Someone Deserves It, an unpublished heist novel by Kyle Seibel. I read Vonnegut’s Timequake and disliked it as a novel. Pruned it would’ve made a nice 40-page zine, but it was fun to recognize jokes I heard Vonnegut tell at a lecture I attended at Indiana University in 1997. Checking the publication date, I see he must have been promoting the book, which ended up being his last. I finally visited the Vonnegut museum in Indianapolis this year and sad to report that it sucks fat dick. The man gave props to my hometown endlessly, and we’re only able to cobble together one typewriter and a couple of poorly scanned, laser-printed photos. Hoosiers should be ashamed. Next, I reread Jim Lewis’ Why The Tree Loves the Ax. I first came across it in the early 2000s in Seattle when friends and I got super into it. Wasn’t a stand-out this time, but I guess it’s fine. I finally hit Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain, the OG oral history music book, and surly one of the best. My first classic of several this year was also my first Edith Wharton. As I understand it, Ethan Frome is the one time she wrote about the not-rich. This was a favorite from the pile, and I’ll endeavor to read more Edith soon. I don’t remember much from Brautigan’s Hawkline Monster, and was annoyed with Steve Almond’s Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow in the end. I read Emily Costa’s Girl on Girl, then ran back to old shit for the 1818 version of Frankenstein, surprised to find it’s not only the monster getting the doctor’s name that movies, cartoons, and Halloween costumes get wrong. The dramatic scene of the creature’s animation (lightning bolts; “It’s alive!”) doesn’t appear in the novel at all. I was picking up confidence and steam for canon, but humbled myself in private, and will now do it here by admitting I read The Idiot’s Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Next up was Kyle Seibel’s Hey You Assholes. I read many of its stories when they were first published in various journals, but the true might of Kyle’s prose, the singularity of his style, and the heart of his project is undeniable with these gems together in one place. I read Tropicália by Harold Rogers for the second time. You’re probably watching his Substack ascent where his essays and jokes are a pleasure, but I’m begging you to read this novel. I think it’s eternal, though sales were slow. I was stunned by the lack of humor in Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but had a blast with my first Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory. I gobbled up Adam Gnade’s food novel, After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different. It was nice to reconnect with Gnade in text and human form this year after meeting him via the U.S. Mail long ago. It seems I’ve wasted a couple of decades not watching the way he moves out there which is a new inspiration. I was disappointed by Hanne Ørstavik’s The Pastor, but can’t remember why, then stoked all over again on my second go with Seibel’s Assholes. Joe Brainard’s I Remember, first published in 1970, was a reminder that few ideas are original, but all available for recycling. Coetzee’s Disgrace is perfect, Gaddis’ Agapē Agape inscrutable, and a reread of the graphic novel Blankets left me cold. I’m grateful I read Édouard Levé’s Suicide early in the year and not recently as it’s dangerous; unapologetic and makes too much sense. I want each of you to find Will Mountain Cox’s Roundabout, a slim and graceful novel about a friendship group, those fragile fucking things. You can skip When She Was Good, wherein Philip Roth writes his one and only female protagonist and misses the mark. The only poetry book I read this year was Promises of Gold by José Olivarez. Many heaters inside. After falling for Disgrace, I was hyped to discover Here and Now, letters between Coetzee and my 21-year-old favorite writer, Paul Auster, but Christ their exchanges were a bore. The only revealing bit was Auster wrestling with the James Wood takedown of his oeuvre in real time. I liked the prose in Harris Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic, but unsure what the book’s doing. Might be my lack of reading from the genres it samples. I finally spent the money on a used copy of Almost Transparent Blue by the other Murakami (Ryū). I suppose I could only be let down by another Coetzee after Disgrace, and so it was with Waiting for the Barbarians. I read Ulysses side-by-side with Patrick Hasting’s guide, which isn’t quite Idiot-level, but brought the intimidating novel down to approachable. I’ll need to read Ulysses again as the first pass hardly feels complete, but damn it’s good to make it through round one. Michael Bible’s Empire of Light wasn’t my thing, but I’ll try another. Many readers I admire name check him on the regular. Bright Lights, Big City was a pleasure, but I suspect it’s the only Jay McInerney I need. I loved Mrs. Dalloway, which made me miss walking around London. Woolf coupled with Joyce got me appreciating what the Modernists were up to, so I pivoted to the U.S. and fully freaked out over The Sun Also Rises. I followed with Hemingway’s other bookend, The Old Man and the Sea. Saw cynical takes on that one, to which I say: hush up, bitches! I skipped forward in time for Richard Hell’s autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, which is excellent and pulls no punches—Kathy Acker butt fuck and all. I didn’t realize how quickly Hell peaced out from music after ushering in the first wave of punk to focus on writing. I read another music memoir, Heroin is the Answer, by Russell Holbrook from the stoned Christian Rock band Joe Christmas, who make an appearance in my new novel. I read Sara B. Franklin’s The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, then Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. I’m dug the book, but forgive me: it’s a little interwar Forrest Gump, no? Apparently I flipped all the pages of Paul Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, though I’ve got no memory of what’s inside, but countless scenes stuck from Franzen’s Crossroads. I wrote about that one a few months ago: Marked Safe From Franzen. I finally read Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs, a cold take from an outsider on a singular subculture, and a fearless look at the pull of group violence, even on the author. I finally tackled some Faulkner this year. I started with Light in August, primarily to see the origin of the Joe Christmas band name. When I finished, I saw a critic note the book is a retelling of The Book of John, I need to revisit the gospel and find the threads. I bounced back to Hemingway for In Our Time, then read Victim by Andrew Boryga. Probably unfair to make Andrew follow Papa and Faulky. Next came The Relegation Reader, edited by the aforementioned Will Mountain Cox. I wrote a long review of that one. Traveled back to Scandinavia for Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, privately delighted to recognize a Hemingway devotee—I wouldn’t have noticed it last year. I did another biography, A. Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, then reread the incomparable Body High by Jon Lindsey while I impatiently wait for whatever he does next. I was not into The Morning Star, the first chunklet in Knausgaard’s new series, and might skip the whole lot, but will go hard on Emmanuel Carrère after finding Yoga, hands-down my favorite read of the year. I hit it twice in a row and wrote about the impact the book had on me. I’m gonna read The Kingdom next. Many times, Mike Nagel has told me to read J.D. Daniel’s collection of essays in letters, The Correspondence. What a remarkable and weird little book. I know nothing else like it. I found Gabriel Smith’s Brat half-baked, and wonder about the editing once Gian passed and the book sold to a big house. The young and sexy diarists of the city are often empty calories for this near-geezer, but I liked Greta Schledorn’s Now More Than Ever. The book’s got heart and her prose kept surprising me as I read it one sitting. The best bit comes when she confronts her mother about her father, and I texted Greta to say I need a full-on dad novel next. John D’Agata’s About a Mountain is… about a mountain. Or mountains. This was another Nagel recommendation, an overwhelming, not-so-pleasant, wildly inventive approach to showing how we live today. My second Faulkner was The Sound and the Fury. It appears late on my list, but I started and stopped serval times throughout the year, rereading, researching, using what help I could find until finishing. Well worth it, but damn. Like Ulysses, I suspect this will come for me again. I ripped through John Tottenham’s Service about a misanthropic and under-accomplished writer working the register at a bookshop on LA’s Eastside. The names are changed, but the novel does not hide its thin veil of fiction. Before I knew who he was, I had a hysterical (and apparently typical) run-in with John at Stories when I visited LA during the gnarly canyon fires. First he refused to open the locked cabinet of collectable books, claiming they’d lost the key, and later I returned to the counter for more punishment and asked if they had a particular book. It was actually that second installment of On the Calculation of Volume. He thought they did, so huffed down from his perch at the register and stood in front of the new releases mumbling about how he’d just seen it. Then, barking What the fuck is this shit?, he pulled a different title from the shelf with theatrical dismay and proceeded to read it for a several minutes. Embarrassed to lurk dumbly beside him waiting on my request, I gave up and moved on. I wish this had happened a few years back when he was still working on Service. I might have become a fictionalized customer inside, which would be an honor. When my wife gave me Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, she said, “I know it’s an airport book, but you might like the mental health parts.” Unfortunately, that’s glossed over and it’s mostly a Hollywood family soap opera. She’s got another memoir about ECT which might dig deeper on the good shit. I read Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which rips. I love when a sad book makes me happy. I wanted more, and started The Easter Parade right away, but didn’t finish yet, so that’ll be my first entry for 2026.

Around Thanksgiving, the music journalists marooned on Substack began to tease their Best of 2025 lists. It was a struggle, they claimed, to trim their indexes down due to the irrepressible number of killer releases this year.

Wow! Which almost-best albums will be cut and left on the version history floor? When the blogs were finally published, these listers, these individuals, included ONE HUNDRED records. To quote Bob Dylan:

Years ago, while working at WME, an executive recommended a book. It was about—indeed it was called—Essentialism, but not for the high-minded philosophical concept. No, this was a pop-biz take on how to accomplish more by doing less. I never read that kind of shit, but this was during my short-lived effort to be a team player, so I gave it a try and found some useful tidbits inside. The one still with me is the author’s bone to pick with a priorities list, noting that priority cannot be plural. It offends the word’s very definition; there can only be one.

I loved, loved, loved three records you can find on every list this year—zeitgeist guys to be sure, you don’t need another post on those—but the album I listened to the most, the single best LP of 2025, is Natural Pleasure by Broncho. I’m certain you haven’t heard this one. It appears on just two year-end lists, and I know those folks pressed play only when I pushed it on them.

I’m surprised I listened to Natural Pleasure myself. Broncho’s been around for fifteen years, and I’ve not been a fan. I tried the first album after a friend joined the band for a minute, but couldn’t find my way in and ignored subsequent releases. Now they’re on their fifth LP, and I don’t know what made me listen, but my conservative estimate is that I’ve played it top to bottom no less than 500 times. I’ve spun it most days since it came out in April, often on repeat, and its pull hasn’t waned. I must have hit it twenty times this week alone. How many times did you play your #73?

If you asked me what Broncho sounded like a year ago, I would have mostly guessed and said, Garage-y? Skuzzy? Dirtbag sexy? But not what I hear on Natural Pleasure. I texted my friend Jared, who manages the band, and asked if this album sounds markedly different from their previous LPs. “Yes,” he said, “but still Broncho 100%.” He highlighted one important change: Ryan Lindsey, singer and principal songwriter, has found his falsetto. When I force fed this record to family and friends, often they said, “She’s got a beautiful voice.”

I’ve posted about Natural Pleasure throughout the year, thirst trapping for fellow fans, but no likes or replies. I got curious about Broncho lore and asked Jared if he could point me to some features or interviews with the band. “No. Are none,” he exaggerated, but only a bit. You can find scattered reviews, show previews, and one paywalled Q&A in that dinosaur Billboard, but little more. I thought: Fuck, do I need to write a piece of Music Journalism?

Natural Pleasure is preoccupied with time. The first lyric on “Imagination,” the loitering opener of the album, is an invitation to try and slow it down. Each tune that follows save one is mid-tempo or below, and Lindsey continues to return to the theme.

You might not notice the words at first. It took me (ahem) time to catch on. Often, Lindsey’s lyrics are murmured, mumbled, or half-sung, and I had to check the lyric sheet many times. On “Funny,” the shadowy second song, words unwind to stand-in for sounds: Hey momma, hey bubby, they don’t know that it ain’t easy when your aaa and ddd, shhuh shhuh shhhuh, just like me.

And it’s not just gauzy singing; the songs are sturdy and packed with melody, but the instruments warble, drift, and fray, the hazy mix a hero of the LP. The effect is warm, cozy comfort, like the best drugs, which for me would be weed from ages 22-45 and Oxycodone for about six months in 2009. Indeed, I listened high many times. I’m off the stuff now but remain in the record’s grip, so oblivion is not required.

As December 31 comes near, I wonder if I forgot 2025’s ticking clock only while this record played. I’m unemployed and have limited responsibility, but rarely slowed down this year. I raced myself on novel deadlines, raced traffic in every direction around the country en route to literary festivals and readings, raced to read books and start the next, raced on the treadmill to lose ten pounds. And high five to me! I got the novel done, made it to many cities, and read a shitload of stuff (no luck on lbs), but Broncho’s 40-minute meditation was a steady respite.

I saw Lindsey call this album a collection of whisper ballads, which is apt, but if I wrote the one-sheet I’d call them underground lullabies. A secondary theme of Natural Pleasure is having kids.

A stunner on the side-b called “You Got Me” is an address from a father to a mother and child. Lindsey claims he wrote the song before learning he and his partner were expecting. The parental lyrics are so lived-in that it’s a nearly unbelievable claim, but I take him at his word (a few songs later, we get one called “Way Into Magic,” so who knows). Anyway, my favorite moment on the whole record is the tune’s bridge.

In one review, someone said the “don’t die” line was funny, but I hear it as purely sincere. Afterall, if we can slow down, stop the clock and get off the grid, what’s left when standing still, staying home? For Christmas, my daughter got a tiny toy drum kit. She tilts back her head, smiles, and sways while she plays with her eyes half closed but half on me.

I hesitate to compare the record to other artists because I know this shit so well by now that it only sounds like itself, but if you like Elliott Smith’s hush, Beach House dreams, Modest Mouse in their drowsy gear, Damien Jurado when he’s spacey, or The Velvet Underground at their most “Stephanie Says,” you might give this a spin.

I told Jared the Manager it’s an injustice that no one gives a fuck about Natural Pleasure. Music accolades hunt the new and the young, and I hypothesized that if Lindsey was 23 and the album a debut, it would be a different story. Jared was surprised by the suggestion, and maybe I’m wrong; maybe Broncho would go unnoticed regardless of age. Either way, I hope they’re happy at home in the Oklahoma underground, unconcerned with year-end anything.

An earlier draft of this review had some extra stuff in the bitchy intro about how these long lists might do damage. When you work behind the scenes with musicians, you see how one show preview, one spin on a third-market station, one unread publication’s inclusion can fuel an artist to carry on for another heartbreaking record cycle, another unsold-out national tour. My original point was that this is pathetic and sad, but that’s a shitty way to see things. Let the bands go on. Jared just sent a demo from a Broncho LP to come.

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I checked into a Times Square hotel, allegedly 3-Stars. After the first night wrestling with the collapsed duvet wrapped in a bed-size paper towel, I walked to Macy’s and took the elevator to the 6th floor, bought a comforter and two pillows on deep discount, then trundled back through Midtown tourists with my puffy loot. Those sidewalks are always packed, but on a winter weekend before Christmas, they’re fully sardined. The slow shuffling was all the more awkward for my wide load. The new bedding just barely improved the situation in my room, but you can’t expect much for $98.

When you visit New York and ask people to hang, the requisite question is Where are you staying? When I answered Times Square, the unanimous reply was WHY?! It wasn’t my pick; my room was booked and paid for by the person I was primarily in the city to see. They were also visiting, stationed in Midtown against their better judgment for convenience of other commitments in the area.

I’m still spoiled from years with a company credit card and the blessing to book rooms with foolish rates in cool neighborhoods, but I’ve got an old soft spot for Midtown. On my first trips to New York at the beginning of my career, self-employed and traveling on my own dime, I stayed at the Hotel Wellington on 7th and W. 55th. The rooms were tiny, no space between the bed and the walls for my suitcase, so I stored it in the shower. I often ate at the diner on the corner, alone in a booth, amused by the $7 price tag on a small dish of cottage cheese. But why am I telling you about hotel rooms?

I know that these memories interest only Anne, the boys, and me, that we’re the only four people in the world whom they can make smile, or cry, but too bad, too bad for you, reader, you’ll have to put up with the fact that authors relate these kinds of things and don’t delete them when they’re rereading what they’ve written, as would only be reasonable, because they’re precious, and because one reason to write is also to save them.

— Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga

Carrère begins his book Yoga at a 10-day silent meditation retreat. He’s a mediocre meditator (he uses the words yoga and meditation interchangeably) and practices tai chi, so Carrère’s there for genuine practice, but also to write a book—“an upbeat, subtle little book on yoga”—that could be found outside the self-help section of a bookstore. It was my first time reading Carrère. The writing is wonderful, and the subject, I told myself, was timely. I’ve dipped into meditation before, fucked around with various apps and teachers for beginners, but it’s never stuck. Given my current state of mind (more later), I need to try something, maybe try something again, so the book was enticing. Carrère talks meditation with a light touch, humor, self-deprecation, and a shake of cynicism. In one section, titled Meditating while drunk, he describes an earlier period in his practice.

When you’re drunk or stoned—I was often both—you think you’re finding nuggets of gold, then you come down and realize they’re lumps of turd … Meditating while drunk is absurd, I agree, but at the time I persuaded myself that I was observing my drunken state. Because the interest of meditation … is that it awakens a sort of witness inside you … Of course, alcohol and drugs turn this secret agent into a double agent who can’t be trusted. Nevertheless, I didn’t stop meditating, I’ve always more or less kept at it, and if I persist in writing this book it’s to say that those who practice the martial arts, Zen, yoga, meditation, all the big, radiant, beneficial things I’ve sought all my life, are not necessarily wise or calm or serene, but sometimes—often, even—pathetically neurotic like me, and that that doesn’t prevent them from, in Lenin’s strong words, “working with the available material,” that in fact you have to do just that, and that even it it doesn’t get you anywhere, you’re right to persist on this path.

Here is permission to be bad at meditation, to not reach the higher plain, to simply try. This isn’t new; all gurus, teachers, and self-help influencers say shit along these lines, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it presented in literature. I told myself the book was written just for me to be read at just this time.

I arrived in New York un-stoned, having not smoked weed for several days. With scant confidence in success, I’ve told myself that my daily driver for decades has turned on me, and now it’s time to move on. It’s not just that I smoke so much I hardly get high, that my sleep is bad, the lack of dreams, the loss of memory, the junk food cravings, the racing heart and body aches. It’s not just that my 3-year-old daughter now recognizes why I constantly step outside… I’ve also become the angriest stoner I know. I’ve been told by more than one therapist that anger is the go-to emotion for covering up deeper and more complex feelings. My current guy suggested that I might not be angry, but sad or scared. I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about because, as I’ve come to realize lately—late late late—I’ve spent my life avoiding feeling much of anything. I’ve used weed, of course, but also work, reading, writing, traveling, and shitloads of thinking to sidestep my feelings.

I’ve taken weed breaks before; a few months off now and then. Twenty years ago, I quit when my ex-wife asked me to, but it wasn’t long before I was back on and hiding it from her. I quit for a while when I had chronic pain and the doctors wouldn’t prescribe pills unless I peed clean. When Mal and I were trying to make a baby, I quit for a bit to foster more sperm, stronger swimmers. Lately, I’ve paused a couple of times to see if it reduced anxiety. It did, of course, but with each quit, I had every intention to start again after a reset. The first joints sparked after being away are still magic, like you remember from when you were young: goofy and loose and fun. But my return was always full-on, perma-stoned, wake & bake and bake all day. You could call it devotion, but you should call it addiction.

While Carrère’s off paying attention to the breath, jihadists attack the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Carrère’s close friend Hélène was romantically involved with the writer Bernard Maris, who was killed in the attack. Carrère was a newer friend to Maris by association, but he knew and admired the man’s work, and Hélène wanted a fellow writer to speak at the funeral. She interrupted the retreat on day four and asked Carrère to come, so this little book about meditation becomes something else. After the funeral, attempting to return to his yoga book, Carrère struggles with friction between his silent sequester and the bloody horror that happened outside, and he’s glum. He soon finds the horrible bottom of a sinking depression, and we get part three of the book, “The Story of My Madness.”

Carrère fought bouts of depression all his life with therapy, with time, and, I suppose, with meditation. He’d been enjoying a surprising 10-year stretch of stability. When his old friend darkness returned with a vengeance, he decided to visit a psychiatrist for the first time.

It’s disturbing, at almost sixty years of age, to be diagnosed with an illness that you’ve suffered from your whole life without it ever being named. Your first reaction is to protest. I protested, insisting that bipolar disorder is one of those notions that are all of a sudden in vogue and get pinned on anything and everything—much like gluten intolerance, which so many people discovered they suffered from as soon as people started talking about it. Then you read what you can on the subject, you reexamine your whole life from that angle, and you realize that the shoe fits. Perfectly, even. That all your life you’ve been subject to this alternation of excitement and depression that is of course the lot of us all-because all our moods change, we all have highs and lows, clear skies and dark clouds—only that there’s a group of people to which you belong, along with, it seems, 2 percent of the population, for whom the highs are higher and the lows lower than average, to the point that their succession becomes pathological.

The diagnosis was Bipolar Type 2. I wasn’t aware there were options. Type 2 is not the one that makes you “strip naked on the street, or suddenly buy three Ferraris,” and I recognized myself in the description of the disease, and so it seems that stuff other than weed can make my heart race. I freaked out a little bit and set the book aside.

I guess I’ve traveled to New York… 75 times? 100? Traditionally, I went to see concerts, musicians, and folks in the music industry almost exclusively, but now I try to make newer friends, an embarrassing endeavor. It’s a big ask: Hi, are you up for a trial period with me? People have their people already, but unfortunately for people, I’m horny for relations of the literary variety instead of indie rock singers and show promoters. This has been my social project for the last few years, and it’s not been without setbacks. I’ve inflicted some harm—alienated, offended, and let people down.

In the spring, I spouted off aggressive, unwelcome, and unqualified publishing advice to a newer friend. I went in hard, and now they don’t want to talk with me about writing anymore. This was a major loss, heartbreaking, as talking to them about writing had become one of my favorite things. In the summer, I said something judgmental and resentful, or at least that’s how it was received, to another newer friend, an editor I had come to love. I was left on read, unfollowed, unsubsubscribed. One strike and I was out—no discussion, my apology unaccepted. Recently, a writer I admire was gravely disappointed with the results after I published a piece of their work. They took the opportunity to say some unkind things. An apology arrived the next day—honest and pure, which I accepted immediately—a massive relief. We moved on, things are okay, but the relationship has changed. Fewer texts, colder replies, less joking, less everything, and it’s difficult to imagine being given the opportunity to publish their work again. Each of these hurt like a motherfucker (look: feelings!), and I can’t help but think the damage is eternal, that forgiveness is weak, but who knows. I still reached out to potential newer friends in NYC and had some good hangs.

In fact he loved literature above all else, and that’s basically all we talked about during the—what?—five or six times we had dinner together. We were in no hurry, we were slowly becoming friends, we had time.

I packed Yoga in my bag for New York, but didn’t read a single page. I often struggle to read while traveling, and I was content to spend more time thinking about what I’d read up to the point of Carrère’s diagnosis. When I got back to Nashville, I started again from the beginning and read straight through to the end. Then, I read it again.

After his diagnosis, Carrère’s depression became dangerous, life-threatening, and he was institutionalized. He’s treated first with Ketamine, then electroshock therapy. Each time he wakes up after getting zapped, Carrère finds himself staring at a reproduction of a painting, a beach scene, hanging on the wall of the recovery room.

This beach, this painting, this poster, are for me the saddest sight in the world. Not just the saddest, but also the most frightening. I hope to never see them again.

I wonder if my version of this poster might end up being the cover of Carrère’s book. I sink further into my own pit after my trip, and I’m still down there. It’s two weeks now without weed, and I could probably blame my mood on withdrawal, but I’m beyond suspicious that it’s something more. But don’t worry; I’m not going to let French literature diagnose me. I’ll take the same step my new favorite writer took and make my first appointment with a psychiatrist.

When I used to quit cigarettes—I did it many times—the smell would often call me back, and I’d go buy a pack. I’d tell myself I’d just have one, then smoke 30,000 over 3 years. It was another book, a real-deal self-help title, that finally helped me kick cigarettes, and eventually, when a smoker would step into the elevator or get behind me in line at Chipotle after sucking down a stick, I found the smell repulsive. I was pleased to find that in NYC, which reeks of weed on every block, I was not enticed to find the nearest dispensary.

That said, I did stink all weekend. On my first day there, I stopped for a pretzel at a cart on the corner of 6th and 42nd. While I waited to order, a cumulus cloud of halal meat smoke engulfed me and sank into the down of my coat. I caught whiffs of it the rest of my time there. Apologies to newer friends whom I hugged hello and goodbye.

Will Mountain Cox says WHAT ARE THE STAKES of literature, then drops a dizzy list of all that comes with the search for an answer: the magazines, the parties, the postings, etc. I count a few shots taken at me myself and I, a writer and publisher and poster, and probably at you as well, but it’s a playful and perceptive opening to a long letter to the reader and a beautiful account of where we are right now. What are the stakes “Of the time we are alive… Of the books we write in the time therein. And of the books we read.” He goes deeper on that last one, the reading:

Of the books that will never die, written by humans who always will … not of the writers living, but of their work alive, written in our time. Of the time therein, with us as living readers. Of the stakes inherent to reading. Of the inherent stakes in reading the work of living writers. And as readers, marking their work immortal.

Look at that shit! This dude is saying that readers make literature eternal, not writers or publishers. Most people fuckin’ around with underground books and magazines are writers and/or publishers themselves, but WMC ignores this and lives in a world, in fact makes us a little world, where readers simply read. Even if almost everyone holding a copy of The Relegation Reader is a writer or publisher, the collection asks us first to be readers, and to get stoked on the deadly-serious and very cool power that holds.

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Daniel Levin Becker opens the anthology with two list poems, and I’m relieved that they are funny. There’s a good snark in WMC’s intro—“every new piece of literature being so funny”—but I’m laughing at lines from poem number one, “Exercises in Pornography”:

They keep getting sidetracked explaining their tattoos.

Playback is slowed down 1,000 percent.

Golf spectators.

I’m surprised by the McSweeney’s-ness of funny list poems kicking things off. Is McSweeney’s out of favor—a GenX success story gone boring? I don’t read it anymore and see that the new issue comes in the form of a Trapper Keeper, so I get it, but I can’t deny what that camp offered as I graduated with my state-school English degree in the late ‘90s. It was bonkers and foundational for me.

After the opening poems, I find two pages of generous editorial, guard rails that appear 25 times throughout the collection. WMC explains his relationship to the writer’s work, essentially why he wanted them included, recommends more of their writing in other books and magazines, and then like your Choose Your Own Adventure books from childhood, offers three or four suggestions on what to read next in the anthology. I played along, did not go in order, and jumped ahead to Joseph Grantham’s poems. Joseph edits R&R, the literary magazine housed under the Relegation roof, but this is not mentioned, which is awesome. Across all the editorial interjections, WMC won’t even mention once that he’s a writer himself. Who among us has the restraint?!

After two poets to start, I take the path marked Jen Calleja for an excerpt from her novel, Vehicle. The setting is post-something—WWIII? Pangea 2?—and it’s certainly post-punk, and like a magnet I’m drawn to Hester Heller as she proposes going undercover to gather intelligence and spread propaganda via lyrics in now foreign and probably dangerous lands as a touring musician. I wonder whether Heller’s plan to use her band as spyware has Ian Svenonius/Nation of Ulysses DNA.

THE CHAIR: What exactly does a band consist of and why would they tour? Wouldn’t it draw attention to you?

HESTER HELLER: A band is a group of narcissists playing music together. A tour is basically a vehicle for them to travel the world without necessarily engaging with other cultures and enjoying the benefit of receiving special treatment for apparently no reason other than working for about twenty minutes a night.

SO funny, so harsh. I can name exceptions to the rule, and I take issue with the 20-minute thing, but I’ll be reading this novel in full. I ordered it, it’s already arrived, and the book looks and feels sick. I’ve been avoiding “band books” the last year or two while I wrote my own. During that time, I saw some disparaging remarks about the sub-genre, but lately I’ve put my antenna back up and see them everywhere.

I do the Léon Pradeau poem, a music essay from Louis Chennevière (very Substacky), and May-Lan Tan with WMC’s near shark-jump story of living on the floor at Shakespeare and Company and stumbling upon Tan’s first book, reading it front to back through the night.

Onto another excerpt from Vidya Narine’s Orchidist next, in which she describes “a Bluetooth earpiece screwed in tight,” and it’s a good reason to read work in translation, to know that people are lame everywhere, but Narine shows the flower shop customers in the story much love.

One day, before my eyes, Yannick gave birth to a hybrid he dubbed a Mnemosyne, after the Greek goddess of memory. It was a deep pink Phalaenopsis whose flowers lasted a particularly long time. He had created it, he told me, in honor of a customer who had become a friend. A famous actor who kept forgetting his lines, and then all the rest, too, as he got older.

I get excited each time a piece is tagged as an excerpt, and I’m hyped that many come from books already published, and not this month or this year. The promo window for these books closed long ago, and now these late-comer excerpts! I love this. We need more of this.

I went to the Rachael Allen poems, then to Lamb, who contributes my favorite poems in the anthology. The internet anonymity has been a roadblock for me, but I’m into these tender pieces about small children and God stuff. I’m surprised by my openness to God in contemporary reading this year.

I hit the Roland Bagnal poems and “So begins a love story” by Simon Johanna. At the end of that one, WMC suggests Sean Thor Conroe for another love story. Sean’s podcast with the novelist Harold Rogers is how I know of WMC—they had him on to discuss his novel Roundabout, a slim book about Paris and friendship that I bought, read, and loved. Harold and Sean have gone Biblical as hell on their pod the last few years, heavy on Jesus and the under-discussed Ladies of the Scriptures, so a carpenter not ignoring a prostitute while traveling on common public transit in “Money” is no surprise. In his note after the piece, WMC says Sean “attempts to pull canon-energy into modern parlance,” and that’s exactly what I love about their podcast, too. I’ve tackled a bunch of difficult books empowered by their stoney baloney chats.

I pick the path to Rob Doyle next, a prose poem, I think, LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” + reincarnation, and another list in its own way. I pass through more poems, Sylvia Jones and Luna Miguel, and now at the end of the pieces, sometimes the Choose Your Own options point to things I’ve already read, so I pick from the table of contents. I did the only collaborative piece, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou’s wild thing, but too wild for me at 4:30am on my first coffee.

I paged to Francisco Garcia’s “James Henry Corbitt,” and didn’t recognize the proper name of the story’s title, unsure if I was reading fiction or history, but cool with either answer:

James Henry Corbitt killed his mistress in August 1950. On trial in Liverpool three months later, the 38-year-old engineer didn’t bother protesting his innocence, though his guilty plea came lodged with a defence of insanity. Unfortunately for Corbitt, the prosecution had uncovered his diary, which laid out the murder plot in allegedly clear-minded detail. Praying for one more chance… to finish her off… Always seem to be in trouble, mental strain, losing control of my brain, think my brain is turning, must be what I was afraid of. On being convicted and sentenced to death, he was taken to Manchester’s Strangeways Prison, the redbrick Victorian monster looming against the fringes of the city centre.

I see the word research on the next page, so this is a true story about Corbitt and about Britain, and I would like to read more about Britain from Garcia.

I moved from the U.K. to Sophie Haigney’s San Francisco piece, her writing making the city Beat again?! I lived in Oakland after college in 1998, an exceptionally lame time in the Bay Area when the Yahoo! billboard was more a landmark than City Lights, and I found none of the romance I read in Kerouac or heard the Easy Bay punks sing about. I worked wack jobs for a year at different tech start-ups, both scams, then bailed for Seattle. Sophie might be onto something new or resurfacing there.

After Will Harris’s essay on a good death, I read Scott McClananahn’s excerpt from his upcoming book. It takes place in the city, not mountains or the hills, which is fun to see and it’s Giancarlo DiTrapano lore, seemingly in good hands. WMC draws a connection between Toye Oladinni’s piece and Mrs. Dalloway, a book I read recently for the first time. I can see it—writing London, updated with Uber—but the connection I found was Toye and Scott’s stories both set in a world of writers, going to writerly parties. It worked for me with Scott’s excerpt, but kicked me out with Toye. Still, 50/50’s not bad for writers writing writers.

Gabriel Smith says what his story’s about from the start: true faith. In fragments, the narrator recounts letters from an unnamed she, a world traveler sending updates from everywhere: Argentina, Saint Petersburg, Halberstadt, and Dubai. I see the faith thing throughout; it’s not subtle and it’s satisfying, quite nicely done, but I’m struck most by the sadness in the piece. I might say it’s the saddest in the collection. I get the sense the letter writer is traveling alone, and whoever’s receiving the letters is lonely waiting.

I struggle through Rodrigo García Marina’s experimental Covid poem, the most formally challenging of anything in the anthology, then read Óscar García Sierra’s story. I see that I’ve written a cryptic note at the end: What are the bricks? I skim for an answer and I remember the zit on the narrator’s nose. Unfair to Óscar to be sure, but it bothered me like farts bother me in stories. I even hate the farts in A Confederacy of Dunces. Kelly Xio is the last stop on my adventure, and I like her long prose poem which is diarist-adjacent and computery. I remind myself to read work referencing YouTube and modern drugs lest I age out.

SO OKAY, it’s a rave review. I’m in for the whole anthology, even the stuff not quite for me. I revisit WMC’s letter to the reader at the beginning, and find a new pull-quote to love. Recounting the start of an earlier publishing endeavor, WMC says:

James and I began a literary magazine … under the assumption that old and immortal books were great, but someone had to make our peers old and immortal too … we could read these young writers’ work, and by doing so their writing would become infinite—to us at least.

That magazine doesn’t publish anymore, but clearly the mission is alive and you can MAKE SOMETHING ETERNAL.

Previous Exes:

Ex-Artists 005: TV on the Radio

Ex-Artists 003-004: Black Mountain & Pink Mountaintops

Ex-Artists 002: John Vanderslice

Ex-Artists 001: Constantines

006 Genevieve Stokes

In the autumn of their career, booking agents will eventually make jokes about signing artists the same age or younger than their own children. I posted about Genevieve on Instagram after becoming her agent, and a manager friend replied to say that she dated Genevieve’s dad in college.

Here’s the tune I thought might spark something for Genevieve.

007 Calvin Johnson

I wasn’t a Beat Happening listener, although I liked that one song. I owned a random Dub Narcotic record at some point, and while I never really played it, obviously I had (and have) much love and respect for Calvin Johnson and K Records. The label released music from long-time favorites like Lync, Make*Up, Modest Mouse, pre-“Loser” Beck in lofi freak folk mode, the Built To Spill singles, and most importantly those Halo Benders LPs. Goddamn. That’s the Calvin stuff for me.

I was flattered when Chris Swanson suggested Calvin and I speak about touring. Calvin was releasing his first solo record, “What Was Me,” and while he had played countless shows with his bands over the years, they were mostly self-booked, but Chris said Calvin was showing an openness to letting an agent give it a try.

Imagine an upright bass speaking, speaking slowly: “SO YOU BOOK SOME BANDS,” Calvin bellowed through the phone on our first call. He was vague and aloof, 85% disinterested, which I took as ultra-cool and also as a challenge. We attempted to pinpoint the types of shows Calvin was interested in playing, and tried that again and again on more calls and emails as I threw ideas his way. The dude sounded put off by the idea of concerts in general, and all venues and scenarios presented problems for Calvin. Over the years, I became familiar with this situation. From time to time, unbookable artists become curious about agency representation. Actually, it’s not fair to call them unbookable; it’s that they are not bookable professionally. Calvin wanted to play the types of shows put on by people who do not want to fuck with booking agents. I called it off with him after a few weeks. We did not confirm a single gig.

I will note that I recently purchased two Sharp Pins records which were co-released with K, and this summer I stopped at a rural-ass coffee shop somewhere in Missouri and the weirdo child behind the register had a stick-and-poke K shield tattooed on their chest. Hell yes.

008 Gabe Lee

Some artists appear on this “barely booked” list because I got involved right before or during the pandemic. I changed agencies during the shutdown, and several artists stayed behind with colleagues on the booking team. That was the case with Genevieve, and also Nashville’s Gabe Lee.

009 Zulu Winter

Zero memory. No clue. Not looking it up.

010 A Gun Called Tension

Short-lived Seattle duo of Dann Gallucci from Murder City Devils and sometimes Modest Mouse with rapper Sean Reveron along with many guests including Andrea Zollo from Pretty Girls Make Graves, Roots Manuva, and Morgan Henderson from Blood Brothers and Fleet Foxes. Almost certain we booked zero shows, but I was stoked to talk music with Dann now and again on the horn.

011 Day Wave

A colleague who represented this artist thought new blood was needed, so my previous assistant and I took it on. We didn’t book a show before I left the job and as I understand it, this dude hardly gives a fuck about being on the road.

012 Jenny Lewis

Again, no shows booked. I was part of the poaching team that woo’ed Jenny away from her previous agency, but then came the pandemic, the new agency for me, and Jenny stayed with capable colleagues at the previous place. It would have been fun to get into this one. It looks like the Rilo Kiley reunion tour is making dreams come true for longtime Jenny fans.

A quick word about stealing clients from other agencies: It is so, so shitty when agents poach artists from other agents EXCEPT for those times when I did so.

013 Big Red Machine

The side-project of Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon with a sick band and several guest vocalists. I shared booking duties with the agent who represents The National, but very few shows were ever played, and I never saw them live. Briefly, Aaron used the name for his solo project and Justin was less involved, but now Aaron is… I dunno, what’s that guy been up to?

Neither Justin nor his manager Josh Sundquist can recall this happening, so I’ve either dreamt it or confused it with something else, but in my mind there was once a Big Red Machine performance with Josh Kaufmann sitting in on guitar. Possibly positioned off stage? With a spotlight pointing out to wherever he was? I would have seen this online, but since we are no longer able to search the internet, I can’t turn anything up. Anyone know anything?

Here’s the band doing “Gratitude” (clean) on Colbert.

014 Sweet Spirit

What comes to mind when I think about this eight-piece Austin band is a hometown show at the Mohawk on Red River. I had yet to see the band live, so traveled to Texas with my girlfriend at the time. We were in a transcontinental and overwhelmingly bogus and exhausting relationship, and she spent the entire night arms crossed, face cross, an unmelting ice statue in the Lone Star heat, eventually hissing in my ear while the band played that she could tell I was going to sleep with Sabrina Ellis, the singer of Sweet Spirit. I did not sleep with Sabrina, and we didn’t book many shows.

015 Hotel Lux

Pandemic Signing™️. Every booking agent who kept their job during the Covid shutdown knows what a Pandemic Signing is. Hotel Lux were (are?) a post-punk band from the UK. Colleagues were into the first EP, and there was a song I really liked on it, so we signed on to represent this overseas band with no fanbase whatsoever, no label in North America, at a moment in time when touring did not exist and nobody could predict when it might start up again. There was a period of time after everyone had stopped watching the news all day and grown bored booking shows at drive-in theaters, so the move was to sign total crap shoots. Perhaps it was optimism, imagining a long, employed future once touring returned. I do not believe Hotel Lux ever made it to North America. A fun essay for a music publication (lol) would be an analysis of Covid signings and where those artists are today.

016 Kean Kavanagh

Pandemic Signing 2 Electric Boogaloo. Kean is an Irish songwriter and producer, now living in London, who released a mixtape I liked called Dog Person in 2020. He eventually came to the states for a few solo gigs, but I didn’t get to see him play. We did hang out briefly in person at a singular and transcendent Dijon show at the Bowery Ballroom when D’s drummer was knocked out with Covid.

017 Danielson Famile

The weirdest Christian Rock of the era. Danielson was uniquely accepted and praised by legit non-Christian musicians and some high-art peeps in NYC, but I found the music nearly unlistenable. I didn’t sign this one; Trey Many handed it off to me as a new and fully inexperienced agent when I started working at his company Aero Booking. He passed a few artists off to help establish my roster, including the Constantines and Songs:Ohia.

018 D.D Dumbo

This Australian artist’s strange debut EP caught my attention in 2014. He came over for SXSW and possibly a few support slots when the record was picked up and re-released by 4AD. We had an extensive tour planned, but the artist pulled back from that in order to take care of his head. Mental health cancellations weren’t a thing… er… of course they were a thing, but people didn’t call it that yet. This could have moved well in the Tune-Yards, Animal Collective, Beirut lanes, I think.

019 John Mark Nelson

I believe John’s done well writing and producing with other artists. I remember him as a sweetheart, but could not possibly hum one of his tunes.

020 Arlie

A colleague was hyped on this Nashville band’s early singles and, because he was in LA, asked me to check them out at a house party they were playing here in town. I loved the songs, so went to the show, and Arlie had the college kids going in this packed-out living room. The band members were still finishing classes at Vanderbilt themselves, just about to graduate. They clearly worshiped Vampire Weekend, and I couldn’t help but remember meeting those dudes in 2007 on the campus of Columbia as their last member was about to graduate and Vampy Weeks touring would begin.

But as Arlie wrapped up studies in 2017, people were wondering about bands with guitars. There was real concern. The question as to whether 2010s indie would ascend and become the new pop had been answered: No it would not. I was pitching Arlie as The Last Great Indie Rock Band.

I left them behind with my colleague when I moved agencies and watched from my phone as the singer in the band shape-shifted every season while the songs moved away from the stuff I liked. They signed a big dumb major label deal, and absolutely nothing happened with the band.

Later, I ran into the singer at the Ryman, leaving a show we’d both attended. He was doing an Adam-Ant-meets-Bozo kinda thing, so I almost didn’t recognize him, and apparently the dude nearly missed me, too. “Whoa,” he said, “You were this super cool guy with long hair when we met. Now you’re old and bald.” It had been maybe 3 years? But I had cut my hair once I admitted how thin it was up there, so maybe fair play.

Anyway, here’s a recent pic of Arlie guy.

I’ve kept a five-year diary, a very Paper Source practice, for almost two years. When my wife and I retire for the night, I turn on the bedside lamp, peel off my clothes, and sit naked on the edge of the mattress using a pillow for a desk. I’m worried about the shape my body makes while sitting like that, so I scribble quickly while Mal does her bathroom routine. I’m not crafting prose, I’m dashing off a recap on where I went and who I talked to. I’ll flag noteworthy events, what I’m reading and writing, and sometimes throw down one thought with depth, but often not. They don’t give you much space to write; five entries have to fit on each page.

After logging 365 days, entries from one year prior appear. The point is to see yourself change or not change; to notice progress, regression, stasis, or loops. I bet the loops are most common. I’ll report back after racking up more years.

The other day, the diary told me it’s been a year without my music industry job. I noted it to Mal, and she went: “FUCKING FINALLY. Can we stop talking about it now?”

I, too, am bored with the retiring agent bit. I’m changing my bio from writer, editor, and ex-agent to simply: Adam Voith, Novelist.

I did not plan this, but on the one-year anniversary of going music-biz free, I sent my novel to a batch of early readers. The book’s not done done, but it’s basically done, and a grip of folks need to read it and tell me if I can use their real names. I’ve passed it to friends and family, too, along with people I admire who were instrumental in the book becoming the novel that it is. I’m stoked that a small group gets a draft with the names as I’d like them to be. I see no world where everyone lets me leave them unchanged in the published version.

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Like many fellow Americans, I’ve been trying to lose the same 10-15 pounds for 10-15 years. If I weren’t colorblind, I might not wear these weights on my wrists while walking the neighborhood. I can’t be sure, but think they’re pink and neon green. I believe they were marketed to ladies in the early 2000s. Now that the heat broke in Nashville, I’m wearing them while walking and listening to audiobooks, waving my arms around, doing curls and flys. They’re 2 lbs each. Very wimpy.

During a brief period early in the pandemic when I made low-stress exercise my full-time job, I achieved relative comfort with going shirtless on the streets of Green Hills. I noticed my neighbor Marty doing the same while walking his dog, possibly emboldened by my own bravery, because when I got back into cookies and candy and put the shirt back on, he was fully clothed again, too. There’s a new shirtless guy on the street this year who walks endlessly, putting my Covid strolls to shame. He’s lean, has a nice tan, and watches TV holding his phone sideways while he goes. I’ve gone past this guy hundreds of times, both on foot and in the car, and he’s never once waved, nodded, or even looked up.

I’ve been walking and listening to long books, most recently, Crossroads. Nagel read The Corrections, freaked out in the 3-Piece group chat, then jumped immediately into another Franzen. Kyle was psyched that Mike was going in. I believe Kyle’s read them all, but said Crossroads was the masterpiece. He’d read it twice already and said he would do it a third time if we wanted to join him in the fall, so now I’ve read my first Johnathan Franzen novel.

When we were in the car recently, heading for Illinois for readings, Kyle heard a few seconds of my Crossroads at 1.7x when CarPlay randomly started it from my phone. He was disturbed and called it my psychopathic trait. I said: THESE VOICE ACTORS ARE GOING SO GODDAMN SLOW. Also you’re 10 years younger, you read in high school, in college, and in the military. I’m playing catch-up, and I hear a ticking clock.

Surprise! Crossroads is great. I’m often ready to be done with characters even when I love them, but found myself slowing down to 1.5, 1.4, 1.3x as I got to the last hours with Hildebrandt & Co. I was going to miss these people, and I was still building rationale for my gripe with the book.

Crossroads is a Midwestern Youth Group Novel, so I was trepidatious having just finished my own book, which is The World’s First Christian Rock Novel. Mine is not fully youth grouped out, but it’s youth group adjacent and Midwestern. I was worried I’d find similarities and go: Oops, one of the best doing this stuff already did this. Of course, I found some overlap. I don’t know how you write a book about American Christianity without a scene in a chartered bus going to a youth retreat, but in the end my manuscript is marked safe from being obsolete. Crossroads shook my confidence in the quality of my own writing (plenty of books I read do that) but aside from a few similar scenes and vibes, I don’t really recognize the Midwestern Christian world in Crossroads. I’m surprised by the progressivism, the intellectualism, and the street smarts. This family, this church… nothing like my Indiana life just two decades after the events in Franzen’s Chicago suburb. Really, neither book is directly about religion. In Crossroads, Franzen’s concern is how to be good, not necessarily how to be godly. My book is about Christian Rock, so it’s about business more than Jesus.

One of the challenges in my book was writing a narrator who knows nothing after the late-’90s. The book is not aware of the current climate or what American Evangelicals look like today. There were hints to where things were headed, but I don’t believe my characters would have been tuned in and able to identify them, and nary a prophet is found in my pages. It was difficult to unthink what I know and tempting to sneak in judgements, warnings, or anachronistic moralizing.

With Crossroads, I could not forget that it was the 21st Century, that it was a book published in 2021. I can accept that there were hippie dippy, liberalized churches in the Midwest in the ‘70s—the Jesus People were going strong—but the book seems to know too much. I checked out Franzen on The New Yorker Radio Hour from October 2021, just after the release of the novel. He’s asked by David Remnick about writing Navajo and Black characters.

“And the way I negotiated that was to give Russ something like a contemporary sensitivity about cultural divides and then have him play off against somebody who didn’t get it.

And really the effort there was to demonstrate that I’m not unaware of the problem. And that—not by way of virtue signaling, but just to try to make the reader feel less uncomfortable. I don’t want to make—I don’t want readers thinking about anything but the characters.

And if they start thinking about, whoa, you know the author has waded into this, then I’ve—then I have failed.”

It’s not a failure. The book is awesome and my gripe about whether this kind of Christian ever walked the Earth aside, its central question is wrestled with to satisfaction for this reader. That said, I absolutely thought about things other than the characters. That doesn’t seem so bad to me—I want books that make me do this—but I did not want to be doubting the social awareness of Christians in 1970s Illinois.

Also, the cussing. I’m calling bullshit on the cussing. Even the leadership at Jesus People USA, freaks in rock bands running the radical Christian commune in Chicago, were not cussing. Cussing didn’t come into the mix until 1998 at the earliest.

Here’s the Radio Hour audio with more context around the quote.

In a different interview included at the end of the audiobook, Franzen says the next book in the planned trilogy jumps forward decades in time and we get to know more about the grandchild born at the end of Crossroads, and yes I am worried that little shit will start a Christian Rock band, sign to Tooth & Nail, and have a transcendent set at Cornerstone ‘95.

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I'm driving home after the shows in Texas and god they were so good. This was a test; whether we can make a two-off work, a Saturday and Sunday in two cities a few hours apart. We did Dallas on Saturday morning at Deep Vellum then drove to Austin for a Sunday morning show at Livra Books.

It's tough for actual touring. With lives and kids and wives and jobs. And when we did go out for a few consecutive weeks in the spring, the evidence suggested the morning gag wasn’t gonna work on weekdays. So the two-off. The weekend trip. In and out. Texas says it can work, which is awesome. Both stores down there rule, both the right size for tiny readings, rad books everywhere, fucking weirdo book people running these spots. It was like the venues, the venues themselves and the vibes coming off the people at these places were extremely encouraging. Texas delivered.

I would say I sorta knew what was going on with Deep Vellum. Barely, but not really. I was hyped their storefront would host us—thanks to Eliana and Riley for that—and to get coffee with Will, proprietor and publisher at Deep Vellum and an assload of imprints. Dalkey Archive and Open Letter and others I’m less or unfamiliar with yet. The store’s a showroom for their titles and select stuff from other publishers and it’s the office, too, the headquarters. Will moved to Dallas 15 years ago to start his thing and holy shit so much is happening in that little building! He was wearing a bootleg Dischord shirt when we sat to chat. The next morning at the reading he was repping War Zone. I loved a lot of what he said while we talked and one thing keeps coming back to me. Will called the reader is the most underserved person in literature. You hear about stewardship in art, someone’s a great steward of books or writers or translators or whatever, fantastic, we need it, I love it, I’m looking for stewards everywhere, but I was like genuinely… surprised. Like I was hearing something novel and different, this dude talking about taking care of people reading books. And this is in Dallas? I can’t stress enough how far away Dallas is from New York City. How distant LA. Not just far away on the map. Like, Dallas is giant, but a cultural hub, maybe not. So for Deep Vellum to double triple and quadruple down on books there is bold, borderline subversive.

I thought a lot about Secretly Canadian, humble in Bloomington, the late ‘90s. First a label. Then a distributor. Then a label group partnering with other badass labels. That’s music. Very different I guess… calculus on upside and audience possibilities and all of that on a totally different scale, but there are similarities. Thinking back I don’t know if the Secretly guys would have said it so succinctly, but they were taking good care of listeners, for sure. On the publishing side I thought about Two Dollar Radio in Columbus. I’ve only dipped into their shop once and don’t know anyone at the press, but they seem to move in a similar way, publishing in a non-major media center at a level every bit as serious and maybe even more focused, maybe more about the shit you want this all to be about. I’m talking out of my butthole, obviously. Anyway, I’m impressed.

Moctezuma Seth Gonzalez is on a slightly different path, equally good to see. He was a book nut in Dallas previously, knows Will and Deep Vellum peeps, but he’s in Austin now running Livra. As I understand it, Seth was collecting and selling rare and out of print South and Central American books, then other kinds of books, expanding like tweaky collectors do, eventually moving to Austin and opening the brick and mortar spot to house the business. This is a crazy-ass store. It’s small, but comfortably packed with books on mismated shelves, tables, and racks, curated and organized into pockets of subject or genre. We got the donuts and coffee going and did our thing. Great crowd in there to listen.

And Kyle and Mike are such fucks. They're too good at reading stuff out loud. They’re so good at writing and reading. I'm lucky to have these dudes, lucky to do these shows with them. We had John Waddy Bullion join us in Dallas, and Alina Grabowski and Brian Allen Carr in Austin. Brian brought out a bunch of family, his mom and his kids, and my uncle, aunt, and cousin came. I told this story at the show, that back when I graduated college I sent these weird letters from a fake guy named Frank who was going to publish my first book. It was a collection of stories, poems, and hardly fictionalized diary stuff, and “Frank” was asking my friends and family for $30 or something to get his new publishing operation going. Kickstarting in the late ‘90s! Plenty of people sent the money and got a hand-bound, hand-numbered edition of the book, but Uncle Ray sent a check for $1000. I went and bought a new computer. At Livra when I told the touching story, Uncle Ray yelled out: I regret it to this day! and got mega laughs.

Kyle flew from Santa Barbara into Dallas where Mike and J live, and I drove from Tennessee. It was like 10 hours, Nashville to Dallas. First day I drove five and stopped outside Little Rock. I was doing nothing wrong as I made my way, breaking no laws, driving like a wimpy saint now in my advanced age, but I got honked at several times like What the fuck? The next day, Little Rock to Dallas, more honking and I realize it’s my own horn going off without me pushing it, quick toots and a couple of long-ass blows. When I got to Dallas, Mike was in the car and he was like, Who's honking at us? We were in the hotel parking garage. It was echoey so you couldn’t tell but I was like, Oh that's us, and I don't understand. I don't know what the fuck's going on, but my car is honking for no reason.

So now I’m on day five of involuntary beeping. In Dallas we pinpointed that it happens when moving slowly and turning left. There are places you can get away with it. If no one’s around and it beeps, it’s funny, But it's happened many times where other cars are all over us and they’re doing nothing wrong and it’s obviously bumming them out. Yesterday we dropped Kyle at the Austin airport to head home. J was driving, god bless her, and the airport was dunked, like it’s a traffic jam in departures. Eventually we get to the curbside and Kyle hops out, hugs and goodbyes, Hell yes, great weekend, etc. etc. and we need to turtle our way to the left, back into terminal traffic, but J’s taking her time trying to find a window where a honk will fuck with drivers around us the least but we see our lane comes to an end a few cars up at an airport cop. She’s directing traffic in a yellow vest, you know, with a whistle and white gloves and it's very intense arm stuff to keep things moving, keep things orderly, and we’re inching our way up and eventually the Honda Pilot is right in front of this cop and she’s whistling and waving us to the left and J puts on her signal, gives the cop a pre-apology shrug, we all hold our breath and she scoots the car over and the horn blares into the cop’s body for a long, sustained blow. We were embarrassed but in full hysterics. The cop was unfazed.

After dropping Kyle off, we drove back to Dallas, back to J and Mike’s car where they left it behind Deep Vellum. We said our goodbyes, and I rolled on toward Nashville. I pulled into the Texarkana hotel last night and it was honking, honking, honking in the parking lot. Honked my way out of Texarkana this morning and back onto the highway.

Oh my god here's this other awesome town I'm driving past. I'm seeing their water tower and it's called Arkadelphia. Love these combo-meal names. What does Philly have to do with Arkansas? Anyway I'm trying to like stop strategically when I’ve got to pee or get gas and I pick exit ramps where I can turn right to services and I’m a master of navigating gas station pumps and fast food lots only turning right and sometimes that means I’m doing wonky routes to circumvent buildings and traffic lights and intersections. Big time Chevy Chase energy.

So okay, Texas is behind us and next, in two weeks, we do Hinterland Festival in Saint Charles, Iowa. We're going to read on the Campfire Stage after morning yoga. I'm excited to try this at a music festival with zero literature/book stuff happening, out of context completely, another test. The ex-agent in me got us a little dough to cover expenses.

Alright I'm driving again, heading for Hinterland. I was home for two weeks, hardly enough time to miss the dudes, and I’ll meet them again at our hotel in Des Moines. I got the horn fixed. Faulty wire in the steering column. I'm always driving this year. End of last year, I went to the dealership and said, Here’s our old Honda Pilot. I’d like to replace it with your newest Honda Pilot, please. I need to drive around trying and sell books and magazines. So far so good. I must be sniffing at 10,000 miles.

Got back to Nashville yesterday after the festival. The family had already left, south to Florida, the Redneck Riviera, for a beach vacation before school starts up for the kids and for Mal who’s beginning a graduate program. I did laundry, opened my mail and whatever, went to bed early, I’m exhausted, then this morning I was back in the car on my way to the Gulf Coast before the sun was fully up.

My neighbor Eddie Schwartz just released a new EP called Film School. Last year, we went to Eddie’s 75th birthday dinner, the most social thing I’ve done with a neighbor since I left my parent’s house for college in 1993. I was a terrible, terrible neighbor during college in Bloomington, in Seattle at three different places, back in Bloomington again in the house by the mall, and then two apartments and a house in Nashville. My stiff-arm collapsed when Mal delivered cookies and local fruit to nearby houses when we moved to a new place together. Now I’m on text chains with neighborhood guys and I wave and say hello, chit chat with people walking dogs or exercising. And now we’re friends with Eddie and Joanne next door, and they’re awesome. They’ve lived in the house a long time, came to Nashville when it was probably 85% a different town. Eddie’s had a long songwriting career here. He wrote “Hit Me with Your Best Shot,” and he wrote or co-wrote other tunes you know. Part of your reward for coming up with a monster all-time greatest hit is a sick beach house on the Gulf. They rent the place out during peak season but the final week had no takers and so they're like, You guys want it? This is last minute and it’s the six days before pre-school is in session, and we’re like, Yeah, yeah, yeah! We want it! We’re only paying the cleaning fee, I guess. I’ve heard from the fam, already there and settled in, that the place is very, very nice. It’s just up the road from the little beach town where they filmed The Truman Show.

Okay I’ve been thinking about the festival in Iowa and want to recap it maybe to just work out my own thoughts. We got booked because a promoter friend I worked with for years curates the Campfire Stage at Hinterland with a few late night sets after the main festival is finished for the day. Doing something in the morning was an experiment, but there are 8,000 people camping out there, basically captives before the main festival grounds open for the day. We offered free donuts and coffee as bait. I think at moments we allowed ourselves to imagine, Damn maybe it’ll be a whole bunch of groggy heads out there with us. Again we were seeking proof of concept. Does it work outside any literary context at a cool music fest? Will people come hear stories and buy books when there is absolutely nothing else to do? 

Was there proof? I’d say it's inconclusive. I guess the other things a camper might do instead of coming to hear funny literature the morning after raging day and night at a festival might include: sleeping in, morning sex, or looking at a phone. Given these same circumstances, we might not rush to do it again at a music-only festival, but it's not like a total dead end. We had some people come listen. I bet we had like…

Okay, so the festival I think is 25,000 people total per day and the headliners this year were Tyler, the Creator, Kacey Musgraves, and Lana Del Rey. Before I retired, I booked Bon Iver to headline Hinterland two summers ago and didn't hear much from their camp about the show. This happens. A band plays a gig and the agent won’t hear shit unless something goes really wrong, like something’s super fucked. Or maybe a show truly transcends, then they'll let you know. When a touring band leaves a city, it comes off the itinerary. It’s no longer on sale or being promoted, Etch A Sketched away, all focus on the next show. Normally, I’d reach out during and after big shows, texting tour managers, promoters, or lead singers. When I was feeling the job, I went to many of the festival shows, especially if an artist I booked was headlining. Maybe because I’d lost energy for the gig, I don’t recall asking for a report, and Hinterland 2023 came and went for Bon Iver.

On my drive to Hinterland 2025, I was talking with Justin on the phone and I was like, Oh, I'm on my way to Hinterland to read. He's like, Oh right on, cool fest. Then he goes, That was a weird one. It's really young. The audience is extremely young and I remember being up there like, ‘Okay, this is… these kids aren’t really knowing Bon songs too much.’ This proved to be true; I was a fucking elder on the grounds. Even Kyle, Mike, and J, much younger than me, were exceptions to the general rule.

We were sent some treasure-map directions to a secret entrance to the festival grounds. You went down a narrow road in the back parking of a building then past a few beat down sheds and ended up at one of the bone yards for festival production semi trucks. Tucked between two rows of parked trailers was a well-hidden, unmarked gravel road. It was rugged through the woods to a clearing with a grassy, natural bowl and the Campfire Stage.

When we arrived and asked the stage manager how it was the night before, he said it was packed and wild for the first late night show out there, a Rebecca Black DJ set. He estimated 300 campers were there in front of the stage and up the hill partying.

Each time we do an event, I’m on the karma payment plan. Before the show as we get close to the advertised start time we try and play it cool, but we’re looking over our shoulders, out the door of the shop or up the grassy knoll to see whether anyone’s coming. I used to put bands in this zone all the time! I have to tell you, the vibe might not be good for one’s head.

Thankfully, each time but twice a handful or more of people show up and we do our thing and sell stuff and feel fine. At the festival, maybe 30 people were there? More than some shows we’ve done, but it’s a wide open space, a big gaping stage, and most people spread out high on the hill. It looked sparse. A few folks brought blankets and lawn chairs. Everyone had donuts. Before we got started, a few clumps of rumpled sleepyheads ambled down the hill only to grab donuts and bail. I guess you can't blame them. Actually, fuck those campers. Just kidding (sorta).

Getting anyone out of a sleeping bag at 10am to hear writers they don’t know is a win by any measure, but from the stage it was iffy, like maybe people weren't laughing or we couldn’t hear or see their feedback. Everyone was so far away, patches on the hill. There were five or six people in the vicinity of the stage, but not up close, they were still probably 20 feet away. As I prepare to say this, I’m like legitimately embarrassed again, but okay… I did the lame thing a sad band does when faced with the vast expanse of an empty concrete floor or festival field: I stepped to the microphone and announced that there was plenty of room up front, that folks should feel free to come up to the stage. No one moved. They never do.

I kicked us off, read my stuff, introduced Avery who did a great piece and hit them with a poem. Mike did his essay which is now privately called “Misty Potato Head,” then Kyle read a new short story then his hit single, “Rollercoaster House.” Actually, Kyle’s not reading shit, he’s doing his stuff from memory. You could take shots at what he’s doing up there, really performing his pieces, but that would make you a cynical prick and you shouldn’t think like that.

Anyway, while the guys read I thought, Okay maybe this one’s a miss, but then after we finished, at the merch table, it was like… I don’t know, it was great? The campers were very psyched and buying books.

UPWARD MOBILITY
by José Olivarez

dancing to avoid the fluttering
of roaches, the boy brushes his teeth
with one eye on the sink
& one eye on the bugs
& one eye on his teeth
& one eye on time
& one eye on homework
& one eye on his brothers
& one eye on the future—
years later when his friends joke
about how he has poor people teeth,
his head will shed its skin
to reveal 5000 eyes the size
of cockroach hearts.

Anti-Christ Teller Machine

by Adam Voith

My mom said, “Perfect, perfect," as she pulled headfirst into a curbside spot early Saturday morning. The street was empty, and she didn’t need to sing the song. When parking was hard to find, she sang a prayer to the melody of "I'm A Believer” by The Monkees.

Lord of the park-ing space
will fiiiiiind a space for me
Not a trace
of doubt in my mind

She sang these lines repeatedly, weaving the lanes of the mall or a restaurant parking lot until an empty space near the entrance miraculously appeared. Whether it took thirty seconds or seventeen laps, God intervened.

"This is perfect," Mom said again. "They won't see us, but we'll have a great view." Across the street was Barrington Union, the first bank in town to have an ATM. They built a second drive-thru lane next to the one with the live teller. The new machine sat in a wall of masonry the size of a Fotomat.

"The other night, your dad and I came for the evening one. It's seven o’clock in the morning, on the dot, then again at seven at night. We parked over there. It was fine, but the view's better here. They'll pull up in a sec. Watch." It was 6:58am.

This was week two of ATM worship. Or at least, it had been two weeks since a teacher at my school happened to see it and told some other teachers, including my mom, who taught Third Grade Science. This was Heritage Elementary. We had outfits; navy polyester pants, a matching polyester vest over a baby blue button-up and, I swear to god, an American flag clip-on tie. I would often meet Mom in the Heritage staff lounge after school where she gathered her Tupperware from the drying rack and chit-chatted with her co-workers. One day they were all talking about the ATM lady, and for the next several days, after school, Mom talked to the teachers on the phone, and I heard many one-sided conversations.

"It can't be real."

"Have you seen it?"

"Three times!?”

"Dennis Buckner’s telling everyone it's demonic, of course."

“Do you think it’s demonic?”

"Is it dancing?"

"What's she wearing?"

"Like, normal?"

"Does she look kinda poor?"

“But I heard it's old. Like an old station wagon?"

"She said it's funny?"

"Not funny? Oh."

"Sounds funny to me. I gotta see it.”

The teachers tried to keep it from the students and not make a big deal. Mom asked me to keep my mouth shut, but eventually kids in class started asking about it.

Heritage Elementary used the PACE learning program, accredited by Who the Fuck Knows. Our learning was done with rub-away markers in laminated booklets you erased before passing them off to the next kid. Heritage, indeed. We sat in plywood pods built for each kid. These, too, were baby blue, painted to match our getups.

Each student had two tiny flagpoles on top of their pod wall. If you had a question about schoolwork, you raised the American flag. If you had a question of faith, you’d hoist the Christian one.

In class, Landon put the Christian flag up and said, "This is more of a statement than a question, but ATM Lady is actually evil—like evil for real. She's dangerous, and we don't think anyone should go there to watch. The Devil’s going to count that as participation." Landon was Dennis Buckner’s son, but more and more people were going to see it. My mom went, and now she had opinions.

“Well, I heard maybe it’s the husband. Like he’s making her.”

“Oh, I couldn’t stop laughing the first time.”

“I remember when I went to a Catholic funeral. Have you been to one?”

“Crazy. Totally crazy.”

“Do you know they burn incense?”

“They're speaking in Greek or something. The priests are wearing all this wild stuff.”

“These hats."

"Oh jeez. How many times has she gone?"

“Has anyone talked to them?”

“I wonder if we should talk to them.”

"Right."

"Right. That's true."

"I wonder what the bank’s doing."

“I think so. Like, rebuking."

"I don't know. I don't think anyone knows."

“Debbie’s got vigils going. They sit in rotation. Just know if you go, someone from Debbie’s group is parked nearby, praying in their car."

Finally, Mom agreed to take me, and by then she’d gone five or six times; an expert. "Okay, okay. Here they come," she said. A car pulled around but stopped short of the ATM. The driver kissed a woman in the passenger side, then reclined his seat and vanished. The woman—normal clothes, normal hair, normal height—got out and walked to the machine.

"That's her,” Mom said. “Doesn't she look normal?"

I asked if we should roll the window up.

“I need to hear, in case she says something,” Mom said. “Just whisper.”

The woman put a card into the machine and punched in her PIN. Beep Beep Beep Beep.

"So, she puts in her card. She puts in her code. Like normal. Like anyone." My mom was narrating. The lady pushed a few more buttons. "She pushes more buttons," Mom said. "And then, okay, look. Look look look."

The lady did arm circles. I don't know what else to call them. She did some leg stuff, tapped on her thighs and forearms, then clapped a couple of times. She reached over and pushed buttons between her moves. Beep beep.

“Wait,” Mom said. “She's going to repeat it." The woman pressed buttons, wiggled, smacked, and tapped around again. It was like a dance, but it was extremely slow. She did the routine a third time and then, warmups over, she started again, only fast.

She was on fire or swatting a swarm of bugs, but the slapping, the shuffling of her feet, and the sounds from the machine all made a beat; they made music. She went on for a while, maybe a full minute, then the machine spit out a receipt. The woman grabbed it, looked at it, folded it, put it in her pocket, and walked back to the car.

"No money,” Mom said. “She never gets any money.”

"It sounded cool," I said.

“No money,” Mom said. “No money, and the bank’s always closed. Who’s she doing this for?”

"Mom, did you hear how it made a song?"

The woman was back in the wagon. The man brought his seat up behind the wheel again.

"That's it," Mom said. "She's done."

"Until tonight," I said.

“Until tonight, you’re right,” Mom said, but she shook her head no. “You know what?” she said, "I don't want to come back here anymore."

The wagon pulled out of the bank lot. A little kid's head—looked like he was maybe five or six, younger than me—popped up from the backseat as they passed by us.

"You see that?" I said.

But Mom didn’t see. She rolled the window up, started the car, and drove home.

a version of this story appears in the Rose Books Reader Vol. 01

Two minor corrections:

• TVOTR had Hotmail, not Gmail

• The venue in Anacortes was called The Department of Safety, not the Department of Music

I complained about this to an acquaintance with heroic recall and he goes, “Do you make notes?” Sometimes. “Do you underline? Star stuff in the margins?” More and more lately. “Do you reread?” Starting to, shifting from volume mode. “Do you smoke assloads of weed?” I did until two days ago! I’m taking a break. It’s an experiment—don’t hold me to it.

Here are a few bits from Joe Brainard’s I Remember, which I started last night.

I remember how good a glass of water can taste after a dish of ice cream.

I remember planning to tear page 48 out of every book I read from the Boston Public Library, but soon losing interest.

I remember “come-as-you-are” parties. Everybody cheated.

I wasn’t familiar with Brainard, but his little book caught my eye at McNally Jackson last week. For one, it was in shrink-wrap, which is a good trick, then I turned it over and saw Paul Auster blurbin’ on the back. “One of the few totally original books I have ever read.” Two people mentioned Brainard to me, unprompted, within 24 hours of buying the book. I suspect people have mentioned him all along, but my ears weren’t in tune. I’m gonna remember I Remember!

I hit the first 40 pages before bed but the format and approach was familiar by page 2. It’s not a novel, not quite a poem or an essay. Of course I wasn’t reinventing the wheel when I wrote Most of My Memories, Age 5-11 (ABRIDGED).

Thanks to Kyle for saying yes to the Little Engines tour, Mike for saying yes to half of it, and the other writers for joining along the way. Please buy Little Engines Archive and Issue Ten at the online merch table.

Morning, Fuckers LA went really, really well. Thank you.

The map kept saying the shortest path from Nashville to California on I-40 was dangerous with winds. It wanted to re-route me south, dipping into Mexico, or north through Colorado. I saw three semi trucks jackknifed and on their side in the grass medium. One looked like it had been there for a while. The second just wrecked, first responders arriving, no one directing traffic yet, rubbernecking galore. The third truck was burned to a crisp, still smoldering as I went by. I stayed the course, survived, and stopped for the night in Oklahoma City.

Come to a show and say hi.