up late for six nights in a row

summer 2024, or, this is turning into a personal blog and not a music journalism site and you'll just have to unsubscribe if you don't like it.

My friends and I have all got the post-grad blues and none of us seem to know what to do about it.

“Both you and I know you’re no victim of circumstance.”

Living at home feels like a purgatory, a life put on hold — well, not my home, but someone else’s, and sometimes it feels like there’s not much of a difference.

Nashville is a funny place to live. It feels like a town that is in the process of becoming a parody of itself, cannibalizing what was ‘real,’ if anything was, and replacing it all with Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk and drunken country stars throwing things off roofs because that’s what a rock star does, right, and Morgan Wallen is the closest thing we have to Led Zeppelin. There’s a reason they call it Nashvegas. But this is different, because here it actually feels like there’s something to mourn — something has actually been lost in the glut of designer apartments and tourist pandering and zillennial Calfornia refugee enclaves besides, I don’t know, a slightly older casino.

”Dear companion, we could be in Arizona or France / What will the world be like, when we see each other free of all circumstance?”

When you’re running away from a pesky and overactive nostalgic impulse, you’ve gotta fill the days somehow. Here’s a partial summary of mine:

• Interning for a satellite radio company. It’s a bit funny to go (in the span of two months) from sitting in your college’s student union running a soundboard while you and your roommate talk about the Mountain Goats’ worst album to sitting in a corporate office running a soundboard for some country star you’ve never heard of with 15 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

• Practicing guitar. Somewhere in mid-July I had two very disturbing epiphanies. The first was that I will never be very good at playing the guitar (the instrument that I half-heartedly claim to play) unless I spend a lot of time trying to be good at it; the second was that I am no longer in college and really have nothing to do anymore, so what the hell am I doing? I’ve also realized that having a strict practice regimen is kinda fun, and since starting to learn fingerstyle, I’ve discovered that there are muscles in my hands I didn’t even know existed.

• Running sometimes and walking sometimes and doing neither sometimes because I am a 22 year old casual who is neither capable of running in 90 degree heat nor waking up at 6am. I swear I was getting faster though… please believe me.

• Reading. I am not as consistent at this as I would wish to be due to a crippling Twitter addiction that I should probably be institutionalized for, but I’m reading more this year than I have in a very long time. Does anyone know where I can find a good sensory deprivation tank? I’d like to sign a 12 month lease.

Here’s something else I did this summer — I published an article in a blog that isn’t this one! I wrote about seeing Bob Dylan on the Outlaws Tour in Virginia Beach for Swim Into The Sound. It’s my first proper concert review and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. You can check it out here. Admittedly, I’m a bit biased, but if you’re in the market for interesting music journalism that’s mostly focused on artists that don’t get Rolling Stone or Pitchfork write-ups, I’d really recommend giving the other stuff on the site a read.

In the spirit of doing something a lot until you’re not bad at it anymore, I’ve decided also to write and write and write, and hopefully I’ll convince myself to follow through on that. Here’s a start.

Lush - Snail Mail

I’ve been trying to remember how I became a fan of Snail Mail. I know with certainty the various entry points for my other high school musical obsessions: Car Seat Headrest at the recommendation of an eccentric college student who was directing me in a one-act play at the community theatre and who had made an experimental short film backed with “Jus’ Tired,” Green Day from my mom’s International Superhits CD, JPEGMAFIA from early-morning drives to school with my friend Marcus.

I remember lying in bed and listening to my CD copy of Lush. I remember driving around Wilmington listening to “Pristine.” I don’t remember how I came across it. Maybe this is good — a final remnant of artistic discovery before it all became etched in the marble of last.fm, easily referable at all times. Why waste time thinking about it, remembering?

For a couple of very bizarre reasons, I’ve been thinking about Snail Mail a lot recently. One of those reasons is that my good friend Van happened to photograph Lindsey and her band at Summerstage in Manhattan — you really oughta check out their work. There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing your friends’ art start to take off, especially when you go from the Meridian Coffeehouse to a big festival in Central Park in a matter of months, and especially also when the art is good. Van is very good.

Despite that moaning from earlier, last.fm does happen to be very handy when you’re trying to find exact dates for an article, and it tells me that the last time I listened to Lush in full before this week was in September 2019, right at the beginning of my senior year of high school. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was her disappointing sophomore album. Maybe it was some self-conscious urge to prove to myself that I was too mature for mopey high school shit like that. Damnit, I’m 19 years old now, and I listen to cool shit now! Shit you’ve never heard of, man! (but also still a lot of Car Seat Headrest… a LOT of Car Seat Headrest).

Somewhere in that jumble of circumstance and repression is the reason that a long five years lay in between my pressing play on Lush. And so I sat in bed on a very late and very dark night in a still-alien room in Nashville, TN and felt a little bit 17 again, a little bit angry and frightened and adrift, and remembered that I love this album.

some songs for you

1. Make My Bed - LUCY (Cooper B. Handy), i.v.

“The memories let go / ask me why, and I don’t know / but I remember every word you said / and I wake up in the morning and I make my bed”

For the days when you wake up and everything is worth exploring and every path before you is equally thrilling. I thought the Robert Palmer song would be a bit too on-the-nose.

2. Untitled #6 - Girlfriends

“I remember when the water here was cold / Now it’s real warm when I’m tired and staggered and old / These old limbs, they aren’t cut out for work anymore / So I’ll claw at my bones / Until they work again”

For chipping away at the feeling that chipping away at the way you feel won’t help.

3. King of Nothing - The Warren Brothers

“I live in this castle all alone / feels like I built these walls / with a heart of stone”

For sitting in a broadcast studio, listening to the guys who wrote ‘Red Solo Cup’ deliver one of the best acoustic performances you’ve ever seen. Really.¹

4. Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues - Bob Dylan

“I was feeling sad and kind of blue / I didn’t know what I was gonna do / The communists was comin’ round / They was in the air / They was in the ground / They was all over”

For mocking reactionary paranoia. Did you know that people were so scared of this song that Dylan was forced to take it off his record, and he walked off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show when they refused to let him play it?

5. The Ballad of Tim Ballard - Cime

“Find a new god, the old god is far too kind / to the migrants, to the vagrants / the signs of the decline / Free the children, know-nothing, you sought the truth / and you found faith at a railroad operating underground”

For mocking reactionary paranoia — still. They probably wouldn’t let Monty play this song on national TV, either.

6. Change - Alex G

“How are you today? I saw your friend’s band play / a little show last night / It’s not my thing / they were alright”

For when you don’t like how things change, you don’t like how things change, you don’t like how things change, you don’t like how things change, you don’t like how things change, you don’t like how things change.

7. Still - black midi

“I’ve / waited / so long / that only a fool would try / and stay / if not for you / if not for only you…”

For mourning the loss of something you loved, and looking forward to what’s next.

8. I’m So Tired - Fugazi

“Out here, barely see my breath / Surrounded by jealousy and death / I can’t be reached, only had one call / Dragged underneath, separate from you all”

For spending too much time on TikTok and hearing this song a lot, for some reason. Would you believe me if I told you that the moody, somber song on Druqks by Aphex Twin that they like best isn’t Avril 14th?²

9. Inspiration Comes - Bladee, Thaiboy Digital

“Inspiration comes at night / Can I just be you one time? / Imagination running wild / Excelencia”

For messages scribbled on whiteboards long ago and never erased; Drain High School football tryouts are still on Thursdays at 5.

11. A Letter From Home - Blue Gene Tyranny

“Dear Blue Gene,

As I sit here writing you this letter I'm listening to the sound of the midnight train as it moves and changes across the hills. It reminds me of you as it travels to the back of my mind. Now that’s a pretty weird idea. I don't know why it should remind me of you.”

For walking through a damp night on a dark unfamiliar road in a hilly unfamiliar town. Maybe you’re on your way back from a stumbled-upon tourist-trap’s birthday party where you ate hot catfish and drank bad beer. Maybe you don’t know where you’re going to, and don’t know why you don’t split town on a whim. I couldn’t tell you.

Bye for now,

John

1. At the end, they both started yelling “LIVE FADE! LIVE FADE!” while crouching and backing slowly away from the microphones. You’ve really got to respect the dedication to a great visual bit while recording something for radio.

2. It’s QKThr.