I put the disc awkwardly into the player—like a first encounter with alien technology. I pressed play. WOW. I had only listened to cassettes up until that point. I didn’t need to know the technical details. I felt them. It was truly a Wizard of Oz moment: going from black-and-white to color.…
Imagine you’re the frontman of a Seattle grunge band in 1993—you’ve finished three studio albums and you’re deep in a fourth. Your producer challenges you to write with more integrity instead of courting what you think fans want. On the drive home, a song starts to assemble in your head, and a stray line from the radio becomes “Black Hole Sun.”…
In 1994, three teenagers in Australia, between the ages of 14 and 15, submitted their demo tape with two songs to a demo contest held nationally. One was called Tomorrow; the band was still Innocent Criminals. Tomorrow won, Triple J and a record deal followed, Silverchair finished Frogstomp—and when the single hit the US charts in 1995, that was when Tomorrow found me.…
Red Rocks lived up to every photo, but the emotional core was hearing Phoebe Bridgers perform “Halloween” after it had already soundtracked our break with Iowa—proof-of-life for a move we’d rushed to make.…
Des Moines opened what was then America’s largest skatepark and landed the Dew Tour—four days of Olympic-qualifying skating where the point felt less like scores than shared progression in the sport.…
Second annual solo writing week, this time in a Kansas tiny-house with a creek under the porch: Song Exploder on the drive up, a fox-eared host, and a new song built from listening to spring like a record.…
Your browser is closer to a hired guide than a dumb window—so who funds the map? A tour of vendor incentives (Google ads, Apple hardware, Microsoft Windows) and why I still ride with Mozilla.…
2020 reminded us how fast bad information rots institutions; this is a pragmatic toolkit—notice your biases, map where your outlets sit on Ad Fontes, quit the aggregation apps, and starve the intermediaries.…
On Election Day 2020 I rewrote Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” verse by verse—the same road-trip frame, a much darker 2020 mirror—after reading Daniel Levitin on songs that force us to humanize instead of demonize.…
Three camera enclosures for a backyard AI rig: fragile bare module, wobbly printable arm, then a proper housing with tripod legs that finally survived kids, pets, and Minnesota weather.…