an episode that felt like a Jonathan Lethem novel with a few bits from Bill Callahan and David Berman thrown in

This was when I was living in the “old house” in Lansing, and we moved from there when I was 7, so I will guess I was 6. That year is pivotal for me because it’s really where my memory stars. I can remember fragments, sensations, feelings, and the odd longer narrative from age 5 or younger, but by the time I hit 7 I can remember most things—classrooms, teachers, television, who my friends were, etc. Age 6 is the in-between stage, where it’s still fuzzy but starting to come into focus. 

I used to sleepwalk as a kid and at least one time I walked out of our house. My parents heard banging on the door at 3 am and when they woke up, it was 5-year-old me. Who knows where I had been or how long I had been outside but as my parents described it years later, I was groggy and just wanted to go back to bed. They had found me in other parts of the house before so they knew what was up, but I never got a sense of what this particular episode meant to them, but it feels related to this story somehow. 

I was playing with my friend Justin at his apartment complex, which was about 5 blocks from my house. I’ve written about Justin here and there—he was by far my best friend through age 8 or so, even though I moved away from him when I was 7. Though I only moved about 5 miles, it felt like it was too another state, and I saw him much less after that. But he was a great kid, we got along well, we shared an imagination. I had many friends when I was young that I didn’t really like, I just wound up with them because of proximity or some other reason, but Justin was another story. I couldn’t wait to see him and we had many adventures. I have written about this a little, but his father was a drummer in a bar band, and he practiced in the basement of their apartment. His parents also smoked a lot of weed, which I only realized much later. I thought some people smoked cigarettes with roach clips.

This afternoon, we might have been playing some variation of hide-and-seek or something similar, and I found myself crouching near a basement window well on the other side of the complex from his unit. And I saw on the gravel in the bottom of this window well a Superman doll, in very good condition. This was out of the way and the well was deep, so it wasn’t something you might just stumble across. I imagined that a kid may have thrown the doll, trying to make it fly and he wound up down here and they couldn’t find him. That’s what I told myself, that it was lost and forgotten. But I saw the doll down there and I wanted it badly. I didn’t have a particular fixation on Superman (Justin and I read comics, but it was mostly Spiderman and Marvel), but something about this doll I just had to have. 

And yet, it felt wrong to take it in broad daylight. Maybe I was worried about taking it with Justin there, what he might say. So over the course of the rest of the afternoon I hatched a plan to come and get it later. I went home that night and decided that I would get up at 5 am, before anyone was awake, and get that doll. I was so excited and nervous about it I couldn’t sleep. I’d drift off for a moment and then wake up to see what time it was, afraid that I overslept (I don’t believe I had an alarm clock, I wouldn’t have had any use for one, but I think there was a clock on the wall of my room). 

Finally when there was just the first crack of light outside I got dressed and slipped out of the house as quietly as I could. I was sure that I would be in a huge amount of trouble if I was discovered, plus what I was doing was basically stealing, which made it even worse. But I was compelled for reasons I didn’t quite understand to get that Superman doll. 

At age 6, 5 blocks feels like a good distance. I walked quickly and the streets were empty and quiet. It was cold. It was like Bill Callahan in “Teenage Spaceship”—I felt like the only person alive in the world, and I still love that feeling, it’s both frightening and liberating. It worried me that the doll would be gone when I got there. I turned the corner and there was the apartment complex and I scurried down to the window well, looking around first to make sure no one was there. There it was. The doll was still sitting at the bottom after a long night. Years later I would imagine seeing it down there when I heard the David Berman line “When the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold,” even though this was a middle-class neighborhood and the doll was not, in fact, broken. Just the idea of unloved inanimate objects experiencing a long night, I felt the loneliness in that. 

I was too afraid to enter the well completely, even though I was small enough to fit in it—I didn’t know who might be on the other side of the basement window. So I got down on my stomach and reached as far as I could, and my arm was just long enough to get a few fingers around the cape, and I pulled the doll up and he was in my hands, and he was mine. I stuck him under my coat and walked back to my house through the dawn streets. When I got home, everyone was still asleep, and I stuffed the Superman doll under my bed and crawled under the covers, thinking about what I’d done as I waited.

I wrote a piece for NPR Music about the corner of Music Tumblr I took part in around 2009-2014, and which I greatly enjoyed. 

Two Things I Remember Writing in 2018

A friend on FB recently quoted Dorothy Parker’s great line that “Writers don't like writing—they like having written” (possible paraphrase, pasted from first Google result). And I get that. Writing can be a grinding, unpleasant activity, especially when you’re not sure what you’re doing is any good. But there are times when writing is fun. I like to remember those times to motivate me to experience more of them in the future.

1) In late January of this year, Julie and I were staying in a cabin in a tiny town in the rolling hills of Connecticut. A friend of Julie’s, whom she met an an artist’s residency, owns the cabin along with his husband. The friend is a writer, and his husband is an interior decorator, and the writer friend also happened to be a big music fan. So it was this beautifully decorated cabin with a room full of great records—and oh yeah, they were also great cooks so they had an amazing kitchen. And on top of all that, there was an upstairs study where the writer friend worked. It was a simple room lined with books on one of its walls and along the wall furthest from the door was a small desk facing a window, which looked over the trees and into the open spaces that ran up to the mountains. I set up there one of the days during our stay while Julie went into town. I had my iPad and an external keyboard and some coffee. 

At first, I worked on a piece I’ve been tinkering with for a few years, I’m not even sure what it is, it might have been a draft a column at some point. But it’s about my wife’s late uncle and my father and their respective relationships with music, some of which I know from speaking to them and some of which I have to imagine based on other things I know about their lives. Julie’s uncle died 8 or 9 years ago, so with him I have been going of my memories of conversations with him. When I was writing it, my father was still alive, but it was often hard to communicate with him. So in each case it was in part about the loss, about not knowing and having to piece things together. Somewhere in there are thoughts about the music of the Caretaker. I feel like I might have something good in this piece but I’m still not sure what it is, so I drag it out once in a while and poke at it, see what’s there and if I can shape it into something. It’s kind of nice to have a piece like this, that no one is expecting but that I enjoy working on whenever I have time and I’m thinking of it. I started it 3 or so years ago when I took a day off work and wandered around Manhattan just for fun, and on that day I spent a few hours in the Reading Room at the main branch of the public library. I’ll always associate it first with typing in that vast quiet room whose windows look up to the skyscrapers.

The second thing I was working on was something I had been assigned: an essay on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea upon its 20th anniversary. I’ve written about this record a few times already, but I always enjoy doing so. In part because I know there are a great many people, including people whose music taste I respect tremendously, who don’t like the record at all. So I feel like I have something to prove. It’s also the kind of record that fans tend to have an exceedingly personal relationship with, so there’s not a lot of good critical writing about it out there. So I feel like engaging with it is a way to voice some feelings that haven’t been articulated especially well, but that are sitting out there somewhere, being felt. And then finally its an album with no political resonance to it, which makes even contemplating it feel indulgent. Add all that up and mix in with it my own strong emotional reaction to the record and you have a recipe for a fun and challenging writing experience. And in this particular case, I even got to re-work some writing I’d done 10 years ago or more, when I was thinking of writing a column about the record but never did. Gotta keep those spare parts around. These two pieces kept me happily typing while looking out at the landscape for the better part of a few hours, until I could hear the car with Julie in it crunching its way up the drive. And then later I finished this. 

2) In July we had a stay in another remote place in Connecticut, not a cabin but a nice house tucked into the woods. This one had a dance studio in a building next door, and one day Julie worked in there while I worked at this huge desk in an upstairs study. There were piles of books and papers on the desk but just enough room for my laptop and a cup of coffee. I was working on the final installment of my Pitchfork column Resonant Frequency, about listening and silence (in one way or another many of the columns were about these things). And what I remember most is writing the opening section, which summarizes the story of a guy named Andreas Pavel inventing the walkman, as told in Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s 2017 book Personal Stereo. When I first read this book in late 2017 it completely blew my mind, especially the section where she interviews Pavel and he describes the evening where he first tested his design for a portable listening device. It gives me chills just thinking of it now, because I connected so deeply with the mystical power of portable sound to shift consciousness. While writing my piece I listened over and over to Herbie Mann’s album Push Push and especially the track “What’s Going On,” which is mentioned in the book as the first track Pavel played on his new invention. I was trying to put myself in that headspace, to see the snow and the forest as he describes it while listening to this easy listening/lightly funky jazz flute number (this version of “What’s Going On” made my list of most-listened to tracks on Spotify in 2018). It was heavenly, I was just so happy to be writing. In the original draft of my column, this section on the first-listen on the Walkman was something like 1700 words long, it was crazy, I just didn’t want to leave it so I kept writing, and in extending that moment I found myself reminded of how writing can slow down and expand time, just by how many words you give over to a given event. That section was wisely condensed by my editor when I finished the column a week or two later, and then it was published after I no longer worked at Pitchfork.  

“I respect working hard but I dread a day job. Or a job interview. I’ve got a truant heart, I just want to be gone. I’d be in the kitchens, the corridors at work, and I’d be staring at the panels on the roof, clocking all the maintenance doors, dreaming about getting into the airducts. A portal. As a kid I used to dream about being put in the bins, escaping from things, without my mum knowing she’d put me out in the bins. So I'm in a black plastic bag outside a building, and hearing the rain against it, but feeling alright, and just wanting to sleep, and a truck would take me away.”

Burial interviewed by Mark Fisher in The Wire, 2007. A remarkable image, the kid in the trash bag hearing the rain on the plastic, don’t get quotes like that in interviews often.

My Year in Spotify Listening

Like a lot of people I checked out the Spotify year-end summary thingy, and since Spotify is only a certain percentage of my listening, the results were surprising, and I tried to figure out what it meant. In general, I listen to new music via iTunes, if I am sent promos. That only encompasses a certain amount of new music of course, but if I’m sent a download, I tend to use that for my listening all year long. Often, I’m “done with” an album more or less by the time it comes out, but sometimes I’ll keep listening (as w/ DJ Koze this year) and I do that with my promo files. My Spotify listening tends to be a mix of things I stick on a few different playlists based on mood or genre, and they could come from anywhere (but they aren’t usually new). 

In terms of my favorite artists (Bill Evans wound up in my top spot, somehow, followed by Joni Mitchell) it was hard to figure out how it’d happened, because I didn’t spend the year obsessed with either. Then I looked at my 100 most played songs, and that did bring back a few things. I’m not sure if the whole list is in order, but the first 5 songs in the playlist are the 5 listed when Spotify gave me my most-listened-to tracks of the year, so I think so? Anyway, that’s what I am going with here. This is how my Top 10 songs show up on the playlist, in order, with one exception: in the middle of the list was Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle,” which I already wrote about on Tumblr 8 years ago (and about which I have very little to say now, except that yes I do still listen to this song a fair amount), so I’ve omitted that and included No. 11. 

Wussy: “Runaway” This was my favorite song of the year, it has 600 plays on Youtube and 5,400 on Spotify, which makes me a little sad. Technically it’s not from this year—Wussy put this out on a small-release tape or CD-R a few years ago—but I’m still counting it. This is the rare case where the streaming media playcounts tend to match the responses of folks I’ve talked to about this song—I mentioned to 4 or 5 people, and in each case they said “Yeah that’s kind of nice I guess...why do you like it so much?” I’ll try to answer that here.  

First I should say that I have no real interest in or knowledge of Wussy. They’re an indie rock band from Ohio, most notable at this point for the fact that Robert Christgau loves them, and has written rapturous reviews of their work over the years, which surely has helped them to achieve whatever small amount of notoriety they have. I checked them out here and there but they didn’t make much of an impression on me. I wish I could remember how I came across this particular song, but I can’t, probably either Twitter or a streaming media algorithm. But I loved it immediately, like, stop-what-you-are-doing-and-listen kind of loved. It just clicked. 

The first thing that comes to mind is the chorus: “I love you, let’s run away.” That’s the theme of so many of my favorite songs, I mean, the first album I bought in my life was “Born to Run,” and if you could sum up the first three Springsteen albums in in 6 words, “I love you, let’s run away” wouldn’t be bad. And I think I liked that this song didn’t try for poetic phrasing, just said it in the simplest way possible.

But the romance of a song like this has a shade of darkness to it, and that draws me in even more. Escape is never a long-term strategy. Eventually you have to figure out how to make life work when you’re in the thick of it. So while it’s such an appealing dream to exit the world with someone you’re crazy about, there is a shelf life to that sort of gesture. I relate to this idea of being fed up with everything in the moment and wanting to jump in the car with the only person who gets you, but eventually, the car is is going to need gas. What then? 

I didn’t know when I first heard this song that it was a cover, so the immediate impact of it was as a Wussy song. But I learned that it was written and recorded by another Ohio artist that people in the band had known, a woman named Jenny Mae. She died last year. Pitchfork did a news story on her passing. She was 49. And when I found that it was her song, I listened to her version and I loved it almost as much (but not quite), though her take also made my Spotify Top 20. I did think enough of her version to order the 7-inch, which was her first release. When I read about Jenny Mae’s life, the song took on another layer of meaning. She suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. And she was described by people who knew her as brilliant and creative and hilarious but also impulsive and self-destructive. Which for me gives a sentiment like “No one likes us anyway / I hate my job / Sweet, sweet are the innocent / I love you, let’s run away” and “40 ounce between your legs/ Shakin up my heart / Turn around and look at me / Light another smoke” a different tint. These are the kinds of things you say when in the throes of a rush of feeling, but they’re not impulses you can safely follow for a lifetime, even though goddammit, sometimes I want to.

Bo Diddley: “Nursery Rhyme” In Richmond early this year I bought an old Bo Diddley album called The Originator. I saw it in a used bin, it was $20, and, it was pure instinct, I had a feeling it was interesting. For me, buying used records, $20 is a fair amount of money, I don’t pay that for something I’ve no idea about, typically. But something compelled me to pick it up. I was intrigued that it had none of the hits I knew. And I took it home and when I put it on a short while later it blew my mind. This surprised me because on the one hand it sounds so much like the idea of “Bo Diddley” I keep in my brain, the one rhythm we know from the song he named after himself, but this was just so controlled, so well rendered, with so much atmosphere. The whole thing is brilliant. I became particularly obsessed with this cut from the record, and then I started exploring the “Bo Diddley” beat in general, reading whatever I could about it and listening to examples. This kind of random deep-dive is the best thing about the internet era for a music fan. 

Mulatu Asatke: “Tezeta (Nostalgia” At nights when I hang out with my Mom at her condo in Michigan I play music over a Bluetooth speaker I bought a year ago. My Mom’s default has for a while been to put the television on, but at some point I asked her about playing music instead so we could talk or just hang out, and she grew to like it. Sometimes we’ll chat about stuff, and sometimes she will play Candy Crush on her iPad while I do things on my phone, which sounds distant but is actually very comforting to me. One of the things I’m doing on my phone during these evenings is finding songs to play. It’s quite fun (and interesting) for me to say to myself “What is a playlist that would make my Mom happy?” and then try and figure out what that might be on the fly. She was never really a music person so I don’t have a lot to go on, mostly her age, a story or two about a song she liked, and a vague knowledge of what she might have heard on the radio in my lifetime. 

In September, my Dad died, and I stayed with my Mom in her condo for a number of days that month. I felt a strange mix of feelings. On the one hand, he was father, I missed him, I thought about never being able to talk to him again, to not be able to share the things in my life. I thought about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to learn more about his life, my knowledge of which is pretty sketchy. There were all the usual things a person would be sad about. But then there was the fact that he had a severe and debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease for the last eight years, and at times he suffered so terribly. I remembered how on a few occasions he called me while he was delusional, he would tell me that he was sure he was going to die. One time, he told me that he saw someone in the driveway who was going to kill him. Another time, he said that it was hard to explain but that he had been split into two people, and he couldn’t take it, he was terrified. I told him that it would be better tomorrow and he yelled, “I’m going to be dead by tomorrow!” I would get calls like this while I was walking to work in Brooklyn 700 miles away, and I would feel so helpless. And so when he passed, I thought about him during situations like that, and also felt like maybe not he had some peace. 

A night or two after my Dad died I was sitting with my Mom, talking, and playing music. She dug out some old photos and we were looking at them, pictures from her in high school that I had never seen. I wanted to see everything, learn every detail. And over that Bluetooth speaker I was playing some random playlist I had found called something like “Jazz for late night.” I wanted background music. And while we were hanging out and talking, this song came on, “Tezeta” by the Ethiopian jazz bandleader Mulatu Astatke. And man, it’s hard to describe, but the mood of this song so perfectly captured the exact feeling I had. The phrase that comes to mind is “bombed out,” that’s the way it seemed, like I’d been beaten up and thrown in a ditch and my ears were ringing and now I was trying to reorient myself after all that had happened. There was a feeling of weariness and sadness but also a feeling that life continues, that we have to gather our memories and keep on. And this impossibly beautiful song captured every bit of that, the one-chord riff moving ahead, in spite of it all, while the sax line captures all the sadness dripping off everything at the same time. I listened to it constantly in the weeks afterward.  

Galaxie 500: “Fourth of July” (live) One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite band in my favorite version. This song is indicative of how (as with all songs on this list) when I’m in the mood I can listen to one track over and over. On a couple of occasions in 2018, I listened to this maybe 8 or 9 times in a row, immediately hitting “back” when it had finished. And the thing I was typically listening to was Naomi Yang’s bassline, which to me holds the lion’s share of the song’s feeling. Her bass playing in Galaxie 500 is so incredibly emotional to me, and it was never more so than here. 

Pusha T: “Infrared” The one truly “new” song on here.” I didn’t have an advance of this record so I listened on Spotify when it came out and I loved it. And this song in particular seemed so perfect, the carefully constructed rap, executed as if it’s coming off the top of his head, the sample—I listened to this many times in a row on a few occasions, and it also sent me to revisit Clipse, which brought me a lot of joy. 

Joni Mitchell: “Carey” Another song about freedom, but here it’s real. Blue is a perfect record but I probably revisit this one more than any other single song because I’m so in love with the production—that bass, that hand percussion...sonically, an album recorded almost 50 years ago simply cannot be improved upon. I remember hearing this one on AM radio when I was very young. It was a single, b/w “This Flight Tonight,” one hell of a 7-inch. I’ve always thought the picture it painted was so incredibly romantic—”Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, maybe I’ll go to Rome / And rent me a grand piano and put flowers 'round my room.” Hey, why not! And if Carey is indeed keeping her in this tourist town, we know it’s only for another hour, another day, another week, whenever she’s ready, she can’t be tied down. But then, that’s the future: this night, now, is a starry dome, and we’re alive, inside it. 

Arthur Russell: “That’s Us/Wild Combination” Sometimes w/ my favorite Arthur Russell songs you can hear the strain as he creates a new genre trying to get a particular unnamable feeling across. But not this one. Sitting in a room with his friend Jennifer Warnes he made a song that feels as natural as a breath. 

Carole King: “Pleasant Valley Sunday” I’m in awe of Carole King’s ability to write songs that sound perfect on the radio. Even if her prime hitmaking years only lasted a bit over a decade, the number of her songs with her name on them that left a huge mark on culture is staggering. Her demo for the Monkees hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday” shows how perfect everything was before the artist who would bring the song to the public got anywhere near it. I found this one on Youtube 8 or 9 years ago and it’s been in regular rotation since. 

Hank Williams: “The Angel of Death” In February and March I was doing research my Pitchfork Sunday Review on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It’s one of my favorite records, and I’ve wanted to write something long on it for years, so spending time w/ it as the winter wound down was an intense pleasure. It’s common knowledge that Springsteen was listening to a lot of Hank Williams when he was writing the album, and when I came across this song, I became obsessed with it. One, the melody sounds right off Nebraska, and “My Father’s House” (another song I listened to a lot this year) especially seems directly modeled on it. But this song has so much going for it on its own. It’s about death and the moment of judgement, but Hank’s melody and phrasing don’t sound frightened. It’s hopeful, a prayer instead of an admonishment. 

Guided by Voices: “Motor Away” I’ve loved this song for years but I listened to it intently around the same time I was playing the Hank Williams, when I was thinking about leaving Pitchfork. I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Pollard’s lyrics (though I love many of his tunes), but he second line here is the one I couldn’t put out of my mind: “When you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime.” That’s where I felt I was. Editing this music magazine that I cared so much about was the culmination of a dream that took a long time, a ton of work, and a fair amount of luck to realize. When the chance of a lifetime comes along, you’re supposed to hold on to it as tightly as possible for as long as possible, until someone finally pries it away, which will happen eventually. I knew that. And yet, deep down, I knew that after 11 years, I wanted to try something else. Run away, motor away, drive away. Sometimes a song can give you the tiniest push.

My Life as a Crossing Guard

I’m guessing this still happens in suburban America, but when I was 9 and 10 years old, there was an activity called Safety Patrol where kids in our elementary school would put on little orange vests and assist the crossing guards at various locations. I can remember 4 or 5 different posts, and each was overseen by a “Safety” of a different rank. 

There was a Captain and a Lieutenant, and they wore these orange belts with a shoulder strap and a badge instead of a vest, but you had to work your way up to that. Only 5th graders were considered for Captain or Lieutenant. And they had the most significant assignment, working with the adult crossing guard to ferry students across Harrison Avenue, a busy street that ran right next to the school. Newer Safeties told kids when to cross less-busy nearby roads, and those roads also had stop signs, so it was pretty routine. Another, more fun post was on the far side of an overpass, and it was a cherry gig because you were some distance from the adults and there was no real responsibility. You were there basically to make sure the kids used the overpass and didn’t throw things off it and so on, but expectations were low. At the end of the year in 5th grade, all Safeties went to the Safety Picnic, which drew from all the schools in the Greater Lansing area, and there was free soda and hot dogs and the Lansing Police would even give kids rides in a helicopter (weird to think that now, but it happened). My main memory of the Safety Picnic was a vast open field with kids running around, and there was a P.A. playing Lipps Inc’s “Funky Town” at a high volume, which was terribly exciting, because the song was so catchy and futuristic (it was then a current radio hit) and I’m not sure I had experienced music that loud at at that point in my life.

Something happened early in my tenure as a Safety that I think of sometimes, when my problems seem insurmountable. I am in general a hyper-anxious person, I pretty much constantly feel tense, I’m always worrying, and it’s very easy for me when I’m in a certain state of mind to try and picture the future and see nothing but terrible things ahead. 

I was given a post where one of my duties was to turn on and off the flashing yellow sign two blocks down Harrison that indicated that school was in session and the speed limit was 25 MPH, and not 35 MPH. In retrospect, this seems like a lot of responsibility for a 9-year-old, basically being in charge of the city’s traffic laws in this area for hours at a time, I highly doubt this arrangement is still in place. Now I imagine that the city could control that light remotely. But back then, you went into the school to get the key, and you walked two blocks to a telephone pole, where the key would open a steel box. Inside the steel box was a switch that would turn the “School Zone - 25 MPH” light on or off. I’d turn it on in the morning, early, before school, and then after school I’d turn it off once all the kids had left the area. Again, I was 9.

On the last day before Christmas break, somehow, I forgot to get the key and turn the flashing light off. Maybe I was excited for Christmas. But I just went home, and then before I knew it, it was Saturday, school was not in session, and when I drove by the corner with my mother, on my way to somewhere, I saw that the yellow “School Zone - 25 MPH” light was still flashing, 24 hours a day, and would be for the next two weeks. I can’t begin to describe the sinking feeling I had in my stomach when I first saw that flashing light, and realized what I had done. I truly felt like my life was over. At age 9 my main thought was, “Well, I had a good run, but very soon it will be time to pack it in,” because I couldn’t imagine a situation where a mistake of this magnitude would be forgotten or that I would be forgiven. I didn’t dare tell anyone, I was just too afraid. I probably hoped a tree would be struck by lightning and fall into the telephone pole and bring the sign crashing down, or something—wishing for some kind of divine intervention. But for the next two weeks, it was like Poe and the telltale heart, every time I would go anywhere near that sign, I would hope against hope that somehow it had been turned off, but there it was, the throb of flashing yellow reminding me of all the trouble that was in store. 

Right now I’m listening to this song on an Amtrak train, and I’m thinking about what happens in it 2/3 of the way through, when Christopher Owens lands on the words “Come into my heart.” That is such a powerful line, and also a powerful idea: On the surface “come into my heart” sounds like a Hallmark sentiment, almost, something you’ve heard so often you never really stop to think what it means, but it’s actually a phrase fraught with anxiety and vulnerability. Everyone’s heart is a combination of beauty and ugliness, courage and fear, dark and light, pride and shame. Asking someone to enter that space is another way of saying “I want you to know me as I really am, not as the person I want you to think I am.” Heavy enough to make you sick.

My father died on September 8. He had been ill with Parkinson’s disease for a few years, so it was not completely unexpected, but the very end was quite sudden and swift and came as a surprise. I flew to Detroit from Brooklyn on the previous Wednesday, took the shuttle bus to East Lansing, and went straight to the room he’d been staying in the last 20 months, at an assisted living facility. When you show up in a situation like that you’re trying to figure out what is going on, when things started to change for him, and what happens now. By the time I got there, his care had already been taken over by hospice, so it seemed as if things were only going to go in one direction.

He wasn’t awake, but I think he could hear me, for the first day or two at least. That first night I didn’t want to leave his room, so after being there a while with my mother I took her home so she could get some sleep and went back and set myself up on his chair and footstool. He was breathing steadily, and loudly. Having once previously sat at the bedside of something who died in hospice care (my wife’s stepfather) I had some experience listening to the breathing and getting a sense of how it changes. It basically grows slower and shallower, and by the end, there’s a long period between breaths that can be frightening, because you’re aware that a given breath might be the last one. My father wasn’t in this place yet—these breaths were fairly deep, and he was snoring, there was still some force there.

An aide from hospice entered the room around midnight, he had the night shift. We spoke briefly but I wasn’t in the mood for conversation so he sat in a chair on one wall, and I sat in mine. It was dark in the room. I thought I might try and sleep in the chair/footstool combination but after squirming around for a while I realized there was no way that was going to happen, so I grabbed my computer.

At that moment, I very badly wanted to read a book called Madness, Rack & Honey by the poet Mary Ruefle. It’s a collection of lectures, most of which are in one way or another about poetry, but really it’s a book about life in the biggest and broadest sense. There was one lecture in particular that I wanted to read, called “On Beginnings.” I had quoted it before here on my Tumblr. It’s a piece where she meditates on opening lines and closing lines in poetry, trying to figure out their history and what they have in common and what those things in common might mean. And toward the end, she writes this:

“in poem after poem I encountered words that mark the first something made out of language that we hear as children repeated night after night, like a refrain: I love you. I am here with you. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now. And I encountered words that mark the last something made out of language that we hope to hear on earth: I love you. You are not alone. Don’t be afraid. Go to sleep now.”

I have no idea whether Ruefle’s thought on opening and closing lines of poems has any truth, but there’s nothing in the world I’m more sure of than that the most comforting last words any of us might hope to hear are just as she says it.

So I looked on Kindl and iBooks but digital versions of this book were nowhere to be found. I then spent close to two hours googling furiously there in the dark, browsing Reddit and torrent sites, trying everything to see if a pirated pdf version of this book might be in circulation somewhere. But no luck. Either it didn’t exist, or I didn’t know how to find it. So our print copy of Madness, Rack & Honey remained on our bookshelf far away in Brooklyn, and I was up at 3 am reading and re-reading the bits of the lecture that I could find online, including the one I had posted on Tumblr a few years ago, all the while hoping that when the time came, some version of these words would be the last my father would hear and then would follow peace.

Hi Mark. I’m a big fan of your writing. I like your take on music as an individual’s quest to understand a certain track or album based on personal experience. In your opinion, what are the best autumn albums or tracks that you continue to return to? I’m planning a trip to Maine and was hoping to dig into some new tunes or blow some dust off old favorites. Thanks!

thank you...let’s see, here are a few fall albums that come to mind, not sure what makes them “fall-ish” to me, maybe a kind of rustic atmosphere tinged w/ a bit of melancholy: 

Leo Kottke: 6 and 12 String GuitarLucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel RoadGalaxie 500: TodayPastels: Slow SummitsJoni Mitchell: Court and SparkThe Clientele: Violet HourJunior Boys: Last ExitOpal: Early RecordingsGil Scott Heron: From South Africa to South CarolinaKeyboard Money Mark: Mark’s Keyboard RepairSeekers Who Are Lovers: You Are the Pride of Your StreetSunroof!: Cloudz

I was going through some old papers and I found an acceptance letter for the first thing I published for money—a haiku in a magazine called Haiku Headlines. They sent me $3 cash when it ran. I also found a paper I wrote in high school about the pros and cons of CD technology, which had only been around for a couple of years. 

"I’m using modes now,” Albert said, “because I’m trying to get more form in the free form. Furthermore, I’d like to play something—like the beginning of Ghosts—that people can hum. And I want to play songs like I used to sing when I was real small. Folk melodies that all the people would understand. I’d use those melodies as a start and have different simple melodies going in and out of a piece. From simple melody to complicated textures to simplicity again and then back to the more dense, the more complex sounds. I’m trying to communicate to as many people as I can. It’s late now for the world. And if I can help raise people to new plateaus of peace and understanding, I’ll feel my life has been worth living as a spiritual artist, that’s what counts.”

Albert Ayler - The Truth Is Marching In, by Nat Hentoff

I have some news: In the next couple of months, I’ll be stepping down as Executive Editor of Pitchfork.

This was entirely my decision and it was a difficult one. I started contributing to Pitchfork as a writer in 1998 and looking back on the last two decades, it’s hard for me to comprehend all we’ve accomplished and the fact that I’ve worked with so many brilliant, creative people along the way. I feel so lucky. But the time is right. Pitchfork at this moment is the best it’s ever been, and after 11 years as an editor for the site, I’m ready to try something else.

I make this change secure in the knowledge that Pitchfork will continue to be the publication you know and love, one whose best days are to come. Thank you to Ryan Schreiber and also to everyone at Condé Nast for the opportunity of a lifetime. Thank you to everyone I’m honored to work alongside every day. And thank you to all the Pitchfork readers who share our passion for music.

I’m going to assist with the transition to a new Executive Editor, so I’m not going anywhere right away. After my time winds down, I’ll take a breath and then I’ll think about what comes next. For now, thank you for caring deeply about what we do at Pitchfork. I’m so grateful to be part of this story.

I recently discovered your blog and enjoy reading it. I'd be interested to see your ballot for the best albums of the 1960s feature if you're willing to post it sometime.

This was it:

1. Bob Dylan: Blonde on Blonde (1966)2. John Coltrane: A Love Supreme (1965)3. The Beatles: The Beatles (1968)4. Miles Davis: In a Silent Way (1969)5. Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)6. Herbie Hancock: Maiden Voyage (1966)7. The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (1966)8. Albert Ayler/Don Cherry: Vibrations9. Nina Simone: Wild Is the Wind (1966)10. The Band: Music from Big Pink (1968)11. Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin II (1969)12. Grateful Dead: Live/Dead (1969)13. Ornette Coleman Trio: Live at the Golden Circle Stockholm Vol. 1 (1965)14. Van Morrison: Astral Weeks (1968)15. Neil Young: Everybody Knows This is Nowhere (1969)16. Bill Evans: Sunday at the Village Vanguard17. Gil Evans: Out of the Cool18. Velvet Underground and Nico: Velvet Underground and Nico (1966)19. The Beatles: Revolver (1966)20. Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (1965)21. The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet (1968)22. The Beach Boys: Smiley Smile (1967)23. Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica (1969)24. Eric Dolphy: Out to Lunch (1964)25. Charles Mingus: Mingus Plays Piano26. Alexander "Skip" Spence: Oar (1969)27. v/a: Golden Rain (gamelan) (1969)28. Buffy Sainte-Marie: It's My Way (1964)29. Scott Walker (Scott Engel): Scott 4 (1969)30. Albert Ayler: Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village31. Duke Ellington/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: Money Jungle (1963)32. Fred Neil: Fred Neil (1967)33. John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman: John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman34. John Fahey: Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965)35. White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969)36. Nina Simone: In Concert (1964)37. Ornette Coleman: This Is Our Music (1961)38. Frank Sinatra: September of My Years (1965)39. Sly & the Family Stone: Stand! (1969)40. Crosby, Stills & Nash: Crosby Stills & Nash (1969)41. Pharoah Sanders: Karma (1969)42. Al Green : Green is Blues43. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Nancy & Lee (1968)44. Silver Apples: Silver Apples (1968)45. The Who: Tommy (1969)46. Stan Getz & Joao Gilberto ft. Antonio Carlos Jobim: Getz / Gilberto (1964)47. Terry Riley: A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969)48. Thelonious Monk: Underground49. Art Ensemble of Chicago: Message to Our Folks50. The United States of America: The United States of America (1968)51. Velvet Underground: Velvet Underground (1969)52. Isaac Hayes: Hot Buttered Soul (1969)53. Ray Barretto: Acid (1968)54. Sun Ra: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1&2 (1965)55. The Byrds: The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)56. The Zombies: Odessey and Oracle (1968)57. The Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed (1969)58. Joe Meek: I Hear a New World Part 159. Albert Ayler: Spiritual Unity (1964)60. Alice Coltrane: A Monastic Trio61. Judy Garland: At Carnegie Hall62. The Kinks: The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)63. Dusty Springfield: Dusty in Memphis (1969)64. John Coltrane: My Favorite Things (1961)65. John Fahey: Yellow Princess (1969)66. Simon and Garfunkel: Bookends (1968)67. George Russell: Ezz-thetics68. Mickey Newbury: Looks Like Rain (1969)69. Otis Redding: Otis Blue (1965)70. Miles Davis: Nefertiti (1968)71. Mississippi Fred McDowell: I Do Not Play No Rock 'n' Roll72. Leo Kottke: 6- And 12-String Guitar73. Oliver Nelson: The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961)74. Scott Walker: Scott 3 (1969)75. The Doors: The Doors (1967)76. The Free Design: Kites Are Fun (1967)77. Dr. John: Gris-Gris (1968)78. Mal Waldron: The Quest79. Archie Shepp: Mama Too Tight80. Odetta: Sings Folk Songs81. Judy Henske: Little Bit Of Sunshine . . . Little Bit Of Rain82. Miriam Makeba: Pata Pata83. Tod Dockstader: Drone; Two Fragments From Apocalypse; Water Music (1966)84. Bob Seger System: Ramblin' Gamblin' Man85. The Pentangle: The Pentangle86. Various Artists: Midnight Cowboy OST87. Quincy Jones: Walking in Space (1969)88. Archie Shepp: Fire Music89. Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention: Freak Out! (1966)90. Amon Düül: Psychedelic Underground91. Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra: The Magic City (1966)92. Os Mutantes: Os Mutantes (1968)

Considering you've become somewhat of a Fixed::Content evangelist, have you ever reevaluated your thoughts on E Luxo So? To me, Mi Media Nanjara through Fixed::Content as a trio form a pretty classic and consistent execution of low-key, non drone-based ambient music.

Yeah I’ve really come around on it, and I agree with your assessment of these 3. Honestly I didn’t really understand what they were doing at the time, took me a little while to tune into their frequency. My ear was trained to listen for “development” and that wasn’t really the point.

Moment That Very Briefly Seemed Heavy With Significance

There’s a guy who wanders around my neighborhood, I’ve seen him for years, and he’s recognizable from a good distance because he’s tall and he walks very quickly and with an oblong gait. He always looks like he’s in a tremendous hurry to get somewhere and I’m pretty sure he sleeps in the street, at least a lot of the time. His pants are often torn and his clothes are generally dirty and he wears a lot of layers. His hair and beard are long. And if I walk by this guy he always says, without fail, “Do you have a quarter?” And he never says anything else. The first few times I saw him I was a little nervous because he appears very agitated and his eyes dart around furiously, like he’s really upset or angry about something. But after seeing him a few times I realized that this is just his state, and if I said “No” to the quarter, he just moved on, walking at his usual double-speed clip.

A few weeks ago I was walking back home in the early evening and it was very cold, the coldest day in New York that I could remember in a long time. I happened to be listening to Harry Belefonte’s version of “Danny Boy,” which I like very much. It had been a while since I’d heard it–I’m finally getting used to Spotify and slowly adding old favorites to playlists. I’m attracted to a certain kind of maudlin music for some reason, music that floods with broad sadness in a way that for some people makes it trite. And Belefonte’s version of this ballad is a good example–when his voice jumps up to falsetto in the chorus, it just kills me.

And then walking down the sidewalk toward me was the guy. It was dark, but I knew his shape. As he got closer I could see he had a winter jacket on but it was unzipped and open, and his shoes didn’t look warm or insulated or even water-tight. I thought man, he must be freezing, and I took off my headphones, and he reached me and asked for the quarter. I said “Sure,” even though I knew I had only a $10 bill. This time I felt like I wanted to say something. I dug for my wallet and said “Man, it’s cold. What’s your name? I’m Mark,” and he said “Danny."

This one has been killing me. “We do not know where you go/In the night Through the door/Through the door that holds you.” Bill Callahan has written a lot of songs about feeling alienated, but the way I hear it, this is a rare one about looking at it from the other side, about how little we can really know about another person’s interior life.

There was a family joke that when I was a kid, I used to lay into my parents about the fact that we had never traveled outside “The Great Lakes Region.” During some Geography unit in 4th or 5th grade the teacher had broken down the United States by “region,” which I suppose included places like “Mid-Atlantic” and “Pacific Northwest” but I can’t be sure because I don’t remember any of the others. What I do remember is The Great Lakes Region, which included Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. I had only been to four of these states, and that was including just driving through Indiana and Ohio. Which may not have been so bad considering I was 11 years old. But I complained, loudly and often. 

Maybe because I grew up thinking the world was so small, I was always on the look out for things that expanded it. And one of those things turned out to be alcohol. I can remember the first time I got drunk like it was yesterday, even though it was many years ago. It was in the basement of a friend’s house. I was 16. There were four of us there, and we got two six-packs of Michelob. A cheap boombox was playing. I believe I had three beers. And I got drunk. And it felt amazing. Suddenly a large part of the anxiety that consumed me for my life to that point was gone. I felt centered in the world, unafraid and happy. 

Later that year, my friend Dave and I would regularly go to see his friend Colin at his dorm room at Michigan State. Dave and I were 16 and Colin was 18. Colin was a freshman. He had a roommate but he wasn’t around much. Colin’s room was quite spare, very little on the wall, a steel bunk bed on the floor, another on the other side of the room, two old desks, a mini fridge. There may have been a Pink Floyd poster up. It was not a cheerful place. 

My main memory of being in this room is it’s dark and I am drunk. Every time I am in there, it’s one of the first 10 or 15 times I was ever drunk. Which is to say that every time was great. I saw new worlds. There were hints that entire universes, ways of being, and ways of thinking existed that I hadn’t heard about. And often, on the small stereo that Colin had in the corner, the Doors were playing, and it often seemed to be a live version of “Texas Radio and the Big Beat"